If you get run over by a car or bicycle while trying to board a bus outside an official station, or if you trip, the bus company is liable, and the driver will be in very big trouble. Also, wehret den Anfängen! If they started doing this, it would set an example: it would make it very difficult to keep the schedule, and would invite people to just walk into traffic to busses stopping at a red light.
I love that. It's part of what's hilariously called the "Beamtendreisatz" (roughly, the three rules of public servants)
1. Das haben wir schon immer so gemacht (that's how we've always done it)
2. Das haben wir noch nie so gemacht (we have never done it like that)
3. Da könnte ja jeder kommen (then everyone would try it)
They're so German that they're very difficult to faithfully translate. Just imagine a grumpy older guy looking for every excuse not to do what you want him to.
Hey newbie, I'm sorry my comment hurt you. But you don't have to be able to read German to apply the charity principle [1] and be a decent human being. Love you, too.
What kind of person comes to an English speaking forum, drops a quote in a foreign language without any translation and pretends to not get called out?
No, it wouldn't. This type of logic only holds if we consider that drivers are automatons who can not analyze risks by themselves. Give the drivers autonomy to judge whether it's safe or not to deviate from the scheduled route.
I rather have a driver signaling me "No, I will not open the door now because I don't think it is safe" over "No, I will not open the door now because I can't break the rules". It makes me think of the driver less as a person and more as a brainless cog.
You not following rules makes me think less of you as a person. Rules are made so not everybody needs to judge every situation correctly themselves. People might overlook consequences or are not informed enough to make good decisions.
On a more serious note, if you prefer more flexibility and wildness try Poland. Very culturally similar to Germany but with more lean towards common sense however it is understood in the moment by involved parties.
Nazis were saying "but we were just following orders" and for everyone else it sounded like a stupid excuse, but for Germans that's a strongly culturally rooted watertight argument. Event today. They just now ensured that their rules are better and orders are more thoughtful.
That said, I really love how Germany feels when you live there.
Oh, I understand it alright. But understanding it doesn't mean I like it.
After 13 years living in Berlin, I've come to terms with the fact that most aspects of German culture are things I need to tolerate, but never embrace.
> Give the drivers autonomy to judge whether it's safe or not to deviate from the scheduled route.
But they are judging it. And deciding it's not safe. You may not agree but it's their evaluation of their safety. The rules are good for them because they can ensure their safety by obeying the rules.
There is no "decision" being made if your flowchart always says "only stop at designed bus stops". "Judging" something presupposes the ability to override established rules and even reaching different conclusions despite similar precedents.
And when I am hit by a camel while departing the bus, that is my problem also.
But of course, most cultures do not support this line of reasoning - you need to be taken care of weather you like it or not. This approach is well tolerated by most people, but saddens and irritates people like me.
Don't talk to the bus driver while they are driving is also a rule.
> Me: Noted. Good thing that is not your problem.
As if... when you get injured while leaving the bus, do you really believe the bus driver would just mind their business? There is another rule that demands you help people in emergency situations
That sounds exhausting. Do things because they’re right or because you want to. Rules are fake (being a little dramatic there, but the point stands - rules create plenty of downside as well, while allowing both people to do the wrong thing with an excuse, and preventing people from doing the right thing without arbitrary consequences that are unrelated to actual outcomes).
And then you go to the media and file a law suit against the bus company for being reckless. You deny ever asking to get out and say the driver instructed you to get off.
You probably wouldn't do this, but the company needs to protect itself against the people who would.
The people that think like this are the ones that want to pick and choose what is not other peoples problems.
It doesn't work or scale in a society. If everyone gets to arbitrarily choose what is 'not your problem', the everything is everyones problem, or nobody's problem.
It’s not “needing to be taken care of”, in your scenario when you go the hospital for your camel injuries and use insurance for medical care (even if it’s fully private paying your own premiums), suddenly another party is involved who doesn’t give a shit about what you think and are singularly interested in passing along their expenses to anyone else it will stick.
The world is more interconnected and complex then one or two parties engaged in an agreement in complete isolation from everyone else so black and white thinking like that just doesn’t work.
This can be out of your control. Your health insurance will ask why that camel hit you, and might sue the bus operator for their damages for letting you out where they should not.
> you think you know what is or isn't other peoples problem.
I don’t think that at all. All I said was that if I absolve the driver of whatever responsibility he believes he has for me, then if something happens as I step out, it is indeed should not be his problem, legally speaking. He might not like it, of course - which is not my problem, to be honest.
edit: this is all linguistics, however. The initial issue was that the driver is unable to open the door even if we both assess the risk as negligible. Sure, he might not want me to suicide jump from his bus onto a highway - even if I believe I have the theoretical right to do that - but that is not the situation we're in. The point was that I should be able to say it's ok, looks safe, I accept the risk if something happens.
> All I said was that if I absolve the driver of whatever responsibility he believes he has for me
Except that you are not authorized to do that, so it doesn't have any effect and it is still his problem.
> The initial issue was that the driver is unable to open the door even if we both assess the risk as negligible.
If he assesses the situation to be safe, he just opens the door. He routinely does exactly that (outside of normal stops). If he didn't open the door, he did not consider it safe.
It's also related to having a social healthcare system. People who keep stepping into traffic and get run over really rack up the hospital bills which, ultimately, are paid by everyone. So the country decided that they need to adopt some measures to keep stupid people from getting hurt.
Unless I’m misunderstanding it’s no different with private insurance in the US.
If you are injured and the circumstances vaguely resemble any kind of accident (broken bones, concussion, lacerations, etc) a few weeks to months after receiving medical care, you’ll usually receive a letter from the insurer asking for the specific circumstances of the accident including the owner of the property it occurred on and any parties who may have contributed to the accident.
That way they can make a claim against someone else’s insurance/sue them/etc to pass along their costs to someone else if possible.
So telling someone “no worries man if anything happens it’ll be my fault not yours” before getting hurt isn’t going to stop the insurer from pursuing subrogation/lawsuit if they decide it’s cost effective.
The ability of the brain to do that gives me 15 min of quiet time to think about problems each evening. But you cannot follow the story in that mode, and the whole facade will collapse on a single innocent question...
In 1998, a 4-year old girl broke into a frozen pond in Austria [0]. She was found at the bottom of the lake after 30 minutes, with a body temperature of around 18 °C (so much higher than the case described in the article). She made a complete and full recovery (her story was filmed) and afaik lives a completely normal life as an adult now.
I've also had a customer support chat bot give me completely wrong information. I could guess what was actually true and knew that there'd very likely be a workaround - involving actual people - to do what I need to do (which turned out correct), but it pissed me off anyway.
Reminiscent of when coding agents fail to fix a bug and keep digging themselves deeper into a hole.
> I understand the problem now, I just need to...
> I was wrong before but the issue is now clear, let me...
> I have complete clarity now! I'm going to...
The exception is translation. Translation is what transformers were originally developed for. LLMs shine in translation, and creating code is, after all, a translation from natural language into a programming language.
A lot of what current LLMs are good at seems to boil down to translation:
* Translate some prompt into a planning list of individual TODOs
* Treat each TODO as a new translation (e.g. from TODO to code), or call some external tool (lookup something on the internet, static code analysis, database request)
* Translate the result(s) of these TODOs into a final text, or into a new TODO list
To me, this is interesting, because maybe the Homo Sapiens intelligence simply developed as a side effect of communication (translating words into actions).
I think that's where it goes, yes. The ability to model the world internally predates spoken language. We (and other animals) already translate what we _sense_ into that internal model. Language is just another translation; all communication is bidirectional translation, internal modeling/thought is wordless.
Yes, predicting the future was never possible. In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak. Yet I am immensely grateful that my ancestors chose to build homes and marry and have children and live life through the great plague, through middle ages in which most of the population expected the apocalypse to be just around the corner, the 30 years war with up to 70% of the population dead in some areas, two world wars, a time in which nuclear annihilation of mankind seemed just one false push of a button away, and a time when large parts of Europe were covered in radioactive substances following the Chernobyl disaster.
End times are nothing new, it's the historic default mode.
> Yet I am immensely grateful that my ancestors chose to build homes and marry and have children
I think this premise is questionable. I double that choice had much to do with it, for most of our ancestors. In particular a large fraction of children (majority?) born were not born out the free choice of the parents, but rather as a result of accident, social pressure/expectation, economic necessity etc.
Given a free choice, the same uncertain and/or bleak future produces the rational outcome that it does not seem prudent to have children.
> In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak
In the past, this was a reason to have children, because you needed somebody to help out and look after you when you were old. Now, it's a reason not to have children, because you're putting people into a world knowing that there is a non-trivial probability that they will suffer all their lives through wars, famine, social unrest, and other man-made disasters.
> you needed somebody to help out and look after you when you were old
Even with social programs in society, this still hasn't gone away. This is still kind of a reason to have kids, and for your siblings to have kids, and have family networks grow to help support each other.
> you're putting people into a world knowing that there is a non-trivial probability that they will suffer all their lives through wars, famine, social unrest, and other man-made disasters
Once again, all of this has also been true for all of human history. Other than a brief moment for the northwestern part of the world for wealtheir people in the 90s-maybe 00s, this has just been the normal state of affairs. Life has always had suffering involved.
If you think that you're simply incorrect. For the average person in a Western country, life is dramatically better anytime in the next hundred years, including the worst possible outcomes of climate change. Not to mention that the exponential growth of solar panels is basically stabilized in climate right now.
> Not to mention that the exponential growth of solar panels is basically stabilized in climate right now.
Sadly, growth of PV can only deal with part of the problem. We're making PV fast enough now that, given panel lifetimes, in 30 years 100% of current electricity demand will be met with specifically PV, and we're also making wind turbines and nuclear reactors and stuff.
The "and also" means we'll probably also be fine electrifying land transport.
Air transport (also fast-and-reliable sea transport) is somewhat harder to make renewable, but theoretically possible. Metal extraction from ore can be done electrolytically.
Concrete's not limited by electricity, it's an independent thing to be solved. So is meat farming. Progress exists on these, yes, but my point is they're not solved just by us being on the home stretch for electricity.
I don't think your "worst possible" case is calibrated correctly.
The worst possible case is global famine and food chain collapse. Food wars, water riots. Starvation in the literal billions.
Living in a Western country won't solve the problems of "crops can't grow anymore" or "keystone species in the food chain are extinct". We'll starve and die in mass numbers just like everyone else.
Even if we had billions dead from starvation worldwide (huge if), life in a western country in 2060 will be better than life for almost anyone born in 1800 anywhere on earth.
"In the past, this was a reason to have children, because you needed somebody to help out and look after you when you were old"
I live in what is supposedly one of the happiest, wealthiest countries in the world, and even here few people trust the healthcare system to take care of them when they're old. My grandpa would have almost certainly died years ago if he had no children to look after him.
It's still valid, if selfish reason to have children.
> In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak.
No, the rate of change was slow enough that you could probably make a good-enough prediction: your life would be similar to that of your father's or grandfathers'.
The problem is that nowadays, some foolish technology-worshiping assholes have pushed the rate of change faster than almost anyone can handle: before we've started to learn to deal with the problems of one technology, another technology disrupts everything again. Society needs to operate at a human scale, and a human speed, or it will kill itself.
> > In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak.
> No, the rate of change was slow enough that you could probably make a good-enough prediction: your life would be similar to that of your father's or grandfathers'.
You are not contradicting the quotation.
You could, as you say, probably make a good-enough prediction: your life would be similar to that of your father's or grandfathers'.
That prediction would be "Just like my parents and grandparents, I live in a cold rotting wooden shack, my entire family have to share a single bed to stay warm, I am only one step up from being my landlord's slave, and this will also be the life of my kids and grandkids".
And it's worth noting (because I'm sure some "clever" software engineer is going to quote Socrates thinking its some kind of mic drop or something), that I'm not saying change all the sudden got too fast just recently. It's probably been like that for awhile (e.g. since the 70s or before).
A lot of those people were able to do it without debt which made it far less precarious. I have equally pessimistic view of the future so I built my house one piece of wood at a time with cash. I bought a piece of shit car with cash. I've never used debt, I just got all the things I have by buying shit cars and shit land and slowly slowly making things better until I have nice things.
For much of the youth, this is impossible. The permitting and regulatory process for houses is hostile to slow and DIY building so even if you can get cheap land near jobs (you can) you can't do it without predicting 30 years of mortgage payments. The pandemic monetary policy (more recently) and cash-for-clunkers(longer ago) trashed the used car markets. Increased regulation, licensing, insurance requirements and liability made childcare far less affordable. Also in the old days "neglect" was stuff like actually starving your kids to death so if you were broke you could work or do domestic stuff to save money and leave them home or to run around outside without Karen having them snatched by CPS.
Annihilation isn't so worrying, it's the surviving that's scary.
Their existence was even more precarious because they were one crop failure from starvation. They couldn't save food for long, and even if they tried an army is likely to come and take it all (if mice didn't get it first).
Dept is bad, but it isn't nearly as bad as the things they dealt with.
Modern civilization is ~2-3 years of correlated bad harvests away from major disaster. If food costs 20x what it used to, a good number of people will starve or die in the political turbulence that will follow...
Modern society has much better transportation. The odds of correlated bad harvests around the world are much worse than local bad harvest in the past. I guarantee every place on earth will have a bad harvest, sometimes two in the next 20 years, but since there is enough harvest overall we are fine.
Most people worry more about what they'll do if they survive than what they'll do if they die to the point I don't think "what if we all die" even barely registers in the calculation of whether to have kids. IF you all starve it's all a moot point. In even an African village everyone who wanted a house could just build it on the copious land available with whatever materials you could find-- I would assert having a home is more precarious now than even medieval or even pre-historic times as the regulations and law will banish you to the street today if you just build whatever you can afford to build as was done in practically all times before.
I don't spend much time worrying about what I'll do for my kids if the nuclear apocalypse happens. I would still have kids if it was 90% chance of the apocolypse, whereas I'd probably not have kids if there were a 30% chance I make just enough to survive but not so much I can pay child support and I sit in a jail cell while everyone around me does nothing but rags on me for being a deadbeat and failure of a father.
Note: Also, except for the first few years, having kids made your situation less rather than more precarious in the agrarian age
Everything about being a male parent was far less precarious, and being a female parent was less precarious after childbirth. There was literally basically no liability if the children died, and not only that, the people around you would likely understand and sympathize with you. You could just make a best effort and if you failed, chalk it up to bad luck and try again. And if you died of starvation, welp your responsibilities in life have ended. That's a lot more inviting to having children than the current status quo.
Society today still doesn't really do dick to help parents but not only that they've built unprecedented apparatus around jailing, ridiculing, condemning, and harassing parents for any perceived weaknesses in their strategy including failing to foresee their financial situation decades into the future.
There is every reason to think legal consequences + misfortune of a child are more devastating than just misfortune of a child. For one, for instance people have had all their children removed when a single child has a fragile bone disease or similar poorly explained illness causing injury or death and CPS accuses the parents of abuse and causes the trauma of not just losing/injury of the child but also losing all your children and possibly being charged. There are cases of people adopting abused children and documenting the prior abuse at time of adoption, but then having their other kids removed when doctors find the signs of the prior documented abuse when the child dies despite the best efforts of the person adopting the child.
I don't know why on earth you would think the trauma of having the legal system + other people attacking you + possibly losing custody of your other kids wouldn't cause more devastation. The whole system is geared around causing additional devastation for families this happens to compared to in prior times.
Maybe the chance of having a child die or an unfixable injured is less than before, but the weight of consequences to consider are higher than before.
From child mortality to soldiers in combat there is a nearly infinite amount of research indicating that whatever bad things you want to look are less devastating when the the entire society around you says "aw shucks, that happens sometimes, maybe just pray better and try again" rather than "omg that sounds horrible you must be so traumatized, have you tried therapy"
What a weird take. You make it sound like their dead children were no big deal, but by god, someone not paying for your children for you is a catastrophe.
> And if you died of starvation, welp your responsibilities in life have ended.
Yes, gosh, imagine people making a big deal out of starving to death. At least they didn't owe someone money.
>ou make it sound like their dead children were no big deal, but by god, someone not paying for your children for you is a catastrophe.
No I'm pointing out American society's fake concern for the welfare of children. They don't punish parents to help children. In fact, it's almost totally crickets when it comes to helping the children. We even spend a gazillion dollars on guided missiles to bomb girls' schools in Iran with barely a fuck given about the children inside. The point is to assert smug moral superiority and to punish, jail, and harass parents not help the children. Society wants all the upside of asserting their opinion on parenting and stomping the boot down on parents but none of the responsibility that goes with the choice to assert your opinion on how children should be raised. Wanting kids raised a certain way while shunting all the responsibility on others at ~no cost to yourself except to punish those who fail to live up to your standards, it's the cheapest and most disingenuous kind of concern but frighteningly actually backed by the precious projection of the "rule of law" that arguably makes children even worse off while also acting as a signal towards inhibiting people to have children since they don't want to subject their every lifestyle choice to the whims of "think of the children" psychopaths that can start a CPS investigation ("we investigate every tip") at the drop of a hat.
> imagine people making a big deal out of starving to death. At least they didn't owe someone money.
I don't think I need to explain why people who have starved to death are able to make less of a "big deal" out of their lot than living people who owe money.
> The Great Famine, which lasted from 1770 until 1771, killed about one tenth of Czech lands' population, or 250,000 inhabitants, and radicalised countrysides leading to peasant uprisings.[135]
I didn't say it would kill everyone though. I said it would kill you. Your neighbors may get just enough to survive, but not enough to keep you alive. (If they have surplus they would help you survive - with the expectation you would return that favor in 10-20 years when the situation reverses.
The actual way the average farmer throughout history survived through failed harvests was the human way:
Their neighbor helped them
The most important human invention ever was a society built around sharing whenever you could because you knew you would rely on that sharing to survive at some point.
I'm glad you addressed that your house-building strategy isn't feasible almost anywhere. There was an interesting article posted to HN on this topic a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31470400
I am German and live near the Swiss border. My wife is Swiss. I always tell Germans: if you want to get a feeling for the life of an immigrant in Germany, go to a non-touristic region in Switzerland. It's definitely not open hostility, but many little things which quickly give you the impression that you are not welcome and seen as a threat. You are treated differently as soon as you are identified as a foreigner, and this treatment is completely independent of your own behavior.
My wife really enjoys talking to Swiss people in German first (she has no accent anymore), and if the reaction is hostile, she seamlessly switches to full Swiss German in mid-sentence. The reactions are often priceless.
It's definitely not open hostility, but many little things which quickly give you the impression that you are not welcome and seen as a threat. You are treated differently as soon as you are identified as a foreigner, and this treatment is completely independent of your own behavior.
Sounds like Seattle in the 2000's.
As soon as one of the locals found out you're not from there, you get the "Seattle Freeze."
Fortunately, I read about it in a book before I moved there, so I knew it when I recognized it. But that didn't make it any less uncomfortable.
I guess with SEA filled with expat tech people these days, it's either gotten much better or much worse.
> It's definitely not open hostility, but many little things which quickly give you the impression that you are not welcome and seen as a threat.
Literally what most expats go through in Europe. I live abroad for 6 years and here, a Central EU country, this also happens. I am trying to learn the language and even then I got told implicitly several times that I will still be treated as a foreigner, no matter how much culture and language I learn from the local country.
We can swap anecdata back and forth, but that doesn’t reflect my experience at all, now in my 4th European ‘expat’ (migrant, really) experience.
Aside from a few somewhat racist remarks outside Berlin, I’ve always been treated fairly. Speaking the local language definitely helps, and living in 50k+ pop. cities.
And then… you visit Switzerland. Very quickly you realise what GP is talking about. Switzerland is the only place where I’d love to live, but hate the feeling of being there.
That's interesting (and a really fun stunt to pull). I always had the impression that the situation is slightly better for other minority-dialect foreigners (Vorarlberg/Südtirol) compared to "vanilla" german speakers, but that might wrong...
In early 2018, before I had children and with much, MUCH more free time, I bought a used X61, plus a used X60 1400x1050 LCD, a new backlight, new internal stereo speakers, a new mainboard with an Intel Core i7-5600U from 51NB, plus new SSD, 32 GB RAM, and the original IBM logo of a X60 which was replaced by a Lenovo logo on my chassis. It's the exact same setup as mentioned here [0], except that I built it myself from the individual parts for cost reasons.
The board arrived from Shenzhen after a month or so. I then had to manually fit (including drilling away some parts) the X60 LCD into the X61 chassis, which was extremely stressful. But in the end it all worked out perfectly. This X62 has been my private machine for 8 years now, and I always travel with it. The display still works perfectly, the 32 GB RAM are still more than enough, and it is still very easy to get X61 replacement batteries on Amazon. But the best thing is the form factor; this thing is just so neat and small and practical. Also the quality of the chassis is incredible. Apart from many, many scratches on the lid, it is still in flawless condition.
I still use an X60 Tablet for travel, mostly as a terminal for the machines at home. Original CPU is good enough for VNC+Wireguard. AFAIK, there aren't any CPU/MB upgrades for X60/61 Tablet. I still like it because of the 4:3 screen.
I upgraded the screen to the 1400x1050 with a new display panel from china, but I had to cut the front screen protector and remove the "oil". It seems a little bit darker without that liquid inside and dust particles entered in that space. I couldn't find any LCD upgrade for the CCFL lamp at that time and now I'm not sure it's worth the effort.
I'd love to see a working coreboot for X60/61 Tablets that can still boot DOS and WinXP.
I had a ThinkPad X61T for a while, and assembled a full set of accessories for it, but it ran hot, and I never managed to get Wacom EMR stylus support in Mac OS working (bought it to be a Hackintosh).
I really wish that there was an updated ThinkPad which supported the current generation of styluses (was looking at an x230T until I got my Samsung Galaxy Book 12 and Staedtler Noris Digital Stylus).
I had a T420s which is a bit smaller than the T430 and I really loved this thing. Did my whole scholarship with it, even bought a second hand to have as a fail-safe. Really nice machine for its time
This is something that recently also crossed my mind. I haven't really done frontend developing for at least 10 years know, but I am already old enough to remember the time in the late 2000s when suddenly everyone stopped developing web GUIs by hand and used frameworks, and anyone still writing HTML, CSS, JS and database queries by hand was ridiculed. Job offers suddenly stopped asking for PHP / HTML / CSS / SQL / JS skills and demanded Ruby on Rails and Django and Spring and GWT, later Angular skills.
It really feels strangely familiar to me: you could get very far very quickly without any real deeper knowledge and have a working web application within a few minutes. It felt like magic. Then you could customize it within the framework by skimming documentation and googling around until... you couldn't, because you had no clue how any of this really worked internally. And just like with vibe-coded web apps, you could recognize the standard framework web app that was patched together in an afternoon from a mile away, but it very much impressed managers.
Amusingly, I sometimes find that developers talk about their go-to frontier model in the same way that GUI developers talked about their favorite web framework ~15-20 years ago. Personification of the tool, even identification with it, frustration that things that worked with version X got worse with version X.1, "I am developing things 10x faster now", "I am going back to writing XYZ by hand", etc.
On the other hand, using frameworks later on was a good attempt to standardize things. Having some homegrown GUI nobody knows how to work with isn't an advantage either.
Personally I refuse things that "feel" too big (Nuxt/Next), but like Vue... Currently though, I want to get rid of most Javascript so I'll work my way to HTMX or Alpine type solutions with server side templates.
Personally the less tech I use the better, there was a time where you had all kinds of bullshit in a web app prior to even adding a single line of custom code.
Ironically, this goes well with LLMs, where you can nail down the patterns and then the clanker can follow them. There is nothing wrong with using clankers for fast typing.
I must say that already in the early 2000s web developers were tired of hand-coding everything, and many sought some sort of automation -- a framework, a CMS. Already in 2004 I made a site with barebone approach -- put a txt in a diretory tree and let PHP simply add tags instead of linebreaks and insert it into HTML. The alternative those days was a heavy content management systems. And I came to Django after two awful PHP frameworks, written by lead developers at the workplaces. So, frameworks like Django were a more gradual transition, and they were much more pleasant to work with.
Sure, as you pushed it further, like add versioning to objects, things got very tricky and not guaranteed to work, and no way to fix.
