If you have something to lose, you will be far more cautious about all aspects of life than someone with nothing. Sex is one of those primal drives that are easy to ignore when there are other things to pay attention to, and easy to indulge in without thinking much when everything has gone to shit. It's not exactly hard to understand that people with options will plan their lives much more intensively than those who don't know if they will be able to eat tomorrow.
Reproduction can be said to be incentivized in low-income groups as children can often participate in the tasks (typically manual labor) performed by the family. Meanwhile, in high-income groups, children take away resources that could be invested into the parents' career progression and wealth management.
Of course low-income groups also suffer from lack of access to contraception, so it's not as straightforward, but that is the birds' eye overview of how it typically works.
Back in the olden days when the majority of human labor was agricultural, having more children meant more hands to work the farm, so having more children actually improved your resource situation. Humans on some level have a biological drive to procreate as well, but if the incentives against having children become strong enough the humans will prioritize short term survival, or maintenance of their standard of living which can feel like survival if slipping for even one month means homelessness.
Free time might be a prime causal factor here. Both the wealthy and working poor may have too little leisure to achieve above-replacement birthrates. That would explain why there are places on Earth with high birthrates yet low GDP per capita.
I'm also suspicious that "wealthier" countries are subjected to more substances which disrupt fertility than poorer countries.
Right. There's also the sophomorically named "TRAMP" for connecting from a locally hosted emacs session to files across a wide range of protocols including ssh.
TRAMP also exhibits a wide range of performance problems. Getting it not to hang the display of the buffer list or lock up Emacs completely for minutes at a time requires a deep dive in to a decade of Stack Overflow breadcrumbs. I've done this, and I'm still not completely satisfied with the performance. I do however love the concept.
No, it requires only one thing: turn on persistent SSH connections. This means that new SSH connections to the same server do not actually require opening a new TCP connection, do not require negotiating new session keys, and do not require additional authentication. To turn this on, add these settings to your ~/.ssh/config file:
ControlMaster auto
ControlPersist yes
ControlPath ~/.ssh/control/%C
You should also use key–based authentication so that TRAMP never has to ask for a password, but this is less important once you are using persistent connections. Add something like this to your ssh config:
Host orod-na-thon
Hostname 192.168.2.133
User db48x
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_your_private_key
Now go to Emacs and open up /ssh:orod-na-thon:~/.ssh/authorized_keys. This is the TRAMP path for your authorized_keys file on the machine named orod-na-thon. It will ask you for your password. Paste in your public key (which you can get by opening up the .pub file that goes alongside the private key in ~/ssh), and save it. Now future connections to orod-na-thon will be able to authenticate automatically using this key pair, and there will be no password prompt when you open a file there.
One problem that I looked briefly into, but have not found a solution is that often I'm browsing the file system (in a terminal) on the remote box and want to open up a file in a certain location (often just for a quick edit). The process of typing pwd, and copying the location into emacs (similar applies to Neovim) already is too much friction, that it's easier to just open the barebones Vim on the remote.
Anyone aware of a solution of how to start the local editor from the remote to open the remote file?
Best solution to that is to use Eshell. Run `M-x eshell` to open the shell inside Emacs (on your local machine), then type `cd /ssh:orod-na-thon:path/to/files`. This will transparently ssh to the server and change to the path to your files. The `ls` command will now show the files that exist on the remote server rather than the local computer. You might now expect that there would be an eshell command that you could type to open a remote file in your local Emacs, but there isn’t.
No, in Emacs you always open a file by typing `C-x C-f`. (Unless you rebound it to some other key, in which case make the obvious substitution.)
Any time you hit `C-x C-f` to open a file it defaults to opening files from the working directory of the current buffer. The working directory of the eshell buffer is on the remote server, so the default list of files that you see are all the ones you were already looking at with `ls`. You can start typing a filename and autocomplete will do the rest.
This is an even deeper and more convenient composition of the shell and the editor than having special commands for tasks like opening a remote file in the local editor.
> You might now expect that there would be an eshell command that you could type to open a remote file in your local Emacs, but there isn’t.
No, in Emacs you always open a file by typing `C-x C-f`
`C-x C-f` calls the `find-file` function which can be called directly from eshell
Technically correct, but it is way easier to hit `C-x C-f` just like you would when you are opening a file at any other time. No need for special cases, you just open the file.
Try some variant of this in your remote .bash_profile or what-not:
if [ "$PS1" ]; then
export PS1='\h:\w\$ '
if [[ "x${TERM}" = "xeterm" || "x${TERM}" = "xeterm-color" ]]; then
function set-eterm-dir {
echo -e "\033AnSiTu" $(whoami)
echo -e "\033AnSiTc" $(pwd)
echo -e "\033AnSiTh" $(hostname -f)
}
PROMPT_COMMAND=set-eterm-dir
fi
fi
Now, locally, invoke M-x ansi-term, then within the ansi-term ssh to the remote machine. Change dirs, hit C-x C-f to open a file in the current (remote) directory.
Apologies, I meant to add more saying I could not get a remote machine to invoke the local emacs reliably. I got close with hacking up emacsclient to ssh back, but was eventually stymied by new network policies at $JOB and eventually settled for the above.
In the specific case of Emacs, assuming you're connected via ssh, sshd is running on port 22 of both hosts, an Emacs server is running locally, and emacsclient is in the default local path, a bash function or script along the lines of
for i in "$@"; do
ssh "${SSH_CONNECTION%% *}" emacsclient --no-wait "/ssh:$(hostname):$(realpath "$i")"
done
should work.
For best results, use ssh-agent + agent forwarding to avoid password prompts.
> The process of typing pwd, and copying the location into emacs (similar applies to Neovim) already is too much friction, that it's easier to just open the barebones Vim on the remote.
Vim has had the ability to open files remotely over ssh, sftp, etc. for a long time using the built-in plugin netwr [1].
Neovim takes it to another level [2]:
Nvim's RPC functionality allows clients to programmatically control Nvim.
Nvim itself takes command-line arguments that cause it to become a client to
another Nvim running as a server. These arguments match those provided by
Vim's clientserver option.
Yes, that's great, and it makes things extremely snappy while the socket connection remains open. Sleep your computer overnight, experience some network stormy weather, leave Emacs buffers open for weeks (as one does) and eventually one of those ControlMaster sockets are going to become wedged, and when that happens you're going to go through some things.
If that happens and you don’t want to suffer through the default 30–second (or whatever it is) timeout, then shorten it. Add `ConnectTimeout 5` to your config.
Good idea fine tuning the timeouts. I took your suggestion and dropped the SSH ConnectTimeout to 5, I was still using the default. I also peeked at the Tramp timeouts, and I realized that I had the variable as tramp-connect-timeout and not tramp-connection-timeout. Thanks!
I had this trouble when I upgraded emacs. I'm now stuck on 27.2 because later versions broke tramp in some way, and I haven't taken the time to debug it.
US strategic military positioning is approximately a trillion times more important than a few billion barrels of oil.
If you had 10 billion barrels of oil, at $80, and you manage to extract 3/4 of it over 30-40 years. Maybe you get a net $5-$10 billion per year economic benefit from that if you're lucky as the US. The US military budget is $800 billion every single year. The US isn't doing this for oil, it's about positioning vs other world powers.
Military projection, global strategic positioning, always trumps something like oil (especially when the US has plenty of that resource).
The US went into Iraq because of Russia, not because of oil. That was a Pentagon program to try to strip Russian influence out of the Middle East, stated directly by four star general Wesley Clark.
The US went into Syria because of Russia, not because of oil. The US is still in Syria because of Russia, not oil.
Most (not all) of what the US does in the Middle East is a power conflict with Russia.
Most of what the US now does in Asia is a power conflict with China.
Oil is a little toy chip on the table compared to the real stakes.
While I would agree that Russia was an aspect of the motivation for those incursions, I disagree that it is the total explanation. Russia is an aspect of a larger picture. After all, we don't go to war with Nations simply because they exist or are influential anywhere. There's a larger picture, just as the war in Ukraine is part of a larger picture than "freedom" or any other such condescending explanation.
The mainly-Russia explanation is also too convenient on a number of counts. First, in this current era of anti-Russian sentiment, it offers the large number of people that were responsible for the widely panned Iraq invasion an "out" that is, just now, socially acceptable.
These are people that are still neurotic about their attachment to the accepted situation that the predicate for the invasion was a lie. A neuroticism that is evident for anyone paying attention to what they still write with some consistency.
All national strength and well-being has an economic basis. Especially military projection. One can't separate our percieved interest in "getting Russia out of the Middle East", or some such, from economic interest. Or at least from economic calculus. Anyone attempting to sell such a tale should be suspect (not you, necessarily).
There are other massive red flags that indicate what the Iraq invasion was about, in terms of a larger picture. These stare in the face anyone willing to look, as they hide in plain sight. At the same time, at least one is inclusive of both the Russia and oil angles. I won't talk about that one. Look harder. Reinterpret crucial data for that era in a different manner from what we are widely told its nature was (and is). Its actual nature is sensible. What we are told about it is not.
The other motivation is military positioning, but has a scope that is well beyond Russia and China.
This "anti Russian sentiment" is nothing new. It's what is called political realism. It has always existed in Eastern Europe as they were more clear eyed when it comes to Russia. It has been also clearly present in US but the official rhetoric has been more soporific toward Russia. But it doesn't make sense to pretend anymore when Russia has opened its cards wide to everyone to see.
That's your nitpick and reason for taking the time to write? That the phrase "anti Russian sentiment" isn't instead presented as natural and eternal but instead as something that ebbs and flows? Go scream at a wall.
The so called anti-Russian sentiment is nothing new. If we take US then it took the most clear form after WW2 when the real ambitions of communism infected Russia became clear to the US leadership.
It didn't disappear even during the interim period between end of 90s and recent years when many fooled themselves with false ideas how Russia is now their partner/friend/not enemy. There was still impactful number if congressmen and senarots who kept the realistic understanding.
So please, if you are not educated about the topic then please don't start calling names when you are corrected.
>The mainly-Russia explanation is also too convenient on a number of counts. First, in this current era of anti-Russian sentiment, it offers the large number of people that were responsible for the widely panned Iraq invasion an "out" that is, just now, socially acceptable.
To be fair to them, the video they're referring to with Wesley Clark is from 15-ish years ago.
You will have to solve the epidemic of homelessness and crime in high-density areas of the United States before people will accept using mass transit. I fully support doing so - I would for example support a national project to build cheap concrete housing for all who need it - but that's the barrier.
I used to live in Portland and Tri-Met and my bike were my two means of transportation for many years. I would absolutely not use public transportation in that city today.
The entire west coast is really bad about its strategy for tackling homelessness. The central issue there is the federal government needs to massively ramp up housing, it can’t be solved at a local level (there’s a role to play for cities but basically you need nationwide housing reform.)
Chicago and NYC have massively used transit systems despite their homeless populations. I lived in Chicago and I miss a real transit system here in TX badly.
That is to say, we don’t need to do A before B. We need to do A & B
Seattle is fine. I've lived here and commuted via bus almost exclusively for 10 years now. The bus stop I catch is right at 3rd and Pine, with is the "scary drug dealing" corner that tourists are warned to stay away from.[0] I've never had a problem with homeless people either on the bus, at the stop, or while commuting. Over literally thousands of trips, I can probably count on one hand the number of fistfights I've seen - I saw more fights outside a bar in Pittsburgh in 2 years.
Some people are just scared of homeless people, poor people, or non-white people (or a mixture of the three). For those people, the issue isn't the actual safety, but their own discomfort or anxiety.
I'd bet that the injury rates on commuting even the scary bus routes here are comparable to or below the injury rate from driving.
The NYC subway is "massively used" but it isn't universally used, and for good reason. It's a national embarassment, both objectively and using an informal international standard scale for equivalent cities. As a result, the NYC subway is somewhere between intolerable and unwokrable for another massive part of the population who can't abide its relative lack of reliability, the danger, the filth or a combination of these.
I don’t understand how more state control is preferable. I live in California and the state government is not very in tune to the needs of my locality and seems very corrupt.
Some cities do not want housing/population growth. Why is that not okay?
> Some cities do not want housing/population growth. Why is that not okay?
Because substantially all cities do not want housing growth. They're all operating under the same set of incentives.
In order to have a vote in local elections, you have to be a resident. In localities with predominantly owner-occupied properties, this implies that you're a property owner. So you vote for policies that increase local housing costs, because you've got yours and you want its price to go up rather than down.
Suppose there are people in San Francisco who would like to move to San Jose or Los Angeles or San Diego, and vice versa. Everyone in San Francisco wants their property in San Francisco to get more expensive and the properties they might buy anywhere else to get less expensive, and likewise for every other city. But since only the people already in San Francisco can vote in San Francisco, the interests of all the people who want to move there are not being represented, and likewise the interests of all the people in San Francisco who want to move to San Jose but don't get a vote in San Jose.
If you move this to the state level, all of the people in San Jose and Los Angeles and San Diego can vote to lower housing costs in San Francisco and vice versa, and since the people outside of a given city outnumber the people in it, the balance could shift in favor of housing affordability instead of the untenable status quo.
That's when they resort to the bribery which they call rent control. Instead of building more housing, they give existing tenants (who can vote in the jurisdiction) lower rents than prospective tenants (who can't). Which moves enough tenants to the other side of the ballot to keep the construction restrictions in place, and further reduces the incentive for new construction, raising long-term rents even more.
Prohibiting rent control at the state level would be a great move because economists broadly agree that it's a terrible idea and then you get all the previously paid off tenants whose rent would increase clamoring for other measures to get housing costs down and increase the incentive for new construction. (Many other states sensibly already prohibit it at the state level.)
In California rent control is established by a referendum so it requires either another referendum to repeal or a some large majority in the legislature (which is unlikely to pass since the legislators understand that it's likely to be their last legislation). You cannot take away free/cheap stuff from people in a democracy, nobody is going to vote for that.
Rent control is a huge pain the ass because it's simultaneously supported by fatcats who know exactly what it does (i.e. raise overall housing costs) and naive idealists who think they're sticking it to the fatcats.
We don't allow a Hokou style of internal migration controls in the US, and we shouldn't allow places to block population growth. Both of these systems lead to massive inequality, lack of opportunity, and bad outcomes.
If you want to wall off your city, it should come with consequences such that you are not allowed to pay for services at a wage less than that which would suppprt somebody living in your city. Typical homes values are at $2.5M? That requires income of $500K to purchase, so no more nurses or cashiers or anybody else's enabling your life that does not get paid at that level.
Your taking of property is a continuous denial of other people living in a place. You paid a fix price, sure, but when the value increases, you are now taking far more away from the rest of society.
Land is not made by human hands. You should have the right to the fruits of your labor, but land is our common birthright, and just by being born first your should not be absolved from paying for what you are taking from everyone else.
Cities councils not wanting housing is why we’re in a mess in the first place. Why would it make sense to do more of the same and expect a different outcome. That’s the definition of something.
Outcomes change as the needs of the municipality change. Members get voted in and out. Do you think there is a misalignment between the city council and the constituents? Or is this what the residents want?
> Some cities do not want housing/population growth. Why is that not okay?
Because it’s being enforced on everyone not just those who like things the way they are. The bar is always higher when you want to force people to do something.
> Some cities do not want housing/population growth. Why is that not okay?
Because "Fuck you, I've got mine" is no way to organize society. Local control enabled a race to the bottom of trying to fob the poors off on someone else.
I think most municipalities see growth as a general good. The issue starts when the cost of growth starts to outweigh the benefits. Roads/water/utilities/waste management are all municipal services that need to be able to handle the growth.
You're right of course, but our capitalist societies are organized around making profit, and pulling the ladder from under them is profitable for those who managed to climb the ladder first.
This won't change until properties stop being good investment vehicles, and that won't change since land is finite and demand for housing in desirable areas is always growing, therefore increasing the opportunity for profit and wealth accumulation.
If your city is also not getting state roads, state universities, state law enforcement, and state fire protection then great. Any city that refuses to get on board with state housing policy should be cutoff from all of the above.
Aren't those things all already handled by the city in most cities? (Except state universities, which aren't in many cities anyway.) That's why fire and police departments are named after the city they operate in, and mayors talk about fixing potholes.
The hostility of not wanting new people around you or any population growth seems to warrant the much more minor reciprocal hostility of forcing that population to island themselves.
I don't think people who insist their city should not grow are hostile. I think they are just ignorant and deluded. They are either not aware of, or choosing to ignore, the fact that their cities are economically dependent on neighboring cities to house their workforces, and to absorb their own natural increases.
That's what's happening in California. Newsom[1] and the legislature are on a war path against nimby's, muni and county planning departments.
City of Berkeley used 'noise' as a reason to block a UC Berkeley student housing project on environmental grounds. State just passed a law to make that illegal.
Judge just told Beverly Hills they can't issue any permits until they comply with state law.
[1] Newsom wants to be president and he knows he isn't going to get there on diversity and pronouns. He has to focus on jobs, housing, and crime.
> a national project to build cheap concrete housing for all who need it
Out of curiosity, have you looked into this?
This was basically the NYCHA approach in the '30s-'50s. Then we got the '70s-80s, and for sure some good came from these developments -- rap music! -- but by all accounts they were not wonderful places to live. Not only because they often segregated poverty, but also because they were poorly maintained, like so many other state-owned housing schemes.
Housing is expensive, yes, and we need more of it, yes. But low-cost housing without other support is not a solution to the "epidemic of homelessness and crime" in cities. We need better plans to help people get out of poverty, treatment for addiction and other mental health problems, integration into society, meaningful work, etc. etc.
I'm not picking on you in particular (you do say "for example", so perhaps you already know the above!) but other should know that the mere availability of cheap or even free housing is not a panacea for social ills.
People don't build cities since we're not in the wild west anymore. Elected leaders along with legislators and property investors do, and their interest is to make a lot of money for themselves while offering you the bare minimum, not provide other less fortunate humans with nice walkable cities.
> People don't build cities since we're not in the wild west anymore.
I think you're confused about the meaning. It's not about brand new cities, it's about allowing construction of certain builds in areas to increase the density of cities, which by extension would lead to amenities in walking distance.
Zoning reforms work, they've been employed in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
Minneapolis & St Paul have a light rail that was pretty decent pre covid, now it is a homeless shelter on rails. Practically no policing so there is open drug trade & usage.
We didn't really try it, we tried to kill it. It was segregated, not funded enough to maintain the housing, and policy was designed in a way to make it fail.
All other advanced nations besides the US do (or did) public housing quite effectively. Even very conservative places like Singapore have amazing public housing.
Many many people want to live in a concrete jungle, which is why NYC is so popular.
Public housing in the US did not fail because it was in large concrete towers. It failed because it was isolated from the economic community, it was not maintained, and it was sabotaged on the funding side.
Mass produced cement blocks are a fantastic way to live, and much of the rest of the world uses to great effect, some for public housing, but also for middle class and upper class housing.
It's so weird that so many in the US have this odd fixation that because they personally don't want that concert box, that so many others would kit absolutely looooove to live there. Check out Asia some time, or basically anywhere else in the world.
The small mindedness of "I don't like it therefore nobody ever could and you should never be allowed to live differently than the way I like" is a very destructive force in the US. We have apparently lost the ability to "let live" in "live and let live. "
You're right, we need truly integrated housing. It does work. My ~$2.5M home is an 1/8 mile from subsidized housing. Outside of boomers on nextdoor who think every package delivery person is casing their home, it works completely fine.
The "silo" isn't the problem, it's the lack of opportunities for employment, lack of access to basic amenities, etc.
People in wealthy silos, in downtowns, do fantastically. The problem was the systemic racism in the US, that enabled such a state of disinvestment and segregation, not the particular form of architecture.
That is an incredibly offensive and racist thing to even concieve, much less try to put into somebody else's mouth.
The problem of public housing's inaccessibility, being cut off from jobs and basic necessities, is well documented. Segregation has been a huge problem in the US because it has been used to deny basic opportunity to Black people, not because a lot of Black people are living together.
FWIW, the communist regimes did that in Eastern Europe, and for all the nasty shit they did, that was one of the few things that did more good than harm. It's how apartments in Bucharest are still relatively affordable despite the massive migration and gentrification.
Unless of course, the way the US tried it was the "malicious compliance way" which was designed to fail from the start, then I'm not surprised it didn't go well.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. Endocrine health is just one example of where doctors ought to investigate before more extreme interventions like these weight loss drugs.
The false dichotomy is to believe that these new drugs are the more extreme interventions.
Many people who go on semaglutide were on the road to bariatric surgery before these drugs were widely available. Bariatric surgery is a major surgery, with not insignificant rates of complications. I guarantee nearly everyone who gets this surgery considers it a last resort. Yet now, most physicians believe these new drugs will essentially put bariatric surgeons out of business.
I'd be all for any options with fewer side effects, but handwavy "endocrine health" doesn't cut it, again for the society at large.
We will carry this beautiful artifact forward with us until all its lessons have been learned.
There was composability and fine control in these systems that is still not present in modern systems. That's not needed for everyday consumers, but boy is it lovely when you're a programmer.
I feel that during the last two decades only Java and .NET ecosystems have come close to the experience, including Android and Powershell/Windows/.NET into the mix, naturally with caveats and plenty of "yes but" counter arguments.
I consider a lost opportunity not to have turned ChromeOS into a kind of Smalltalk like experience with a mix of Flutter/Dart.
Naturally one can argue Common Lisp experience with Franz and Lisp Works, Raket, or Smalltalk, are the closest to the Lisp Machine ideas, but their mainstream opportunity is now lost.
Both the Java and .NET ecosystems are monumental (in every sense of the word) engineering accomplishments, but they don't strike me as very similar to the ultra-dynamic, introspective Lisp Machine experience. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
FWIW, the browser (though still far off) feels closer to me, with the ability to instantly pop open a DevTools console and inspect the state of everything, as does Apple's Cocoa-based stuff from my limited exposure to it, maybe not surprising given its Smalltalk heritage.
You have to think about the whole ecosystem and not only the VM.
Dynamic nature of the runtime, being able to plug agents, changing code dynamically, the IDE experience inherited from Smalltalk vendors that jumped into Java, VisualVM and JFR, ETW, runtime APIs to the JITs, self hosted implementations, nowadays out of fashion, sending bytecodes for RPCs and network agents (RMI, .NET Remoting, Jini), are some of the reasons.
Exactly... the JVM is incredibly dynamic. It's gone totally out of fashion because of security and complexity, but I used to enjoy using OSGi to load just about any Java library into the runtime by typing its Maven coordinates, then immediately start using the library from a shell... and then just remove that lib if I didn't "like it" and it would be gone as if it never existed... I don't think a lot of people realize you can quite easily do that kind of thing on the JVM.
The feature and bug of the OSGI experience is its rather coarse granularity. It’s finer grained than, say, a WAR, but obviously much different than something akin to the Smalltalk or, to a lesser extent, Common Lisp.
That said, make no mistake, an OSGI module can easily fall into that sweet spot of compiling and reloading fast enough to fall within the cognitive loop of effectively being “instant”.
And if you organize your code well, other parts of the overall app are (mostly) unaware something has changed. Java can be quite dynamic but has not formalized things like dynamic class change lifecycle. OSGI does expose that, and lets the rest of the code tap into that so it can handle change more robustly.
Yeah, it is no accident that a JIT designed originally for Strongtalk ended up becoming the first JIT for Java.
And .NET by being "Java 2.0" after the J++ lawsuit, inherited most of the same dynamism, alongside the ability to support VB capabilities, which by VB 6 were also quite nice.
That is the sales pitch, the reality is that 10 years later it is still catching up with features offered by other bytecode formats explored since UNCOL came to be in 1958.
I'm too young to have ever touched a lisp machine, but I heard many opinions about them. If you used one, could you please briefly share your experience?
I think the best description of the kind of thing the lisp machines (the Symbolics ones, at least) supported is described in this thread mostly carried by Kent Pitman [1]. I'd at least read all of the comments he wrote as well as whatever else you need for the context he is posting in.
Well, it's a combination of the hardware, OS, IDE, and language. Modern languages and VM's have caught up to many features of the Lisp machine. I've read lots of people's comments about them along with its documentation. Let me highlight a few things you might still like.
The language is highly dynamic, supports types for better speed, macros let it rewire itself to better express concepts, it is interpreted for instant development, still compiled with good performance, safer by default than many compiled languages, and you can edit the code and save state of running programs. I've just named off advantages of all kinds of programming languages all mixed into one. The flexibility was so strong that, as new paradigms were added (eg OOP, aspects), they could just bring in a library to make the language itself do that.
Aside from live debugging, my favorite feature when trying Lisp was per-function, incremental compilation.: make a change within a function, press a button, that individual function was compiled (sub-1-second), and that got loaded into the system for live interactions. I could iterate about as fast as I could think or type with the code still being fairly quick. It was mind blowing.
Today's machines have OS's in one language, supporting libraries might be in another, there's often a runtime with its own style, the app language itself for the logic, and usually one for the web browser. The mismatches between these languages can cause all kinds of headaches. Debugging them takes different tools. In a Lisp Machine, everything from the OS to the IDE to your apps were written in Lisp. IIRC they came with source. Any failure in any layer loads up in the same IDE with code in same language.
The IDE was also fully-featured for its time. Today, we have a lot of good IDE's. I don't think most of them share a language, source, and libraries with your apps, though. I'd like to see a comparison between top IDE's today and the Lisp Machine to see where today's tooling is stronger or weaker.
Those are a few things that come to mind. I assure you that my experience trying to code in native languages was way different in both development speed and debugging. Learning Python now, it's good for rapid development but not as flexible or compiled. Lisp would give me all that.
Many more ecosystems are using Python, though. By using Python, I get to use every library they build, guide they write, and maybe get paid for my code. Odds of all of that go down when using Lisp. Such social factors, along with high cost of Lisp Machines, are a huge part of why they disappeared. Less-powerful languages are going strong. If using a Lisp (eg Clojure), it's often tied to platforms written in non-Lisp languages.
To add, I believe the biggest factor in the death of the Lisp machine market wasn’t the software, but market shifts in the 1980s. For one, Lisp had a strong association with symbolic artificial intelligence, and during the AI boom of the 1980s, Lisp machine vendors such as Symbolics and Xerox were successful selling Lisp machines to companies and institutions that did AI. The Reagan-era military was a major customer of Symbolics Lisp machines, if I recall correctly. However, this AI boom was followed by a long AI winter that started in the late 1980s and didn’t end until the machine learning/big data boom of the 2000s. By then Lisp was no longer the language of choice for AI practitioners; it’s now largely Python (and sometimes R) backed by numeric computing code written in C, C++, and even Fortran.
In addition to the AI winter, Lisp machines were facing performance and cost challenges from RISC workstations. Suddenly not only did Lisp programs run faster on Unix workstations, but they were cheaper, too. Due to the combination of the AI winter and competition from the Unix RISC workstation market, many Lisp machine vendors exited the market, pivoted, or shut down in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Symbolics Open Genera was part of this pivot; it is essentially a Symbolics Lisp Machine VM originally running on top of a DEC Alpha processor running a proprietary Unix from DEC.
It’s just unfortunate that Symbolics and Xerox didn’t make Open Genera and Interlisp-D (which was similarly ported) more available, which could have been a strong contender to Java in the 1990s (the Common Lisp Object System blows the socks off C++ and Java) and to Python and Ruby in the 2000s, and could’ve introduced many of the benefits of having such a flexible development environment to a much wider range of developers at an earlier point in history…who knows what tooling we’d have today if we picked up where Lisp machines left off in the 1990s. The closest we’ve gotten to these Lisp environments are GNU Emacs, Racket, Squeak/Pharo, and Apple’s work in the 1990s on Dylan and SK8 (this would’ve been particularly revolutionary if it weren’t for Apple’s precarious state in the mid-1990s).
But, alas, the industry took a different direction…but at least Interlisp-D is finally open source, and thanks to Hacker News and other sites more people like me who never used a Lisp machine (I was born in 1989) get to learn about them.
Which is why I love systems programming in automatic resource management languages so much, it is something one needs to actually live through, like those systems.
Most of these systems have failed for monetary and bad management reasons, not technical ones.
Unfortunately in technology it seems ideas have to be recycled multiple times until they finally catch on, the hard part is if one is still around when they do catch on.
> Lisp machines were facing performance and cost challenges from RISC workstations
Which were themselves hideously expensive and out of reach of the consumer, facing cost challenges from personal computers. Initially not performance challenges, but that came around in the early 90s.
Yep, I think it's a useful phenotype, not a disease unless the degree to which the otherwise useful traits manifest causes one to struggle to live a happy life.
> Yep, I think it's a useful phenotype, not a disease unless the degree to which the otherwise useful traits manifest causes one to struggle to live a happy life.
Yes, it is important to distinguish phenotypes from disorders. If one has the phenotype, but isn’t impaired by it to a clinically significant degree, one does not have the disorder (ASD), but one does have the broad autism phenotype (BAP; aka the broader autism phenotype or subclinical ASD). [0] The number of people who have the phenotype without the disorder is likely several times those having the disorder. The broad phenotype is particularly common among close blood relatives (parents/siblings/children) of those with the disorder. It is also has an elevated prevalence among STEM professionals.
I think it is unfortunate there is not greater public awareness of BAP and its distinction from ASD. Probably many of the people who describe themselves as “on the spectrum” in a colloquial sense have BAP not ASD.
[0] strictly speaking, one can speak of a narrow autism phenotype (phenotype with the clinical disorder) and a broad(er) autism phenotype (phenotype without the clinical disorder), which together make up the autism/ASD phenotype as a whole. Given the distinction between the two is clinical, it is possible in theory for the exact same phenotype to be broad for one person and narrow for another - one person might be in a less supportive environment which produces clinical impairment, the other in a more supportive environment in which impairment remains at a subclinical level - impairment arises through phenotype-environment interaction, it is not always inherent to the phenotype in itself
Thanks for the terminology here! I was diagnosed as Asperger’s over 20 years ago, but in a sealed part of my medical record so I didn’t get booted out of the military. Went on to complete 22 years.
My son, however, has severe ASD and will likely need a caretaker for life.
Military and police famously attract people (primarily males) with autism. I am not related to military but since war in Ukraine I followed a channel called Speak The Truth to understand how a US veteran with Republican leaning background (he himself defines himself more neutral than that) to get context to the war. The guy ticks all the ADHD boxes (ADHD is considered to be related to ASD), to the point it gets hilarious.
Do I agree with him on everything? Well, I am on UA side but politically I am progressive left and European. So I obviously do not agree with him on a lot of matters. But apart from his ads (lot of BS/scams) it has been interesting and, at times, valuable. It is a misconception that people on the spectrum get along with each other.
> Yes, it is important to distinguish phenotypes from disorders. If one has the phenotype, but isn’t impaired by it to a clinically significant degree, one does not have the disorder (ASD), but one does have the broad autism phenotype (BAP; aka the broader autism phenotype or subclinical ASD). [0] The number of people who have the phenotype without the disorder is likely several times those having the disorder. v
This seems like a way to try and reason that you can be autistic and not have the 'disorder', but it doesn't work like that. There is no one who has the phenotype without the disorder.
The subset of ASD is really just BAP where the intensity of the traits and/or their particular expression come in conflict with the expectations and basic needs of daily life, requiring support (and diagnosis). Even in absence of this conflict, the acknowledgement of one's autism is useful from a self-compassion and tolerance standpoint
> Even in absence of this conflict, the acknowledgement of one's autism is useful from a self-compassion and tolerance standpoint
What is "autism"? It is a dimension, a continuum, (even a set of dimensions) not an either-or category. Of course, at certain level of extremity or severity of impairment, the dimensional becomes effectively categorical. But as you move along that continuum in the other direction, there is no clearcut boundary between it and "normality"/"neurotypicality", nor is there a clearcut boundary between it and other distinct forms of "aneurotypicality" with which it has significant overlap (e.g ADHD, OCD, the schizophrenia spectrum, personality disorders, PTSD, eating disorders, giftedness and intellectual disability). Clinical diagnosis is always going to have a subjective element – cases far from those boundaries almost everyone will diagnose the same way, but near those boundaries the diagnostic outcome often says more about the clinician than about the patient/client. The boundary is shifting over time, it varies geographically, and it is questionable to what extent the justification for that spatiotemporal variation is scientific, as opposed to social/cultural/political.
Do I have autism? Well, do I want to have autism? I once almost paid over $1000 for an ASD assessment for myself, but my psychologist and psychiatrist talked me out of – they both said "if you really want to pay over $1000 for a piece of paper telling you what you already know, go right ahead-but maybe there are other things you'd rather spend that money on?" I decided for now to take their advice. But if I ever decide I really want to add ASD to my personal diagnosis collection, I can fork that money out and I'd be rather surprised if I didn't get it.
I have the traits I have, but a diagnostic label is not the same thing as the traits it labels. Our son's psychiatrist once said to me something which will always stick in my head: "psychiatric diagnoses are these strange hybrids of scientific theories and cultural constructs; some clinicians put more emphasis on the scientific theory perspective and others more on the cultural construct perspective; I myself don't have a firm view on the correct balance between those two perspectives, because I haven't been keeping up to date with the research literature on those debates"
I'm saying that ASD only really matters for when support is needed. Diagnosis can open doors to government provided support.
I think self-diagnosis is fine for people who don't require support. Though I've noticed that some people will both not acknowledge it, but at the same time unconsciously hold prejudices in relation to this 'difference' that they don't acknowledge, often in condescending ways.
Which I think was part of what my psychologist and psychiatrist's point was – in spite of my various issues, I somehow manage to have a job that pays well, a wife and two kids, cars, property, investments... I wouldn't be eligible for any government-provided support (nor should I be), no matter what pieces of paper I might purchase. Someone else who doesn't have those things, such a piece of paper can have some real practical benefits for them (irrespective of whether the piece of paper is an "accurate" or "correct" diagnosis)
> I think self-diagnosis is fine for people who don't require support.
This is what I don't agree with. I associate "self-diagnosis" with over-reification of ASD, which is a pet peeve of mine – emphasising categorical over dimensional understandings, ignorance of the doubts over ASD's validity as a scientific theory, ignorance of the evidence that it is (partially) socially constructed. And that's hardly a point unique to ASD, it applies to all psychiatric diagnoses – yet, many people seem to "identify with" ASD as their "true self" to a degree that rarely seen with other disorders – how many people identity with BPD or schizoaffective disorder or dysthymia in that way? And I don't like that identification. Whatever diagnoses I may or may not have, they are not me – and I don't want my children growing up identifying with their diagnoses either.
> Whatever diagnoses I may or may not have, they are not me – and I don't want my children growing up identifying with their diagnoses either
It's not a matter of identity, but explanatory power. To reiterate, the self-acknowledgement/'diagnosis' as autistic (not ASD) is 'useful from a self-compassion and tolerance standpoint'. So instead of, why do I find X difficult when everyone else finds it easy (or even laughs/condescends/points it out), I can say, I'm autistic, that's not easy for me.
I agree that autism is a fuzzy socially-defined phenomenon. The distinction, once again, is only as valuable as how much it comes into conflict with society. So, by example, if a child is being made fun of for not understanding the tacit social rules of the playground, or a teenager of the art of seduction, or an adult of polite conversation, this self-awareness could be useful as a way of understanding one's own difficulties, and also as a way of surmounting or managing them. It can also be useful for others to be more aware or tolerant. I also agree, it's not on the person themselves, they are not broken in some way.
> It's not a matter of identity, but explanatory power. To reiterate, the self-acknowledgement/'diagnosis' as autistic (not ASD) is 'useful from a self-compassion and tolerance standpoint'. So instead of, why do I find X difficult when everyone else finds it easy (or even laughs/condescends/points it out), I can say, I'm autistic, that's not easy for me.
It bothers me a bit that, if you turn it around, the lack of an explanation would be an impediment to self-compassion and tolerance. "I find X difficult" ought to be enough, whether that coincides with any other traits (autistic or otherwise) or not.
You make a good point. The "I find X difficult" is a 'disability' trait, and disabilities are only really relevant where they conflict with the expectations of wider society. In all cases it's really the social exclusion that's the problem. If someone has a trait that either can't be changed, or takes exceptional effort to mask, it shouldn't be on them to do the impossible. If however it's just habit, or actual lack of effort to change, that's a completely different thing.
> It's not a matter of identity, but explanatory power. To reiterate, the self-acknowledgement/'diagnosis' as autistic (not ASD) is 'useful from a self-compassion and tolerance standpoint'. So instead of, why do I find X difficult when everyone else finds it easy (or even laughs/condescends/points it out), I can say, I'm autistic, that's not easy for me.
I have no problem saying I have autistic traits, as do both my children. I find some things easier than the average person and other things harder, and no doubt my autistic traits have something to do with both. But I'd much rather say "I have autistic traits" rather than "I am autistic". Traits have far greater reality – and scientific validity – than diagnoses.
Autistic traits are also very common in people with something other than autism – in fact, most psychiatric disorders, a significant subset of those diagnosed with them display heightened (even if subclinical) autistic traits. Identifying with a diagnosis rather than traits encourages ignorance of that reality.
I think the word autism has become such a loaded term that it has become undesirable. The removal of the distinction between 'autistic person with significant access needs' and 'autistic person with low access needs' (formerly aspies) has been problematic, in that it took a term historically (and incorrectly) associated with Rain Man and conflated with someone who's socially awkward, might struggle with emotional regulation, be hypersensitive, may have difficulty with motor skills, have nervous ticks and habits, shutdown in overwhelming situations, burnout from normal tasks, etc. but otherwise can function in a day job, pay the bills, do the laundry, cook, eat, and bathe themselves, if only with more struggle.
I've heard this plaint a lot lately, that there needs to be different language to talk about this common neurological phenomenon. I heard that there was a push to write the DSM VI in terms of its biological mechanisms. It sounds like an almost insuperable challenge, and might explain why an updated revision of DSM V was released after a decade, instead of a new manual.
> I heard that there was a push to write the DSM VI in terms of its biological mechanisms
There are two basic problems with that proposal (1) we still largely don't know what those biological mechanisms actually are, especially not with the degree of confidence necessary for them to be used for individual diagnosis (2) there is massive social/cultural/political/institutional/professional/financial investment in some of the current labels (especially autism/ASD), even though they correspond poorly to what is really going on in the brain, and any attempt to replace them with a more accurate system of labelling or diagnosis produces major pushback from people who are threatened by loss of those investments
One proposal (in the second paper I linked) is to merge ASD, ADHD, intellectual disability, borderline personality disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, language impairments, learning disabilities, tic disorders, atypical epilepsy, and reactive attachment disorder into a single disorder (an undifferentiated "neurodevelopmental disorder" or what Christopher Gillberg calls "ESSENCE"). ASD is already a kitchen sink, but still small enough that people can pretend it isn't; let's make a kitchen sink so big that nobody can deny it is one. Including BPD and reactive attachment disorder also helps clarify the complexity of causation, that many children's problems are produced by complex interactions between biological factors (genetics, in utero exposures, etc) and social environmental factors (trauma, abuse, neglect, maltreatment, parental mental illness, etc)–whereas labels like "ASD" wrongly put all the emphasis on the former to the exclusion of the latter
Regarding the two basic problems: I imagine the people involved are aware of the enormity of the challenge, and don't seem to be concerned about Big Psychiatry (nor does new hard-science based diagnosis and treatment threaten profits of that industry). But really I don't know. It was just an off-hand comment from Robert Sapolsky's Human Behavioral Biology lecture series on YouTube, they might not be attempting this at all.
> whereas labels like "ASD" wrongly put all the emphasis on the former to the exclusion of the latter
Early intervention autism treatment has limited success. If you've got dyspraxia, inattention/hyperattention, fidget, avoid eye contact, have meltdowns, speech/processing delay, etc. you're fighting something at the neurological level that can at best be attenuated over time by plasticity, or simply just managed, like epilepsy.
> you're fighting something at the neurological level that can at best be attenuated over time by plasticity, or simply just managed, like epilepsy.
Nowadays, the label "ASD" is applied both to children whose issues become apparent in early childhood, and also to children who don't develop serious issues until later in childhood, even adolescence. A two year old with severe issues, it is much more likely to be predominantly biological in origin. But a ten year old with milder issues, it becomes much harder to say to what extent it is biological compared to what extent it is due to how they've been raised.
Consider families where one of the parents (sometimes even both) has a personality disorder such as BPD or NPD – that can produce difficulties with the parent displaying consistent emotional responsiveness to the child, which can harm the child's emotional development, resulting in attachment disorders, emotional and behavioural disturbances, etc. Ideally, the parent is aware of this and can get professional help in preventing this from happening; however, many such people are in complete denial about their condition, and will refuse to seek help. There is a lot of symptomatic overlap between children with attachment disorders and ASD. Commonly, there is lots of funding and resources available for the ASD label, little or none for any others. If the parents aren't open about what is really going on, few professionals want to go digging. So they'll diagnose the child with ASD. If anyones suggests parental issues may be a contributor, many will trot out the tired talking point of "Bruno Bettelheim's discredited refrigerator mother theory".
Added to this, it isn't like "autistic traits due to bad parenting" and "autistic traits due to biological factors" are mutually exclusive categories. It is entirely possible the child already has a baseline genetic disposition to autistic traits, which are then being amplified by the poor family environment. There is a lot of overlap between personality disorders (especially BPD) and ASD, and some even question the validity of the ASD-BPD boundary – even if they are indeed distinct conditions, they likely have some shared genetic loading.
> Commonly, there is lots of funding and resources available for the ASD label, little or none for any others. If the parents aren't open about what is really going on, few professionals want to go digging. So they'll diagnose the child with ASD.
I agree that there's probably a lot of mis-diagnosis, but that's hard to quantify as an outsider to the profession of psychology. I think this is separate to autism being a nurture over nature thing.
> Added to this, it isn't like "autistic traits due to bad parenting" and "autistic traits due to biological factors" are mutually exclusive categories. It is entirely possible the child already has a baseline genetic disposition to autistic traits, which are then being amplified by the poor family environment.
I agree that genetic, pre-natal, and very early childhood environments have a huge impact on behaviour. My opinion relies heavily on an assumption that there's genetic and pre-natal neurological/gene expression differences for autistic people, and that is probably the source of our disagreement (i.e., nurture vs nature).
> I agree that genetic, pre-natal, and very early childhood environments have a huge impact on behaviour.
I agree, but I don't know why we should have "very early" there. Late childhood and adolescent environments can also have an enormous impact on behaviour.
> My opinion relies heavily on an assumption that there's genetic and pre-natal neurological/gene expression differences for autistic people, and that is probably the source of our disagreement (i.e., nurture vs nature).
There's genetic and pre-natal neurological/gene expression differences for lots of people–yes, including "autistic" people, but also including people with "non-autistic" disorders (such as ADHD, OCD, personality disorders, schizophrenia spectrum, bipolar). I'm unconvinced there is any fundamental difference between "autism" and "non-autistic neurodiversity"–"autism" is a heterogenous collection of many distinct differences, and some individuals with "autism" likely have more in common with certain cases of "non-autistic neurodiversity" than they do with most other cases of "autism". The same difference in gene expression or neuroanatomy can produce radically different behavioural results in different social environments
Broken or not depends on context and who you ask. In the end we are all HR and as many of us must function in society. Add to that that there's an abundance of jobs due to babyboomers quitting the workforce (though less in USA according to Peter Zeihan) and there is a large benefit having people in general function in society.
My daughter is 5 y.o. and has a best friend on school. Our daughter is undiagnosed for now, we both are. I get the feeling the mother of her best friend isn't happy with them being best friends. Why? Fear of being excluded, I suspect.
Right now I'm unemployed since December and the lack of employed role model for my kids is thus far more harmful than lack of income (though latter will become relevant again within time).
When I was 18, I attended an elective subject at college about "Professional communication". It was the first time I learnt that body language is even a thing. There's definitely courses to help with communication skills, particularly in a professional context, though I imagine the quality of said courses would vary dramatically. Not to mention there's a whole cottage industry of unqualified 'life coaches', 'style coaches', and so on, though their value is probably even more variable. I'm not sure if they could help employability, but such services are available to everyone.
I got help. Not when I was 18 when I needed it (could not finish my education), or at the very least nothing of substance but with a severe lack of empathy. As an adult, as part of my autism diagnosis was therapy understanding autism. That was fascinating, it helped me a lot. I also followed an adult education aimed at people with autism. It didn't fully align with my interests so I had to find something related to that within the job market. I ended up with a job within that field, with 3 one year contracts. Because I already was deemed 100% unemployed the org got benefits for contracting me. Unfortunately, my neighbors complained about our kids noise and even accused me of being a child predator/rapist. The former (regarding the noise) being truth though something we do try to minimize and the latter BS but also my worst nightmare before becoming a parent. I ended up with a burnout (and on the brink of a psychosis) and slowly got back to working full-time. I reported myself 75% better, but unfortunately my contract didn't get renewed (that sword of Damocles was apparent back when I got the burnout, so it was of little surprise).
The day I got unemployed I had to report to the government employment agency, and the above was basically not believed. I feel misunderstood. I already mentioned the story truthful though omitting some personal details, so I'd like to add the art of cooking a dinner as well as programming are some of the most awesome things one can perform, in my opinion. But because of the endless possibilities and the many small steps I can only perform very simple, basic, archaic instruction sets.
You neighbors sound like trash. That sounds like a tough situation, and it's a small mercy that you have at least the financial support of the government. Autistic burnout is real, and I've cumulatively spent years out of work because of it—once again I was fortunate to have the financial buffer. I eventually got to a better place, but not before being in the workforce again. If it helps to talk, I've put my Slowly ID in my bio for a few days
Thanks! I will remember the categorization. It’s certainly useful to distinguish between a person who needs a full-time caretaker and one who can hold a full-time job where the only categoric similarity is “they think more like each other than not”. I’ll try not to use ASD for myself anymore.
Fuck BAP and all these people with ASD who don't have it severe and end up being in denial, proposing masking and "getting over it" and other tough boy talk.
If you got diagnosed with ASD, you have ASD and there are tons of false negatives out there (undiagnosed people) as well as those claiming they're true positive (in reality undiagnosed, they may very well have ASD in some form, or not). It is also possible you have misdiagnosed false positives. Psychopaths, for example, could very well benefit from such.
I know I am not the latter. I know I have empathy, and when I don't, it is likely because of overstimulation otherwise. I recognize this in my children as well. My mother's late best friend (geez, typing this makes me realize how much I miss her) who was different in life as status quo in a way irrelevant to this discussion described my kids when tbey were very young as "friendly". A simple thing to say, but her observation was so aptly sound, I shluld remind myself about it more often next temper tantrums.
> Fuck BAP and all these people with ASD who don't have it severe and end up being in denial, proposing masking and "getting over it" and other tough boy talk.
BAP is a construct developed by researchers, see e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30995078/ – we can debate its value as a scientific theory, but all this stuff about "being in denial" is irrelevant to its scientific status.
> If you got diagnosed with ASD, you have ASD
There's this MIT PhD thesis I really like, Phech Colatat's Essays in the sociology of autism diagnosis. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/90070 In the first half of his thesis, Colatat looked at three specialist clinics in the US, all run by Kaiser Permanente
(which in his thesis he refers to by the pseudonym "Allied Health") – management was already aware that three clinics had significantly different diagnosis rates, but those differences were being ascribed to patient characteristics and referral patterns. Based on statistical analysis of medical records, Colatat argues that neither of those explanations actually work, and instead the real explanation is differences in the professional culture of each clinic – an explanation he backs up by considering the organisational history of the clinics, and the different diagnostic philosophies which influenced their respective founders. He concludes that approximately one-third of the outcome of an autism diagnosis in those clinics is determined by the culture of the clinician – and he notes that, despite these significant differences in clinical culture, they were all specialist clinics which put great emphasis on diagnostic rigour, and many diagnoses are done in generalist clinics with significantly less rigour, so it is entirely possible the cultural contribution might turn out to be even bigger if one brought those diagnoses into the analysis. So, one third (maybe even more) of the time, whether you have ASD depends, not on you, but on which clinician you see.
> instead the real explanation is differences in the professional culture of each clinic
A cultural aspect is that some practitioners believe the line between ASD and 'not-ASD' is in a different place. In my view, the pathologized label of ASD only really belongs to people that need support (even then I find the 'disorder' label problematic), but a broader autistic label belongs to anyone affected by autistic traits. The distinction of how many traits is the minimum for a autistic label is somewhat arbitrary, and whether someone cares to identify as autistic in light of these traits is outside the purview of the clinic.
> and whether someone cares to identify as autistic in light of these traits is outside the purview of the clinic
Yes, because autism is a cultural construct, and each individual gets to negotiate their own relationship with that cultural construct
Which is not saying it is purely a cultural construct - we started with some very real traits, and then cooked up a family of (unproven) scientific theories to try to explain those traits, and then erected a cultural construct on top of that, which has a rather complex relationship to the traits and theories which it justifies itself with
It's not exactly what I meant. If you have the traits, you may not wish to describe yourself as autistic. Some of that comes down to the stigma. If you don't have autistic traits and you claim to be autistic, that's just being dishonest.
The 'cultural aspect' is that every society develops tacit rules around conversation, dress, eye contact, politeness, taboos, how to move and touch etc. and penalizes people who can't divine and follow them. However, some cultures are more aligned with autistic traits. Like in Russia it's considered strange (even false) to smile without reason. Some countries have avoidance of eye contact as a feature.
Edit: Interesting aside is Sabine Hossenfelder's video on autism. She takes a self-assessment at the end which yields a positive result, and then concludes, "I don't think I'm autistic, I'm just rude and German", which I think isn't some confirmation that autistic traits don't exist in the context of Germany (Hans Asperger was a Nazi instrument and from nearby Austria after all) but that some countries don't exclude people with autistic traits. And that kind of tolerance is really the ideal end goal.
> It's not exactly what I meant. If you have the traits, you may not wish to describe yourself as autistic. Some of that comes down to the stigma. If you don't have autistic traits and you claim to be autistic, that's just being dishonest.
I have a different perspective. What makes some traits "autistic" and others not? Okay, there is some positive correlation between them - but lots of "non-autistic" traits are positively correlated with "autistic" traits too. How big is the difference in correlation between different "autistic" traits on the one hand, and between "autistic" and non-"autistic" traits on the other? Is that differene in correlation big enough to provide scientific validity for the distinction between those two sets of traits?
Lynn Waterhouse argues that autism originated in a couple of related but distinct scientific hypothesises – Leo Kanner's "early infantile autism" and Hans Asperger's "autistic psychopathy" – both concerning a cluster of postively correlated traits in certain children, which displayed some similarities to those traits displayed in adults with schizophrenia which Blueler had labelled "autistic". As those related hypotheses evolved, they were eventually merged into a single hypothesis "ASD" – which however, is so vague and amorphous as to be essentially unfalsifiable. Waterhouse argues that Kanner's and Asperger's hypotheses were perfectly legitimate for their time (the 1940s), but have never been confirmed, and the best interpretation of the available evidence is that "autism"/"ASD" (in all its versions) is a false theory, that should be filed in the annals of the history of science next to phlogiston and the luminiferous aether. But, like Ptolemy's epicycles, rather than abandoning a scientific dead end, people keep on fiddling with theory to try to keep it alive.
But, even if Waterhouse is right, and "autism" is an inescapable scientific failure - it has had enormous cultural success. And that's what I mean to say it is a culutral construct. Indeed, its cultural success is arguably a major factor stopping people from moving on from it, even if (Waterhouse argues) that is the right thing to do from a purely scientific perspective. And to be clear, while Waterhouse denies that "autism" is anything other than an arbitrary grouping of traits, a label based on history rather than the best current science, she doesn't deny for a minute that sometimes these traits can produce significant impairment–and even if we judge it a failure as a scientific theory, that doesn't in itself answer the separate question of the benefits or harms of the cultural construct that theory has sprouted.
Laurent Mottron's perspective [0] is less radical than Waterhouse's, but has some overlap. He argues (contra Waterhouse) that it is too early to declare the narrower 1980s/1990s idea of "autism" (and even its cousin "Asperger's") a scientific dead end. But, he thinks we've blown up its boundaries to the point that it has lost all scientific value, and so at that point he agrees with Waterhouse that 2020s ASD is a scientific dead end. However, rather than Waterhouse's proposal of abandoning the concept entirely, and looking for complete replacements, he wants to go back to a focus on the older narrower concept (which he labels "prototypical autism"). I think he'd agree with Waterhouse that the current concept is largely a cultural construct riding on the back of a failed scientific theory; but they disagree about the scientific value of its prior iterations.
What was once autism is disintegrating into the neurodiversity movement, which I don't disagree with. I suppose it just becomes unwieldy when certain traits cluster frequently to say one has, by example, Sensory Processing Disorder, Dyspraxia, Inattentive ADHD, Social Anxiety Disorder, engages in stimming and regulating behaviours, avoids eye contact, occasional meltdowns, etc. etc. Autism was a shorthand for a kind of fuzzy classification of this clustering. I can see the merit to the opposing argument, but I speculate that there will be some neurological commonality that is found, and this fuzzy classification will have been fruitful.
There's growing evidence of neuroanatomical differences between ASD and control populations in (replicable) studies, and I think further neurological study can be the only path forward to settling this debate as to whether autism needs to fragment, change shape, or be abolished as a concept entirely.
> There's growing evidence of neuroanatomical differences between ASD and control populations in (replicable) studies
I'm not sure how many of those studies actually have been replicated. My impression is that most of them fail to replicate.
And even those which do replicate, have two serious issues: (1) they only establish group differences not individual differences-even if on average people with ASD are more likely to have X, some ASD individuals will lack X and some non-ASD individuals will have it, meaning we can't actually say X=ASD; (2) most of them are flawed in only considering a single diagnosis (e.g. ASD vs "typically developing"), not multiple diagnoses (e.g. ASD-only vs ADHD-only vs OCD-only vs two or more of the above vs "typically developing"), which renders them incapable to answer questions about the scientific validity of the boundary between ASD and its related diagnoses
Don't take it from me, take it from the first link on a cursory google search:
> Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are a heterogeneous group of neurodevelopmental disorders that are diagnosed solely on the basis of behaviour. A large body of work has reported neuroanatomical differences between individuals with ASD and neurotypical controls. Despite the huge clinical and genetic heterogeneity that typifies autism, some of these anatomical features appear to be either present in most cases or so dramatically altered in some that their presence is now reasonably well replicated in a number of studies. One such finding is the tendency towards overgrowth of the frontal cortex during the early postnatal period.
My interest in this thread is exhausted, so I'll agree to disagree with you on the biological deterministic aspects of autism, and let you dig down that rabbit hole.
My guess is that either you have no lived experience with autism, don't know many people in the autistic community, or have a lack of sensitivity to the very real nature of the disabilities it entails, even in the undiagnosed cohort—enthusiastic misdiagnoses aside. The difficulties from dyspraxia are of very real consequence, regardless of social interpretation. Stimming and regulating behaviours are a real thing, regardless of whether or not it is frowned upon in a social context. Meltdown, i.e., the consequences of not being able to regulate congruently to one's environmental stimulation and fatigue, is a real thing, whether it is accommodated for or not, in the same way that an epileptic fit is a real thing. One could say that a majority of the population is affected by this, and it doesn't change my argument. One could say that some people are so barely affected by their meltdowns, and it doesn't change my argument; they are still real adverse effects of real consequence experienced by people—actual disability—and no amount of equivocating makes them go away. There's perhaps people who are slightly hypochondriac and are looking to pathologize themselves, but this doesn't change my argument, because they aren't autistic, they're just making false claims. There's perhaps some practitioners who are either incompetent or corrupt, and this doesn't change my argument, because they are misdiagnosing.
> ASD-only vs ADHD-only vs OCD-only
Strictly my opinion: the kitchen-sinking of ADHD, OCD, ASD, dyspraxia, meltdowns etc. is due to the gaining traction on the idea that there's a neurological commonality that drives these behaviours, and their attendant comorbidity. Occam's razor.
People are opting out. I redirected my career away from a tech mega-corp for precisely the reason that eventually I'd have to relocate to the bay area to continue advancing. There's absolutely no way I'm doing that to my family.
Actually there are tons of empty office buildings and residential units.
It’s the same situation as in New York.
Plenty of landlords can afford keeping their prices high hoping for the eventual bite. If they lower their prices further they do a bigger damage to their portfolio for years to come once you factor in rent control.
Forget rent control, the way commercial real estate works, many banks give loans based on certain minimum rents being paid, if the landlord lowers the rent the bank can call the entire loan to be paid immediately.
If there is no rent, then there is a default too. You don’t get to pretend your property is worth $x per sq ft unless it is landing in the bank account.
What the landlord does in this situation is paying out of pocket the expected interest payment to the bank, while deducting this as a cost from their other more profitable portfolios.
In that case, the landlord could rent for a lower rent than the bank is okay with, and supplement the missing amount himself. That would be cheaper that leaving it empty and paying all the rent himself.
No, the lender or the servicing company will regularly request the P&L and check up on business. Paying out of pocket does not mean the debt covenants are satisfied.
The “damage” part is only real if one intends to refinance constantly and chase the highest multiple possible. The flip-side of rent control is high occupancy. If the building was properly capitalized and rented with a proper return in mind, rent control ensures you keep turning a profit year after year. Not sure about SF, but in many jurisdictions including utilities allows higher increases. Staying on top of these allowed increases and ensuring good budgeting makes a lot of rent controlled buildings a gold mine.
EDIT: of course if you mess up, that mistake is now set in stone and backed by legal resource of your city, so it’s not risk free.
> rent control ensures you keep turning a profit year after year
this assumes the returns set out by the rent control is appropriate in all future situations. Even with the allowance for increases, there are still situations where such an increase is insufficient.
Yes, unfortunately we have seen examples recently with COVID where municipalities basically offloaded subsidizing rent to landlords by both prohibiting increases and evictions for non-payment. These policies are not part of what’s normally thought of as rent control or rent stabilization ordinances.
Unfortunately, the proverbial cat is out of the bag and we will likely see repeats of such “subsidies”. It’s unclear how it will change the calculations long-term. Short-term, it has already driven the unlucky small landlords out of business and forced surviving to keep greater reserves. This increased reserves need will definitely hamper future development and probably will drive rents up even more due to lack of supply. Large corporate landlords tend to focus on the higher end of the market, but the shortage is in the more affordable price range…
Progressive leftists (correctly) think that landlords are leaches. Expect no sorrow or concern from the average SF voter and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
If property owners want to turn their buildings into businesses, they need to be smart businesspeople and plan for those situations. If they fail then that's the market dynamics at play!
I think that comment is talking about evictions and rent increase moratoria we saw during COVID lockdowns. It was very close to a black swan event, at least for me. Now, reality has changed and landlords need to plan for the risk of not having income for several years. It’s not normal rent control/stabilization, so the long term effects are yet unclear. For now, leverage is risky, so new investment is going to be hard to come by.
Reminds me of the situation with AOL dialup, which I was surprised as heck to learn is a) still a thing and b) charges way more than I would have expected in areas where its otherwise not feasible to get high speed internet (easily). Could be similar to the situation here with people who can't leave/won't leave for personal or career reasons, and taking up the prices available.
I think "captive market" is the term you want. Same reason cable TV bills keep climbing to +$200/month, and newspaper delivery prices keep going up while the product keeps shrinking.
Demand for some things is elastic only down to a point. That's the point where customers are hostages.
Newspaper prices are more of a death spiral than a captive market.
People stop getting papers delivered in favor of online news, so prices have to go up to cover fixed costs, pushing more people to stop getting papers delivered and so on.
I notice, walking around the 'hood, that some people still get the San Jose Mercury-News delivered. Why?
I think they just have to get a morning paper, and if it's getting shittier by the year, well, so be it. You're right, lots of readers have already cancelled, but there's a core of readers who won't. The Merc can raise the price and they'll just pay it.
Same. I've never lived in SF, but I convinced my wife to relocate to NYC so I could kick-start my tech career. We lived there for 4 years and then moved to FL in 2018. I'm glad I had the experience of living there, but I'll never do it again. Nor will I ever move to SF, no matter how lucrative the offer.
The Bay Area is also a much bigger place than SF. Unless you’re familiar with a lot of the Bay Area it would be pretty unfortunate to refuse a lucrative offer in many Bay Area places because of the problems that SF is infamous for.
You would rather raise a child in a state like Florida where the government has made it illegal not to glorify the confederacy and chattel slavery?
That is a very odd choice. I get that the bay has a crime/homeless/CoL problem but fleeing to a place with much of the same issues in its own cities while also being one of the worst parts of the country culturally outside of then isn’t any better, IMO.
I didn't say anything about bay area homelessness, in fact the comment you're responding to was specifically about NYC, which I mentioned I lived in for 4 years. Also, no offense, but I'm willing to bet you haven't spent much time in Florida, if at all. Culturally, about half of my social circle is made up of Venezuelan refugees, all of whom love living here.
Several of them are granted official refugee status. Also not sure what bias you’re talking about.
FWIW, I’ve lived in 8 states - TN, MS, GA, AK, CO, NY, NJ, and FL. Every one of them has pros and cons, and you find all sorts of people everywhere. This idea that a particular state is somehow culturally worse, reflects a lack of either depth or life experience.
As someone who chose NyC over SF to start my tech carrier myself, it looks like it would have been much better if I had gone to SF (from how my colleagues did). NYC was my dream city so I don’t regret it but SF is leagues ahead in terms of tech ecosystem.
> Nor will I ever move to SF, no matter how lucrative the offer.
You have never lived there, if I understand correctly. Why wouldn't you move there? Is there some experience you have with it? Housing prices? Internet rumors?
I've never lived there, but I visit often for work. Primarily two reasons - the first is that I'm starting a family and neither I nor my wife have any family there. The second is, as you guessed, the home prices. If I wanted something even remotely affordable, I'd have to live far away and have an insane commute. We've already lived that lifestyle in NYC, and we're not eager to return to it.
Well, family is more than just daycare for one thing. But the larger point is that I don’t see my reasons as issues that need to be addressed. Silicon Valley is not the center of my universe.
South Florida, about an hour north of Miami. The prices down here have gotten kind of crazy so I'd like to move, but our family is here so that makes it difficult. Still better overall than NYC.
Appreciate the response. Wife and I looked at SoFlo, specifically Miami, really closely. Even lived for a month. It was hard for us to pull the trigger, but cool to see it's working out for others.
I wouldn't mind being there as opposed to this winter in the bay...
I think it is a misconception that you need to be in the Bay Area to advance an tech career. Unless you have some ultra-non-portable skill that only develops in one region on Earth, you might need to reconsider your career path, because it sounds too limited to be useful.
I took them as saying that they'd need to move to the Bay Area to advance in the specific tech mega-corp they were in previously, not that you have to be in the Bay Area to advance in tech in general.
People often consider their desires to be prime movers, when there they are perfectly aligned with the systems of incentives they inhabit.