servers are treated like absolute garbage

And either way, if you wanted to believe the merit-based approach, you're talking maybe the top 5% of servers anywhere making "good" money. Wage theft in the industry is colossal.

I will be pleasantly surprised if the removal of tax on tips does absolutely anything to move the needle for the bottom 95% of servers.

The restaurant industry has been lobbying for this to further avoid the pressure of raising wages and the complication of reporting taxes — the reasoning is out there in the open.

This is the sort of modern shell game where corporate interests further obscure costs to trick the lower class into thinking it's a good deal. It's akin to the math on maintenance Uber drivers tend to fail to do when they're calculating their wages... they're absolutely getting hosed and most of them don't even understand how.

If someone earned $125k salary + $25k in tips. Their taxable income would decrease by about $6k (or $500/mo, 4% overall).

Tipping sucks and your taxes suck too. When I see that something costs 15€ on the menu then I expect to pay 15€ and nothing more. How can you be happy about surprise taxes? How can you plan your spending when you don't see how much something costs and you still think this is superior?

We tend to avoid touristy areas, though, when we travel, so maybe that explains the better service. If I had to work in a service job that caters to tourists, I'd probably be less happy too.

Having said that, on the occasion when I've been in places like that and I really was in a hurry, no one has looked at my funny or seem put out when I've flagged someone down to ask for the check.

Second, what you and me consider to be good service is probably quite different.

It is sometimes absurd. In the UK there's an often an extra step of "oh, you're paying by card? let me go back and bring the card reader". Some places have just one reader shared among all waiting staff, so you're not going to get it faster unless you tip enough to make the staff wrestle for it.

I like the Japanese style the best — there's a cashier by the exit.

Maybe when you come to Europe adjust to the culture. In Europe you don't eat with the clock in your hand so you can run off too the next meeting while you're still chewing. This isn't bad service, it's part of eating out that you don't storm off and take your time.

An ordinary European restaurant doesn't work with the tempo of a McDonalds, that's a feature and not a bug.

We're in the middle of a thread in which hundreds of Europeans are complaining about American culture, which is to tip at restaurants. In fact, the original post I responded to was:

It’s crazy that this still happens in the US. Tipping is a thing of the past. Pay for your meal and have the restaurant pay their people for their work. End of story.

I think it's a little ironic that when an American complains about European culture — which is to be slow — suddenly there's a bunch of tut-tutting from Europeans about "adjust to the culture" (and you're not the only one!).

We're in a thread where people are debating the relative advantages of different cultural practices. I think America's practice of tipping has distinct advantages that make it better. And no, you're not "eating with the clock in your hand' or whatever in America: is just that when you want the check, you get it.

That's nonsense. In the UK if the service is good I leave a tip. If it isn't then I don't. From my (limited) experience in the US it looks like you have to tip regardless. If that's the tipping culture then that culture is rotten.

>>The service is so, so much better in the U.S. because of tipping.

Honest question - do you consider waiters who ask you if you need anything every 2 minutes "good"?

>> The service at restaurants everywhere in Europe was at best mediocre

What's your opinion on restaurants in Poland? Was the service better or worse than in Spain? How was it compared to Czechia and Slovakia?

I've got great and shit service in Europe.

I've got great and shit service in the US.

Tip/no-tip hasn't been a factor.

- (shameless plug) My company, Synthetic, supports LoRAs for Llama 3.1 8b and 70b: https://synthetic.new All you need to do is give us the Hugging Face repo and we take care of the rest. If you want other people to try your model, we charge usage to them rather than to you. (We can also host full finetunes of anything vLLM supports, although we charge by GPU-minute for full finetunes rather than the cheaper per-token pricing for supported base model LoRAs.)

- Together.ai supports a slightly wider number of base models than we do, with a bit more config required, and any usage is charged to you.

- Fireworks does the same as Together, although they quantize the models more heavily (FP4 for the higher-end models). However, they support Llama 4, which is pretty nice although fairly resource-intensive to train.

If you have reasonably good data for your task, and your task is relatively "narrow" (i.e. find a specific kind of bug, rather than general-purpose coding; extract a specific kind of data from legal documents rather than general-purpose reasoning about social and legal matters; etc), finetunes of even a very small model like an 8b will typically outperform — by a pretty wide margin — even very large SOTA models while being a lot cheaper to run. For example, if you find yourself hand-coding heuristics to fix some problem you're seeing with an LLM's responses, it's probably more robust to just train a small model finetune on the data and have the finetuned model fix the issues rather than writing hardcoded heuristics. On the other hand, no amount of finetuning will make an 8b model a better general-purpose coding agent than Claude 4 Sonnet.

You're also wrong: there were plenty of "anti-war protestors" during the Holocaust, who lost, and were wrong; plenty of radical feminists who were (and are) anti-trans; and the idea that the American Revolution was primarily about maintaining slavery has been debunked — for one thing, it was often led by Northeners who had already banned slavery. (The 1619 Project eventually conceded and issued corrections.) Environmentalist groups in the 70s doomed the planet by making it near-impossible to build nuclear energy in the US, and then later drove the US into spiraling inequality by making it near-impossible to build enough housing. Opposing eugenics was once a conservative opinion, whereas the "science" of eugenics was favored by academia — and most of the suffragettes! The largest anti-eugenics movement came from the Catholic Church.

Of course, new ideas that were better than old ideas usually came from people now termed "progressive" — the term is self-defining (if it wasn't "progress" no one would look back and call it "progressive.") But plenty of bad ideas have also come draped in the cloaks of people who term themselves progressive, and opposed by people who at the time were termed conservative: it's only in retrospect that we rewrite the people in the wrong as not-progressive, and consider the people then termed conservative as the true-progressives. Ultimately most people want good things for most people, and mainly argue — sometimes vociferously, and acrimoniously — about what the best way for that to happen is.

If you read early radfems' complaints about trans women, you'll see concerns about men infiltrating the burgeoning movement to subvert or destroy its ability to effect much-needed substantial societal improvements for women. Nowadays, internet access and 10 minutes can disabuse you of this notion – but in the past, you'd have to have talked to an out, activist trans woman (who would often adhere to a different school of feminism to you, which if anything is evidence that she is dangerous to the Cause!) or had the right zines circulated to your doorstep (not really an option until the 90s, by which time it was generally understood that Transphobia Bad, the debate was about to what extent trans women's experiences were central to the Cause ("only tangentially" versus "in every respect"), and everyone knew you could pick up a Judith Butler book from your local library), to receive evidence to the contrary.

Likewise, the Catholic Church's conservative opposition to eugenics: they raised concerns about the human rights of those subject to eugenics practices, and later added secular arguments as justification. Contrast their opposition to trans people, which is… theologically confusing, to say the least: the existence of trans people "erases differences" (Galatians 3:28), distorts the image of God (Genesis 2:22), and (I seem to remember one bishop claiming) has already killed God… somehow. (Perhaps Pontius Pilate was secretly transgender? (This is me being silly.)) The justifications are all over the place, as is characteristic of post-hoc rationalisations of Conservative bigotry: replace the vague unevidenced claims about God with vague unevidenced claims about "nature", and the Catholic claims become the same rubbish as TERF claims. (Obligatory note: many Catholics do hold coherent views on this topic: I'm talking about the overarching organisation, not the people, or even all parts of the organisation.)

Small-c conservatism is a strategy, and isn't right by accident: it's an application of the same principle as Chesterton's Fence. Capital-C Conservatism is about denying resources and happiness to perceived enemies, while harming them as much as you can rationalise while still calling yourself a good person. (There are no capital-C Conservative policies that do not involve hurting people, prohibiting social mobility, or restricting what kinds of people are allowed to exist: many of them can't possibly qualify as small-c conservative policies, because they're only "conserving" an imagined past. Anti-immigrant sentiment in North America is one example: https://xkcd.com/84/.)

To undrape the cloak, we can look at how people talk about their ideas, and how they respond to criticism. (And remember not to focus on those calling themselves "conservative". Many "progressives" are actually capital-C Conservative, with a different – but no less harmful – idealised-state-of-nature: many modern-day eugenicists work in autism "charities", promoting "progressive" torture "therapies".) Unfortunately, this does not tell us which ideas are good, and which are bad: to find that out, you have to look at reality, not study rhetoric.

Most people may want good things for most people, but many people wilfully delude themselves about what "good things" means. Those, perhaps more so than the liars, are the dangerous ones.

False dichotomy [0]. Basically a bunch of sophistry to say "all conservatism is bad."

> the existence of trans people "erases differences" (Galatians 3:28),

You can't just quote the Bible without providing a translation, and I can find no translation with this wording. I would suggest that you refrain from commenting upon other cultures that you are ignorant of, as this is a form of cultural appropriation at best, and active bigotry at worst.

Same with your supposed "quotations" of Genesis 2.

> Capital-C Conservatism is about denying resources and happiness to perceived enemies,

Apply principle of charity [1].

> [...] while harming them as much as you can rationalise while still calling yourself a good person.

> Many "progressives" are actually capital-C Conservative, with a different – but no less harmful – idealised-state-of-nature: many modern-day eugenicists work in autism "charities", promoting "progressive" torture "therapies".)

On this we can agree - I don't actually see much difference between progressives and conservatives; they all fall prey to religious and superstitious thinking. All this self-aggrandizement about how diverse and inclusive one is, all the moralizing and ethical high-horsing, is really just a series of magic incantations the progressive chants to themselves to "psychologically manage the results of living in a materially deeply unequal society," [2] without actually needing to do anything about the material reality. Not so different from the way the sinner takes a dunk in a bathtub of water and is now "born again, free from sin," doesn't take the Lord's name in vain, uses gender-neutral pronouns, and wears a crucifix or a Pride flag - take your pick of religious idol.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

[2] Liam Kofi Bright, "White Psychodrama." https://philpapers.org/archive/BRIWP.pdf

The quotation was from Pope Francis. The Bible reference (one of Saint Paul's letters) was me being facetious. Same with the Genesis reference: transphobic Catholics cite Genesis 1, but if you try to interpret Genesis 2 by the same logic, it says the opposite (and more definitively): the bigoted reading is eisegesis, and not even particularly good eisegesis.

For the record: I also think "my" reading of Genesis 2:22 is eisegesis. Very little of the Bible has to do with trans people specifically. Those passages of the Old Testament which do are best interpreted by an Orthodox rabbi, since they can't really be understood out of context (which hardly anyone else bothers with learning); and the few things Jesus is recorded as having said about trans people (that is, people who'd fall under the modern umbrella category "transgender") were positive; but trans people have little spiritual significance in the major Abrahamic religions (as compared to, say, Hinduism) and aren't major characters of any of the narratives, so there was little reason to say much about them (until the Talmud, which has rulings about a lot of uncommon situations, such as the appropriate treatment of many minority groups – but dates to after Christianity's split from Judaism and isn't really regarded by Christians).

This specific example wasn't my point. The Catholic Church is one of the few organisations in reissbaker's comment that's been around long enough to have taken a strong stance on two of the topics mentioned in the comment. (And I don't know enough about their take on slavery to neatly categorise it as small-c conservatism or capital-C Conservatism: from what little I know, it seems more like Realpolitik.)

> Apply principle of charity

That is me being charitable. There are harsher ways to apply "the purpose of a system is what it does", here.

>> Apply principle of charity

> That is me being charitable. There are harsher ways to apply "the purpose of a system is what it does", here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith

1. Nvidia cards

2. Hooked up to Linux boxes

It turns out that Nvidia tends to work pretty well on Linux too, despite the binary blob drivers.

Other than gaming and ML, I'm not sure what the value of spending much on a GPU is... AMD is just in a tough spot.

I genuinely wonder if people would wind up spending less money if they had to pay for services than if they get exposed to ads that lead them to buy more things. But either way, once ads and "free with ads" are gone, there's much more room for other competitors.

Ads don't require pervasive and invasive tracking for every breath you take

Or can instagram only be free if ads are targeted to detailed profiles of individuals built over decades as they are tracked across the whole internet?

Yes. Targeted ads need to be 100% to 700% more efficient than regular ads to be as profitable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43996623

So it's not about the perceived effectiveness of advertisements that you feel as a user, it's about the rather more unique product that they sell to advertisers that really raises their revenue.