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I completely avoid any haskell package in Arch and just build it with Stack, it's usually simple.

It certainly works for software, but we may be hitting diminishing returns on software. You may argue it's been a social net negative for a decade.

The problem is that while it has warts still, in reality it isn't much different than the human slop from offshoring projects.

Thus it is already good enough for many companies.


Can the users of the software even keep up at that point? We may have reached diminishing returns on software production, and not enough impact on the rest of the process.


That the whole article can be seen as a masterpiece of talking around the obvious while avoiding stepping on the mine. Obvious rules cannot be applied systematically because certain government metrics would look bad. Goodhart's law, any explicit metric will be immediately optimized. And this is people optimizing metrics as best as they can in play. I'll leave the obvious as an exercise for the reader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law


Why not just say what you mean? This sort of nudge nudge wink wink stuff is so weird.


Suspension and expulsion rates are closely watched, as well as graduation rates. Changes in these numbers trigger federal investigations. Meanwhile, disciplinary actions in general are closely watched for DEI/civil rights considerations and there is a significant pressure to under-report them because it makes the school look better.


Vagueposting is a new term online for this kind of behavior - it stems from people getting absolutely destroyed online for various opinions, resulting in people not feeling safe to say what they really mean. Sometimes it's hateful opinions, sometimes it isn't. The end result is people will become unable to simply state their opinions and we won't be able to pick apart people with terrible ideas from the good ones, because no one wants to talk!


> resulting in people not feeling safe to say what they really mean

This is hacker news, most of us are anonymous. People say all sorts of vile things on here. Come on, Ambolia, have the courage of your convictions.


It's more effort than courage. Saying vile things takes no effort for many people. Saying a difficult truth takes more effort.

In any case, his caution birthed a comment tree that's normally verboten.


This isn't Reddit, you aren't going to get softbanned by downvotes


We're talking about schools in the US, which means we're talking about black and latino students. This trips the culture war wires, so people get wink winky.


Because some things are politically incorrect to say.

If those things are left unsaid and everyone still understands what's being referred to (even generally) there can be some alignment on the issue.

Some people with ideological axes to grind like to pick fights on particular points, even (perhaps especially) when it is not constructive.


I'll volunteer: in every single video of American teachers being assaulted I've glimpsed over the years, the assailants were black.

I'm sure someone could take their time and find a few rare instances of that not being the case (if they can manage to do it before I inevitably get -4 points [flagged][dead] for this callous sacrilege), to which I will preemptively reply that someone equally invested in the argument could easily find ten videos confirming my anecdotal observation for each one you provide.


I am reminded of a former boss's niece who was a kindergarten teacher in a rural, very white district. No physical abuse, but she was very surprised the first time a kid started cussing her out.

It's not a race issue so much as a poverty and cultural issue. Any racial correlation is a proxy for those two things.


Saying you're too lazy to actually check if these videos are genuinely all black students, but someone could do it, and you know the answer even without checking somehow, isn't exactly convincing.

There just aren't enough blacks in the US for them to completely dominate any crime. To be at your imagined rate of 90% of instances being black, when only 13 or 14% of the population, would require a ridiculously high rate compared to every other group.


As if that wasn't bad enough, Trump revoked the Obama/Biden which didn't allow schools punish black students unless they punished an equal amount of whites:

https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/education-department-...


Have to be careful forming your world view based on worldstar TikTok, you might be getting Chinese psy-opped


Right, as opposed to other media where you wouldn't be?


Sundar, Elon, and Zuck have my best interests in mind and at the forefront of their goals. Xi wants nothing more than the downfall of my glorious Western values. He’ll stop at nothing, even stooping so low as to violate the Anthropic terms of service.


Wouldn't be Chinese I guess


So what?

Let's take aside the charged component of this and just suppose hypothetically that 100% of the assaulting students belonged to some subgroup. So what?

They may be 100% black, or 100% male, or something, but it's not like you can reasonably just say "So no males at our school." Regardless of whether you can find a subgroup who this belongs to with a very low specificity, you still need policies that tackle the behavior itself rather than trying to find some really weak predictor.


I'll bite. The importance is this: if you do not acknowledge a disproportion of a certain group committing the offenses, then you cannot enforce punishments without them seeming inequitable. If 90% of the suspensions of students come from a certain protected group, if you refuse to believe they are 90% of the offenders, we must roll back the policies because they are clearly bias.


Or the simpler way is to not acknowledge what group is committing offenses and not care what group is receiving punishment. People rightfully get suspicious when it's about groups.


What's the metric optimized here, minimize black students expelled?


To some degree it's a concern for "problematic" statistical outcomes, but it's also anti-bias training, both explicit and implicit, giving individual decision makers hesitancy when dulling out punishments.


Wonder if "problematic" and bias training are still a thing or if that went away 2 years ago. Did notice we stopped getting those trainings at work.


Yes, or rather "minimize frivolous civil rights lawsuits", which would come as a downstream of having skewed racial expulsion rates.


If it's really this, seems there needs to be some state or federal pushback against these lawsuits. Cause idk about schools, but it's gotten out of hand elsewhere. We've already seen the SCOTUS ruling against DEI very quickly having a positive impact on universities and even corps.



> CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Yeah, no.


It's not rocket science, certain kids showing up as getting impacted by punitive measures looks bad on certain government measures. So they stop getting punished. Problem solved!


Which ones?


Does it matter which kids is it? Just remove the metrics, apply the punitive measures fairly, and let the dice fall where they may. Or don't and allow the safety of teachers and the quality of public education to keep degrading. We live in a harsh world and sometimes sacrifices have to be made for a higher cause.


> We live in a harsh world and sometimes sacrifices have to be made for a higher cause.

Maybe that’s what the people sacrificing the teachers believe too?

From other anecdotes in the comments it seems like it’s not just teachers but other customer service professions too. Your hypothesis that you don’t want to go into detail on might be incorrect. Guess we’ll never know


Punitive measures only work if you believe you have something to lose, a lot of these kids don't. Sure, you can þunish them for their infraction, and you'll have justice, but it's not going to stop them from doing it again unless they feel like the lost out on something. And if you have nothing in the first place why do you care?

And a punishment is also just attention from an adult, and that often feels like a win over being completely ignored the rest of the time.


> þunish

Today I learned that the Icelandic keyboard has a dedicated key for typing þ


The British one doesn’t, so I’ve no idea how I did that.


Yeah I read that and gave up. It's also one of those "let me explain Smittywergermanjensen's Law to you"


Probably because what this poster seems to be implying is a sort of inconvenient or unpopular truth. The kinds of things that there's no point actually saying out loud no matter how true they are, because they just make people angry and being explicit about it just paints a sort of target on you instead of actually driving anything towards a solution

We already have a lot of studies and statistics about problems with education, but the narrative about education problems seem to focus on the wrong things, things that the studies and statistics don't really support.


OK — Under-represented minorities would be expelled at higher rates than whites and asians, and the district would get sued for discrimination.


"...so weird".

"weird" is two years ago. Time to update your firmware.


Because these things are for unfortunate reasons of historical happenstance, correlated with race. And if you let race into the discussion the evil people who peddled all this bad metrics and bad policy can use it to sow division and get everyone arguing with each other while they quietly dodge blame.


Because he would immediately get massively downvoted and flagged.


What are the "obvious rules" that could be applied here? (They aren't obvious to me.)


Preemptively jail minority and special ed children and make them work their way up from prison to school.

OP doesn’t seem to have an answer other than “equally apply the rules and outcomes” but he hasn’t shown us that non-minority students are expelled (or whatever punishment) at a higher rate currently, it’s currently his vibes based hypothesis that he’s afraid to openly state.


Comparing raw punishment rates tells you nothing, because transgression rates can vary.


Listen buddy, I make $350k programming. Obviously I’m an expert in something as simple as knowing what’s wrong with black kids and schools.

I get what you’re saying. Even if we already punish black kids at a higher rate, it’s not high enough, because they could be committing offenses at and even higher rate than that. And we can’t possibly know that, because everyone is afraid of the DEI man, so they only report white offenses in school.

That’s why my solution was brilliant, we side step all that by putting them in jail from the start, and they work their way out from first principles.


you didn't capitalize black so you're racist btw


Some people are saying I’m the least racist to ever do it


The current Minister of Defence of the Houthi government is Sunni.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_al-Atifi


I did consider writing (Shia) instead of Shia but I still think it is mistake from a long term perspective due to previous history between shia and sunni.


We saw during Covid that many jobs are not needed. And we may be heading to energy lockdowns. Companies could lose a lot of valuation or just use the "AI is doing everything" excuse.


> And we may be heading to energy lockdowns.

Energy lockdowns have always been part of US culture, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout#USA

It's un-American to invest in infrastructure and build a better power network. Both parties agree on this.


Electricity comes from the wall outlet. What would we need a better power network for?

(/s)


Not needed for what?

What jobs are "needed" by the economy is a function of who has the money. There's no measure of efficiency, or redundancy, that isn't relative to a specific distribution of wealth.


Lots and lots of middle management and HR jobs (off the top of my head) are absolutely 0 value add and definitely just leech off of actual labor.


The point is that what we think is valuable (and I agree, most corporate busywork is IMO a waste of everyone's precious time on this planet) doesn't matter under a system where labor and resources are ordered about by the people with the most money. Those jobs exist because our rulers (the ones in charge of the money) want them to, and that is the only definition of "valuable" that matters. Likewise, all the low-paid and unpleasant labor like digging up minerals with no safety equipment, sewing shoes for 17 hours a day, wiping asses in nursing homes, etc. is low-paid and unpleasant because our rulers want it that way.


> Lots and lots of middle management and HR jobs (off the top of my head) are absolutely 0 value add and definitely just leech off of actual labor.

That’s a very engineer type of take.

Both middle management and HR serve roles that are believed to be useful to someone (maybe not you).

Often it is some form of protection by serving as a fall guy or complying with regulations, but it can be other things (e.g., increasing headcount/budget to gain power, etc.).


Sales


> Sales

Yes, many sales people or even whole sales teams are effectively dead weight, but a highly-skilled sales team is a godsend both to the company and the economy.

We should all be wishing for more effective sales teams — the world would be a better place.

Most people have never experienced a good sales team, so I’m guessing this sounds like total fiction.


how are they required at all? why can't a company publish its products and services on its website and customers can take it or leave it? why do we need commission-paid schmoozers in-between, who make multiples of what rank-and-file workers earn? The workers create value, and are paid the least. That's the definition of perversion.


> how are they required at all?

I’m going to take your comments at face value. I encourage you to find a good salesperson and shadow them for a day or two.

> why can't a company publish its products and services on its website and customers can take it or leave it?

Do you assume most people actually read product info? If they do, so you assume they understand it? The answer to both of those is a resounding “no” (especially in areas that change rapidly like tech and medicine), even if it doesn’t apply to you. For some potential customers this is due to lack of time, and for others it’s simply lack of ability.

A good sales person is finding and connecting their product or service with customers who will find value with their product or service. “Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat a path to your door” has largely been shown to be untrue.

> why do we need commission-paid schmoozers in-between, who make multiples of what rank-and-file workers earn?

There is a lot to unpack here.

Commission-based pay can be debated, but I assure you that any system that yielded better results consistently would become the new standard fairly quickly. It is what it is.

The amount sales people earn is generally based on two things — their relative value to the company and the market for sales people. Losing one key salesperson to a competitor can mean the end of a lot of small businesses.

The “schmoozer” comment can simply be addressed by saying that some people are more likely to pay for a product or service from someone they know or like. This might be a rational criterion in some cases, irrational in others, but it’s very real.

> The workers create value, and are paid the least.

Workers do create some value for sure. Matchmaking the customer to the product or service also has value. You may not personally believe that, but the market seems to.

The relative amounts of pay are largely market driven, imho.


Thank you for the thorough response


A lot of that money is printed and handed to some players that recirculate it where they see fit. It's as "needed" as the government paying you to dig and fill curves.


Energy lockdowns are already here in other countries like Pakistan. They're conserving oil for important uses only.


The good thing about energy lockdowns is that you get to join all your friends and cook a communal lunch in a big pot.


  energy lockdowns
Rationing.

Another item from the soylent green checklist.


The majority of working hours are not needed. The only purpose is to play along in the game of capitalism and be good little consumers. It's mostly social benefits with occupational therapy.


All the crypto stuff already felt like it was doing a big push to move computing power away from general consumers, though may have been unintended.

Another thing is the general impoverishment and decline of productive power that can be papered over by centralizing the output of that production to hide the general decline. I don't think anybody is buying that we are richer than 20 years ago anymore.


Monero is the opposite. Everyone can mine on their CPU and just like most cryptocurrencies, it makes you your own bank.


Yeah but their strategy on that seems kinda dumb to me because it either does nothing or has a negative effect on the ecosystem. If someone wants to mine bitcoin on their own CPU they can, and if my PC has enough hash power to find a coin on a blockchain then let me tell you, that chain has real problems and is not a serious player. That amount of computing power doesn't justify paying any interesting amount of money.

It isn't the biggest technical concern and at least they have principles, but I expect something that looks like Monero + easy to mine will eventually appear and turn out to have an advantage in the real world. Although it is hard to predict because it isn't completely clear what (if any) impact the algorithm difficulty has in practice. But if there are big datacentre mining a cryptocurrency with dedicated hardware then that means there are people with skin in the game who want it to succeed. Seems like a better equilibrium than whatever the Monero people are aiming for.


Like Monero but easy to mine is Monero. A Monero mining ASIC is called a CPU, by design.

Or do you mean higher block rewards? Don't worry, the value of the coin automatically adjusts to nullify that.


> Like Monero but easy to mine is Monero. A Monero mining ASIC is called a CPU, by design.

That is the "does nothing" argument. But compared to Bitcoin, having a general-purpose [0] ASIC seems like it'd make the network less secure - if someone wants to run something like a 51% attack against Bitcoin they first have to buy a ridiculous amount of specialist Bitcoin-only hardware that will potentially lose all its value after a successful attack. Also probably be a lot easier to track who did it.

Monero the equilibriums are less obvious. Does that matter? No, I don't think so, I still own a certain amount. But it isn't a helpful axis to experiment on and I don't see where the upside is meant to come from vs just going with sha.

[0] Edited, was special-purpose.


What do you mean compared to Bitcoin? Bitcoin has special-purpose ASICs and Monero does not.


Oh yes, sorry. General purpose. I edited the comment.


There are no general-purpose ASICs, it's like saying a hot ice cube.


You're the one who called a CPU an ASIC. Seems pretty general purpose, it's a Turing machine simulator.

And hot ice cubes are a thing. They've made ice at up to 650K if the wiki phase diagram is any indicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phase_diagram_of_water.sv...


Do you understand why Monero's mining algorithm is designed the way it is? If you design a chip to be optimal for mining Monero, you create a shitty CPU that performs 2% better than an ordinary CPU at mining Monero. You may as well use an ordinary CPU to mine Monero, because it can do other things too.


Well, yes. I do. Why do you want to consider mining Monero with a shitty custom CPU? That's a bit of a non-sequitur and I don't see the relevance to the thread. We've been in furious agreement on that point for about 4 posts now and I'm not sure where you're trying to go with it.

I'm going to reiterate that you are the one who started calling a CPU an ASIC, I'm was just trying to match your language to be friendly. A CPU is technically as ASIC for a certain class of computable functions, so if you want to call it that I'm happy to as well. If you don't want to call it an ASIC we don't have to, we can just call it a CPU.


To repeat what apparently caused you to start this stupid argument:

> A Monero mining ASIC is called a CPU, by design.

This is true. If you make a Monero mining ASIC, then you have made a shitty CPU. Off-the-shelf CPUs are the best possible chips for mining Monero with, and this is by design.

The Monero hash function works by generating random programs and then running them, so that you need to have a CPU to generate hashes, and all of the optimisations in a CPU benefit Monero hashing. If you build a chip that does this, you have built a CPU. It's even built so that the instruction set is irrelevant, because the same program is run thousands of times before a new one is generated, making the overhead of translating it to any needed instruction set negligible.


In theory, in practice it caused shortages of GPUs for other uses and the production never caught up to old consumer prices.


Those of us who slung code in the terminal era saw this democratization of computing, in the form of the personal computing revolution, come and go.

And .. some of us just spent the same budget as we spent back then on PC’s, on Nvidia DGX gear …


A setup like this but in phone size would be ideal. The free software mobile world has really been a dumpster fire from the beginning.


Yes, whoever can shrink this down to the size of something that would fit in your pocket would make a killing. Imagine not only being able to make phone calls, but use productivity software and even browse the internet.



I have been following this one for a while, but I have never seen anyone report on its status in linux.


A big issue is that the keyboard would take up valuable screen estate.


I can imagine it! It should be called the Imagine Phone, or iPhone for short.


Yes, if those ran Free Software like a thinkpad they'd by amazing. Oh well.


Nope they just called it a smartphone when you could hook it up to your laptop and connect the phone by infrared, USB, or later Bluetooth when it appeared. Using the phone manufacturers software that was naturally free for Windows 98 but also W2K, XP and even Mac sometimes.

You really want the headphones when you're using the laptop as a phone because it can have audio feedback otherwise, especially if using the built-in laptop mic.

iPhones just weren't that smart when they finally arose, you did have to use your imagination but it wouldn't get you far in actual computer interaction like smartpones are supposed to, compared to a Motorola or Sony-Ericsson true smartphone.

You can only imagine how much better it would have been if more choices would have maintained their leadership and there were still other options besides only the relatively shoddy Android and iOS.



The request said 'shrink it down,' it didn't also say, 'neuter it to 3 gigs of RAM and cut CPU and GPU performance to a small percentage of what it was such that many modern websites won't function.'

The T480 as a daily driver, while slow by current standards, would still meet the needs of many. I use mine often and with plenty of RAM and storage it's still very capable, if underpowered for some tasks.

Incessantly trying to make the Librem 5 happen, as if it's the answer to everyone's needs without a shred of practical reasoning, just makes the project look like a silly novelty.


Yes, shrinking things down has it's own costs and tradeoffs, what a surprise. Some people may find such tradeoffs suitable, in case the main features are still there. I do in this case.


That modem or a few others can be used with some of the small SBCs, which have a smartphone size or even a smaller size.

If you connect then to some battery pack with a USB charger, you have a mobile solution, though one more cumbersome than a real smartphone.


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