skulk

Not even this. The USA has a labor shortage that is filled by workers who used to migrate seasonally until it was no longer allowed, thus creating a perverse system that encouraged business owners to look the other way and immigrants to stay instead of leave.

A long time ago, the southwestern part of the USA was Mexico, but a certain destiny manifested itself and changed that. It seems like this didn't affect day-to-day life due to a generous treaty for a while until some Americans decided they deserved the land there more than the people who were there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation#Cession_o... -- see the part about 1930 removals.

Obviously, the people who were kicked out were performing some useful economic function, so the USA decided to have it both ways: The Bracero program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracero_Program

This program of importing cheap labor had an expiration date, and it was allowed to expire in the 60s. Guess what happened then?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9017686/

> Despite the forced removal of Mexicans during the 1930s, as soon as the United States entered the Second World War, authorities approached Mexico to negotiate a binational treaty that arranged for the annual entry of legal workers for seasonal labor in U.S. agriculture (Galarza 1964; Calavita 1992). The resulting Bracero Program lasted from 1942 through 1964, and its effect on the likelihood of migration is readily apparent in Figure 3. Between 1940 and 1945 the probability of U.S. migration rose nearly seven times, going from 0.003 to 0.020 before leveling off briefly and then rising to new plateau of 0.029 from 1956 to 1959. In 1960 Congress began to phase out the Bracero Program, finally letting it expire at the end of 1964, bringing the probability of migration down to 0.017.

Why did they let it expire? presumably to increase demand for American labor. A laudable goal to be sure, but is that really what happened? Surely people stopped crossing the border to do labor here and Americans started getting hired more.

This whole thing is beyond messed up and the fact that this history is essentially erased (I wasn't taught this in school) absolutely boils my blood.

> Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend.

There is a pretty clear down-trend post-COVID here.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...

Immigration in the US is a completely different problem with its own crazy complex history of cause and effect. Using one as a lens to study the other seems foolish at best.

re: questionable legality https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...

> Moreover it's not hard to think of vaguely similar objections to fertilizers.

It's completely different. If LLM companies pulled this out of thin air it would be also different, but no; they've effectively plundered the commons and locked up all the profit for themselves. If intellectual labor goes the way of agricultural labor, I think humanity will have lost something valuable.

And don't come back with the "farmers would have said the same thing about the industrial revolution!" thing again if you're just going to terminate your thought there. Automating agricultural labor brings vast material benefits for all since it lowers the cost of tangible goods needed for life. I'd challenge you take this one step further and explain why automating intellectual labor will provide similar fruits and is therefore something to cheer for.

tractor manufacturers or fertilizer companies didn't suck down the work of generations of predecessors in a questionably-legal fashion only to turn around and sell a heavily discounted version of that back to them. I'm not sure where "parasite" becomes appropriate, but your analogy is poor.

there probably never was any there for a meaningful amount of time, but it's incredibly hard to prove a negative.

If you have a ton of capital, you still can't spin up Claude Opus and compete on price with Anthropic with your new fancy optimizations. With open models you can and that is great for consumers.

It feels like the US military is 90% racketeering and 10% physically protecting Americans, if that. Most of our protection comes from two gigantic oceans on both sides.

Though, I really do enjoy this racket so I guess I'm not allowed to ask any questions about the ethics of keeping it going.

Your motte-and-bailey argumentation here is extremely tiring, and I'd encourage you to take a step back and look at what's being discussed here.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/cost...

US science is in chaos not because of pushback against this evil "demographic tracking and reporting", but rather an extremely capricious attitude towards any research from the administration. This isn't about the practices of the universities choosing who gets a grant. The administration is terminating random grants based on keywords that they find in the abstracts even if the keyword has nothing to do with evil DEI.

> If Science is really the priority, it should be easy to stay neutral on unrelated contentious social issues.

Science is being used to study these contentious social issues. That's the kind of science that's getting suppressed, _but that's not even the issue here_

This comment shows up on every single emacs thread and for the life of me I can't understand why. It takes one line in a shell to pull down a premade config and if that were to be built on, who would decide what gets put in? I don't think it's worth anyone's time to decide what everyone needs in a premade config.

Williams College wasn't content to blindly follow a vague directive restricting their speech. They already received very few grants as the article said. You better bet most scientists at big institutions were tripping over themselves to police their own speech to ensure they aren't uttering any of the new forbidden words like "engender."

> These practices are too ingrained and sacrosanct at this point to let a mere funding crisis throw them off course.

Yes, some people have egalitarian principles. As much as you think there is a conspiracy against your group to keep you down it's just not true.

This group of people you're describing ("scientists who are only willing to do science if it involves preferential treatment") is simply not real. The idea that academics would cling to DEI statements or refuse funding is beyond laughable, and could only be dreamt up by someone who has never experienced academia.

the inverse is true as well-- I can produce or identify any note with zero reference and imagine entire melodies and harmonies and yet am still probably mediocre at best at composing.

These are very interesting anecdotes. The feeling I've been getting is that the inherent complexity in software hits people at prompt-time because they simply don't have the words to express what is needed. (edit: or don't have the knowledge/patience to interpret what the LLM spits out)

this statement is equivalent to "pi is a normal number." While most real numbers are normal and pi is suspected to be so, it isn't known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

> Your audience, or whoever you aim your work at, should be treated with respect.

I just want to amplify this point. As I was reading this, the LLMisms kept jumping out at me and each one felt like the author looking at me and deciding that my time spent reading this prose wasn't actually worth anything to them.

OP: I want YOUR thoughts, not the next token predictions of a gigantic pile of matrix multiplications. I want your awkward sentences, grammar mistakes, half-baked thoughts, self-doubt, silly jokes. I don't want this pile of grandiose mechanical slop completely devoid of humanity.

I've studied how pre-NNUE stockfish worked and the principles of static position evaluation are accessible to a 500 rated player. The rest is writing an efficient search algorithm, which is purely an endeavor in computer science, not chess playing. So your expertise in programming gave you the leg up here, and predictably your opponents experience in chess doesn't help. Your point only serves to bolster TFA's argument.

what does actually playing chess have to do with writing an efficient game tree search algorithm beyond a few simple principles? You challenged him to a programming contest and won, as the vastly more experienced programmer. Even though he could use AI, your domain knowledge here proved to be the deciding factor.

Haven't looked into this in depth but sub-nanosecond sync for systems up to 10km apart is interesting since 10km is about 33 light microseconds. There is some trickery going on.

Complaining about 2:1 immigrant to local birth rate has absolutely nothing to do with long-time permanent residents (who are locals). It's clearly a fear that white culture is being overrun by brown/chinese people.

Your comments degrade the discourse at least as much as you think mine do.

it is sad, X11 had a suite of tools like xrandr that worked regardless of your wm/compositor but now with Wayland these tools are compositor-specific (or have to agree to a standard).

Demanding proof of systemic racism every time it's brought up is kind of gauche and just tiring. You don't have to believe that it exists, but it very much does. I know you're going to clap back at me and say "so you have no argument, got it" and yes I'm not going to present you with one. I'm just telling you the way you're arguing this is kind of lame and incurious.

Huh? So more nonwhite people is a net negative for Australia? How isn't this just bald faced racism?

This chiding from you would be better received if there was a shred of evidence that the other tribe is even slightly receptive to this kind of discourse.

Unfortunately, the norms of discourse are pretty much gone. This is terrifying in the long-term.

posted 7 years ago but applies far more broadly now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAbab8aP4_A

I'm having trouble taking your comment seriously if you think that one number is enough to disprove systemic racism.

I've started using ewm to get this kind of unification between emacs window management and non-emacs window management.

https://codeberg.org/ezemtsov/ewm

It's not clear what purpose this serves, as it just emits C code: https://github.com/alonsovm44/tc-lang/blob/9cb8af37cadc9221c.... Why someone would choose to write this and not C is therefore beyond me (there are fat pointer libraries for C)

In the pre-LLM days I'd congratulate OP on a clean implementation because this would clearly be a learning project, but now that I know that this doesn't represent much beyond a claude code prompt it just feels so hollow.

OP, if you're reading this, I'd love to hear you reflect on what you learned from working on this project and how (if at all) you plan to use this in the future (and if I'm completely off the mark about how this seems 100% AI generated). I'm not trying to take a jab or anything, just trying to center this discussion on human-produced outputs.

> computers do not help human education in the slightest

I had no access to anyone who could teach me calculus as a kid except Khan Academy, so I think this is a gross exaggeration. But I agree in the end, that all my "real" learning did come from pen-and-paper practice, not watching videos.

So if I wanted to actually use this and I write some rust-but-lisp code and there's a compile error, will it show me a nice error message with an arrow pointing to where the error happened in my lisp code?

Can I use the amazing `rust-analyzer` LSP to get cool IDE features?

I suspect the answer is no, but these might be good further prompts to use.

Your GitHub link 404s.

I wonder, why not just get ECA to run `emacsclient -e <elisp>` instead? Does that not work as well?