sxan

sxan, 7 days ago

https://i.imgflip.com/8psqg2.jpg

sxan, 7 days ago

I unironically love this building. It’s brutalist, but with flair; most (not all, but most) brutalist architecture is also minimalist, which I find depressing. This is brutalist but absolutely not minimalist; it’s almost whimsical. I respect and applaud the architect for the wacky combination.

I wonder if it’s technically Bauhaus; I’d expect more glass and less concrete.

Is there an architect in the audience?

sxan, 6 days ago

Wouldn’t that be an exciting project to work on? Maybe it’s different for blue collar folks; I’ve always valued projects that weren’t the same thing I’ve done a million times before.

sxan, 7 days ago

In the US, and I’m guessing most everywhere else, developers are part of the problem. They buy properties that may currently have affordable housing on them and redevelop to more expensive units. They’re also responsible for the disappearance of ownable housing - over there past decades, they’ve been buying houses that have come on the market and turned them into rentals, or torn them down and put in denser rental units. They’re responsible for urban sprawl, turning farmland into suburbs.

Some of this is supply and demand, but don’t discount marketing and encouraging growth in demand for suburb housing over more sustainable urban housing.

Finally, when articles like this talk about “developers,” they don’t mean the people who know how to build buildings: they mean the mega corporations who are purchasing property to own indefinitely, removing properties from ever being able to be purchased by families. Even in cases as in the article, “condos” are just fancy rentals. You “buy” it, but the developer (who is also usually the ultimate property manager) gets maintenance and other fees - they’re for-profit HOAs.

“Developers” provide little benefit, and such is vastly outweighed by the damage they’ve caused in contributing to the current housing crisis: the inability of younger generations to afford to buy houses, or afford rent, and the increase in homelessness in western countries.

One of the larger Nordic cities - Stockholm, Helsinki, something like that - passed laws a few years ago to restrict property developers in order to preserve affordable housing and prevent gentrification.

Property developers are not our friends.

sxan, 7 days ago

Oh, man. My condolences.

But, seriously: rural PA can be gorgeous. The issue is, as you said: the politics. When we first moved there, a new friend told me: “Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Alabama in between.”

Another replier to your comment said they lived outside Allentown - I don’t consider that “rural” PA. The suburbs in PA are vast, and while it can look rural, you don’t know PA rural until you drive to somewhere like New Berlin: through coal country. I knew people who’d grown up within 3 miles of where their grandmother grew up, lived there their entire lives, and never ventured more than a few dozen miles from the Mainline. Never visited Gettysburg, a mere 4-hour drive.

And you’re so right! The Mason-Dixon line is the Southern border of PA, and yet Confederate flags abound. That, and Trump signs; they just never take those down, campaign year or not.

We moved to Minnesota from PA (answering OP’s question) and I was surprised at the political similarities. Around The Cities it’s fairly liberal, and even through the few-hour drive to Deluth. But once you get off the main commuter thoroughfare, those Trump signs start appearing everywhere. Iron ore is to MN what is coal to PA, and mining is mining. Although, the property around the big Northern lakes is all lake-homes owned by urban families who can’t afford lake homes around The Cities, so there are pockets of Blue out there. Anyway, I found the similarities to be surreal. The biggest difference is that the PA coal country is far poorer than MN iron country.

But I’ll repeat: the countryside in PA is amazing, especially in the Poconos, but also in the farmland. Just beautiful.

sxan, 7 days ago

Eh. His base will cough it up for him. And then he’ll get it reduced by half during appeal, and pocket the difference.

Right now, it’s his most profitable business venture.

sxan, 8 days ago

“How” depends on your client works. Do you mean through the web interface, or are you using one of the dozen Lemmy mobile clients, or the couple of native Linux clients, or something else. Are you running your own instance of Lemmy?

My client doesn’t let me block instances; only communities. I didn’t think it was possible to block whole instances unless you were running your own.

sxan, 7 days ago

Sweet. It’ll be great when my client supports it.

sxan, 7 days ago

The most hilarious - and depressing - thing is that Joe’s stumbles are news, while Trump’s speeches are barely coherent. We’ve just come to expect it from Trump, so when he rambles stream-of-conscious non-sequitors for an hour, it’s par for the course and not news-worthy.

sxan, 7 days ago

No, no: he’s looking for forms for both the IRS and the Internal Revenue Service. He’ll probably also needed the phone numbers for the chiefs of both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the FBI to have on speed-dial when agents come knocking.

I don’t know why he doesn’t just call Joe Biden directly on a recorded line and inform him that his Person is declining all legal liability under the Uniform Code of Military Justice as per form 1065b that he bought from on an internet website.

He needs to educate himself, duh.

sxan, 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

I think he’s walking a line. On the one side are people who want the US to stop all support until Israel stops, want the US to stop threatening the international courts seeking to hold Israel officials accountable for war crimes - essentially, want the US to treat Israel like we are treating Russia. On the other side is a powerful, well-funded pro-Israel lobby (which the Palestinians don’t have) and a traditionally fairly cohesive and influential pro-Israel voting block. Plus, Israel is our Ally, like officially; Palesteine is not.

He’s slowly, slightly shifting from full-throated support of Israel, but so far all he’s doing is withhold some ordinance. It feels as of all he’s doing is pissing off both sides, rather than shifting some support.

Honestly, I think he’s in a no-win situation. It’s critical for the USA that he win this next election - Trump is an existential threat to Democracy in the US. There’s a lot of money and influence he loses by not getting the pro-Israel lobby on his side, and who does he lose by continuing support? Are the disenfranchised youth going to vote for him if he pivots on Israel? All the folks who’ve been complaining (rightly) about the cost of living, housing prices, healthcare costs, loss of rights over their own bodies - all these folks who protest-voted in the primaries and are threatening to protest-vote in the general election… they’re all suddenly going to jump on Team Biden if he cuts off Israel? In enough numbers to counter what he loses from the pro-Israel lobby?

So I think the irony is that if standing with Israel means he can win the election, it’s still a better outcome for Palestine than if he loses. If he loses the election, Trump will tell Israel to just go ahead and glass the area.

Edit: Came across this article here today, which I think has basically the same view.

sxan, 9 days ago

I’m not sure that you’re describing the same thing, but this very experience you’re having with Lua is what drove me away from Ruby, and ultimately from all non-statically compiled PLs.

Instability in the VM, but more so in libraries, meant upgrades became projects to fix things that broke because libraries introduced regressions, API changes, and new bugs. For any non-trivial application, something would break. This was entirely unacceptable for services; entire suites would go down because of a regression in one popular library, and you get to find these things out at runtime.

Eventually, I went back to entirely statically compiled languages - I’d encountered the same usage with bytecode VM languages like Java, to a lesser degree. But with PLs like Go, once I have a binary, it’ll work until someone breaks libc. Not impossible, but that happens years or decades apart, not monthly like it did with Ruby.

Now I make do with zsh, or bash if I plan on sharing, with help from the usual ask/ser/grep crowd. If I start feeling cramped, I know my program is getting too big for scripting and switch to a reliable language. The short-term convenience is not worth the long term grief.

sxan, 9 days ago

I don’t have enough experience yet with WASM; ultimately, it’s bytecode, right? So the same rules apply. Note I didn’t make an exception for dynamically linked programs; the more components in your stack that are variable, the more instability you have.

But it sounds like you’re doing a sort of plug-in system, and that involves instability by design. Using WASM seems far easier that implementing a bespoke Lua VM.

sxan, 9 days ago

I love my country; I love its culture, I love its language, I love its ecosystems… I just hate its repressive government?

It’s usually either that, or: I love my country, but I can work here in an entry-level job and still send enough money home to support my extended family.

Anon hasn’t yet heard a valid reason for this because they’ve never asked and, honestly, don’t want to know because then they couldn’t feel superior.

sxan, 9 days ago

Interesting. I wouldn’t have thought it’d be limited to some nationalities, although maybe there’s some truth to it.

I worked with two Turks (both living in the US, but under what circumstances I don’t know; I believe one was nationalized, and the other on a work visa) at the same time in 2016; one was radically supportive of Erdoğan, and believed the coup was real; the other thought he was a dictator and that the coup was a false flag meant to allow him emergency powers and a crack-down.

I say “radically” in the first case because she’d get agitated and angry about any criticism of Erdoğan; the second would discuss it as if he were in a debate. I have no doubt his beliefs were just as passionate, but he’d argue his points, not just declare things.

ANYWAY, that’s the extent of my experience. I lived in Munich for two years and, as an American, was vaguely aware of the immigration tension, but this just after reunification and the West Germans were still coming to terms with the impacts of that. And my friend circle was urban college students, so I swam in the most liberal of waters.

sxan, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

I was surprised to see lions over the couch instead of a reclining nude.

sxan, 9 days ago

In this case, it’d have been the Borg who’d have been assimilated.

sxan, 10 days ago

I moved to Germany in my late 20’s and lived there for 2 years. I went with perfect teeth; I returned with several cavities. My brushing habits did not change, and while you could blame my cavities on several factors (the food was different; I drank way more beer; I got two years older), I’ve always attributed it to the fact that Germany does not fluoridate their municipal water - and everyone drinks bottled water anyway. At least, the crowd I ran with did. It’s been years, but as I remember, you didn’t get water at restaurants unless you asked, and then if you did, you got bottled water. In any case, I went from drinking fluoridated water regularly to zero flouride except what was in the toothpaste. And, honestly, I don’t remember paying much attention to which toothpaste I bought, and many don’t have flouride in them.

So, yeah. It’s just one anecdote, and there could have been many other factors, but it convinced me about the importance of flouride. Now we drink municipal water (US), but it’s going through a whole-house triple filtration system and I don’t know how much flouride we’re getting. So in addition to the usual tooth care (brushing, flossing) I also rinse with a flouride mouth rinse, and I’ve been doing OK dentally.

sxan, 10 days ago

Well, it’s different. On the one hand, you’re not getting flouride into your system; on the other, you’re not getting flouride into your system.

I really don’t know if flouride ingested makes its way to your teeth, or how much difference it makes if it does. But I’m not about to start self-medicating with the stuff, so rinse it is.

sxan, 10 days ago

I want to start hanging in those forums and offering to sell “how-tos” that answer these questions. Just scrape all of the old posts and run it through ChatGPT for a summary, and sell it like an ebook.

There are only two things stopping me: first, I’m just barely held back by ethics; and second, I am entirely uninterested in learning enough about it, or in spending any time lurking in the forums reading posts.

I suspect it’d be a relatively easy income stream, tho.

sxan, 10 days ago

Yeah, I get it. But they’re still people, and probably generally not on high end of the intelligence bell curve; it feels like taking advantage of a handicap. I dunno; it’s about me, not them, and I don’t want to be a grifter.

If you steal my entirely original and patented idea, I ask only that you report back how much money you’re making.

sxan, 9 days ago

See, you can already talk the talk, and recite the secret magic incantations.

sigh. Now I’m going to have to see what I can get out of an LLM in terms of material. For science.

sxan, 10 days ago

I was referring to the concept from the essay, Death of the Author, not that the guy was the author.

sxan, 10 days ago

One of the early thought experiments in art history is this:

You’re walking through a forest and come open a beautiful arrangement of rocks evoking a sweeping movement, like a bird’s wing in motion. It look’s artificial, but you can see that the rocks could just be there by an accidental result of nature. The effect is captivating, but you can’t tell if it’s man-made or not. Is it art?

The argument Barthes makes is that the meaning of art is always more a function of the interpretation by the viewer than the intention of the artist.

sxan, 10 days ago

I just saw another one in random(@kbin.social), so I jumped in and scrolled back; there were only a couple in the past two days, but three days ago there was a series of several posts in a row (6? 8? Something like that).

I an not subscribed to any kbin magazines, so I don’t see them in my curated feed; they mostly show up in the uncurated “World.”

FWIW; you expressed curiosity, so I followed up with an example.