Tell that to crop failures of sustinance farmers. "Oh you just chose the weather to be bad/a fast soreading disease/a severe drought. Live with your choices".
I don't necessarily think everyone should move out of cities to go back to living in rural areas and villages. I want it so that living outside of the city more viable than it is today because there are very real benefits to living there.
In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You never feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society. This just didn't happen when I was growing up in a village. There is a joke that Asian parents don't think depression exists. I think part of that mindset is rooted in how many of them grew up - depression was just not really a thing in a village.
I sometimes hear of people who try to move to the country side, only to hate it and want to move back to cities. I get it. It's not for everyone. But I think it can be aided with technology such as AI+robots helping with your farms or house work, self driving cars taking your kids to school a bit far away, AI doctors who can do most of the basic healthcare work, etc. And if you can build a business with 1 or 2 people + AI, then it also makes remote work more viable. Basically, I think tech can bring a lot of the city quality of life to the country side.
If kids want to move to a town/city for more opportunities or networking, they'd be free to do so when they're older. Most do. But right now, the cities seem like the only path to having a decent quality of life.
> In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You never feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
That just means we need to structure cities differently.
I live in a 1 sq km neighbourhood (literally, 1 km square) that houses 10k people.
It has almost everything I could wish for at walkable distance, schools for all ages, parks, a gym, a pool, sports campgrounds, medics, pharmacies, stores, markets, etc.
What doesn't exist (e.g. a movie theater, a library) I can reach by public transit in half an hour. The city has 2M people, there's plenty of stuff to do.
I've lived here all my life, my kids go to school with the kids of my school mates. They walk to school from at least 10yo, they visit each other's houses. During school breaks and weekends, they play in the park with their school friends while their parents grab a beer in a nearby kiosk.
You can build communities like this within cities.
City kids have friends, play outside and go visit friends. That is completely normal in most world cities. And yes, where public transport exists, city kids do use public transport to get to school, to visit friends or to go to the gym.
> I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society.
The weird thing is, rural people show a lot of distrust and fear that city people seem to show less. Rural people just assume that city means danger and fear.
> depression was just not really a thing in a village.
This is simply not true. If you look at social issues like alcoholism, drug use, suicides or domestic violence ... villages have plenty of those. They have harder availability of psychologists and psychiatrists. That does not mean issues do not exist there, they measurably do.
City kids do not have less friends then rural kids. They do not socialize less. And if their super local turns up mistreating them, they have actual option to go elsewhere.
> Degree matters here too.
Yes. Small villages have more of these. The rural culture of alcoholism and domestic violence acceptance is both something very real and traditional. What are we talking about here, seriously. You frequently had to drink with others, else you was an outsider. And if family situation turned out bad, you have literally no where to go. (It is not like it would be easy in the city. But you have to from village to city to maybe get help.)
>> City kids have friends, play outside and go visit friends.
> Yes, and city kids also eat, poop, and talk. :)
> I think it's the degree that matters.
The degree is easy to measure. What happens on a cold winter night or generally on a day with bad weather when "play outside" and "visit friends on foot" is out of the question?
City kids can still visit friends (because they are not beholden to adults with cars) and can chose about a billion different activities (because, once again, they are not beholden to adults with cars).
Even socially city kids have a greater degree of freedom because they are not stuck with the same group of people for all eternity. A friend's kid has a more varied social life with his basketball friends than with people from his school, for example. And half of the time we don't even know where he is at any given moment because, once again, he does not depend on having an adult to drive him everywhere for any activity that is not "playing outside".
> In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You never feel lonely.
In Japan that's true in a lot of city neighbourhoods as well. The high trust is extremely valuable but villages are not the only way to achieve it.
> Kids play with each other and run around freely.
> I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society.
I feel like you live in the US where everything is just dysfunctional.
I live in Stockholm. Kids play with each other and run around freely. And they have significantly more freedom because they can get anywhere on their own and not rely on an adult with a car.
> In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone.
I never felt unsafe as a kid or abused in any way although my mom would make me memorize our village's name and location in case I get abducted while playing with my friends. We'd often go over to neighboring villages to play because some of our friends from school lived in a different village. We played until dawn and then went home to have dinner.
Cars in rural settings are generally faster and more indispensable for their owners. It is much easier to enact policy that reduces car traffic in cities than in villages.
It makes a pretty big difference. Yes, the opportunities in the city are bigger for everything, but so are the dangers. The amount of crazy people. The effort involved in getting to a nice and safe place where the kids can just run around without you having to watch them every second. Those places also exist in some cities, but way too few. So great that you don't have a car, (I mean it) car free places in cities I do enjoy, there are just not many of them.
I have two three year olds. Parks where they can run around with relaxed supervision are not far. A big park is close enough that they can walk the distance and in less than half an hour by bike we can reach a forest and four or five other parks.
Then your reply "Most of those opportunities involve getting hit by a car." is somewhat weird. This wasn't the case even in my own backwards country of Moldova in the 90s, after the fall of Soviet Union, much less today, when people are noticeably more civilized.
1. The people actually obey rules (e.g. they actually let people pass at pedestrian crossings, something unheard of all the way into the 2000s). In general road accidents are decreasing.
2. Still doesn't support your "Most of those opportunities involve getting hit by a car."
Even with my eyes constantly in the logs window, credo + ex_dna + ash_credo [1] and looking at all the output, I still miss a bunch of shit that LLMs produce. Can't imagine just ssh'ing from a phone and letting an LLM lose (though I've tried it once or twice).
[1] Tools for Elixir to catch various code smells:
We need more pragmatic languages. E.g. Erlang and Elixir are functional, but eschew all the things FP purists advocate for (complex type systems, purity, currying by default etc.)
ocaml has a complex type system but it's also very pragmatic in that it doesn't force you into any one paradigm, you can do whatever works best in a given situation. (scala arguably goes further in the "do whatever you want" direction but it also dials the complexity way up)
> I will cast my vote for mobile websites over apps on phones. For personal choice reasons I have always had a "budget" phone with less memory and storage (and less cost) than a flagship phone. I also kept them running for years.
Then, unfortunately, apps are a better choice for such phones (unless the app itself is just a thin webview wrapper). These days too many websites would fry a budget phone.
How can Bob produce novel things when he lacks the skills to do even trivial things?
I didn't get to be a senior engineer by immediately being able to solve novel problems. I can now solve novel problems because I spent untold hours solving trivial ones.
I would love to see someone attempt to do multiplication who never learned addition, or exponentiation without having learned multiplication.
There is a vast difference between “never learned the skill,” and “forgot the skill from lack of use.” I learned how to do long division in school, decades ago. I sat down and tried it last year, and found myself struggling, because I hadn’t needed to do it in such a long time.
Most people learn multiplication by counting, it has been in basic mathbooks since forever. "1 box has 4 cookies. Jenny ha 4 boxes of cookies. How many cookies do Jenny have?" and so on, the kids solve that by counting 4 cookies in every of the 4 boxes and reaching 16. Only later do you learn those tables.
That’s definitely not how I learned it, nor how my kids have learned it. I vividly remember writing out “2 x 3 = 2 + 2 + 2 = 3 + 3.” I later memorized the multiplication table up to 12, yes, but that was not a replacement of understanding what multiplication was
Ah yes. The famous theoretical mathematicians who immediately started on novel problems in theoretical mathematics without first learning and understanding a huge number of trivial things like how division works to begin with, what fractions are, what equations are and how they are solved etc.
Edit: let's look at a paper like Some Linear Transformations on Symmetric Functions Arising From a Formula of
Thiel and Williamshttps://ecajournal.haifa.ac.il/Volume2023/ECA2023_S2A24.pdf and try and guess how many of trivial things were completely unneeded to write a paper like this.
Sometimes I wonder how deeply some people actually read these articles. What's the point of the comments if all we're doing is re-explaining what's already explained in such a precise and succint manner? It's a fantastic article. It's so well-written and clear. And yet we're stuck going in a circle repeating what's in the article to people who either didn't read it, or didn't read it with the care it deserves.
> That’s what the program he just took was supposed to be for, learning not output.
If you send a kid to an elementary school, and they come back not having learned anything, do you blame the concept of elementary schools, or do you blame that particular school - perhaps a particular teacher _within_ that school?
That's not a good analogy. A good mathematician isn't necessarily dealing with calculations, i.e. long division, but rather with proof.
No-ones becomes a good mathematician without first learning to write simple proofs, and then later on more complex proof. It's the very stuff of the field itself.
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