Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 300 posts

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

#51

Post by oulipo2 »

bondarchuk wrote: post #39
oulipo2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but in France we have about 100/150 feminicides per year. You're much more likely to be killed by your (seemingly "sane") partner in a bout of fury over a breakup than by some random autistic guy

Bayes' law, many more people have romantic partners than former homeless living with them.

That wasn't the point of the answer. The point is "How well do you really know someone?". You really don't. Many people live with partners who end up killing them, although they thought they trusted them.

Besides, "Bayes law" is not on your side on this one, it's well-known that "regular people" are over-represented in homicide, and "autistic people" or even "schizophrenic people" are under-represented and are mostly harmless

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

#52

Post by m4ck_ »

reop2whiskey wrote: post #19

[flagged]

IDK about ya'll but the ~25-30% (or whatever) I pay in taxes/SS/medicare isn't going to be a significant enough bump to enable me to eliminate homelessness...

Where we can actually take the government out of the equation and actually help people: Zoning. In places without governments like Haiti you can raise a family in a relatively simple structure. It's not ideal but it's how humans have been not-homeless for the entirety of our existence. Currently in the US, this is basically only legal in extremely rural areas where there are no jobs, schools, stores, etc.

I can find lots near a major metro area on the east coast for 10-20k, less than I pay rent in year; but I'd have to spend half a million on some shitty twig built monstrosity that meets minimum sq footage, parking, and other arbitrary regulations that only exist to drive housing prices up, in order to live there. I can't just buy a $10k shed from Home Depot, add insulation and all the other niceties we enjoy and live there. (even the most staunch anti-government, anti-regulation types would agree this should not be legal: they want big government to use violence to prevent anyone from building cheaper housing, because cheap housing hurts their net worth, on paper.)

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

#53

Post by Forgeties79 »

ajb wrote: post #46
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy Christmas, folks! > please have some humanity about the homeless In the US, the homeless population exploded , in the 1980s, when they closed down all the mental institutions. Before that, there was a far less pervasive homeless population in urban areas. Being "on the spectrum," myself (but highly functional), I can attest to how easy it is for an autistic person's life to go sideways. Many autistic folks have…

Non-neurotypicals can receive bad treatment from neurotypicals. But, it's also a trap to start thinking that neurotypicals are 100% intolerant. The corollary of not knowing when they're offending people, is that they also don't know when they're receiving tolerance - which is actually a lot; although it's understandable that this is not obvious.

> But, it's also a trap to start thinking that neurotypicals are 100% intolerant.

I didn’t get that at all from what they said tbh

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

#55

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

fragmede wrote: post #32
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy Christmas, folks! > please have some humanity about the homeless In the US, the homeless population exploded , in the 1980s, when they closed down all the mental institutions. Before that, there was a far less pervasive homeless population in urban areas. Being "on the spectrum," myself (but highly functional), I can attest to how easy it is for an autistic person's life to go sideways. Many autistic folks have…

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.

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

#56

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

oulipo2 wrote: post #51
bondarchuk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bayes' law, many more people have romantic partners than former homeless living with them.

That wasn't the point of the answer. The point is "How well do you really know someone?". You really don't. Many people live with partners who end up killing them, although they thought they trusted them. Besides, "Bayes law" is not on your side on this one, it's well-known that "regular people" are over-represented in homicide, and "autistic people" or even "schizophrenic people" are under-represented and are mostly…

You confused P(A|B) with P(B|A), stop doubling down.

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

#57

Post by fragmede »

namanyayg wrote: post #38
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…

I'm trying to understand this better, possible to share any examples?

Not going to share a personal example, but eg plug "I bought my mom a vacuum cleaner for her birthday. Why did she get mad at me? she keeps complaining about the old one!" into ChatGPT vs find me any human willing to sit down and have that as an actual discussion with me as a human of any age. I'm just supposed to get it? I'm a fucking monster and unworthy of being loved because I need that explained to me? "You should just know!"

Fuck people.

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

#58

Post by ajb »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #53
ajb wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-neurotypicals can receive bad treatment from neurotypicals. But, it's also a trap to start thinking that neurotypicals are 100% intolerant. The corollary of not knowing when they're offending people, is that they also don't know when they're receiving tolerance - which is actually a lot; although it's understandable that this is not obvious.

> But, it's also a trap to start thinking that neurotypicals are 100% intolerant. I didn’t get that at all from what they said tbh

Yeah not trying to imply the GP did. Just offering another perspective.

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

#59

Post by mft_ »

It’s a lovely, wholesome, heartwarming story… but it also made me sad that there wasn’t something more reliable than incredibly-unlikely-serendipity to help this man (who as well as autism, had a difficult family background and may have been educationally subnormal [for want of a more 2025 phrase]) and ensure that he was at least safe and happy, and maybe even relatively productive.

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

#60

Post by moondowner »

> The homeless centre told them Ronnie needed an address to get a job, Rob said, but "to get an address, you need a job".

> "That's the Catch 22 that loads of homeless people are in."

Breaking this systemic barrier would make life easier on a lot of people.

Post reply on HN