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We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

bbc.co.uk

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Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#211

Post by BellsOnSunday »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #202

In England the advice is that the best thing you can do for homeless people is refer them to the correct social services, which has the resources and skills to deal with people who are often mentally damaged or unwell in some way. The case of Aaron Barley triggered this after a lovely and caring family took in a homeless boy into their own home leading to a terrible situation in which he murdered two of the family. h…

Who says that's the advice "in England"? I'm in England and it isn't my advice.

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#212

Post by sieabahlpark »

eeeficus wrote: post #178
cogman10 wrote: post #13

Beautiful story but with a sad undertone. A large percentage of the homeless have autism [1]. And that really sucks. If these people don't have support, their lives can turn miserable fast. And unfortunately it's just way too easy for these people to end up in abusive situations. It's a lot of work to care for people with autism (moderate to severe). There is no standard for what they need, their capabilities can be…

There’s always someone with the buzzkill. Do you think is really that hard, for those who care, yo find all these sad facts? FFS man, let us celebrate the good a little bit. In this world is really not that hard to find the bad!

[dead]

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#213

Post by fragmede »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #55
fragmede wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully LLMs have ingested enough of human writing that one afflicted in such a way can describe the exact set of circumstances and ask the LLM how they made the other people feel, and figure out why they got expelled from the group this time. It never stops happening for us. I'm 42 now and it's happened twice this past year. But at least now I can figure out what it is I did wrong and how to prevent that from hap…

That’s an interesting idea. My main concern would be hallucinations. They could be damaging.

What would it even hallucinate? You wouldn't be asking it to cite a court case from 2004 that doesn't exist and it wouldn't invent people you didn't tell it about in the first place.

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#214

Post by fcatalan »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #72
catlikesshrimp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, that can happen to any kid depending on the background I grew up at a time when a home appliance was an acceptable gift for the woman in charge. I heard women complaining progressively more through time, and now it is not an acceptable gift.

> I grew up at a time when a home appliance was an acceptable gift for the woman in charge. This is also how I grew up (my parents were a little bit more on the conservative side). This together with the fact that I am not deeply knowledgable in the US-American common practices also made it hard for me to understand why the mother was angry about this gift, in particular considering that she did complain about the ol…

I bought a expensive fancy pan for my wife's birthday a few years ago. We both cook, clean and do groceries and chores equally so it never occurred to me that it was inappropriate. We both like cooking. I'm more of a stewpot guy while she's better in general at "pan stuff" and had been complaining about the old pan. She chided me a bit for spending so much on a pan and there was that.

But when I mentioned it over coffee at work most of my female colleagues were aghast. I defended myself saying something like "It's the 21st century, we are way past the point that I can't gift a pan to my wife" and they said "Well that might be at YOUR home!", and I learned a thing.

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#215

Post by Macha »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #172
nithril wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone that like to do DIY, that's not a work tool, that's a play tool that is coincidentally a work tool to do work.

Same thing back at you. The vacuum is a play tool to anyone who finds cleaning to be “fun”. There’s whole genres of cleanup games on steam which are extremely popular, profitable, and well reviewed. One of my favorite vectrex games is a Pac-Man clone where you play as a vacuum.

Powerwash simulator is occasionally fun. There's shiny rewards, I don't have to deal with potential bad weather, and there's no random patches that take 20 times to get rid of. If I don't feel like powerwashing simulator, it will wait for me, forever, with no ill consequences or social judgement.

If I never wash my actual driveway, the same is not true. Therefore I will need to wash it at times when it's unpleasant or I don't want to, and it will take longer than powerwashing a driveway in Powerwash simulator.

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#216

Post by fragmede »

zahlman wrote: post #101
fragmede wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully LLMs have ingested enough of human writing that one afflicted in such a way can describe the exact set of circumstances and ask the LLM how they made the other people feel, and figure out why they got expelled from the group this time. It never stops happening for us. I'm 42 now and it's happened twice this past year. But at least now I can figure out what it is I did wrong and how to prevent that from hap…

Such a large fraction of human communication is non-verbal (and, unless you're actively studying this sort of thing as a neurodivergent person trying to fit in) unconscious that it's hard for me to imagine this working very well on average. The LLM simply couldn't possibly get enough relevant input. And even emotional reactions purely to words are informed by context that the LLM didn't experience and the user won't…

Freakishly weirdly precise memory that doesn't work in other ways can be used to relayed relevant details to ChatGPT. I'll describe the weird face she made when I said that thing or the exact position of her body and the exact level of pressure with which she touched me on the arm and exactly where on my arm, for example.

As far as the framing, it's helped me realize that actually, hey, sometimes it is their fault and they are being unreasonable and I actually didn't do anything wrong, they just don't like me. I mean yeah, that's also a thing.

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#217

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

scotty79 wrote: post #188
card_zero wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think statistics are relevant at all. Suppose the stranger is wielding a kopesh, an ancient Egyptian sword. What we want to know is not "how many murderers use kopeshes?" (none of them), but "is this guy a murderer?", and that seems in line with what you're saying about statistics. However, the question "how many wielders of kopeshes are murderers?" is also irrelevant, and the answer is still none of them. Si…

> Similarly, "how many strangers in your house have been murderers?" is irrelevant, even if the answer is "all of them so far". That doesn't sound very sane.

Complete word salad.

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#218

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

fcatalan wrote: post #197

Not as hugely generous as this story, but during his whole college professor career since the 70s, my father always took care that none of his students spent any major holidays alone and away from home, so we always ended up having 2 or 3 of them around for Christmas, the New Year, Easter... They were from everywhere around the country and the world, and it was so very enriching for me and my siblings. I had a huge p…

Huh, I wish to some time be in the position to do this.

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#220

Post by johanneskanybal »

alwa wrote: post #122
the_arun wrote: post #107

When you read this story - your heart warms & your eyes gets filled. It is crazy nice feeling. You feel like this world is such a better place. Yet, it hurts - to know there are so many homeless that our system needs corrections.

It also reminds me that systems can’t fix situations like this. The system of “care,” as the story alludes to the autistic person experiencing in their youth, often looks a lot more like warehousing the people on the margins of society, often in unpleasant (and almost always in institutional) conditions. Some kinds of humanity can only ever happen person-to-person, and it’s a great treasure for everyone involved to e…

That’s an easy cop-out and disagree as an European with stronger social nets. But yes this is still a heart warming story.
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