> Some people choose to rent instead of buying because they don't want to deal with property upkeep (which is undoubtedly a bad deal, but one that some choose to make regardless.)
Is it? My understanding is that strictly return-wise, index funds are distinctly better than property value in most countries, especially if you factor in all the maintenance cost and risks. Some countries have pretty good tenant protection, which is another big factor in practice.
Separately: Personally, I've really enjoyed and benefitted from not having to deal with the complexities of ownership, and it is well worth it in my own time/money/hassle/annoyance calculation. My own time is the single most valuable asset I have; one could say: it is ultimately the only real asset I have. Everything else merely translates to that.
The rent vs own argument is a detailed and deep one, and anyone who comes down 100% on "one answer" (even things like "house hacking") is likely missing something.
Index funds are almost always better than house appreciation over long periods of time; if you discount leverage - because it's "normal" to be leveraged 80% on a house, but you can't margin your index funds that high, and the government doesn't protect you from gambler's ruin on margin.
Owning usually tends to win out the longer you want (or have) to remain in the same location and same house, renting tends to win if you move relatively often (location or changing home type/size, etc) or if you're in a rental inversion (which much of the coasts are in).
At the extremes nobody suggests you should buy a house instead of renting a hotel room or AirBNB in a city you're visiting.
And it's not strictly a financial decision; it's also a personal one and people may choose the "financially non-optimal" because of other reasons.
This really depends 100% on how good your landlord is, over and above the tenancy protection you mention.
> index funds are distinctly better than property value in most countries
It's much easier to borrow £200k to buy a house than to buy stocks, and then you don't have to pay CGT on it. Housing is the only asset the general public can leverage gains on.
Land is not an investment (at least, not without explicitly improving the land). Buildings depreciate. If land (or the buildings on the land) are returning anything close to an index investment, an economy is seriously sick.
Edit: yes, you can rent the property out—but, societally, that's just shunting the problem down the road.
Just like with absolutely any other tool, their value is in what it enables humans using them to accomplish.
E.g., a hammer doesn't do anything, and neither does a lawnmower. It would be silly to argue (just because these tools are static objects doing nothing in the absence of direct human involvement) that those tools don't have a very clear value.
Seems equally silly to me to suggest that hammers and lawnmowers don't do anything, but I mean here we are.
When people use other people like tools, i.e. use them to enable themselves to accomplish something, do those people cease to do things as well? Or is that not a terminology you recognize as sensible maybe?
I appreciate that for some people the verb "do" is evidently human(?) exclusive, I just struggle to wrap my head around why. Or is this an animate vs. inanimate thing, so animals operating tools also do things in your view?
How do you phrase things like "this API consumes that kind of data" in your day to day?
To me, it's precision in language. "Doing" involves an action. You could in that sense compare the computer part of a robot to the mind of an animal. The mind may be involved in planning or the main source and possibly in control of the action, but it doesn't do. Your example robotic lawnmower is not merely a computer. It may contain one. The computer inside it does not mow the lawn.
To put my comment in context again: I replied to a comment that said "By that logic, nothing computers do is scary." as a response to "Why would it be scary? Claude is just parroting other human knowledge. It has no goal or agency.". I was following the train of "logic" of this chain of comments.
As long as this hypothetical Claude doesn't have control over objects, it cannot do anything. It completely depends on how its output is processed and received. An LLM spits out words, a computer ultimately spits out bits; what makes them "scary" is not what they produce, but fully depends how that product is translated into action by its environment. It cannot be determined in isolation by only looking at the computer/LLM ("mind") part.
The mind part does not do. A computer may be attributed to have "agency", but the "objects" around it can have agency too. A computer cannot force anything on its own; a toddler (or a president) may have agency, but they require cooperation by their environment to exercise that agency. If you break a leg, you can want to move it all you want, it won't do.
It's not merely a "linguistic semantics thing". Think Nuremberg trials. Who is responsible, in a network of 'autonomous agents'?
> Seems equally silly to me to suggest that hammers and lawnmowers don't do anything, but I mean here we are.
To be clear, I am not the person you were originally replying to. I personally don't care much for the terminology semantics of whether we should say "hammers do things" (with the opponents claiming it to be incorrect, since hammers cannot do anything on their own). I am more than happy to use whichever of the two terms the majority agrees upon to be the most sensible, as long as everyone agrees on the actual meaning of it.
> I appreciate that for some people the verb "do" is evidently human(?) exclusive, I just struggle to wrap my head around why. Or is this an animate vs. inanimate thing, so animals operating tools also do things in your view?
To me, it isn't human-exclusive. I just thought that in the context of this specific comment thread, the user you originally replied to used it as a human-exclusive term, so I tried explaining in my reply how they (most likely) used it. For me, I just use whichever term that I feel makes the most sense to use in the context, and then clarify the exact details (in case I suspect the audience to have a number of people who might use the term differently).
> How do you phrase things like "this API consumes that kind of data" in your day to day?
I would use it the exact way you phrased it, "this API consumes that kind of data", because I don't think anyone in the audience would be confused or unclear about what that actually means (depends on the context ofc). Imo it wouldn't be wrong to say "this API receives that kind of data as input" either, but it feels too verbose and awkward to actually use.
I'm not sure how to respond then, because having a preferred position on this is kind of essential to continue. It's the contended point. Can an LLM do things? I think they can, they think they cannot. They think computers cannot do anything in general outright.
To me, what's essential for any "doing" to happen is an entity, a causative relationship, and an occurrence. So a lawnmower can absolutely mow the lawn, but also the wind can shape a canyon.
In a reference frame where a lawnmower cannot mow independently because humans designed it or operate it, humans cannot do anything independently either. Which is something I absolutely do agree with by the way, but then either everything is one big entity, or this is not a salient approach to segmenting entities. Which is then something I also agree with.
And so I consider the lawnmower its own entity, the person operating or designing it their own entity, and just evaluate the process accordingly. The person operating the lawnmower has a lot of control on where the lawnmower goes and whether it is on, the lawnmower has a lot of control over the shape of the grass, and the designer of the lawnmower has a lot of control over what shapes can the lawnmower hope to create.
Clearly they then have more logic applied, where they segment humans (or tools) in this a more special way. I wanted to probe into that further, because the only such labeling I can think of is spiritualistic and anthropocentric. I don't find such a model reasonable or interesting, but maybe they have some other rationale that I might. Especially so, because to me claiming that a given entity "does things" is not assigning it a soul, a free will, or some other spiritualistic quality, since I don't even recognize those as existing (and thus take great issue with the unspoken assumption that I do, or that people like me do).
The next best thing I can maybe think of is to consider the size of the given entity's internal state, and its entropy with relation to the occurred causative action and its environment. This is because that's quite literally how one entity would be independent of another, while being very selective about a given action. But then LLMs, just like humans, got plenty of this, much unlike a hammer or a lawnmower. So that doesn't really fit their segmentation either. LLMs have a lot less of it, but still hopelessly more than any virtual or physical tool ever conceived prior. The closest anything comes (very non-coincidentally) are vector and graph databases, but then those only respond to very specific, grammar-abiding queries, not arbitrary series of symbols.
Agreed, just like hammers get the nails hammered into a woodboard. They do what the human operator manually guides them to do by their nature.
I am not disagreeing with you in the slightest, I feel like this is just a linguistic semantics thing. And I, personally, don't care how people use those words, as long as we are on the same page about the actual meaning of what was said. And, in this case, I feel like we are fully on the same page.
Yeah, plausible - I come from a very small state in the south that never had a nuclear plant (hint hint), and as the books read in school are chosen by the state, it probably wasn't a priority.
I have never come across it outside of school either though, even until today, and I still spend a lot of time reading and in libraries and book stores. Which makes me think it only circulated within these 2 groups - political anti-nuclear readership, and then from there into school readings.
I don't know if you're being serious or not, but in case you are: There is a difference between (re)using other people's open sourced code, hopefully reviewed, and giving anyone in control of the third party repository the ability to run arbitrary code on your user's devices. Even if the "random GitHub repo" doesn't contain any malicious code right now, it may well contain some tomorrow.
Completely agree. This is really unique. Can you imagine if it were standard practice to be open to supply chain attacks like that, by blindly relying on hotlinked or unpinned dependencies?
Why imagine? Let's take a quick look at what's actually happening right now. We can check some widely used libraries and see what their instructions are teaching new developers.
Pay close attention, they are inviting the new developer to link not just to Bootstrap, but to Popper!
HTMX (code snippet from their quick start guide):
```
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/htmx.org@2.0.8/dist/htmx.min.js"></script>
<!-- have a button POST a click via AJAX -->
<button hx-post="/clicked" hx-swap="outerHTML">
Click Me
</button>
```
Fontawesome: A video quick start guide and instructions that recommends using the direct link to the kits via CDN for performance!
Look, I certainly don't think they should be used this way. But, to say that it's unique to the White House app? I definitely wouldn't say that. In fact, I think you've dangerously overestimated the status quo.
I was being sarcastic. Although hot linking is not particularly common, it's common enough; and unpinned dependencies are just as much if not more of a supply chain attack risk.
I'd bet something like 70+% of all JS apps are inadequately protected against the risk of a malicious actor gaining access to a dependency's repo.
Pearlclutching over this while ignoring the lessons of `left-pad` and `colors` is biased motivated reasoning at best.
I'm not sure I follow. How does an integrity check help when the source is compromised? The developer doesn't know that their repo is compromised. They continue posting legitimate hashes because the repo is legitimately compromised.
there are several corpo open source ai apps that have rce built in.
to cut a long story short they pull their config from the developer's server on startup. that config has user level permissions giving rce.
some have no rce but get remote executed exfiltration of all the prompts. the app pulls its posthog config on startup and can just take all the keyboard inputs.
submit a disclosure and they do nothing or accuse of 'ai slop reports' despite being vibe coded themselves
There are internet and electricity outages in many places over the world, controlled and uncontrolled. Also natural desasters take out infrastructure at least temporarily.
One "popular" example for those whose horizon doesn't extend over US country borders:
"Hurricane Katrina devastated communications infrastructure across the Gulf Coast, incapacitating telephone service, police and fire dispatch centers, and emergency radio systems. Almost three million customer phone lines were knocked out, telephone switching centers were seriously damaged, and 1,477 cell towers were incapacitated. Most of the radio stations and many television stations in the New Orleans area were knocked off the air. Paul McHale, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, summarized the damage by stating, “The magnitude of the storm was such that the local communications system wasn’t simply degraded; it was, at least for a period of time, destroyed."
"Our preparedness culture must also emphasize the importance of citizen and community preparedness. […] Thus, citizens and communities can help themselves by becoming more prepared. If every family maintained the resources to live in their homes without electricity and running water for three days, we could allocate more Federal, State, and local response resources to saving lives. Similarly, if every family developed their own emergency preparedness plan, they almost certainly would reduce the demand for outside emergency resources. As the 9/11 Commission Report states, “One clear lesson of September 11 is that individual civilians need to take responsibility for maximizing the probability that they will survive, should disaster strike."
How Legal Punishment Affects Crime: An Integrated Understanding of the Law's Punitive Behavioral Mechanisms (2025)
"This article explains what these 13 potential effects of punishment are and how they have been theorized. It further reviews the body of available empirical evidence for each of these mechanisms."
Is it? My understanding is that strictly return-wise, index funds are distinctly better than property value in most countries, especially if you factor in all the maintenance cost and risks. Some countries have pretty good tenant protection, which is another big factor in practice.
Separately: Personally, I've really enjoyed and benefitted from not having to deal with the complexities of ownership, and it is well worth it in my own time/money/hassle/annoyance calculation. My own time is the single most valuable asset I have; one could say: it is ultimately the only real asset I have. Everything else merely translates to that.
reply