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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)BL
Posts
6
Comments
757
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • who is gonna buy my house in 40 years?

    A sad but serious answer is that your house will either be worth less or worthless because of climate change (looking at you, Florida, but also wildfires/water scarcity) or extra valuable for those seeking climate refuge.

    Completely seriously, it was a major consideration when my wife and I decided to move to where we are now, to one of the safest areas of our country for climate change risks.

  • That's not possible with the technology. LLMs will never be able to write compelling stories because they are incapable of comprehending anything. There will need to be a human "at the wheel" guiding every stage of the process.

    Or maybe that's what you meant? LLMs will get better at making compelling snippets, if guided correctly.

  • Sure, but nothing I wrote above depends on trust. This seems like it could be an Econ 101 example of the profit motive increasing the total utility in the system. Hence why I said this has the potential to be win-win-win.

    I don't trust companies to pursue anything other than the profit motive but sometimes that can be a good thing.

  • The piece I don't understand from this idea is: who will pay for the investment in building the housing, then?

    Communal co-op housing is likely a better model, but it only works with government-subsidized low-interest-rate loans. Without those programs, who's going to put down the $500K it takes to build the home in the first place?

    Until our capitalist system changes, I don't know how to square that circle.

  • Essentially, there's four different things going on:

    1. The interest payment portion of the mortgage
    2. The principal payment portion of the mortgage
    3. The opportunity cost of capital invested in the downpayment and home equity (principal payments)
    4. Market exposure to rising/falling housing prices

    We can simplify it a bit by imagining a 0%-down, 0-principal-payment mortgage: if mortgage rates are 6% (for easy math), then every $100K of home value costs $6K/yr in interest, or $500/mo. So, at 6%, a "fair" rent on a $500K house is $2500/mo.

    What that means in reality is that with $100K invested in the down payment, the owner is paying $2000/mo in interest (with the rental money), and is "earning" $500/mo on their $100K investment. (Plus, on average, they are investing 1/360th of the $400K owed on the house in home equity through principal payments... greatly oversimplifying compound interest and amortization schedules).

    That $100K in the stock market could instead earn, on average, about 9% in equities, or ~$750/mo. That's the opportunity cost; instead of buying a rental property, the next best alternative is likely something like stocks.

    But the owner also gets exposure to the housing market, and could also earn a return on home appreciation.

    Now let's add the 5th component: damage, maintenance, vacancy, and "deadbeat" tenants. Owners also take on the risk that renters will not pay their rent, that they won't be able to find renters consistently, or that the home will be damaged. There are lots of horror stories of tenants doing $50K of damage in a year they only paid $20K in rent.

    Anyway, all that said, it's a lot more complicated than just "paying their mortgage for them". I don't know what it's like in your area, but in the market where I live, rental prices are not covering the full mortgage payments... but it still usually works out if housing prices continue to go up forever. Once that bubble bursts, a lot of rental property owners are going to be losing a lot of money—especially since home appreciation was their only profit in the first place!

    This comment so far ignored maintenance costs and land taxes, but they should probably add another $500/mo to both sides of this equation; it doesn't affect the rest of the analysis, though, since it should effectively be a wash between the owner and the renter.

  • I don't know. I can see it.

    The Subway near me is often very quiet, but at particular times, predictably every week, they're absolutely slammed. If they jacked all their prices by $1, then offered "off-hours discounts" of even $2, they'd probably see the same average price per sandwich, but shift customer demand to keep the restaurant more steady. They might even attract new customers who don't come during rush times because they're time sensitive, not price sensitive.

    In other words, this could be a win-win-win for everybody:

    Subway sees higher total revenue
    Price-sensitive customers can shift their orders to lull hours and save a bit of money
    Time-sensitive customers have lower wait times during lunch/dinner rush.

    Subway (and Wendy's, for that matter) already do this a bit with their coupons; I rarely go to Subway without coupons since I'm price sensitive. Switching from coupons to scheduled price fluctuations isn't really a big change, and keeps people paying less with coupons from gumming up the dinner rush.

    I think this could be good.

  • I liked this article, and I think a lot of the commenters here are missing that the general public is treating LLMs as AGI. I have a whole 5-10 minutes I spend on why this is when I present about LLMs.

    "The I in LLM stands for Intelligence" is a joke I read (and include in my presentation to hammer the point home). Laymen have no idea what AI or LLMs are, but they expect it to work similarly to human intelligence, since that's the only model they know, and are surprised to learn it doesn't work that way.

    Edit: Forgot what I came to the comments to post, before I read everyone else's complaints about this, lol.

    A small correction: the Air Canada example wasn't an LLM, it was just an old "dumb" chatbot that was likely sharing outdated policies.

  • I looked it up, and qBittorrent can easily handle hundreds of torrents, apparently. I haven't noticed any problems running 180-ish. I'll probably try to keep it capped to 300 or something like that.

  • As a newbie, I was rushing to figure out all the mechanics fast enough to unlock the greenhouse in year 1. It was a bit of a stressful optimization game trying to max out every single day.

    Since I unlocked it, cash is rolling in so fast I don't even know what to do with it anymore. I just hit Spring in t year 2 and it's really chill, now. I'm thinking of selling most of my animals since It's repetitive needing to pet them and make cheese/mayo every day. I might just cheat and get a couple auto-petters to make it even more relaxed...

  • If there are less than 5 seeds, then I keep seeding indefinitely. Above that, I'll consider deleting it to free up space once I'm done with the media.

    Unless it's from a private tracker, in which case I'll just seed everything forever to get the sweet bonus points.

  • The sexism and racism at the time was ridiculous. Jackson was, essentially, the victim in that situation, and Timberlake was mostly ignored. It seems most plausible that he was supposed to rip off just 1 later, not two; an easy mistake to make.

    Yet the director/publicist/team that planned the poorly-conceived stunt and the person who made the mistake weren't black women. (Or who knows behind the scenes, but they weren't known to be black women.)

    And here we are again with Taylor Swift getting hate for daring to be a successful woman and to endorse the person running against the "grab-her-by-the-pussy" misogynist. Ironic. And depressing.

  • I think it's fair to roll it out in stages. Big systems take time to change and implement.

    It also makes the most sense to start the roll out with commonly used drugs and lower-income families. Families earning $100K+ don't need immediate relief on drug costs, not the least of which because they likely already have private coverage from their employment.

    A single-payer system will obviously be the best and most efficient, but a 5-year roll out (or whatever) is totally reasonable. Big change takes time, and that's fine.