> But i gotta say, living off grid is fundamentally solipsist. Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society will always be a dead end.
They haven't abandoned society. They are trying to improve it. I don't understand the solipsism criticism. It seems specious. There's a clear philosophical drive:
If merchants didn't accept them, they would go out of business. How is that not obvious? Technically there a choice. In reality, you have no choice, and no recourse, and you can't outcompete these companies either. The idea that you can just decide to block CC payments and survive is fantasy. You're essentially signing a death warrant for your business. That's not any meaningful form of "freedom."
> If Visa and Mastercard didn't add more value than they cost, then merchants wouldn't accept them.
You are seriously arguing that because businesses have to give customers what they want that these businesses are oppressed? I'm not going to bite, because there is a very clear difference between doing something because somebody else is forcing you to, and doing something out of choice and free will because it benefits you.
You are trying to pervert words and the concept of freedom in a quite uncanny way - for nobody's benefit. Most people and business owners aren't living within a mental prison where they oblige themselves to min-max everything in life and make all decisions according to a fantasy of rationality. Many of them refuse to accept CC payments, even if it might be in their best interest to.
No they don't. We're not talking about lemonade stands here.
Business owners don't have a choice. They must use CC processors or else lose their business. That's the point.
You're shoehorning a philosophical definition of freewill into a context where it doesn't apply.
Given that consumers and businesses have "freewill" or "freedom" to make any financial decision, then by your logic there are no bounds a company can possibly transgress.
Why do you think we have anti-trust laws, or consumer protection laws, or the FDA, or have litigated against monopolies in the past, or have the host of many other things which protects consumers from being taken advantaged of?
I have never heard anybody try to make a definition of free will more wrong than what you are making. You are arguing that people don't have free will, because they are obliged to in every situation do what is best for their economic interests. But no such obligation exists in reality. Everybody has the freedom to make decisions that divert from their economic interests or from their interests in general. Almost all humans make such decisions every day.
You're damn right that a business owner will lose his sales and his profits if he doesn't give customers what they want. Which usually includes paying by card. Your option would be to take away the options and freedom from customers to decide where and how they spend their money, which has been tried already and became a total failure called the Soviet Union. But I guess hackers are much more enlightened and will succeed where every one else failed...
You're damn right about lemonade stands also. A business whose owners refuse to give customers what they want usually doesn't grow much, and stays small. Then they cry that they are oppressed by card processors or by middlemen, and only on HN will you find people who actually take them seriously.
Only in a tyrannical world should business owners have a right to make a profit without a duty to tend to their customers needs.
You're missing the point completely, not just of this exchange, but of the entire thread. It's not about the relationship between businesses and customers. It's about an entrenched system which parasitically drains the consumer, benefiting the few at the cost of the many - and the health of the economy (read: society) as a whole, and why this system persists because it's interlocked, not because it's fair or beneficial. Read some of the other responses to understand.
Credit card companies are essentially charging a rake on the consumer economy. They provide a valuable service, but skimming every transaction and funneling it into a handful of private companies is a net detriment for the vast majority of society. They've been at it for decades. First-mover advantage. Entrenchment effect. When CCs are integral to the transaction of money, it's essentially a tax on exchanging money. It's monopolies conducting parasitic toll collection.
Consumers shouldn't have to pay a fee to give someone money. Sellers shouldn't have to pay a fee to collect money. Security should be built into the system, not a luxury you're taxed for.
They should not be able to tithe all of society in perpetuity because they set up shop decades ago.
See also: the app store, telecoms, health insurance in the US
> Consumers shouldn't have to pay a fee to give someone money. Sellers shouldn't have to pay a fee to collect money.
As I said, the fee you're paying if you use a credit card is for financial intermediation. That's not just "giving someone money" or "collecting money". There are other things included that have significant costs to provide.
> They provide a valuable service
And that means all your rhetoric about "charging a rake", "tax", "parasitic toll collection", "tithe", etc. is misplaced, because those things all imply that there is no valuable service being provided.
If you want to argue that there are ways to reduce the cost of the valuable service, for example by competition, that's one thing. But that's not the argument you're making.
3% of transactions is an incomprehensibly large amount of cash. The systems that exist to transact cash have been in place for decades already. Major countries have already developed their own payment systems because they understand the problem and the cost to society. Most of these are entirely free and AFAICT, they work just fine.
> for example by competition
Sure, if you set up a time machine. Even in that case, there would be no meaningful competition. Someone else would simply occupy the position in the middle of the intersection instead.
"Parasitic" and "toll collection" remain accurate descriptors. What about "entrenched" and "monopolistic"?
Also, even if we strictly looked at the credit side, 3% take is arguably still too much now, even if the mechanics back then did justify the 3% fees. This is why regulators everywhere are now capping fees because the manual "send the imprinted invoices to then sort and get payment" is no longer there (and why they are eager to make fraud harder, unlike the post-facto system that exists in the US)
It's not too readable. It would benefit from a columnated layout. The fold is also too long. It should be an introductory block.
Overall, the "rhythm" is a bit off. The user should know what they're seeing even before they see it, at least conceptually. The design/layout doesn't section off dense sections from skim material. Front pages in general should be built for skimming rather than deep consumption (scanning). Scanning should appear optional visually.
There's a lot of "scan" material, but users who visit your site mostly just want to know what they're looking at - at least at first. So the deep material kinda just gets in the way of actual comprehension.
Another critique: too much visual uniformity. Every major section looks the same (poor "rhythm"). This leads the eyes to glaze over much of the site.
It sounds dumb, but our eyes don't "read" a webpage, we "see/feel" it instead. We see structure, layout, differences in colors, font sizes, patterns, bold headings, etc. We ignore the actual textual content. We only do actual reading when we're hunting for something specific (eg, a specific nav link).
The aesthetic itself is fine, but the layout and structure need work.
It's no different from learning vim. Just stick with it until the shortcuts become cognitively automatic.
It also helps to learn upfront the idiosyncratic terms and concepts like buffers, windows, frames, yanking, killing, etc.
Most of these terms map one-to-one to more familiar nomenclature like copy, paste, etc.
Buffers is a concept a bit more unique and integral to emacs. It's easier to understand in practice than in reading.
Most importantly though, emacs is a lisp machine, and exposes the highest level of granularity, and enables the finest level of customization for the user.
Emacs is incredibly powerful with ai agents. Because everything is a function, and emacs is introspectable down to its atoms - agents can write, review, execute, and evaluate the results in a closed loop. The evaluation part is usually what's missing from most agent-driven workflows. Either you (the person) needs to do a live evaluation or the ai agent derives a primitive evaluation using what's available (eg, screenshots, looking at html/css output to form a visual representation).
In emacs, everything is available, everything is a primitive function, everything can be inspected, the documentation (ie, contextual food for agents) is built-in, and emacs itself can be piloted entirely through function calls. This means that agents can fully control an emacs instance and run that closed loop (write, test, evaluate, repeat) with almost complete information - which makes the [given prompt] : [results conforming to spec] relationship much tighter than in most environments.
Cancelled. Anthropic can get bent if it wants to market itself as the ethical AI choice and at the same time lies in bed with those openly pushing for a surveillance state.
In my case, the ethical AI theatre fell apart as soon as I read about their first military contracts, specifically with the US government.
Their ethos is boiled down to ”we’ll do everything to stop AI from killing us all! However, on the path to AI world domination, we don’t mind helping with killing people here and there :)”
I canceled when they first labeled as a supply chain risk. Switched to codex and neverlooked back. This company will be more evil then Google at the end.
OpenAI had the the same restrictions. Also required you to verify via Persona. I complained and at some point the restrictions were removed. Not sure if because of my complaining or if someone in our org actually verified.
I've started experimenting with claude to run end-to-end tests for an emacs package I'm developing. It's incredible.
The way it works:
1. You start emacs in daemon (server) mode.
2. You prompt claude to instantiate an emacs client and write/run tests.
That's it.
Claude will then "pilot" an emacs instance where you can visibly see it running tests. Since almost everything is a first-class function in emacs, and emacs enables almost complete introspection, claude can debug the code in the execution environment. You can also just look at the piloted emacs instance and prompt the agent on what's wrong in the running application state.
This is much more thorough then just having claude write unit tests because many of the issues you might encounter are visual/gui things - which, again, because emacs allows so much introspection, can be examined by looking at the current application state.
Isn't this just a Bambu marketing point? I have a Prusa MK4S and a Centauri Carbon - they both print without any fuss and can be operated without any deep technical understanding.
Im not sure what problems people are even envisioning having. I got a diy Anet8 that was badly assembled by somebody else years ago that they gave to me for free. I tightened up some fittings and strapped down some loose wires and it still just works. If newer and supposedly better printers were more difficult I would consider them junk, in operation they aren't that complicated of machines. The most complicated thing I gotta do is usually change the print temp up or down 5 degrees for different company filaments.
They haven't abandoned society. They are trying to improve it. I don't understand the solipsism criticism. It seems specious. There's a clear philosophical drive:
https://100r.ca/site/about.html