Yeah we have heaps and heaps of unused land, land isn’t the problem. Just don’t put it on the small bits of land that humans live on

“No one tells us about it, when I was at school, I was naive … I didn’t realise it was a loan that you have to pay back.”

Grace has chosen not to make voluntary repayments, wary that any savings she contributes could simply be undone.

“I want to pay [my HELP debt] off as soon as I can. […] I don’t regret it, but I wish there was a different way young people can still have access to education.”

This series of paragraphs is a wild ride. So she somehow was simultaneously:

• completely unaware that you have to pay for university,
• refuses to pay it off early because it might disappear somehow (?),
• but also wants to pay it off ASAP;
• while wishing there was another way to go to university other than taking a very generous loan.

Am I missing something here? Should university be completely free? Most of the article is also just pointing out that longer term loans means that you pay more in interest… Like, yeah? Do undergraduates not understand these basic financial concepts anymore or something?

Hello fellow wog!

I think the article is highlighting an interesting social issue: that ultimately there actually is no “universal culturally appropriate way” to refer to anybody. You actually have to talk to the people sitting across from you and feel out what they prefer and are comfortable with.

Anecdotally, the mob I used to hang out with were happy to be called black, and they called me white, which I was happy with, and that was the end of it. At the same time, I wouldn’t dare call random people black just because my friends were ok with it. So it’s a bit unfair to be bemused by people being cautious, since I think intuitively we all understand the rocky terrain in this area.

It almost feels like it boils down to a respectfulness thing. Like it’s fine as long as nobody feels like they’re being made fun of or spoken to disrespectfully, which can be hard if you’re not familiar with each other.

It’s funny how we outsourced everything to make it cheaper but that backfired hard

Open Weight vs Low Cost. Are these models cheap because they are open weight and having hundreds or people stress test running them on different hardware helped to lower the cost? Or is it that they are being provided as loss leaders to drive the prices down?

I wouldn’t be surprised if the A.I. in China is heavily subsided so that people use them. Not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, but I’m not sure it’s sustainable long term, or a fair way to compare A.I. models. We need to compare the true computational and financial cost of each token internally, not whatever is being charged for it externally, otherwise you’re just saying “stuff made in China is generally cheaper” which we’ve known for decades. This might be a complicated question to answer though.