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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Norway has something similar, you own the inside usually and the HOA own the outside, including the houses themselves. Live in one, largely a good thing but some things come slow since they need to be voted for of course. Generally worth it, since you get good deals on things like internet. It’s cheaper but it’s also something you usually have to use and the only option. Eg only that provider of internet.

    I’m my case, they are also responsible for my balanced ventilation, my exterior doors and my water heater. So when the time comes, they handle it. Shared costs cover snow plowing, the shared community building, upkeep of garage, outdoors and the buildings, and things like water bills and taxes paid. In particular, HOAs purchases do not need to pay a 2.5% of the purchase price fee when you purchase a home. This itself saves you quite a bit, and makes up for some of the extra you pay in monthly costs. (but pretty much all of those are at least going somewhere that benefit you anyways)

    The downsides are, there are special rules so some people that have membership may have a right to take over the winning bid in a sale. I myself used this to purchase my place, having gotten 10 years of seniority in “HOA company”. You spend the seniority with your purchase, but also are not allowed to own more than one part. Also, no long term renting so there aren’t any companies buying and renting out and things like that. You have to live in the HOA.





  • If you use it frequently, I suggest getting a GUI that have profiles or remember options so you don’t have to mess with commands all the time. I wrote my own little command line wrspper which is Windows only since I don’t have Linux to test on. Though it shouldn’t take much effort to add support.

    Makes it much more convenient when you don’t have to specify things like archive (ignore duplicates), filename to be “artist - title” (where possible), download destination, etc. Just alt-tab, Ctrl-v, Enter. And the download is running. And mine also has parallel downloads and queue for when you got many slow downloads.







  • If CO2 is a byproduct of another process, then I’d make a guess it is fairly cheap. The flaw here is that CO2 and H2 are both products of steam reforming using methane… Which is to say, the cheaper version might just come from using natural gas. Hydrogen has to be sourced from some energy consuming process, and that too is often from the methane steam reformation. So it’s certainly possible, but yet again is ready to become yet another “green” product made from fossil fuel. Doesn’t have to be, but I can be.

    Edit: to correct a discrepancy, the article mentioned hydrogen, but if the hydrgon comes from water used in the process then some of the issues of providing H2 is less big. But either way I expect this to be energy costly. Nevertheless, a lab made product is still something that doesn’t need large areas of land to produce.




  • I kinda get where he is coming for though. AI is being crammed into everything, and especially in things where they are not currently suited to be.

    After learning about Machine learning, you kind realize that unlike “regular programs” that ML gives you “roughly what you want” answers. Approximations really. This is all fine and good for generating images for example, because minor details being off of what you wanted probably isn’t too bad. A chat bot itself isn’t wrong here, because there are many ways to say the same thing. The important thing is that there is a definite step after that where you evaluate the result. In simpler ML you can even figure out the specifics of the process, but for the most part we evaluate what the LLM said or if the image is accurate to our expectations. But we can’t control or constrain the output to exactly our needs, because our restrictions largely are just input in a almost finished approximation engine.

    The problem is, that companies take these approximation engines, put them in their product and consider their output fact. Like Ai chatbots doing customer support, and make up facts like the user that was told about rules that didn’t exist for an airline, or the search engines that parrot jokes or harmful advice. Sure you and I might realize that these things come from a machine that doesn’t actually think about it’s answers, but others don’t. And throwing a “*this might be wrong because its AI” on it is not an acceptable waiver of accountability.

    Despite this, I use chatgpt and gemini a lot to help me program, they get a lot of things wrong but also do great. It’s a great tool, exactly because I step in after the approximation step, review and decide. I’m aware of the limits. But putting these things in front of “users” without a review step means you are advertising that you are either unaware of this flaw, or just see the cost-benefit analysis and see that if noting else it’ll generate interest during the hype.

    There is a huge potential, but throwing AI into a situation where facts are needed when it’s only making rough guesses, is the wrong way about it.





  • It’s worth adding I greatly prefer MS Auth style authentication, since I don’t have to find the right entry to read the Auth code and then write it on the other computer. Instead MS pops a notification and you either type or select the right number, verify with fingerprint and done. Much more convenient.

    It often tells you what you login into and where you are attempt to log in from, so it’s a few extra layers of security for those that have that awareness to check those details.