teeray

I’ve mentioned this on another thread, but municipalities are incentivized to create HOAs: the city/town gets all the tax revenue and gets to provide a fraction of the services—it’s a great deal for them. They need to be disincentivized to do this by default by a state-level forced reduction in property taxes for HOA properties and a forced on-ramp (similar to ADU legislation) for cities/towns to accept the developments (dissolving the HOAs in the process).

> Until the goals given him are unachievable, in the given timelines, by human thinking and reasoning alone.

Would that not be tantamount to constructive dismissal? Consider: you may have your prayer times during the day, but they will be counted against you in performance evaluations.

I just imagine this is the demonstration: https://youtu.be/xMxVBY70dPU?is=8wOIoZgZdnMCbMdR

IME, nobody reads the tests in code review either. They just see "looks like it has tests" *check*. Many times, I've caught LLMs writing completely vacuous tests for configurations of components that were impossible. But coverage number go up, so those tests get written.

"Why will nobody buy my Tulips?"

It would be an interesting mechanic if the plea deal also altered a ceiling penalty (multiplier maybe?) in the event of a loss for the defendant.

> No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained.

I spent the last couple years trying to get contractors out to pave our private road. They'd either no-show, or ghost. It didn't make any sense since these were all 5-figure jobs. I'm trying to give you money, what gives? I learned from the contractor who did end up taking the job that our city is absolutely brutal with contractors... which can be a good thing for quality of work, but too much in this case means many contractors just refuse all work in the city. They're big enough that it's no great loss.

I am a president of an association that handles all aspects of road maintenance (construction, sweeping, snow removal), a full commercial sewer lift station, stormwater drainage, trash / recycling, street lights, interfacing with utilities, forestry maintenance, and permitting along with general Q&A. We are a volunteer 3-person Department of Public Works.

The problem is that municipalities absolutely love HOAs. They get all the tax revenue and get to wash their hands of most responsibilities involved with them. From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.”

Oh, but if you want to do anything, you still need to pay those permit and inspection fees! No, we won’t help you find a paver at a reasonable rate even though putting those contracts out to bid is what we do all day long.

What is really bullshit is that HOAs aren’t granted a property tax abatement for absorbing many municipal functions.

> you are responsible for what it does.

Unless, of course, you are a frontier lab itself. Then you can’t possibly be held responsible.

Terrible Slime

Token Ring functions a bit like a ham radio net in my understanding

I remember finding an old hub off in a far corner in 2008 working on my school’s network. It was a rare find then!

Weird, it’s almost like people hate talking to robots

I like to avoid dentists with flashy “STATE OF THE ART WHITENING/IMPLANTS” advertising and gleaming new expensive equipment. They need to make payments on all that stuff, so they’ll go looking for problems that aren’t there.

As a Neal Stephenson fan, Van Eck phreaking is where my mind went after reading the abstract. Glad to see the technique is alive and well today :)

> For good or bad, a lot of studies have confirmed that cards have overwhelmingly increased consumer spending.

There is a lot of psychological awareness created when you have to pull a couple singles vs. a Benjamin out of your wallet vs tap card for all amounts.

Easy, the social contract around streaming has become enshittified. The agreement used to be, “pay us every month and we give you access to a vast catalogue that you could never hope to accumulate yourself.” Sounds great, sign me up. Now people have a dozen streaming subscriptions and a search engine to locate content among them. The joke is, that one specific movie is often not on any of them. Or if it is, it’s on the one you have to watch a bunch of ads for.

> I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry.

Apples and oranges comparison. We eat the direct products of water usage in the agriculture industry. It keeps people alive. It’s fallacious to compare that with water usage that goes to serving ads.

“Life, uh, finds a way”

“Your honor, it is impossible to say why the sentient D20 chose to roll <5 for this patient. It is omniscient, and has been weighted carefully by our alchemists to produce decisions as cold and impersonally as the best of our insurance drones.”

It’s Comcastic!

There is a certain hilarious irony in killing the big boss with love

Where are the felony charges? This is an insult to everyone that has ever been prosecuted under the CFAA?

> makes medical care cheaper for patients

I think you misspelled “increases profit margins for hospitals” if you’re talking about US healthcare.

Just wait until it gets its hands on a shady biolab just outside of oversight. “Claude, make me Captain Tripps”

“Yeah, you’re right, but let’s do that refactor in a separate PR” and it never happens

> Whatever you believe or values you have, what your congressmen, senators and president do, is a choice.

It’s not really. Elected leaders gleefully ignore their electorate and get repeatedly re-elected. You can write letters to them, and they just write back “lol no”. The citizenry have very little ability to direct or reclaim the power that they are legally forced to delegate.

This is why these companies paying subscriptions shoveling everything into Claude thinking "oh, they're not training on our stuff" is hilarious to me. Of course they are. They probably are extra super-duper sure not to have Claude admit to that in any way, but there's no way they're giving up training on the sum total of both open and closed source code out there.

I think the asymmetry of fair use is what feels the most wrong about copyright and AI. Forever, fair use has been limited with an iron fist: you can’t rip that DVD because it’s copy-protected; You can only use 10s of that song in your school project. Then these AI companies wield fair use like a sledgehammer in a way that nobody has been able to for decades to enormously profit. Maybe it’s technically correct, but it feels like mass exploitation of a loophole that the legal system has previously taken a dim view towards (see: Aereo).