You can do that in many institutions, why would you pick an institution with little reputation in these depressed cities?
The entire point is that reputable and well funded institutions with large campuses and thriving social and civic networks are doing fine. It’s small institutions that popped up to satisfy a once growing are being drained as demand falls.
Education is great, expanding your mind is great, but there is little incentive to foreclose other opportunities along the way in pursuit.
Government/municipal transit exists, in part, to service a “long tail” of need among the residents. Its goal is not innovation but reliable presence for many.
There is room for private taxis, buses and trains full of people, private cars, bikes, etc. in the wide distribution of transportation modes.
Transport depends on a good network of places you can get to. That is why transit tends to be a monopoly - if there are two players there are places you can't get to so you want whoever you selected to serve more places.
Note that I count roads as one of your transport networks.
There's this strange belief that work (labor) isn't like other types of goods and that a good pay should result in above-and-beyond performance. Rather than that pay simply just being the cost of labor.
When eggs went up from 4 dollars to 8, nobody expected them to taste twice as good. That's just what they cost now. But when developers go from 80,000 to 160,000 on average or something (arbitrary numbers), people do expect them to work twice as hard. Otherwise, they're abusing their employer. As if employers even could be abused.
> Sounds like child services should take those children then?
This is a HUGE, dangerous leap.
> If they can't apply for the lunches, then surely they aren't getting food at home, nor the proper medical care.
Plenty of parents (and plenty of people generally) just aren't aware of social services but are quite aware that they're supposed to feed and care for their children. Plenty more forget to fill out paperwork and return phone calls. Many states' governments actively make applying for welfare and support difficult or inconvenient - plenty of parents can't take the time to return paperwork in person, make phone calls during the workday, etc. Needing support - either welfare or just kindness and assistance - is not a moral failure and not a sign of a bad parent.
Beyond that, CPS wouldn't necessarily provide a great life for the child. There is a lot of difference between an imperfect parent and a danger to a child. Oh, and of course, CPS is a lot more expensive to run than a few meals. Giving out free meals at school is a lot easier if we want kids to be fed.
As an anecdote, I was laid off from my job once, and someone asked me if I applied for unemployment within my state. I didn't know it existed, nor that I was eligible until months later when a barista told me during small talk. The whole time I managed to remember to feed myself (and my family). I sure hope no internet commenter would look at that and decide to take my children away!
My wife was one of these kids. She knew then (and I know now) how and why she tried desperately to get into a state program and away from her drug addict parents. Living in the desert, in a broken trailer, 2 adults and 2 children, only a water tank (reuse that bath water), miles of flat hard (or wet slick) brown dirt in 120 degree heat in every direction. No money, no radio, sometimes TV rabbit ears.
Begging for food from grocery store clerks as her parents bought beer and toilet paper inside, drugs outside. She grew up thinking they were derelict because of the drugs. As they got older and had to quit the drugs or die, she found they were just unfit people.
Lots of people in the world are unfit to care for the children, but the children often persevere and society absorbs the damaged alongside the deaths.
This colors my views of the world, as much as anything I experienced.
I got reduced price lunch for a significant part of my childhood.
My parents weren't bad. My mom was just impoverished. Our society does not pay people what they deserve. Our society pays people as little as possible. That leads to good, well meaning, and talented people who are nevertheless poor.
It's disappointing that there is such an automatic response to cover up for the parents who starve their children that people automatically dismissed your argument.
I have a problem with government stepping in to remove children from their parents but parents should definitely be blamed for their own child starving. I think all empathy should go to the child who is starving and significantly less to the parent who caused it (even if they are starving too, they are an adult and they have significantly more choices then a starving child)
It's a reductive one-liner from someone obviously unfamiliar with and disinterested in the problem space, and it's the kind of statement people familiar with and interested in the problem space hear so frequently that it sounds intentionally ignorant.
When you're reasoning outside of your own domain it's easy to get stuck in a "yeah, but why male models?" loop unless you listen to feedback.
That's very judgemental, assuming he's unfamiliar and disinterested.
A lot of people have their own detailed reasons for why things are happening that don't make sense when you zoom out and ask basic questions. E.g the children are already starving, all the nuance you are describing is based on the assumption that the children aren't already starving.
> we don't need any new apps that do similar things to existing apps"
I’m not a “Googler who may be responsible”, but my understanding is that Apple does this too… and Google App Store has a reputation for being lower quality.
I assume it’s because unoriginal apps at some point are just “polluting” the market and making it harder to find higher quality products. Which is generally what users want. Some things are redundant - how many flashlight apps, weather apps, ChatGPT wrappers, etc are needed? I guess Google doesn’t see value in hosting and distributing such apps.
I’m not sure I agree with this, but I understand it. Target or Walmart don’t need to sell your random trinkets that no one buys, and Google is deciding that the same applies to their store. At least with Android you can generally side load and access alternative stores, so you can build a richer marketplace where different “stores” can serve different customers.
> Some things are redundant - how many flashlight apps, weather apps, ChatGPT wrappers, etc are needed?
For what it's worth, the wording Apple uses in their App Review Guidelines [1] is:
> 4.3(b): Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already. We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience.
I’ll give credit to Apple for formally writing a policy to this extent, but it’s disappointing. There’s always the risk of putting in a lot of time for an app that is genuinely unique but Apple may not think so.
I’d much rather Apple let in junk apps but do more to promote curated lists of good apps. I like the “Editors Choice” section. I think it is generally a step in the right direction to surface decent apps.
Plus there’s also already some kind of precedent: Maps does an acceptable job promoting third-party “Guides” to attractions and food for many cities.
For what it's worth, that bit of the policy was written early in the life of the App Store, when there really was a glut of low-effort novelty apps, particularly in the categories they mentioned, and when app discovery features in the store were more limited. It's probably not as necessary nowadays, but it does help guide developers away from writing apps which users are unlikely to find useful. (And if you've genuinely put in the effort to create something novel, it shouldn't be difficult to convince the reviewer of that - App Store review is a two-way street.)
quoting from a nice piece: https://lmnt.me/blog/app-stores-and-payment-methods.html "It still blows my mind how little the App Store has improved over the last decade. It’s barely changed. Almost every bad thing about the App Store still exists. And almost every good thing that happened for app distribution and payment methods is just the result of regulation."
I don't really understand this thinking. If a long tail of mostly unremarkable apps make the good ones hard to find then that is a flaw of the ranking algorithm.
If an app is not even in the app store, how can it possibly attract user interest? What if users happen to like some quirky feature that seems unremarkable to app store reviewers?
I used to think this, but then I just abandoned their search and now use Kagi. (I use the !gp bang for the Play Store, no App Store bang seems to exist.)
I can't imagine ever going back to native store searches now that they're full of ads.
Sure, could be a neat feature, but practically, 95% of the time that I’m searching for an app I know the specific app I need already and am just searching by name. The !gp bang doesn’t search Kagi, it directs to the app with the matching name on the Play Store, but skips having to wade through ads to get there.
The other 5% of the time where I’m looking for an app for a particular function, there usually don’t exist enough apps that perform that function for filtering on search results to be worthwhile.
I’ve had some luck asking ChatGPT “How does AppX make money?” I’ve also asked it to find me games based on genre, style, and control constraints “without ads or with removable ads” and it does a fair job.
> I’m not a “Googler who may be responsible”, but my understanding is that Apple does this too… and Google App Store has a reputation for being lower quality.
It doesn't help much for Apple. You can search for pretty much anything on the App Store and get at best a handful of useful results, followed by page after page of complete dreck.
> I think it just does that to eat up your token quota and get you to upgrade.
If you pay for a subscription then they don’t have an incentive to use more tokens for the same answer.
It’s definitely because feedback from people has “taught” it that more boilerplate is better. It’s the same reason ChatGPT is annoyingly complementary.
> an LLM is regularly asked to produce a valid block of code top to bottom, or repeat a section of code with changes, when that's not what we do.
Eh, it's mostly what we do. We don't re-type everything every time, but we do type top-to-bottom when we type. As you later mentioned, "next edit" models really strike that balance, and they're like 50% of the value I derive from a tool like Cursor.
I'd love to see more diff-outputs instead of "retyping" everything (with a nice UI for the humans). I suspect that part of the reason we have these "inhuman" actions is because of the chat interface we've been using has lead to certain outputs being more desirable due to the medium.
I’ve started asking Gemini all sorts of things I would’ve googled but don’t want hallucinated. Their integration with search to “ground” the answers is one of the missing pieces required for LLMs to remove direct searching altogether. It’s the final missing version of “I’m feeling lucky”.
The only thing missing is a faster way to go from thought to typing. The ChatGPT apps’ pop-up bar is too easy to not bump every thought and question into. I just don’t trust the results as much.
The entire point is that reputable and well funded institutions with large campuses and thriving social and civic networks are doing fine. It’s small institutions that popped up to satisfy a once growing are being drained as demand falls.
Education is great, expanding your mind is great, but there is little incentive to foreclose other opportunities along the way in pursuit.
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