rdbl27

"Critics and opponents of the current regime" who travel overseas includes far more than 55k people every single day.

A more honest way of interpreting that data is: "even if you are a vocal critic of the current regime, it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever search your phone at the border."

California is as socialist as many European countries. It has _extensive_ social services along the lines of what you describe.

These make the problem worse, rather than better, by enabling.

Junkies get a free apartment from the city, free food, free healthcare, free clothes... and now have unlimited free time to go scam cash for a fix.

Free taxpayer-funded rehab? Exists, but almost none take it. That would reduce their drugs time. Forcing treatment would be cruel and oppressive, according to the left. So the cycle continues.

Newton was able to attend Cambridge at all only because his parents were prosperous yeoman farmers who owned substantial agricultural estates and held private incomes.

Nearly all schools at the time were not subsidized by society and required substantial tuition payments. Most children had to get jobs. School was rare.

Newton's parents, while not extremely wealthy, could afford to send him to expensive private schools, instead of requiring him to get a job at age 8. This was a prerequisite for entering Cambridge.

His early career was subsidized by his upper middle class parents and inherited capital, not by society at large. He became a professor at age 26, and was paid a salary in exchange for work after that.

Newton and Leibniz both inherited substantial estates from their upper middle class parents.

Neither was fabulously wealthy, but they were both able to bootstrap their academic careers with inherited money until they became famous enough to receive patronage.

"Individuals choosing voluntarily to spend their own money researching mathematical puzzles and curiosities and pure knowledge" is a very different ethical proposition than modern academia, which depends heavily on compulsory tax payments levied on everyone.

1. is debatable, but in any case that is not the argument that the GP post made -- the post specifically argued that it's worth developing knowledge with no immediate known application, because some application may be developed later.

That's a different argument than "knowledge ought to be accumulated for its own sake."

2. is unclear; the economic funding model of the 18th century was very different. At that time, there were very few academics, and nearly all were independently wealthy and self-funding. That is, they chose to spend their own money on mathematical curiosities to amuse themselves.

Now, in modern academia, we are discussing the case that public tax money ought to be appropriated and allocated to pure knowledge / curiosity discovery _at scale_, for work which -- by definition -- has no known application or use. This is a very different economic and ethical proposal. This is no longer the question of how one rich man chooses to spend his own money; we are discussing the social application of common resources -- compulsory tax payments for all.

It's easy to imagine other ways to spend that tax money that have much less debatable social value -- how about free healthcare for all? Better roads, or high speed trains? No famines? Flood control? There are a million other ideas with immediate benefit.

I appreciate the value of pure knowledge as much as anyone, but it's also hard to make the case that it should be pursued indefinitely, whereever possible, and without limit or boundary when so many competing priorities exist. It's a question of competition for very scarce resources, versus unlimited wants. How do we decide appropriate allocations?

Leetcode does not test your ability to code in the sense of anything related to real world engineering applications.

Leetcode merely tests your ability to memorize and regurgitate algorithms from a textbook -- a skill that LLMs can now do a thousand times faster and more accurately than any human.

It never had much to do with real world software engineering, and now it's even less relevant than ever.

The claim is falsifiable; the bulk of 18th century math is "forgotten" in the sense that few, if any, people still use or apply or even know about it.

It's not "forgotten" in the technical sense that one _can_ still go dig into the dusty archives of any number of old university libraries, and review learned journals, diaries, commonplace books, personal correspondence, and so on from the 1700s that describe the mathematical work of the day in detail.

You can then systematically review that work, and test whether the claim that "nearly all mathematical output of the 18th century has been generally forgotten and never found any use."

I hypothesize that this experiment will show that nearly all of the mathematical output of the time long ago fell into oblivion. This is a falsifiable claim.

True, but this is also a stunning example of survivorship bias.

Countless other mathematical curiosities were developed in the 1700s -- and forgotten. Calculus just happens to be the one that found practical applications later, so that's the one that's well known today.

It's difficult to draw the conclusion that "every possible branch of learning ought to be funded" by appealing to "later practical value" based on this cherrypicked example.

On the other hand, clearly _some_ novel theoretical work with no apparent immediate value _does_ yield real world benefit later.

Since we lack the resources to fund every PhD with a crazy theory on what the next new subfield ought to be, how do we decide?

Seems like AI could help massively there, by removing a huge bottleneck around technical elaboration and application seeking.

Don't despair; new tool rollouts are always a hard sell -- especially when replacing a beloved classic.

For me, the killer feature would be "ease of use."

Sure, I _can_ make rsync do any number of rarely-used optimizations, if I feel like studying the manpage for half an hour and figuring out how to fit it to my exact use case.

If your tool has the same features but is automatically adaptive -- I'd use it.

Copying thousands of tiny files in deeply nested subdirs? Just works. Copying a huge file that's already encrypted? Just works. Copying a mix? Just works.

No special flags to set, zero config. It just works, optimally, every time.

"Reducing the user's cognitive load" is the killer feature here.

They chose a license that is _explicitly designed_ to allow people to profit from their work without paying.

There are many other licensing terms in common use. They chose that one.

That's fine, they can do what they like with their work. There is no moral obligation to reinterpret their motives in a fashion that differs from their formally expressed preferences.

They chose to accept donations -- also fine. If you want to donate, go ahead. If you don't -- that's fine too, by definition.

So.... Since they explicitly chose not to require any payment, there is no moral obligation to pay them. That's the point.

Would it be nice? Sure. But "not donating" is also fine.

"Donations" are, by definition, entirely voluntary. Whether someone using the software under its proper licensing terms is wealthy, whether you approve of their business model, or other factors are all irrelevant.

"It's the right thing to do" in reply to a moral query is the "begging the question fallacy".

The question at hand is of the form: Is it right to do X (to donate, in this case)? Your reply amounts to: yes, because X is the right thing to do. This merely restates the query as its own conclusion.

"Donations" are - by definition - entirely voluntary.

If people want to donate, that's fine. If they don't want to donate -- also fine. That's what "donation" means.

Therefore anyone's decision not to donate is entirely consistent with the author's own expressed preferences.

Whether an actor happens to be large and rich (OpenAI) is irrelevant. The license -- the author's formally expressed preferences -- does not say anything about "free unless you are rich." They could certainly have done so if they had wanted to. They didn't. You are taking it upon yourself to claim that you know what's best for them.

You believe you know better than the authors themselves about how they ought to be treated?

They chose -- explicitly, voluntarily, knowingly -- to give the thing away for free. That's their right for their own creation. Your preferences don't supersede theirs.

Surely "the right thing to do" includes some element of the authors' explicitly stated preferences about how they wish to be treated.

In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone.

Your feelings about what constitutes "the right thing to do" are apparently different from those of the authors. You believe you know better than they themselves do how they should be treated.

The AI product doesn't fall apart (at least, not a good AI product.) The proposition is that is functionally indistinguishable from a human product to the extent that _there is no way to tell_, absent a formal and seperate disclosure.

It's a Turing test for art -- and the machines are winning, at scale.

The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.

The makeup of the numbers is shifting radically.

20 years ago, ~all Facebook users were organic real life social networks chatting with each other online.

It's not gone yet, but for many years, that "organic social network" usage segment has been declining.

The commercially motivated "social media influencer marketing" segment has been growing faster than the "organic" segment has been declining.

Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives?

The case of Sweden entirely falsifies the theory that "it would've been much worse without government action."

No government action whatsoever was taken in Sweden. None. Death rates were no better or worse than adjacent countries that intervened extensively.

Ergo, government intervention was irrelevant one way or another.

ICE agents arrest _people who committed crimes_ at green card interviews (including "entering the country illegally," which is a crime.)

As I said, the United States is very welcoming to foreigners who are willing to follow the laws.

Yes. The United States.

Despite the whirlwind of media to the contrary, the US is very welcoming to foreigners who follow the laws (that is, don't enter illegally) and make an effort to integrate by learning the language and customs.

Much more than any other country on Earth.

He's coldly rational:

The investors gave him $5 million. Large commitment, large risk.

Each customer gives him 15k per unit. Even a rare large customer who buys 100 ovens gives him 150k. Small commitment, small risk.

If he breaks his promise to the investors, he can't raise more money easily. It will be very hard to find another $5 million.

If he breaks his promise to the customers with a garbage product, he can more easily find a replacement customer for the much smaller risk.

Yes. 99% of things just worked, zero modifications.

The few cases where something was not directly translatable was <10 minutes with a coding agent to make some minor config changes, and then it just worked.

I generally agree, but it's a bit overstated to say "nobody talks about Oracle now" -- they made a profit of about $17 billion dollars in 2025.

More specifically, 0 dB is the loudest sound the audio system is rated to produce without distortion. It's common to be able to actually drive systems harder than their specified engineering limits, which is why meters have a short positive dB section marked in red.

Over 99% of students who attempt your "mostly quiet" strategy are managed entirely out of academia long before tenure.

You won the lottery, which is great for you, but it's not a strategy to promote to others as life advice.

The problem is not a presumption that government can't ever be good. The problem is that the team you personally think is "good" won't be in charge forever.

Everyone loves enabling broad government authority when people they like happen to be in charge.

Sooner or later, a government that is "bad" (for any possible definition of "bad" that you personally approve of) will someday be in charge. Then, suddenly, enabling all that broad government authority seems like not such a great idea.

You are glossing over the fact that Japan severely punishes crime, and acquittals are almost unheard of.

Sure, but those are cherrypicked cases where a technology became obsolete. There are many counterexamples of decades-old technologies that are still actively chosen for greenfield work today, in 2026.

SQL was first released in 1973. More new SQL is being written today than ever.

C++ (1985) is the de facto standard implementation language for web browsers, JavaScript engines, networking stacks, telecommunications, video games, high speed trading, CAD/CAM, video rendering and editing, audio processing, filesystems, databases, hardware drivers, automotive, aerospace, and robotics, among others.

Is Rust making inroads? Sure, and it's a tiny fraction of C++ still. It's a long ways from being the standard.

Likewise, Python is often cited as the "AI language," but that's on the surface -- CUDA, tensor libraries, inference languages, GPU kernels, compiler stacks, and so on are usually C++.

Then there's C -- introduced in 1972. Still widely used for greenfield in kernels, device drivers, embedded systems and microcontrollers, filesystems, firmware, network stacks, cryptography, databases, compilers.

LaTeX, MATLAB, Erlang, Verilog, PostScript, Lisp (including Scheme and Clojure), shell scripting (and the UNIX paradigm itself)... the list of old tech that still sees new projects in 2026 goes on.

Isn't your whole post "just a complaint" too?