One unconventional datapoint for reference - docs couldn't make sense of my apneas, have none of the normal risk factors. Eventually discovered it was a subtle oral food allergy.
The difference between nice and average gear in rock climbing is pretty slim. A few grams, smooth action on the moving parts... it's also primarily a failsafe, so it's inherently obvious that it won't help you climb dramatically better, any more than a nicer parachute will help you fly a plane better.
There's also a long tradition of the strongest climbers you know climbing on mank (i.e. safety gear so ragged it is terrifying to behold)
> There's also a long tradition of the strongest climbers you know climbing on mank (i.e. safety gear so ragged it is terrifying to behold)
It's not uncommon for trad climbers, or maybe it was. When I was younger I couldn't afford much, and I climbed with others in basically the same situation. My rack consisted of mostly passive protection, some nuts, some rocks (not literal rocks, i'm not that old). I eventually got a few micros and cheap cams (literally 3).. Some of the climbing I did back then was terrifying, not only because I was so new to it, and climbing relatively hard dangerous routes, but because they were made so much harder by having limited active protection, and a limited range of passive gear.
I got very very good at creative nut placement, threading the gnarliest of threads, and was very sparing with cams, trying to save them for only where it was completely impossible to place passive gear. I also got good at hanging on in uncomfortable positions for stupid amounts of time while trying to engineer a safe piece of protection out of very little.
In more recent years I added a couple totems (which are amazing, and amazingly expensive), and then got gifted a rack of cams the likes of which i've never seen. A lot of my trad climbs are feeling a hell of a lot easier now I can just chuck tons of cams with far less sparingly especially big crack climbs... It makes me wish I bought better gear earlier, maybe I would have been able to try a wider range of routes, but I'm also grateful for my hard earned skill of making the absolute best of poorly protected routes with passives, my opinion "well protected" is often very different from other peoples provided it's not literally blank run-out. And what others consider "unprotectable" I can often find perfectly safe protection on.
A very decent trad rack can be had for under £1000, and last a long time - In the scheme of things that's not a lot compared to most activities. I don't know why I'm still so frugal about it, I can afford it now. I feel like ropes are the most expensive part of climbing because you can go through them so quickly and have to buy new ones pretty much every year.
x86 is the same way for programmers. All the renaming and so forth is completely hidden from the program. It is only detectable through performance differences.
In theory, a codebase is a language precisely describing a program. The same program can be described in other languages. So that’s what you’re asking the LLM to do, in the same way you can describe a flower in either English or Spanish.
For a naive newcomer - could you go line by line, wrap the whole thing in “unsafe”, compile to an identical binary, and then slowly peel away the “unsafe” while continuing to validate equivalence?
That would at least get you to as much rust as possible, and then let engineers tackle rethinking just those concepts.
Converting C to legal (unsafe) Rust is quite possible; there is indeed already a tool that does this (https://github.com/immunant/c2rust).
The problem you run into is that the conversion is so pedantically correct that the resulting code is useless. The result retains all of the problems that the C code has, and is so far from idiomatic Rust that it's easier to toss the code and start from scratch. Progressive lifting on unsafe Rust to safe Rust is a very difficult order, and the tool I mentioned had a tool to do that... which is now abandoned and unmaintained.
At the end of the day, the chief issue with converting to safe Rust is not just that you have to copy semantics over, but you also have to recover a lot of high-level preconditions. Turning pointers into slices is perhaps the easiest task of the lot; given the very strict mutability rules in Rust, you also have to work out when and where to insert things like Cell or Rc or Mutex or what have you, as well as building out lifetime analysis. And chances are the original code doesn't get all these rules right, which is why there are bugs in the first place.
Solving that problem is the goal of this DARPA proposal, or perhaps more accurately, determining how feasible it is to solve that problem automatically. Personally, I think the better answer is to have a semi-automated approach, where users provide as input the final Rust struct layouts (and possibly parts of the API, to fix lifetime issues), and the tool automates the drudgery of getting the same logic ported to that mapping.
Right. Used c2rust once. Been there, done that. The Rust code that comes out is awful. Does the same thing as the C code, bugs and all. You don't get Rust subscript check errors, you get segfaults from unsafe Rust code. What comes out is hopeless for manual "refactoring".
The hardest part may be Rust's affine type rules. Reference use in Rust is totally different than pointers in C/C++. Object parenting relationships are hard to express in Rust.
what you need to avoid is incompatibilites between different high level languages with a low level intermediary so you arent stuck attempting to convert high level hardware abstraction directly to another high level hardware abstraction.
I'm not saying smartphones are never a problem. However, look at old photos of the bus or subway in the USA or UK from decades ago. Passengers were not having social hour - they were minding their own business, reading a newspaper, listening to music, staring out the window...
I'm more interested in the question of whether technology tethers us home more strongly, instead of venturing outside of our homes.
>they were minding their own business, reading a newspaper, listening to music, staring out the window
Much better cognitively than endlessly scrolling Instagram reels YouTube shorts that are algorithms trying to keep you hooked. Sometimes I’ve seen people just open random apps and close and do nothing. It’s like a habit they are unable to let go.
Phones must be orders if magnitudes more common than newspapers. It seems that no matter where you are in the world, everyone from age 12 and up has one on them 24/7 and uses it as soon as they have 20 seconds to spare. Newspapers were something only a few adults would use, and you usually have read all the interesting parts by the time you get your second coffee.
I agree that the tendency for wanting distractions has always been present in humans, but the hyper connectivity of today's world really taps into it unlike anything else we had before. It's a different quality.
I would call that the difference between a small town and a city, which isn't new. You establish those ties because you see the same grocer regularly - there's only two grocers in town, after all. Meanwhile, in the city, you could buy groceries twice a week and never see the same clerk twice.
There can be small grocers in big cities and faceless corporations in small towns, in fact in my experience in midwest America small towns (sub 5000, say) have 0 shops, people drive the 15 minutes to the nearest walmart
midsize cities / college towns ~100k will have a specialty butcher and a tobacconist where you can actually get to know the shopowners
I'd generally agree with the stuff about everybody just driving to Walmart, but that was just to stock up on nonperishables/freezeables. There was always the local mini mart/gas station, movie store, school, church, pool hall, bar, etc. And everybody tends to know everybody anyhow, because you often have inter-family relations dating back generations.
If urban city shops and restaurants have had regularly rotating staff for decades then loss of those touchpoints can't have much difference to do with the claimed decline in mental health of the last couple of generations as suggested upthread though.
(A few hundred years back cities were mostly only the size of small towns today anyway, the average person didn't really frequent stores and rural communities were sometimes really isolated, and we don't really have an accurate picture of how any of this affected mental health)
i live in a city with a population of 14 million people, but still most of my everyday transactional interactions like buying churros, chicken wings, or electrical supplies are with people i know and transact with repeatedly. that's because i walk there, lacking a motor vehicle. i imagine this was also true of day-to-day commerce in ancient rome, and of course the patron-client and master-slave relationships that were so central in roman society were anything but anonymous
I agree: I live on and off in a city of many, many millions. Maybe it’s just the idiosyncrasy of how I choose to live and shop, but I personally know most of the people with whom I transact regularly in the same way you describe.
Including many of the specific humans who staff the handful of Anonymous Big Chain kinds of enterprises that have weaseled their way into our city: even one of those branches tends to have familiar faces managing or preferring to work the shift that overlaps with when I visit.
I would know how to seek social and transactional anonymity if I wanted to—just go do my shop in a different neighborhood!—but I don’t want to, and that seems pretty consistent with the way things are done in my city.
This isn't the difference between a small town and city, it's the inevitable result of late stage capitalism. In cities it's still possible to go to small stores and create connection with your local grocer, butcher, etc. I purposefully do it, but I have to seek out the places it's still possible, they're dwindling every year. The problem is capitalism wants to consolidate and treat people as fungible to extract more value, which has the side effect of preventing the formation of social bonds.
Capitalism isn't a person, it doesn't want things.
The problem with people that talk about capitalism the way you do is that they mistake human nature for the system that was built around it so when they try to change the system, the people are maladapted and transgress against it by default then it fails miserably.
No, the issue is pedantic people like you who can't understand that "want" is a simple way of saying that a system is biased towards certain outcomes. Capitalism is not an expression of human nature, it's a single possible pareto equilibrium. To say otherwise ignores huge swaths of humans history, and many modern nations which have achieved equilibrium in different ways.
I understand capitalism as “things can be owned and sold” + “you can profit from investment”.
> it's a single possible pareto equilibrium
I propose that those other equilibriums’ stability depended on at least one of these:
a) small population size&density
b) violent totalitarian enforcement
c) indoctrination in caste system and/or religion
d) no contact with capitalism
> Capitalism is not an expression of human nature
Ownership is very natural for humans (2 year old already declares “it’s mine”).
Finally, capitalism is just one part what makes a society. I bet there are quite significant societal differences between Sweden vs US now vs US 70 years ago.
> Ownership is very natural for humans (2 year old already declares “it’s mine”).
The idea that something a two year old does is a suitable basis for the foundations of society as a whole is both hilarious and terrifying. Two year olds are tyrants.
Both capitalism and socialism are spectrums of systems rather than single monoliths so any definition is going to be fuzzy. However, it's probably useful to specifically say that in capitalism specifically private property and/or capital can be owned. Generally speaking, socialist systems still allow personal property to be owned, they just place restrictions on the ownership or private property and/or capital.
It's also probably worth considering that socialism doesn't necessarily have to forbid ownership of private property or capital outright. It could, for example, mean that revenue/profit/income derived from private property or capital is taxed more highly than revenue/profit/income derived from labor.
probably a lot of people are using terrible definitions of 'capitalism' such as '“things can be owned and sold” + “you can profit from investment”', which explains why these discussions are full of so much nonsense
wikipedia's current definition says:
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, self-interest, economic freedom, meritocracy, work ethic, consumer sovereignty, profit motive, entrepreneurship, commodification, voluntary exchange, wage labor and the production of commodities. In a market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.
this is not a perfect definition but it is a much better one
Capitalism is a system built by people that recognize that humans are reliably selfish and seeks to align their selfish interests as best as it can with the rest of the populous.
No nation has ever achieved equilibrium but we are enjoying the most peaceful times in history during a time after the previous wave of capitalism-alternatives failed miserably or acquiesced.
Just about every measure of human flourishing is in the rise, globally.
Measures of human flourishing are rising for the mid-stagers and so globally it might look ok. In late stage countries human flourishing has begun a decline.
While the last 20 years we have made progress on a some acute problems like heart disease, complex ill-health is very much on the rise - Cancer, nearly all mental health issues, obesity & diabetes, suicide. Poverty is on the rise, literacy rates are down.
Human flourishing is just keeping its head above water in these places. Humans are resilient, but there are limits.
Capitalist-fundamentalists will also throw up their hands when asked how we might solve existential problems for which the is no end in sight - eg global warming, the toxifying of our food systems with plastics and industrial chemicals, government debt, etc.
> Capitalism is a system built by people that recognize that humans are reliably selfish and seeks to align their selfish interests as best as it can with the rest of the populous.
You just described mass institutional psychopathy.
I don't consider my family to be innately selfish within the family dynamic, or my friends to be innately greedy.
If you build a system that rewards greed and selfishness (and punishes giving), people will be greedy and selfish within that system. Don't reverse the cause and effect.
That's simply not true. Democratic Socialism/Social Democracy has been very successful.
It's also quite possible that humanity can eventually find a new system that works better than capitalism. After all it took thousands of years for humanity to find capitalism.
The countries you are likely thinking if who say they are those things are still capitalist countries with a touch more of social welfare than other similar countries.
There are other countries who claim to be socialist but are just totalitarian dictatorships (not surprising, in order to control the economy, you have to control the people), are lying or both.
That's just semantics. Whether we want to call them left wing forms of capitalism or moderate forms of socialism isn't really important. What's important is that there ARE nations with successful economic systems that are better than what people call "late stage capitalism".
These successful economic systems are still based on private ownership rights and the right to assemble (in this context the right to form business partnerships with low exit costs). In other words: the core capitalist building blocks.
That's like saying anything with four tires and a motor is a sedan. Name economic systems (including socialism) have the right to create businesses and own property. Capitalism is ownership of private ventures by an investment class who reap the profits (paying the employees as little as possible); socialism is when companies are owned collectively (most may be owned by employees, some may be owned nationally). Everything else is unrelated.
They're not wrong. Late stage capitalism sucks, but the alternative systems out there seem to lead to mass starvation or total collapse. People have been lifted out of poverty worldwide as well. Some kind of balance seems necessary.
The welfare states of Western Europe and the Nordic countries seem much better than America's system of late stage capitalism and they have not lead to mass starvation or total collapse.
Likewise, America's economy seemed to be much more healthy when it had a more active/successful labor movement.
I'm not sure if the current success of Norway can be replicated everywhere. It has a small population living off a state oil fund that has something like $300k/person.
I think capitalism is fundamentally different than other systems because of one important nuance. In capitalism you can buy a plot of land and go start a communist society, or a socialist one, or whatever you want. So long as your little society can feed itself, you can do whatever you want. Well even if it can't feed itself, it can still do whatever it wants - but it probably won't be particularly long lived. But in socialist or communist societies you can't just go start up your own little capitalist society.
Capitalism is biased towards whatever the governing authority says it is. In America, due to onerous regulations and taxes, it's difficult for independent players to become established and the regulations favor a handful of large companies in most sectors. This is not universally true in every country, and they're just as capitalist (arguably more so) than us
