At least in California, there are a lot of public support programs. I mean, a looooot of public support programs. A LOT. Like, to the point where the state is spending tens of thousands of dollars for each homeless person, and probably north of $100k per person per year for a subset. Talk to a firefighter or paramedic in a CA city sometime. They will tell you, there's "regulars" that they have to deal with every single week. The cops and firefighters know all of them by name.
We're paying hours a day in overtime to basically have the cops, firefighters, and EMTs deal with the same small population of mentally ill people on the same street corner every week, for years. These people cannot get better because they choose not to stay in the mental hospital or substance abuse programs offered to them. Someone is 5150'd, placed on a 3-day hold, and 72 hours later they walk out of the hospital and back to the same street corner, where they have a mental breakdown again the following week. You can offer support -- they will basically tell you the same thing, I'm not sick at all, there's nothing wrong with me, I am not a danger to myself or others, and you are shit out of luck.
At the same time, there are way more homeless people who are silently and cleanly living in their cars and showing up to work every day at a low wage job. Most people won't ever see them unless they look closely. Visit /r/urbancarliving sometime to get an idea of what that population looks like. Those people might get a 15 minute "knock" from the cops once a month.
The actually progressive option is to involuntarily incarcerate people who need it, while not criminalizing car/RV living, offering work placement services, housing assistance etc. The most realistic thing would probably be to build subsidized mobile homes and clean, low-rent central places to park an RV.
You correctly identified the biggest thing here though which is making housing affordable. Unfortunately, that will never happen.
I mostly agree with your points, but I think the involuntary incarceration is a major rock and a hard place situation.
There are definitely people for whom it would be a compassionate (and often societally optimal) thing to do. Giving the government the power to decide to take people away indefinitely is just a spectacularly bad precedent. Especially right now.
Yes, you have to be very, very careful. Lots of abuse with involuntary commitment, that's part of why it was abolished so completely.
I mean the reason this is a pipe dream and we all just opt to deal with it is that our state/institutional capacity has been eroded so completely. So, we just take away the public benches and call it a day.
The cruel way to do this is to just criminalize the behavior and then move all these people into the prison system. I think that would be a moral sin, but I see why people go there -- the alternative would be to construct a totally new, parallel mental health system with kinda like a jury/parole board type system, representation, and so on, and make it explicitly not part of the criminal justice system. Since the point is rehabilitation, not justice. All that would probably be insanely expensive, but a society focused on the humanity of its citizens would probably see it as worthwhile. Our society unfortunately, just does not see its citizens that way.
One of the benefits of institutionalizing the problematic homeless (either via incarceration or involuntarily mental health treatment, there's not a whole lot of difference between those two things from the perspective of the person subject to them anyway), is that it would allow the state to relax certain laws about simply being unsheltered without otherwise causing problems for people. Someone who is living silently and cleanly in their car is not a problem for me - I know more than one relatively well-paid, reasonably-intelligent person who is basically living that kind of lifestyle voluntarily - and I would prefer it if they weren't even getting a 15 minute knock from the cops once a month.
I live in a shelter, if you looked at the cost per person, it would probably be north 20k per resident to be housed here. This is the overhead of rent, utilities, salaries for case worker, security, maintenance, etc. When you include other parts of the system, it's easily another 5k; this isn't even taking in account of SNAP, cash assistance, medicaid, etc. There is a whole system and it ain't cheap.
Now, this isn't to say living is great. You are living in a dorm with 20+ felons, you have bedbugs to contend with, and it's dirty. I still have a normal ass job as well. Being homeless fucking sucks.
Ideally, the given example would be something not ajacent to the presently white-hot category of "AI agents".
Like, look at e.g. YC minus the AI and AI ajacent companies. Are those startups meaningfully more impressive or feature-rich as compared to a couple years ago?
Not yet, no. I think that's because coding agents got good in November, most people didn't notice until January and it still takes 3-4 months to go from idea to releasing something.
I expect we will start seeing the impact of the new coding agent enhanced development processes over the next few months.
Why not take it a step further? Make each function in the codebase its own project. Then the codebase can fit into the context window easily. All you have to do is debug issues between functions calling each other.
I don't think it's a joke about left-pad, but the idea that the complexity increases tremendously when you take a cloud of "small" things all communicating with each other. You've just pushed the complexity elsewhere. Claude can easily crunch the small microservice, but you're pushing the complexity to communications issues, race conditions, etc.
Oddly enough I constantly run into the same issue on monolithic codebases too.
Things could just be one file but they end up being 12. I had to look through 12 levels of indirection for a single boolean recently. Twice, on two separate projects in the same week.
At least in a single codebase, that issue is at least theoretically solvable. At least the indirection wasn't split across 12 repos!
I switched to Zed for the first time over the weekend on a somewhat complex mixed C/rust project. I was able to set the whole thing up in about an hour to my liking and it is a really nice IDE, coming from bloated VS Code. I think they have a really nice AI-assisted coding setup, I think that the "file review pane, in line with IDE" UX is correct for AI tools. I'm skeptical that terminal or "agent" based AI programming is viable long-term.
Very cool. I think what's so remarkable is that this is basically the (ultra crappy *) version of the original hypermedia.
A person who knows something puts up a page, and uses hyperlinks to link to other pages. Those other pages have information from other people who are sharing their knowledge.
Of course, that isn't how the internet works now. Everything is a platform/app that wants to maximally surveil and control their users as much as possible.
* Not talking about the work of the person who made it; it's very cool and great UX. Moreso that the models themselves are an expensive, smeared, inaccurate/dishonest approximate version of actual human experience/expertise.
I mean, yes? I think when we say, we should force 18 year olds to do something useful for society instead of working doordash or taking college classes that they don't care about, that is kind of saying something about the usefulness of those things.
If the market figured it out we wouldn't be having these discussions in the first place.
It's not a market failure. If you pay enough money you can attract either citizens or even destitute African people to volunteer to get blown up for the glory of Trump and the oil companies.
I was first made aware of GPT2 from reading Gwern -- "huh, that sounds interesting" -- but really didn't start really reading model output until I saw this subreddit:
We're paying hours a day in overtime to basically have the cops, firefighters, and EMTs deal with the same small population of mentally ill people on the same street corner every week, for years. These people cannot get better because they choose not to stay in the mental hospital or substance abuse programs offered to them. Someone is 5150'd, placed on a 3-day hold, and 72 hours later they walk out of the hospital and back to the same street corner, where they have a mental breakdown again the following week. You can offer support -- they will basically tell you the same thing, I'm not sick at all, there's nothing wrong with me, I am not a danger to myself or others, and you are shit out of luck.
At the same time, there are way more homeless people who are silently and cleanly living in their cars and showing up to work every day at a low wage job. Most people won't ever see them unless they look closely. Visit /r/urbancarliving sometime to get an idea of what that population looks like. Those people might get a 15 minute "knock" from the cops once a month.
The actually progressive option is to involuntarily incarcerate people who need it, while not criminalizing car/RV living, offering work placement services, housing assistance etc. The most realistic thing would probably be to build subsidized mobile homes and clean, low-rent central places to park an RV.
You correctly identified the biggest thing here though which is making housing affordable. Unfortunately, that will never happen.
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