I’m saying sleeping on a bench that is meant for transit users to wait for a train is, indeed, anti-social.
This is fairly trivial to demonstrate using a categorical imperative. If everyone used the transit system to sleep in, then that transit system would likely cease to exist, and the benches would not be maintained.
We very much ought to have places for people to sleep. That those resources are rarely provided to many folks satisfaction is shameful. Still when public services are make less functional this can interfere with the literal viability of expensive transportation systems. They can rapidly become insolvent if transit consumers prefer alternatives due to the misuse of spaces.
The idea that need trumps all other factors leads us to inefficiency public services that collapse.
Nobody ever does that, whatever a "categorical imperative" might be or represent. But not having benches because a victim of capitalism might, Heaven forbid, sleep on it, is the epitome of cultural and societal barbarism. Countries that do that are not part of civilized society, they might be wealthy, and many of them are (I've seen a similar philosophy in regards to benches in Switzerland), but they're not civilized.
>whatever a "categorical imperative" might be or represent
If you do not understand the concept of a categorical imperative, I would strongly suggest studying some ethical philosophy. There are folks that have spent lifetimes trying to figure out the best ways to see human flourishing, and they have some very, very good ideas.
Firstly, I agree with you. I just don't think it's a contest, and I don't think "ranking something as worse" means the other thing should be considered permissible.
Homeless people have no moral obligation to stay away from benches due to "solvency of transportation systems", if society doesn't care about them in return.
You seem to think need trumps all duty to your fellow citizen. I do not. By suggesting need trumps everything, you are demonstrating why the benches have disappeared.
If we live in a would where we accept that we allow some folks to disrupt complicated social programs, then those aspects of the social programs will disappear or the programs themselves will disappear.
This is exactly what the essay describes as happening. When someone on a bench disrupts the service and we will not remove the person creating the disruption, then we will end up removing the bench.
We can clutch our pearls all we like here, but people will stop using a social service they are uncomfortable using. And when they don't want to use it, they will stop funding it. As long as we live in a democracy, this will be in issue.
I believe in duty as much as the next guy. But duty goes both ways.
The Earth has lots of resources that are privately owned. The process by which these resources become privately owned has no satisfactory libertarian justification ("land and oil become yours when you mix them with your labor", really?) If the profit from these resources was divided equally, everyone would have enough for food and shelter. The people who have less than that are essentially victims of theft. Society should first pay these people the fair share that was stolen from them, and only then start telling them about their duties to society.
Why do some people litter when they are steps away from a garbage can? Why do some people play their phones at high volume on public transit? Anti-social behavior comes in all shapes and sizes.
There is a distinction between pro- and anti-social behaviors beyond capitalist and socialist systems. You can have anti-social behavior in both systems. You can have pro-social behaviors in both systems. This should be fairly straight forward.
Not accommodating someone disrupting a service does not mean we need to be absolute pricks about it. This happens every day in public libraries, public parks, public toilets, and public transit systems. Simple because a need exists, doesn't mean the library or transit system does not also exist to meet needs.
If you think that socialism -- alone -- will end homelessness, I would ask you to check your history books. There was homelessness and vagrancy in the USSR. There are plenty of folks in San Francisco who refuse shelter when offered: https://x.com/LondonBreed/status/1734350588899717423 ... we are currently experiencing a move in large parts of the west from high-trust to low-trust societies. Much of the issues around homelessness, lack of housing, and refusal to provide adequate shelter space stem from folks engaging in low-trust behaviors, treating property as a zero-sum good, and cities as places that should exist in a type of stasis... rather than as communities that must continuously grow and change to meet needs. These low-trust issues certainly can persist in low-trust socialist societies as well.
That series is over, and the magical feeling of being in an open-ended fantasy world is really hard to replicate when we're not kids anymore. Loom is another game that gave me that feeling.
But there was one idea in QfG that I wish more games would use. Namely, designing three different solutions for every problem the player is facing. This idea works so well to create a sense of possibility in a game, I don't know why it got forgotten.
I think this depends on the subject. Something like math or music is "learned, not taught": you spend a lot of time practicing by yourself, sometimes asking a teacher when you get stuck. But something like CPR or assembling a drum kit is "taught, not learned": the teacher guides you through the motions and you're done.
In my (small) experience, SSE is a bit finicky: 1) Firefox kills a webpage's SSE connection when you close and open the laptop lid, making you write code to reconnect, unlike other browsers; 2) there's no way to see the HTTP status code if something went wrong; 3) proxies can still mess things up sometimes: https://dev.to/miketalbot/server-sent-events-are-still-not-p...
If you have a constant stream of data, SSE does make sense. But if your goal is to have events arriving infrequently or a irregular times, then good old long polling will work in strictly more cases, at the cost of maybe 2x more resources.
Wild graphic. US spending on one flying killing machine (the F-35) is comparable to total spending on the Marshall plan to reconstruct Europe after WWII, or the interstate highway system, or all datacenters combined. Priorities!
And this is why I hate log scale graphs. Even in the cases where it does have a useful effect, 90%+ of people are still going to interpret it in a linear way and therefore make it massively misleading.
This seems like nonsense at any angle? Like, if the agent hype comes true, then agents will be just as good at using any website as humans are, and there's no need to make any changes to your site. And if the hype doesn't come true, then who cares if your site is agent ready.
Unless of course you want to expose some functionality only to AIs, not humans. Then sure. But why would you want to do that?
Yeah, plus it's a bit... single minded. A static single page site is _quite_ "agent ready". Scores 0 here. It's not like it'll need an MCP or whatever.
There was an old Soviet cartoon about a child who found a box containing two magical servants and immediately asked them for ice cream and sweets. Well, since the servants "do everything for you", the first servant fetched the sweets for him, and the second one ate them for him. I've often thought about this cartoon since the AI thing started.
I'm working on https://suggestionboard.io, a live polling/feedback/Q&A webapp that doesn't require an account. Just launched the first version, now looking at the market and making small improvements.
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