The thing about archives is you either parse them now or parse them later. With how much JS and other crap is served in modern social media frontends, I'm not sure WARC is the best format for archiving from them.
But that is the point of WARC: otherwise, your archival method need some sort of general inteligence (ai or human behind the scenes) to store exacly what you need.
With WARC (and good WARC tooling like Browsetrix-crawler) you store everything HTTP the site sent.
I'm confident that they can. This isn't a new idea. Something like this would be a walk in the park for Opus 4.5 in the right harness.
Of course it likely still needs a skilled pair of eyes and a steady hand to keep it on track or keep things performant, but it's an iterative process. I've already built my own ASCII rendering engines in the past, and have recently built one with a coding model, and there was no friction.
Ok, but if you have a wooden hammer and chisel, and a steel hammer and chisel, choosing the wooden one is an artisanal choice, not a practical one. These tools enable an amount of velocity I've never had before, both in research and development.
Renee Good was killed after dropping off her six-year-old child at school. I agree with you, but people like her have children and are not trying to die in the street just for looking at somebody the wrong way. And it's one thing to open carry, it's another thing to become a trained and confident marksmen.
And as someone who has had half a dozen police officers simultaneously pointing guns at my head, mistaking me for someone else in public, once you're in that situation, escalation is only going to lead to death. Out here, police shoot you if your hand goes anywhere near your waist.
It's a prediction algorithm that walks a high-dimensional manifold, in that sense all application of knowledge it just "search", so yes, you're fundamentally correct but still fundamentally wrong since you think this foundational truth is the end and beginning of what LLMs do, and thus your mental model does not adequately describe what these tools are capable of.
Me? My mental model?
I gave an analogy for Claude not a explanation for LLMs.
But you know what? I was mentally thinking of both deep think / research and Claude code, both of which are literally closed loop. I see this is slightly off topic b/c others are talking about the LLM only.
Sorry, I should have said "analogy" and not "mental model", that was presumptuous. Maybe I also should have replied to the GP comment instead.
Anyway, since we're here, I personally think giving LLMs agency helps unlock this latent knowledge, as it provides the agent more mobility when walking the manifold. It has a better chance at avoiding or leaving local minima/maxima, among other things. So I don't know if agentic loops are entirely off-topic when discussing the latent power of LLMs.
Citation needed that grokked capabilities in a sufficiently advanced model cannot combinatorially lead to contextually novel output distributions, especially with a skilled guiding hand.
It's not, because I haven't ruled out the possibility. I could share anecdata about how my discussions with LLMs have led to novel insights, but it's not necessary. I'm keeping my mind open, but you're asserting an unproven claim that is currently not community consensus. Therefore, the burden of proof is on you.
I agree that after discussions with a LLM you may be led to novel insights.
However, such novel insights are not novel due to the LLM, but due to you.
The "novel" insights are either novel only to you, because they belong to something that you have not studied before, or they are novel ideas that were generated by yourself as a consequence of your attempts to explain what you want to the LLM.
It is very frequent for someone to be led to novel insights about something that he/she believed to already understand well, only after trying to explain it to another ignorant human, when one may discover that the previous supposed understanding was actually incorrect or incomplete.
The point is that the combined knowledge/process of the LLM and a user (which could be another LLM!) led to it walking the manifold in a way that produced a novel distribution for a given domain.
I talk with LLMs for hours out of the day, every single day. I'm deeply familiar with their strengths and shortcomings on both a technical and intuitive level. I push them to their limits and have definitely witnessed novel output. The question remains, just how novel can this output be? Synthesis is a valid way to produce novel data.
And beyond that, we are teaching these models general problem-solving skills through RL, and it's not absurd to consider the possibility that a good enough training regimen cannot impart deduction/induction skills into a model that are powerful enough to produce novel information even via means other than direct synthesis of existing information. Especially when given affordances such as the ability to take notes and browse the web.
> I push them to their limits and have definitely witnessed novel output.
I’m quite curious what these novel outputs are. I imagine the entire world would like to know of an LLM producing completely, never-before-created outputs which no human has ever thought before.
Here is where I get completely hung up. Take 2+2. An LLM has never had 2 groups of two items and reached the enlightenment of 2+2=4
It only knows that because it was told that. If enough people start putting 2+2=3 on the internet who knows what the LLM will spit out. There was that example a ways back where an LLM would happily suggest all humans should eat 1 rock a day. Amusingly, even _that_ wasn’t a novel idea for the LLM, it simply regurgitated what it scraped from a website about humans eating rocks. Which leads to the crux: how much patently false information have LLMs scraped that is completely incorrect?
This is not a correct approximation of what happens inside an LLM. They form probabilistic logical circuits which approximate the world they have learned through training. They are not simply recalling stored facts. They are exploiting organically-produced circuitry, walking a manifold, which leads to the ability to predict the next state in a staggering variety of contexts.
It's not hard to imagine that a sufficiently developed manifold could theoretically allow LLMs to interpolate or even extrapolate information that was missing from the training data, but is logically or experimentally valid.
So you do agree that an LLM cannot derive math from first principals, or no? If an LLM had only ever seen 1+1=2 and that was the only math they were ever exposed to, along with the numbers 0-10, could an LLM figure out that 2+2=4?
I argue absolutely not. That would be a fascinating experiment.
Hell, train it on every 2-number addition combination of m+n where m and n can be any number between 1-100 (or 0-100 would be better) BUT 2, and have it figure out what 2+2 is.
I would probably change my opinion about “circuits”, which by the way really stretches the idea of a circuit. The “circuit” is just the statistically most likely series of tokens that you’re drawing pretend lines between. Sure, technically connect-the-dots is a circuit, but not in the way you’re implying, or that paper.
> If an LLM had only ever seen 1+1=2 and that was the only math they were ever exposed to, along with the numbers 0-10, could an LLM figure out that 2+2=4?
What? Of course not? Could you? Do you understand just how much work has gone into proving that 1 + 1 = 2? Centuries upon centuries of work, reformulating all of mathematics several times in the process.
> Hell, train it on every 2-number addition combination of m+n where m and n can be any number between 1-100 (or 0-100 would be better) BUT 2, and have it figure out what 2+2 is.
If you read the paper I linked, it shows how a constrained modular addition is grokked by the model. Give it a read.
> The “circuit” is just the statistically most likely series of tokens that you’re drawing pretend lines between.
That is not what ML researchers mean when they say circuit, no. Circuits are features within the weights. It's understandable that you'd be confused if you do not have the right prior knowledge. Your inquiries are good, but they should stop as inquiries.
If you wish to push them to claims, you first need to understand the space better, understand what modern research does and doesn't show, and turn your hypotheses into testable experiments, collect and publish the results. Or wait for someone else to do it. But the scientific community doesn't accept unfounded conjecture, especially from someone who is not caught up with the literature.
That's wonderful, but you are ignoring that your kid comes built in with a massive range of biological priors, built by millions of years of evolution, which make counting natural and easy out of the box. Machine learning models have to learn all of these things from scratch.
And does your child's understanding of mathematics scale? I'm sure your 4-year-old would fail at harder arithmetic. Can they also tell me why 1+1=2? Like actually why we believe that? LLMs can do that. Modern LLMs are actually insanely good at not just basic algebra, but abstract, symbolic mathematics.
You're comparing apples and oranges, and seem to lack foundational knowledge in mathematics and computer science. It's no wonder this makes no sense to you. I was more patient about it before, but now this conversation is just getting tiresome. I'd rather spend my energy elsewhere. Take care, have a good day.
I hope you restore your energy, I had no idea this was so exhausting! Truly, I'll stop afflicting my projected lack of knowledge, sorry I tired you out!
Ah man, I was curious to read your response about priors.
> If an LLM had only ever seen 1+1=2 and that was the only math they were ever exposed to, along with the numbers 0-10, could an LLM figure out that 2+2=4?
Unless you locked your kid in a room since birth with just this information, it is not the same kind of set up is it?
No, you were being arrogant and presumptuous, providing flawed analogies and using them as evidence for unfounded and ill-formed claims about the capabilities of frontier models.
Lack of knowledge is one thing, arrogance is another.
You could find a pre-print on Arxiv to validate practically any belief. Why should we care about this particular piece of research? Is this established science, or are you cherry-picking low-quality papers?
I don't need to reach far to find preliminary evidence of circuits forming in machine learning models. Here's some research from OpenAI researchers exploring circuits in vision models: https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/ Are these enough to meet your arbitrary quality bar?
Circuits are the basis for features. There is still a ton of open research on this subject. I don't care what you care about, the research is still being done and it's not a new concept.
Since I was a small child, my grandfather used to beat me savagely and shake me and pin me to the ground, screaming that the devil was inside of me and that I would never be capable of loving or being loved. This was literally beaten into me. He'd beat me with the buckle end of the belt, like a whip, hitting my face, arms, whatever he could. He'd keep beating me until I couldn't cry anymore, telling me that men are not supposed to cry, and that it was his responsibility to teach me not to cry. I flashback at least once a day to it.
But, he was wrong. I love a lot. So much that sometimes it's unbearable. I cry all the time. Sometimes out of pure love for someone. And there are people who I think love me. Of course the doubt is permanently sewn in. But my heart goes out to you, seriously. I love you just for existing and being yourself, and I hope you're okay. We're not alone. Email's in my bio if you ever want to talk.
I just want to say thanks for sharing your burden and how you were able to overcome it so others can be inspired.
I feel like nowadays people are really encouraged to never display any vulnerability. It goes totally against the hype and hustle culture of the attention economy. To do that so candidly takes a lot of courage and confidence, and that's really impressive.
I'm sorry that happened to you and I'm glad you're doing well. And if that doubt ever seeps into your thoughts, remember they were full of shit and you're absolutely capable of loving and being loved.
I appreciate the sentiment, but knowing that it's entirely coming from you and your experiences, and nothing to do with me and my own personality except for the one thing we have somewhat in common, means that your comment is to me merely a representation of you and what you stand for. Which is great and beautiful, but it doesn't cross the bridge of being a meaningful comment on my end.
That's actually the exact problem I'm facing, so it's incredibly relevant.
A year ago, I was talking to the local Catholic priest (I was donating some religious statues that I had effectively inherited), and it came up in conversation that I was going through a rough time. He went in for a hug, and it felt so absolutely empty and disingenuous. I accepted it merely to avoid a scene, but it was absolutely not welcome or meaningful.
When I'm out in the city, I want to reach out to those people who put that they feel "100%" alone just like I do. I wrote in the article some of my thoughts and feelings on this, and some things I tried and didn't try.
But ultimately, that's the gap I want to bridge now. We have a thing in common. How do we go from there? (Not you and me, but me and a stranger who has the same problem as me that they want to solve.) What do I say next? What's the next thing we can do in that interaction, or maybe a later one if I ever see them again? This is my question to myself, what I'm wondering in this whole post.
> it's entirely coming from you and your experiences, and nothing to do with me and my own personality except for the one thing we have somewhat in common, means that your comment is to me merely a representation of you and what you stand for. Which is great and beautiful, but it doesn't cross the bridge of being a meaningful comment on my end.
Man, well said. People who "over engage" are doing it out of a sense of kindness, but you're right that it feels hollow and is really just about them.
I think the solution to this is basically what you're doing. Build small connections via whatever engagement mechanism you can and let them organically grow into meaningful ones. Jumping from zero to pretending you have a meaningful connection is exactly why those gestures feel hollow. There is no shortcut, it takes time.
Sounds like you're making those initial connections with your signs, which I think is great.
I can assure you that there was nothing performative or hollow about my comment. OP said something that resonated with me, and so I shared my story in an attempt to bridge and find commonalities.
It's possible you are just projecting biases onto my comment. I'm not sure what "over-engaging" is, but you're free to ignore my comment if you feel that it was too personal or too long. I don't however, understand the contempt, or insinuations that I am attempting to take some kind of shortcut with personal connection.
You can connect quickly with strangers if both parties are receptive. And as I just mentioned to OP, I have made life-long friends from this site, who I have met multiple times in person. I reach out to people often, and people often reach out to me, over email.
That is why I shared my story and mentioned to OP that my inbox was open: to develop or at least explore a possible connection. This is as intentional as it gets with making connections, but your priors are causing you to misunderstand my intentions and paint my comment in an insultingly negative light.
> I can assure you that there was nothing performative or hollow about my comment. OP said something that resonated with me, and so I shared my story in an attempt to bridge and find commonalities.
Sorry, I didn't mean to say at all that what you're doing was somehow performative. By saying it feels "hollow", I mean that when you are on the receiving end of an action like this it often feels hollow because you have no relationship with the person. They are skipping several steps in the relationship development process from zero to "I want to engage with you on something that is deep and painful".
This may be totally fine for some people, but to me (and apparently to the person I was responding to) when it happens I feel like I am becoming some sort of symbolic prop to the person. It's uncomfortable. It doesn't feel like a human interaction at all.
My intention wasn't to cast doubt on your motivations, just to tell publicdebates that I understand the feeling he was describing.
Thank you. I understand where you're coming from. And I know interactions online can seem fleeting or meaningless. Personally I find meaning in connecting with strangers, even if once. I don't think we need to fully understand each other's internal experience in order to relate. I appreciate you clarifying your intent :)
Absolutely, happy to. And likewise! I'm sorry if what I said came off as judgemental or insulting. Not at all the intent, I assumed the motivation was nothing but kindness.
Not a doctor or anything, but what happens if you check your assumptions about someone's actions being hollow or making it about them and consider that they actually want to support you and show you love or empathy as a possibility? Removing some of our own defensive layers might be a first step - though I understand how difficult that can be since we've been burned so many times and they layers are there for a reason!
> knowing that it's entirely coming from you and your experiences, and nothing to do with me and my own personality
That's not the point of empathy and not the point of my outreach. I don't need to know you precisely or be within a certain proximity in order to empathize with you.
> A year ago, I was talking to the local Catholic priest (I was donating some religious statues that I had effectively inherited), and it came up in conversation that I was going through a rough time. He went in for a hug, and it felt so absolutely empty and disingenuous.
For what it's worth, the man who did these things to me was a Catholic deacon, and the hypocrisy is blood-boiling. He would give very pleasant-sounding homilies about love, acceptance, patience and understanding, and then come home and savagely beat and torture me through physically painful punishments and extended periods of isolation. I would not go to a Catholic leader if you are looking for surefire genuinity. The institution attracts performative, power-seeking individuals.
> What do I say next? What's the next thing we can do in that interaction, or maybe a later one if I ever see them again?
It's a combination of bridging and bonding. Meeting individuals, like myself or a stranger on the street, and learning that you have something in common which provides substrate for conversation and communication through a shared experience, is bridging. Developing those relationships by building around that core is bonding.
We typically bond contextually: We both go to the same school or office and see each other daily, or we run into each other at the store each week, etc. I once ended up becoming best friends and living with someone who was my cashier at Trader Joes.
Instead of telling me our personalities and experiences have nothing to do with each other, we could discuss our experiences, find commonalities that are more than surface-level, and bond over those. I've met great people on this website. I've met some of them in person. Friends are all over the place, hiding in plain sight.
> For what it's worth, the man who did these things to me was a Catholic deacon, and the hypocrisy is blood-boiling. He would give very pleasant-sounding homilies about love, acceptance, patience and understanding, and then come home and savagely beat and torture me through physically painful punishments and extended periods of isolation.
Everyone in my family knows what happened. His temper was famous. They all downplayed or ignored it. That includes my mom. She was too busy doing drugs and going in and out of prison to give a shit that I was being abused. My dad was also a drug addict and a sexual abuser and has not been in my life for a very long time.
And my grandfather's siblings ignored it for reasons I can only imagine, since my grandfather would sometimes pin me to the ground and spit in my face while telling me that I should be grateful because what he did to me was nothing compared to what his father did to him.
Of course, now my mom pretends that living with her was always an option, and that remaining in my environment was my own choice. She is a major narcissist who victim blames, blames her children for everything and says horrible things to me.
I kid you not, like she used to remind me all the time that when I was a fetus inside of her, she fell once and landed on her back "to protect me" and that I'm the reason she has terrible back pain now, that's a sacrifice she made for me and I should be grateful, because it's basically my fault. As far as I am concerned, I do not love her and she is not allowed in my life. And anyway, as I mentioned elsewhere she's currently in prison for domestic abuse.
I no longer speak to anyone in my family outside of my sister because no one stood up for me. Even my sister downplays the seriousness of what happened.
My grandfather is now in his 80s and well-acquainted with the town's DA. There isn't a shot in hell that I can touch him. I do not know what he has done to other people, he was only ever this violent with me to my knowledge. My brother usually aided him in assaulting me and was not on the receiving end of violence. My grandfather was an award-winning boxer so it was quite a bit of violence.
Good questions. If we're going by Oxford's definition of "stop feeling angry or resentful", I think the PTSD is here to stay, along with other facets of my personality and life which will always remind me of my experiences. Past that, I have made peace with my life, because that's the thing I'll always have to grapple with. Otherwise, I would just be so bitter... Instead, I focus on how statistically lucky I am to still be alive.
But I have no intention of speaking to my father or grandfather ever again. As for my mother, I laid out clear terms for what it would take to begin communication with me again, and she responded about as narcissistically as you can imagine... So I have made my peace with that as well. She's in prison now and I have no plans to reach out to her while she's in there. She lied to me about the situation, lied to me about the case, and lied to me about the sentencing. So as far as I should know, she's not even in prison. I had to pay the local clerk of court for access to her court documents just to know the truth.
I think Christianity as a religion has evil roots. The character of Jesus is portrayed valiantly, but the character of God is frequently portrayed as nothing short of sociopathic and psychopathic.
I don't respect the religion at all, nor any Abrahamic religion, as it's built upon falsehoods that justify prejudiced, authoritarian behavior. These religions have been the basis for untold amounts of conflict, conquest and cultural destruction. People who understand these things and still seek positions in such institutions should not be trusted. And we know the Vatican in particular has quite a sordid history of protecting child abusers.
I agree, leaders in any capacity can abuse their position. Look no further than Boy Scouts of America for examples at scale.
And I personally went to a therapist who ended up in prison for fraud. I also went to a daycare that shut down after an investigation stemming from me coming home one day with lashes all over my face and tongue and no recollection of what happened.
Bad people are everywhere. At least we can try to avoid institutions built to justify abuse.
> I don't respect the religion at all, nor any Abrahamic religion, as it's built upon falsehoods that justify prejudiced, authoritarian behavior. These religions have been the basis for untold amounts of conflict, conquest and cultural destruction.
Many people claim that the Bible, the church, their faith, etc has helped them. What's your take on that? Do you feel that the bad has outweighed the good in terms of its effects on people? This is a tough one because people, if they're biased, look to examples that favor their view.
I would imagine that if more bad than good came out of religion, then that religion would eventually fade to nothing.
For every evil religious person I've met, I tend to know a few good and even awesome ones.
God is a great author to reference. The Bible is filled with enough atrocities and inconsistencies that it remains my number one recommendation for deprogramming Christians.
God told Abraham to kill his son as a test of fealty, then psyched him at the end:
Now, you could point out that many of the stories in Genesis, including the Garden of Eden, can actually be traced back to older works, such as the epic of Gilgamesh.
Some people, when confronted with Gen22, simply say
"wow, I want nothing to do with this religion",
and walk away.
Other's see the story and say "wow... how do Christian's get around this one?". And so volumes have been written on this story. There's a ton of rich theology there for folks who were wiling to look past the initial hurdle.
I.e. the argument that "look at this horrific story" only really works for a small subset of people who aren't willing to look into the theology of it.
Now, one could argue that people who find the theology of the story satisfying are somehow demented, but that's a different argument.
A rare show of vulnerability on hackernews. I commend you and echo the sentiment!
I really appreciate you sharing your story. Know that it does not define you and you are absolutely loved and are worthy of love, especially from yourself.
Predominantly, rejecting all priors and aggressively maintaining an open mind, reading a lot as a child, intentionally deferring the formation of concrete opinions about things until I was on my own and able to guide my own hand.
This was necessary because I was raised by two major conservatives, in rural, conservative areas, surrounded by racists and sexists, my computer use and reading materials were surveilled and restricted, I was only allowed to listen to approved Christian music, I couldn't really even choose my own clothes, shoes or hairstyles. My belongings were regularly searched and my school administrators and teachers were always looped into the surveillance circle, alerting my grandparents and school administrators and punishing me if I so much as drew a stick figure holding nunchaku or dared journal about my experiences.
There was a very aggressive and invasive attempt to brainwash me and the only thing I could think to do was wait until I was on my own, and learn everything from scratch. This began at 16, when I became homeless after refusing to enter Confirmation as a Catholic (I am atheist). My grandparents kicked me out and stole/broke most of my things. My mom was too busy doing drugs and not working to support me.
I read a lot of philosophy and studied various topics. This has helped immensely with forming a foundation for my morality, sense of ethics and motivation. I still battle with a lot of internal demons stemming from my childhood and disorders including ADHD, and I can get extremely depressed, and I've burned out a couple times, but I just devote myself to my work and studies and get by. My brother, on the other hand, turned into a domestic abuser, which tracks considering his large role in the violence I experienced growing up.
It's clear to me that intentionality was the defining factor in escaping most of the traumatic cycles present in my family tree, including drug addiction, violence and crime (as an example, my mom is currently in prison for abusing a mentally-handicapped quadriplegic)
Hear me out. Its not just social awkwardness. You're experiencing class boundaries and do not seem to have the right mentality to bridge the gap.
First, you call homeless people bums, which sets the stage for how you see and treat them.
I'm an excellent engineer, but I was abused and impoverished as a child, homeless as a teenager. During my 20s, I started a few companies but my savings have been continually depleted taking care of family members. I don't have a sports car or a big bank account, or nice cameras. When I see a stranger or homeless person, I smile and wave. I keep cash on me so that I always have some to give out. I buy people lunch and sit on the curb eating with them and attempting to understand them. I learn the names of my local homeless folk and ingratiate myself in the community. I've moved to a few cities so I've had the opportunity to do this a few times.
I don't do this because I lack social anxiety; I sometimes have extreme agoraphobia, to the point that I have to hype myself up for hours just to go to the grocery store, and I have to wear noise-cancelling headphones to reduce the amount of stimulation. I have PTSD. I'm an extreme introvert. A hermit at times.
But what saves me is the philosophical understanding that I have a duty to the social contract. That empathy and direct aid are nonnegotiable parts of being human. I've been homeless and I know what it's like to be truly hopeless and live a life of uncertainty, fear and hunger.
You need to bridge that gap. Class-induced anxiety is real and I acknowledge that it's probably difficult, but it's not an excuse. You sound like you're in a position to change someone's life. Taking those steps might change your own life.
> I buy people lunch and sit on the curb eating with them and attempting to understand them.
I clearly don't have the same people on the street as you do. You should not be just sitting down and having lunch with people who are having daily psychotic breaks or are otherwise aggressive. You can't have a conversation with someone who is constantly riding the line of ODing. I have a regular I see who runs around in the road screaming at cars and people.
The very incomplete "down on their luck" view of homelessness is killing progress in my city.
I have lived in many metropolitan areas and have seen the gamut of homelessness. As I mentioned in a downline comment, the trick is to ignore the people who are not in a position to receive help, and actively seek those who are in such a position. I am not suggesting walking up to random homeless folk in San Francisco who are tweaking out and hanging out with them. I am not suggesting to risk your safety by approaching the first person you see. You live in your area; study it, pay attention, and over time you'll start seeing some familiar faces. This has worked for me in New Orleans, it worked for me in Texas and worked for me in California.
So I'm willing to bet that my understanding of homelessness is more nuanced/holistic than even yours. I have been homeless. Have you?
What progress do you feel is being hindered by a collective display of compassion?
It's funny there was a moment I was at a bus station, somebody asked me for money and I dumped all the coins I had in my wallet in their hand for future bus rides. And some lady comes up to me jokingly like "you handing money out? what about me".
But yeah I think I should just give the money out, I think aside from the guy at the red light that's there almost everyday when it's warm, it's rare I encounter somebody personally. Until I go into the city.
Buy someone new clothes. A sleeping bag. Utensils. A library card or bus pass. If it has to be cash, you don't have to stop at $5. I sometimes give out tens and twenties. Obviously at a place like California your altruism can be spread pretty thin; just ignore the people who are more difficult / less appreciative. Find someone who is appreciative. Get to know them and find out what is holding them back. Maybe you can't help, maybe you can. I've had people tell me I've made their day, their week, their year.
It's that thing though I'm pretty sure I was scammed by this couple at a gas station asking me for "gas money" even though they wanted cash then the lady said "your mother raised a good boy" lmao.
To me this is a gov problem not an individual problem. Yeah if someone was dying in front of me I would try to help them. But now I gotta go to a store and buy em a tent and what not? I guess I am an asshole. Also read up "do you give money to homeless" on reddit. Almost all of the answers are no.
I have to go there and face my fear. See if I do get assaulted, I'm a 6ft buff dude so I don't think so but I'm also not a trained fighter. I just hate this fear, that normal people like living in NYC deal with on a daily basis.
Getting jumped is real though, I've been jumped before by a group.
Might as well just give the $5 though and move on with my life.
Back to women, I have negative traits as demonstrated above, indecisiveness and low self-esteem/caring about what other people think of me too much.
All this stuff is stupid, "I'm a good person because it's what people think you should do" give money to a non-taxed church, politicians, etc... then the individual person not giving a dollar to a homeless person is a bad guy.
I've been fucked over plenty times, sometimes to the tune of 5 digits. Once even cost me my home, and I found myself homeless again for a while.
A good friend of mine once gave someone a ride at a gas station, and they led him to a house where another person jumped inside the car with a gun. They held him hostage, tried to force him to do fentanyl at gunpoint, and drove him around to several ATMs so he could empty out his account. They used his vehicle to sell drugs, and held him hostage in a motel room where they were also sex trafficking women. They nearly killed him, and he is lucky to be alive.
I also know others who have been jumped around here and had the shit beaten out of them. For reference, I live in a city frequently cited as a "murder capital" of the US. You have to be way more careful out here than in downtown San Francisco. As far as NYC, I imagine it's a mixed bag depending on your area. I'm not suggesting naively approaching strangers, I hope it doesn't come across that way.
You aren't an asshole if you don't buy someone a tent, I was suggesting ways to help that have more tangible impact than handing someone a $5 bill which probably just goes towards an addiction. I don't hang around Reddit, so I can't speak for the general callousness of the community, but what I'm suggesting is to go beyond the average, to do more than most would, in reverence of the fact that we're all floating on this lonely space rock together.
As far as women, all I can say is that my girlfriend would be fine with any of those traits, as long as I still maintained a level of compassion.
There is also the thought of too many people to help. Like right now there are thousands/millions of people starving is it my fault? Should I empty all of what I have to help them because I'm guilty if I don't. That's what I'm wrestling with granted what we're talking about is not the same thing. Handing somebody $5 and moving on is not that but yeah idk. I guess as a person that keeps giving shit out eg. $100K to my own family, it gets old.
But I will go out there, I'll see what happens. I need to face my fears.
I hear you. I've had ungrateful family members drive me broke. Compassion is doing the right thing, even when it's scary, or it hurts, or no one is watching, or when people around you misunderstand and demonize you, or they are just plain ungrateful and leave you holding the bag. I admire your willingness to continue grappling with it and finding your own answer.
Regarding women again, are you meeting enough of them? What's the scene like where you live? I don't know what it's like in NYC, but the social/dating scene in my current city just doesn't exist, and I'm watching some of my friends grapple with seriously heartbreaking loneliness.
I don't know what to tell them. I'm dating my high school sweetheart again, but we were broken up for several years, and many of the experiences I had with women during that time were quite traumatic. The rest of them were just not a good fit. I had completely given up on dating altogether, at least for a period of time, and only then did the love of my life find her way back to me. Despite years of extreme loneliness in new cities, I still consider myself lucky and wish I had some actionable advice I could tease from the situation. I've even experimented with building dating apps because this epidemic just scares the shit out of me.
I'm not in NYC sorry to give that impression. I was mentioning NYC as far as being densely populated, I'm in the midwest. Honestly I don't meet much women outside of work or the occasional girl I run into at a gym. I know the cliche saying "go join a club" meet girls that way. I could see that but it's also possible I like being alone too but yeah it just bothers me that my self-deemed value is whether or not I get laid.
The other problem too today is the fakeness of social media, filters on faces, photos looking like peopel go to beaches all the time/live extravagant lives.
Bars it's like a self-control issue, use drinking for courage then you get too f'd up.
In the midwest but we have a small "city" with "skyscrapers" that I wanted to go into and do photography at.
I'm guessing you're only a few years into your web career, so I'll provide some background. lodash is a popular library that fills in many blanks that pre-2015 JavaScript had. It still provides value in modern JavaScript, but it's no longer as important as it used to be.
JavaScript is actually based on a standard called ECMAScript. ActionScript shares this standard, as an example. In 2015, we got ECMAScript 5, which modernized JavaScript in many ways. With that came many changes such as ECMAScript moving to a yearly update cadence, in response to the large amount of effort involved in implementing ES5, which came with a ton of changes.
One of those changes was ES modules, or ESM, which provided an official way for working with modules. The import/export syntax you're used to is a part of that spec. Before this, we had competing non-standard specifications for module loading, such as CommonJS.
ES5 reduced the need for tools such as lodash, and so it's less common in newer projects. It also is old enough to have been around before ESM was adopted, and is a large project, and so like many projects it either had to completely rewrite everything, or use transformation tools such as babel. If not, the user was responsible for using babel/etc to transform the code. Now, in modern stacks, because this is unnecessary, native support for CommonJS is being phased out, leading to OP's conundrum.
Now we have TypeScript, and the horrors of JavaScript 10+ years ago are a fading memory.
Nope, I'm about 15 years in and (unfortunately) deeply familiar with all of that. As someone else pointed out below, it was the use of ESM as a verb that threw me off.
Thanks for taking the effort to type out a history lesson though, hopefully someone will benefit from it.
I owned a nice little parcel, but my registrar had issues with a payment and the email got swallowed up and I didn't notice. Forgot to check up on it because I paid for several years up front at a time. Oh well :)
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