sinker

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.

> "Many of them refuse to accept CC payments"

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?

> significant costs to provide

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"?

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

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.

You're right. I want to say that openai is a viable alternative, but they're even less trustworthy.

It might be time for me to start looking into Chinese models or purchasing hardware for local llms, even if the cost amounts to 5-10k.

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.

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.

This is a good example of "completing the loop."

Same here - with minor changes (mostly rebinding shortcuts), my extensively customized config works in terminal also.

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.

Spreadsheets are better in theory but varsets work so much better in practice.