> Sure the 4,995 unemployed might be able to afford the gizmo, but the state does not receive the same taxes. So what happens to those 4,995 unemployed people ? who is paying for their health benefits and social security (retirement) ?
So are we're simultaneously facing a big unemployment crisis, and a big shortage of health care providers and retirement care takers?
- Almost everything on blogs and HN are opinions, so don't take things things too seriously
- Fun and humour are subjective, and a substantial part derives from novelty and subvertin expectations. It's hard to make something fun for an audience that has already seen such dozens of times.
- The audience('s background and expectations) is diverse and varies with time. So what's considered "fun" is audience specific and often cyclical.
Do you have some better alternatives for a country where private mental health care costs €150/hr, while the government/insurance paid care have 3-6M+ waiting lists?
Well on the one hand, an obviously terrible solution is not inherently better than doing nothing. ie, LLM mental healthcare could be _worse_ than just letting the current access times climb.
My other stance, which I suspect is probably more controversial, is that I'm not convinced that mental health care is nearly as effective as people think. In general, mental health outcomes for teens are getting markedly worse, and it's not for lack of access. We have more mental health access than we've had previously -- it just doesn't feel like it because the demand has risen even more sharply.
On a personal level, I've been quite depressed lately, and also feeling quite isolated. As part of an attempt to get out of my own shell I mentioned this to a friend. Now, my friend is totally well-intended, and I don't begrudge him whatsoever. But, the first response out of his mouth was whether I'd sought professional mental health care. His response really hurt. I need meaningful social connection. I don't need a licensed professional to charge me money to talk about my childhood. I think a lot of people are lost and lonely, and for many people mental health care is a band-aid over a real crisis of isolation and despair.
I'm not recommending against people seeking mental health care, of course. And, despite my claims there are many people who truly need it, and truly benefit from it. But I don't think it's the unalloyed good that many people seem to believe it to be.
>My other stance, which I suspect is probably more controversial, is that I'm not convinced that mental health care is nearly as effective as people think. In general, mental health outcomes for teens are getting markedly worse, and it's not for lack of access. We have more mental health access than we've had previously -- it just doesn't feel like it because the demand has risen even more sharply.
There's also the elephant in the room that mental healthcare, in particular for teens will probably just be compensating for the disease that is social media addiction. Australia has the right idea, banning social media for all goods.
>I think a lot of people are lost and lonely, and for many people mental health care is a band-aid over a real crisis of isolation and despair.
Professional mental health care cannot scale to the population that needs it. The best option, like you mention, is talking to friends about our feelings and problems. I think there has been an erosion (or it never existed) of these social mental health mechanisms. There is a learned helplessness that has developed that people have lost their capacity to just be with someone that is hurting. There needs to be a framework for providing mental health therapy to loved ones that can exist without licensed professionals, otherwise LLm's are the only scalable option for people to talk about their issues and work on finding solutions.
This might be controversial but mental health care is largely a bandaid when the causes of people's declining mental health is due to factor's far outside the individual's control: loneliness epidemics, declining optimism towards the future, climate change, the rise of global fascism, online dating, addictiveness of social media and the war on our attention, etc.
I was watching "A Charlie Brown Christmas" the other day, and Lucy (who has a running gag in Peanuts of being a terrible, or at least questionable, psychologist) tells Charlie Brown to get over his seasonal depression he should get involved in a Christmas project, and suggests he be the director of their play.
Which is to say, your stance might not be as controversial as you think, since it was the adult take in a children's cartoon almost 60 years ago.
Your Peanuts reference made me smile but I don't see why you thought a little girl's comment in a 1960s Christmas special was supposed to represent the "adult take" on mental health in the 1960s.
Lucy isn't actually a psychologist which is part of the reason the "gag" is funny.
Knuths intention seems clear enough in his own writing:
Literate programming is a methodology that combines a programming language with a documentation language, thereby making programs more robust, more portable, more easily maintained, and arguably more fun to write than programs that are written only in a high-level language. The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a computer.
and
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our
main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us
concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what
we want a computer to do.
In a way this is what notebooks are for Python and other languages. They mix documentation and code such that you can run that code and inspect the output. See for example the pytorch tutorials.
Yes, notebooks are a restrictive type of litterate programming, interactive and browser bound.
TeX was "proven" as a text/typography tool by the fact that the source code written in WEB (interleaving pascal and TeX (this is meta (metacircular))) allows for you to "render" the program as a typographed work explaining how TeX is made+ run the program as a mean to create typographic work.
I'm lacking the words for a better explanation of how do I feel sbout the distinction, but in a sense I would say that notebooks are litterate scrips, while TeX is a litterate program ? (The difference is aesthetical)
There is Org Babel in Emacs that can be an alternative to jupyter notebooks for literate programming (research/devopsy tasks). It is more powerful in some aspects and weaker in others.
I dream of a world where the Knuth idea of programming and mathematics are naturally embedded in our cultures, like novels are.
I find it weird to not be able to find linux source code and commentaries or even math/physics/science masterpieces in libraries where you can find Finnegan's Wake easily (at least where do I live), and not be able to talk about the GHC in between two discussion about romance or the weather at the bakery.
> I find it weird to not be able to find linux source code and commentaries
That one statement is a great concise explanation/motivation for "literate programming".
Explanations with code, that explain code design choices, in a way that enables the code to be understood better, and the ideas involved to be picked up and applied flexibly to reading and writing other code.
Another way to view it is: Developers are "compilers" from ideas to source. Documenting the ideas along with the "generated" source, is being "open source" about the origin and specific implementation of the source.
I think that statement is also a great concise explanation for why literate programming doesn't really work in practice.
For something as complex as the Linux kernel, there is no single document that is going to explain the entire system to anyone who reads it. For a start, different people need different levels of explanation. Someone fresh out of a JavaScript bootcamp is going to need a very different guide to Linux than someone who's spent years working on the Windows kernel and just needs to know what's different and what's the same. Moreover, the further a person is from understanding how the Linux kernel works, the more iterative the explanation will need to be: first setting up the broad concepts, then explaining these concepts in more detail, then clarifying these details with more precise examples, and so on. If these layers of explanations are bound to code, then the person who needs less of an explanation will end up skipping parts of the codebase (assuming they let themselves be guided by the literate documentation). If the explanation is not bound to the code, then that's not really literate programming, it's just documentation.
The other issue is that even two different people with similar levels of skill will often want things explained in different ways. Partly, that's going to be things like the analogies they're used to, and partly that's going to be a question of what they need from the explanation. A document "The Linux Kernel for the Data Scientist" will probably look very different from "The Linux Kernel for the Systems Engineer", and both will be different again to "The Linux Kernel for Project Managers". A huge part of technical writing is understanding precisely who your audience is, and in literate programming, your audience kind of becomes "everyone", which is too large an audience. The advantage of separating code and documentation is that you can write your code for a much more restricted set of readers, but provide a bunch of different additional guides that are each aimed more precisely at a target audience.
I think literate programming can work for programs that are primarily intended as tools for teaching (because then the whole application is designed to be read by a specific target audience, and can be written from that perspective), but for general-purpose applications, particularly more complex ones like the Linux kernel, are better served by separating out the different documentation concerns.
> different people need different levels of explanation
> the further a person is from understanding how the Linux kernel works, the more iterative the explanation will need to be
Good points. Reminds me of how science is communicated. The target audience of a research paper is other researchers. If the target audience were broader, it would have to be more akin to a textbook.
Yes, marketing often works via fear. And decision making in organizations often works through blame shifting and diffusion of accountability. So organizations will just stick with centralization and Cloudfare, AWS, Microsoft et al regardless of technical concerns.
If there is a significant mismatch between what people are looking for and what manufacturers provide, why would some other manufacturer not jump in to capture the underserved demand? It doesn't seem like there's only a very small number of car (or laptop) manufacturers.
At high level, WSL2 provides a single optimized VM and Microsoft-compiled Linux kernel. Optimized here means that the VM only provides a small set of devices to the Linux kernel, and the kernel operates with exact known hardware, which is much smaller and simpler compared to a full blown kernel (which detects a large variety of hardware) and fuller featured VMs (c.f. qemu emulated devices: https://kashyapc.fedorapeople.org/virt/qemu/qemu-list-of-emu...).
And when you run multiple "distributions" or instances, they all share the same running VM and kernel. So after a one-time startup of the VM+kernel, opening more distributions/instances is like starting new system containers (similar to lxc/lxd or systemd-nspawn, which are also very quick to spawn on Linux) rather than new VMs. The architecture is quite similar to Linux-on-ChromeOS (Crostini).
That entire library/dataset is less than 5Mb compressed, which is barely larger than the size of modern commercial websites. An entire bible in uncompressed plaintext is only about 4Mb (compressed about 1Mb). Computers can really handle tons of data really fast; we've just become too accustomed to inefficiencies everywhere.
If someone is using Debian it’s likely because they want no frills Linux, with apt-get, and the reliable cadence of LTS releases. And the added benefit of if they run into a problem it’s likely somebody else has as well
> Honestly I can’t quite believe mlc works at all, let alone qlc. I do wonder why there’s no way to operate qlc as if it were mlc, other than the manufacturer not wanting to allow it.
Manufacturers often do sell such pMLC or pSLC (p = pseudo) cells as "high endurance" flash.
So are we're simultaneously facing a big unemployment crisis, and a big shortage of health care providers and retirement care takers?
reply