yusina

Right. And just as little as a refugee can decide their way out of the situation that their home country is in chaos and war, a homeless person rarely can decide their way out of poverty. The latter may have made choices earlier in life that contributed to their situation, but just claiming "well it's their choice that they are homeless" is not doing justice to the situation out there. Unless of course the situation is a choice, like for Elon Musk. At any point he could move into a permanent home wherever. It's absurd to use the same term for his situation as for an average person living under a bridge in SF.

The step from "it's a choice" to "it's your fault" is very small. There is a whole industry of populists thriving on the lack of distinguishing between these two.

Tech people often miss the social connotations such terms bring with them. Understandable, as many got into tech because of its clear definitions and lack of ambiguity and baggage, but the real world just doesn't work that way, and we have to acknowledge this.

It shows carelessness or incompetence or a combination thereof which extend to the entire code base.

> I know people who say they're homeless by choice.

To me, that's a blatant misnomer. Elon Musk also calls himself "homeless". (By choice, quite obviously.) There is not much to discuss once the term is assigned that meaning.

Exactly. Thank you.

Calling it a "choice" to seek asylum in another country because of war or threat of death in someone's home country for e.g. sexual orientation reasons is beyond cynical and cruel.

I truly hope you will never be in such a situation and then meeting somebody telling you that you are a refugee because of a choice you made.

I find it useful that terms have meaning and one can distinguish between what belongs to it and what doesn't.

A pork steak is a piece of meat taken from a pig. Once it's made of beans or some mushroom it may still be tasty (and I love good veggie food), but it's not a pork steak.

Similarly, the term "homeless" also has a certain meaning, and using it for something else muddies communication waters. And at worst, it makes the fight against actual homelessness harder: Next time some tax dollar is planned to be used for relief, somebody will point to those cases and say "well some homeless enjoy the sunrise and love the outdoors and have two suits in locker, and ain't none of my tax dollars go to that!!"

If you want to call that "gatekeeping", then sure. What's the purpose of your comment then? Gatekeeping me and telling me I should not call out the misuse of the term?

I'm not sure where all your mentions of the Bay Area come from. I'm writing from a European perspective, and in all major European cities you find homelessness prevalent. And it's not pretty.

A millionaire in the Swiss forest is not homeless. Choosing to live in a tent is not homelessness. To me, the term "homeless" implies a lack of alternatives. As soon as it's a choice, to see romantic sunrises or fall asleep to ocean waves or whatever, that is, if calles "homeless", to me, a misuse of the term. It's a nice life, I've done it too and loved it, but I'd not start to call it "homelessness" and place myself into the same category as the poor souls sleeping under a bridge.

Of course it's a spectrum. Some folks have been forced out of their home and are living out of a car while finding a new place. That's homelessness. For some of those, it's temporary. For others, it's a spiral into misery, next is to lose the job, having a mental health issue, soon the car breaks down, and eventually they are sleeping under a bridge. Insubstantial of whether it's in SF, Berlin, Sao Paulo or Tokyo. Similarities to a concious choice are only superficial. Once it's a choice, it's outside the spectrum and is doing the fight against homelessness a disservice.

Tell that to a real homeless who typically as to be very creative to even just charge their phone. If they have one.

I really appreciate the new title. It's doing the topic more justice.

And it didn't happen and if it had then he'd have crashed on a friend's sofa. And his laptop and two suits would have been safe in a locker at university.

An actual homeless person would have a quite different experience of a bust.

That was surely a great experiment. But it's very different from actual homelessness. I would have appreciated if the author had acknowledged that more. It's closer to a backpacker-in-a-tent-in-the-mountains experience than homelessness. In the latter, the living-in-a-tent is just a comparatively minor aspect of the experience.

This was a choice (essentially to save money) and the author had multiple fallback plans. Real homelessness is born out of desperation and lack of alternatives. Tragedies of mental health issues, abuse, severe financial distress, no savings, debt, warrants. No nice shower at the gym, no locker to keep a laptop and two suits. The constant fear of not just the police but also of getting robbed by another homeless, likely after something to sell for drugs. That's very different from anytime being able to crash on somebody's sofa to save on rent so you can earlier "afford to build companies".

We can even see it in one of the later paragraphs where potential spots in the bay area are evaluated. The local homeless should not be close. Oh, they shouldn't? That gives you an idea of the conditions actual homeless folks need to live under.

Or just ... breathe normally? Your body can handle this pretty well on its own.

What's the point of this hyper-optimization? (Unless it cures a condition obviously.)

"But they could have just ..." does not take away the fact that the impact on their lives was real. An impact that you caused.

Again, discovering this situation via what you call an "experiment" wasn't perhaps bad outright. But the longer it went and the more you guys were observing that people actually behaved that way and how negatively they were affected was less and less justifiable.

Any scientific experiment involving humans or animals nowadays requires ethics considerations and approval by an ethics board. For good reason. Just saying "well they could just ..." is not good enough.

Definitely.

But it also means acknowledging later on that it was actually harmful to others.

That's not a prank, it's just idiotic.

We all did stupid things when young, but most of us have by now realized that what they did wasn't actually funny.

That's indeed my observation too, in general but also in tech in particular, but I didn't want to straight put insult the typical HN commenter as I'm sure there are also lots of moral individuals around here.

> I don't get why people keep thinking it was forgotten

Well, I replied to a post that gave a link to a document that supposedly exhaustively (?) listed all alternatives that were considered. Monads are not on that list. From that, it's easy to come to the conclusion that it was not considered, aka forgotten.

If it was not forgotten, then why is it not on the list?

> Is this really a good idea for a language that can't express monads naturally?

That's a separate question from asking why people think that it wasn't considered. An interesting one though. To an experienced Haskell programmer, it would be worth asking why not take the leap and make it easy to express monads naturally. Solving the error handling case elegantly would just be one side effect that you get out of it. There are many other benefits, but I don't want to make this into a Haskell tutorial.

News flash, the vast majority of landfills' contents eventually also end up in air, food, kids, schools.

The vast majority of landfills eventually leak. It's overall a terrible way to handle this waste w.r.t. environmental impact.

It fascinates me that really smart and experienced people have written that page and debated approaches for many years, and yet nowhere on that page is the Haskell-solution mentioned, which is the Maybe and Either monads, including their do-notation using the bind operator. Sounds fancy, intimidating even, but is a very elegant and functionally pure way of just propagating an error to where it can be handled, at the same time ensuring it's not forgotten.

This is so entrenched into everybody writing Haskell code, that I really can't comprehend why that was not considered. Surely there must be somebody in the Go community knowing about it and perhaps appreciating it as well? Even if we leave out everybody too intimidated by the supposed academic-ness of Haskell and even avoiding any religios arguments.

I really appreciate the link to this page, and overall its existence, but this really leaves me confused how people caring so much about their language can skip over such well-established solutions.

How is it evil to displace jobs? Why should we fight for keeping humans in jobs that machines can do?

I'm not saying there is no evil, but that argument at least holds little ground.

And what makes you believe that engineers have more morals than cable news folks have? Does not match my experience.

Most of them got into tech because it's fun and because it pays royaly. Morals have little to do with that for lots of folks.

Well, look at the CEO of X, tells you all you need to know about that platform.

I challenge you to go through the history of your own posts and count how often you salt your statements of opinion with the magic dust of "I believe".

I did. You are not living up to the standard you are demanding of others (and which rarely anybody around here satisfies anyway).

Seems we are not getting anywhere. We can agree to disagree, which I'm fine with. Please refrain from personal attacks going forward, thank you.

That's one of the best takes on this matter that I have seen in a long time.

(Ironically, I would not be too surprised if it was produced by an LLM.)

So, it is your opinion that the mere expression of opinion "without anything else" is not allowed in a discussion?

And if that is so, didn't you also "just" express an opinion? Would your own contribution to the discussion pass your own test?

You might have overlooked that I provided extensive arguments all around in this thread. Please reconsider.

>if a human came out living but with a brain that had zero electrical activity, that would be extraordinary, we normally come out with a baseline of pre-programming.

That statement reveals deep deficiencies in your understanding of biological neural networks. "electrical activity" is very different from "pre-programming". Synapses fire all the time, no matter if meaningfully pre-programmed or not. In fact, electrical activity decreases over time in a human brain. So, if anything, programming over time reduces electrical activity (though there is no established causal link).

> I sometimes think this debate happens because humans don't want to admit we're nothing more than LLMs programmed by nature and nurture, human seem to want to be especially special.

It's not specific to humans. But indeed, we don't fully understand how brains of humans, apes, pigs, cats and other animals really work. We have some idea of synapses, but there is still a lot unclear. It's like thinking just because an internal combistion engine is made of atoms, and we mostly know how atom physics and chemistry work, that any body with this basic knowledge of atom physics can understand and even build an ICE. Good luck trying. It's similar with a brain. Yes, synapses play a role. But that doesn't mean a brain is "nothing more than an LLM".

If 99.9% fail and you see one that didn't, then would it be surprising that it didn't? No! It's not 100%, so there must be some example. For that one it's not surprising.

More precisely, it's not surprising that one exists. It may be surprising that this particular one survived, just as it wouldbe surprising that it's my neighbor who wins the lottery next week. But it's likely that somebody will, so if somebody has won, it won't be a surprise that somebody did.

I agree with your description, but the pizza place case is even simpler: Statistics don't guarantee future single sample properties. 70% fail in the first year. So, 30% don't. Why would it be surprising to see one that didn't? It would be surprising to see none that didn't fail. So, it's expected to see lots that don't fail, Pete's being one of them.