The HOA is the owners. The owners vote in some board members who do the work on behalf of the majority of owners.

Sometimes the HOA hires some 3rd party management company to handle stuff, but in our case we felt it was wasted money because we would care more about the results. In the end I can see why a lot of owner boards do that as the day-to-day of running the place is obnoxious.

The public spaces were on our property, so our responsibility.

Chuck Testa!!!

I was the president of my HOA. Somewhat not intentionally.

It was my first home, a condo, and I bought it at launch right after it was built. After about 6 months of living there, a neighbor approached me and said the whole rest of the board had flaked out, and would I like to be president of the HOA?

I said sure, it seems interesting and I definitely want the value of my ownership to be protected.

So me, him, and another guy formed a new board.

Oh man, the messes we started to uncover. The super low dues didn’t even cover the trash removal, hallway electric lighting bill, elevator maintenance contract… Much less any landscaping. No wonder the place was looking rough.

And of course there was no budget to put money away for long term needs like reroofing or whatever.

So we worked hard on a plan to propose to the owners to increase the dues about 70% so that we’d have a well landscaped place and hopefully no surprise expenses ever because of an ample rainy day fund.

Less than 10% of the owners even showed up to the HOA meeting, so we didn’t meet quorum.

We tried again, and finally got quorum after knocking on doors and asking for people to please come and vote.

This was just one issue. I’d get regular calls like hey, somebody dumped an old mattress by the dumpster. Can you call the removal company (the regular trash service wouldn’t take that kind of thing). Or calls like “there’s some sick trees in the front yard, when are you finally going to get an arborist out here?” And so and so’s room is leaving trash in the hallway, can you please go talk to them?

I resigned within a year. Screw those guys and I’ll never co-own without getting to choose my partners again.

The US projects its own interests worldwide but those often overlap with the interests of other as well.

For example, the US often stipulates intellectual property and worker rights in it’s trade deals. The US actively protects shipping lanes. The US actively negotiates visa-free entry for American passport holders to other countries. The US invests in the economies of foreign countries to stimulate trade opportunities. The US controls the SWIFT banking network which makes it so that we don’t need to send gold bullion or pallets of cash to buy things from other countries, and participating in the system requires member countries to have certain controls in place that attempt to block bad actors. The US, through it’s embassies and ambassadors, deploys it ideology to foreign governments, and makes deals that allow foreigners to invest in the USA and Americans to open businesses in foreign countries.

The US actively shuns and makes life difficult for menace dictatorships on the global stage by creating trade exclusions.

There have been coups since the beginning of time and always will be, as it’s human nature. Many citizens of other countries have no belief that the future of their country belongs to them after decades or centuries of dictatorships or kingdoms. On the whole, history shows that kingdoms rise and fall for many reasons and the people sometimes benefit and sometimes suffer for it.

Obviously it’s a highly complex topic, but if the US wasn’t doing these things, then Russia or China would be, or there would be more powerful regional factions, which could reduce the size of the world in terms of travel and trade options for many.

Whether the US is the right one to be in control of this at this point in history is a matter of intense debate among some, but it could absolutely be worse than it is now.

Thanks for your patience while I researched the details.

Yes, I’m free for a lunch meeting last Friday. See you then.

He gets a pass because we already know it will happen. No surprises at all. The bar is very very low. I guess his ‘genius’ is that he’s got enough cash to both set the bar low and then manage to still function marginally.

The media reporting on that would be boring.

With everyone else, the bar is still slightly higher.

Driver support was so dicey. If you had anything even remotely not mainstream, you would be compiling your own video driver, or network driver, or basically left to figure it out for any other peripheral. So many devices like scanners and very early webcams just claimed zero Linux support at all, but you could at times find someone else’s project that might work.

I tried to switch to Linux as a desktop system several times in the late 90s but kept going back to windows because hardware support just wasn’t there yet.

Wouldn’t be surprised if there was an exceptionally well funded US startup that makes a debut before TikTok is blocked if they don’t sell. TikTok has to weigh the possibility that they can’t compete if they don’t exist.

Hell to the no.

One of the best things ever about LLMs is how you can give them absolute bullshit textual garbage and they can parse it with a huge level of accuracy.

Some random chunks of html tables, output a csv and convert those values from imperial to metric.

Fragments of a python script and ask it to finish the function and create a readme to explain the purpose of the function. And while it’s at it recreate the missing functions.

Copy paste of a multilingual website with tons of formatting and spelling errors. Ask it to fix it. Boom done.

Of course, the problem here is that developers can no longer clean their inputs as well and are encouraged to send that crappy input straight along to the LLM for processing.

There’s definitely going to be a whole new wave of injection style attacks where people figure out how to reverse engineer AI company magic.

This whole thing happened 30 years ago now. Wow. These two must be in their 50s now. It was such a media circus at the time.

Pretty much every country in the world where citizenship, nationality, and ethnicity are the same thing you find xenophobia.

IMO all forms of taking care of yourself are self care. You have to love yourself before you can offer anything to anybody else.

The effort starts an upward spiral of increasing rewards. You feel better about yourself, people treat you differently, you feel more confident, and the cycle repeats.

Will this change on YouTube’s side affect Invidious instances?

A miniaturized version of the whole country on the wall using rocks.

A python script hooked up to the openai API could be a fun way to play with this. Just edit the comments with random bs somehow marginally related to the original topic but incorrect.

It’s a real shame though because those old comments are often lifesavers when you’re looking into really niche subjects.

Agree with another commenter that documentation is an issue. If you’re a developer, it’s not too bad. It uses a kind of homebrew model/view/template python backend that might baffle you for a while.

If you don’t need to modify it or integrate it too much with your bank, e-commerce sites, cash registers, etc then it pretty much works out of the box.

Odoo came from a fully open sourced project years ago and is getting more and more closed and expensive over time as they go upmarket. If you really want to own your data I’m not sure that’s a good direction.

There is a fork called Flectra that is usually about a version behind Odoo but reintegrates a lot of the paid features of Odoo for free, but its documentation and community is even smaller.

My company has an office in China and I’ve been there many many times.

Chinese people are like all other people - same needs, same hopes and dreams, same fears, same drivers. In the city where our office is located, they are extremely hard working and want to ensure a better future for their family. Just like most American cities.

Their city is very high tech, moreso than many American cities because they skipped a lot of legacy technology.

They don’t necessarily subscribe to the same moral/value system as Americans, for example they often see copying each other’s ideas as a compliment whereas Americans see it as stealing. Kind of like - if it’s possible to copy, then it’s fair game - so don’t make it possible if you don’t want it copied. Perhaps that drives a different kind of innovation.

Obviously there are many more cultural differences. But as a people, we are all essentially working with the same needs.

All that being said I don’t appreciate the great firewall when I’mthere, the censorship, and the fear they have about discussing banned topics. I don’t appreciate the high-tech security cameras at every corner, or all the tracking of activities. The younger generations tolerate this for now because they are wealthier than their parents and told to cooperate, but that may not hold long term.