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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • In his position as pope he has no state power, only spiritual, and in his position as monarch of the Vatican, well there’s only church employees living there and Italy has an eye on things. Generally speaking unless otherwise stated Italian law applies within the Vatican.

    Also he’s elected. Not that that means much it means that he’s a mouthpiece of the oligarchs (cardinals) electing him. But while we’re at elected monarchs, there’s one rather curious case: The French president is co-prince of Andorra, that is, their head of state, he shares that position with the local Bishop. Nearly 800 years ago the Andorrans said “yeah let’s not get invaded” and gave the title to the French head of state, then revolution happened, now the French are electing the Andorran head of state.



  • If you want a really advanced build system there’s shake, which can deal with things like building things that generates dependency information for things that build things. In a nutshell: It’s strictly more powerful than make because (a single invocation of) make operates on a fixed dependency graph while shake can discover dependencies as it goes.

    Mostly though you should use whatever comes with the language you’re using, and if you’re doing something simple use make. That includes “link a multi-language project where the components are generated by language-specific systems”. It notably doesn’t include multi-stage compiler builds. GHC switched from recursive make, which is a bad idea, to non-recursive make, which was… arcane, but at least you didn’t have to make clean to get a correct build, to shake. Here’s the build system it’s a whole project to itself.


  • For me, the context was surplus to drive prices down.

    Then you want to regulate the market such that there’s a surplus of ordinary apartments and a relative lack of luxury ones. People are free to furnish theirs more luxuriously, that’s not an imposition, but not having affordable ones would be. No need to get into fixing absolute prices all you need to control for is relative availability.

    The market is not a good in itself. It is a mechanism to attain good things. To do that, in the real world, to actually approach the free market ideal (perfect resource allocation by perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information) you have to enact regulations because, as we already discussed, both rich and poor folks alike are idiots: The rich invest in stuff based on hype, creating real estate bubbles, the poor tolerate 120 buck fridges even though they want 150 buck fridges.

    If the market goes down, many people lose their retirement provisions.

    Again we’re in /c/europe, here, not in the US. Also why should irrational investors deserve protection. “Socialism for the rich but not the poor”?

    There are not enough plots, in Germany the rent is capped but the building requirements don’t allow to reduce costs.

    Rent increases are capped. Not rents for new construction. Rents that the welfare system will pay are capped, not the ones on the open market.

    …and yes there are plots. There’s actually a shortage of construction capacity, not in the least because politics just won’t commit to firm targets, something that construction companies can work with, make sure they don’t overshoot when growing. They’d rather not go bankrupt so they only increase capacity conservatively.

    Change those, and capital will build more housing.

    There is no shortage of capital flowing into the market, there has never been a shortage during all of this. The issue that noone wants to, or can, pay the rents that those people demand. We’ve been over this. The same investment at a more moderate ROI expectation would’ve built everything we need multiple times over.

    There are enough laws in Germany that you cannot have a prefabricated house and build it everywhere without ajustments.

    Oh sure some municipalities will tell you that your roof needs to be at a certain angle. That’s peanuts compared to the overall costs and believe it or not, there’s generally a reason for those requirements – it may seem cultural but if you e.g. get a lot of snow you either want all snow to come down as fast as possible, or not at all. People weren’t stupid 500 years ago when everyone started to angle their roofs like that.

    Low tech high risers should bring rent down to a fraction but they are not allowed to be built.

    They’re absolutely allowed to be built, you can still build the same kind of housing stock as was done after the war during reconstruction.


    Lastly, beware of looking at all this in isolation: Getting rid of regulations that ensure that the city looks nice, is liveable, is walkable, that housing is healthy to live in, the whole shebang, would have untold macroeconomic costs down the line.



  • Twenty years ago, the media that kids had available for consumption was age rated.

    It was, still is, was ten years before, and trust me that didn’t stop me one bit.

    What’s different then and now is the degree of choice people employ in their media consumption. It’s not like there was no Nazi propaganda on the net in 1990, it’s that who the fuck seeks that stuff out. The feeds that were choice-free were, yes, sanitised (TV, radio, though if you stayed of long enough TV would show rather interesting things), but also numerous. Like at least seven TV channels over the air, and plenty of radio stations (though most played shoddy music). Imagine having seven tiktok feeds you can’t fast-forward but switch in between. On current algorithmic platforms, you skip something, get shown the next thing, algorithm learns about you, about how to draw its hooks specifically into you. Back in the days, you couldn’t skip, switched away, and if there was only uninteresting stuff on the other channels you switched off. Internet? Age of web rings, search barely even existed. Anyone remember altavista?

    I roamed the library, inhaled multiple series of books whole-sale, but in between, there was always this magic moment: Browsing. Looking at things, shaking them a bit, see if they’re actually interesting. Great availability of things, yes, but also limited time, and preferences, so you got picky.

    That’s the skill that’s getting lost: People are outsourcing their consumption choices to algorithms. Worse, ones who care about nothing but retention, how can they keep you hooked so you watch more ads.

    …which btw ties back into youth protection. Ratings etc. exist but the general consensus in youth psychology is that as soon as youth seeks something out by themselves, they’re ready to consume it. Ratings are there so that kids don’t stumble across things inadvertently, not so that they are completely unable to consume it. A hoop to jump through, maybe some secrecy, all that is a proper framework, “they think it’s not for me, I think otherwise”, puts the mind in the right inquisitive-but-cautious frame. That, however, presumes a choice algorithm that’s running in your head, and not in the cloud.

    And meanwhile, “media literacy” is understood as “spotting fake information”. BS. Any information will become true to anyone if you allow it to be fed to you without getting your own agency involved. The question is less “are kids able to sniff out BS” – they by and large are. The question is whether they have the power to say “I choose not to continue down this path”, whether they have trained that muscle. Because without that no amount of skill in spotting bullshit will save you.


  • Because we have a market economy. We can switch to planning, but that has its own disadvantages

    Planned economy is not when there are regulations.

    They should not. It’s market manipulation that we don’t have enough apartments.

    “Manipulation” implies intent to achieve that state of affairs, and, no, that wasn’t the goal of capital. Capital wanted ROI and looked for it in the wrong place.

    With different zoning laws or more plots to built, there would be enough apartments.

    In the US, yes. Europe by and large doesn’t have such inane laws.

    In which way? Why are those apartments not on the open market?

    The syndicate – did you read the link I gave you – specifically works towards removing properties from the market, get all control into the hands of the tenants. Rents pay for the mortgage, that’s it, no middleman, and the legal structure ensures that tenants can’t band up and cash out like many a cooperative did.

    That’s also why people shouldn’t be forced to be rational. The Sovjet Union was forcing people to be rational but people weren’t happy.

    The fuck has the USSR to do with anything we’re talking about. Also why are you calling tankies rational go to lemmygrad if you like them so much.



  • No, nope they wouldn’t. Generally speaking when I explain why something posted here is AI, I get upvoted, when I explain why something is unlikely to be AI, I get at best controversial votes, while next to me a post with the equivalent of “I can tell by the pixels” is getting upvoted. It’s very rare for someone to chime in and actually discuss the case in an exploratory manner.

    There’s already plenty of drama within the artist community over false AI allegations. Accusations from people who should know better than accuse someone of using AI because “the shading is too good while the hands are too bad”. Why the hell would lemmy be better at this than artist twitter.

    Here’s a quick intro on how to spot AI art, and, crucially, how not to.


  • AI has no concept of the technical concepts behind art, which is a skill people appreciate in terms of “quality,” and it lacks “intent.” Art is made for the fun of it, but also with an intrinsic purpose that AI can’t replicate.

    I generally agree with you, AI can’t create art specifically because it lacks intent, but: The person wielding the AI can very much have intent. The reason so much AI stuff is slop is the same reason that most photographs are slop: The human using the machine doesn’t care to and/or does not have the artistic wherewithal to elevate the product to the level of art.

    Is this at the level of the artstation or deviantart feeds? Hell no. But calling it all bad, all slop, because it happens to be AI doesn’t give the people behind it justice.

    (Also that’s the civitai.green feed sorted by most reactions, not the civitai.com feed sorted by newest. Mindless deluge of dicks and tits, tits and dicks, that one).

    AI is replicating the art in its training set

    That’s a bit reductive: It very much is able of abstracting over concepts and of banging them against each other. Interesting things are found at the fringes, at the intersections, not on the well-trodden paths. An artist will immediately spot that and try to push a model to its breaking point, ideally multiple breaking points simultaneously, but for that the stars have to align: The user has to be a) an artist and b) willing to use AI. Or at least give it a honest spin.


  • A surplus in supply would threaten them with an infinite time to wait for their target ROI.

    Dindingding winner winner chicken dinner. That’s exactly what’s happening. Question still being why such stuff should be allowed in the first place, why should ordinary folks have trouble getting apartments just so that some rich fucks can try to make profit.

    Fiat currency. Public banks can hand out credits to whomever wants to build with a solid calculation.

    You can’t just print money because inflation. That said, yes, public banks are absolutely able and willing and happy to invest in housing projects. It’s how e.g. these folks get much of their money. Things get difficult though when there’s speculators throwing money around, artificially increasing property, land, and construction prices. Public and cooperative banks are generally happy if your project earns enough rent to finance their fixed-term deposit rates but with inflated costs earning that rate means inflating rents and then you again might be out of people who can afford it.

    Side note the mortgages on multiple flat type properties don’t tend to get paid down, ever: By the time the mortgage matured it’s time to renovate the thing, and you roll it over into a new one. Still the rent prices you can achieve with that are nothing like you see on the open market.

    I want to live in a society where people choose the solid products on their own. Everything else calls for trouble down the line.

    It is irrational to expect rational behaviour from people.

    I don’t undderstand that.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window


  • If demand is so big, of course only housing with the highest margins is developed, which is the luxery market.

    BS. There’s no market for overpriced accommodation which developers finally understood so they’re dialling it down. Took them long enough.

    If there would be a surplus to the point that the speculative capital doesn’t find a buyer when selling, prices would be much lower.

    It’s not about not finding a buyer. It’s about finding a buyer that meets their ROI demands, otherwise they’re happy to just let properties sit idle. That’s the “speculation” part.

    Again, the solution is regulation in the form of taxing vacant property. Can’t find a tenant, you say? City will be happy to provide you with one, straight off the top of the waiting list for social housing. Not the price range you want to rent for? Well, then you can pay taxes until you think otherwise.

    In the end, money is power. If you don’t want all the power to end up with whoever happens to have money you gotta stomp people with money at some point or the other. When they whine, tell them they should become better business people, not invest in such stupid schemes as trying to turn a working class neighbourhood into accommodation for billionaires.

    This should take cheap Chinese brands off the market that don’t have a support network in Europe.

    Turkish, more like, China isn’t really in the market here and Beko rules the low end. Still, two years warranty instead of the one year that’s the legal minimum.

    And honestly, 120 Euro fridges turning into 150 Euros fridges would be a good thing. Building things in a solid way is a different thing than blinging it out: Don’t push designers to get rid of the fourth bolt for the attachment plate, don’t save fifty cents by buying cheap lubricant, penny pinching is a disease. May increase GDP in the broken window way but who the hell wants that.



  • “Anarchism is when there’s no sound emission regulations for tailpipes” is literally a lib take.

    Where ACAB, on a personal level, comes into play in Schleswig-Holstein (or, well, came, laws have changed) is getting your weed impounded and then somehow no letter from the state attorney ever arrives, informing you they’re not going to prosecute because “minor amount”. The dreaded letter from the driving license authority, accusing you of being unfit to drive because of having an “addiction personality”? Not there, either. One may just come to the conclusion that that bastard of a cop didn’t file paperwork and opted to smoke your weed instead.

    Sure, they also do stuff like enforcing court orders to throw someone out of an apartment for not paying rent – and into the hands of the Ordnungsamt to assign a shelter place and gently kick them towards social services. But a) they didn’t write those laws, b) it’s probably not their favourite part of the job and c) the Ordnungsamt is cops, too. Municipal, ununiformed, and unarmed, but still cops. ACAB in that sense has no more power to judge individuals than “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism”. That is: All cops are bastards but yes so are the rest of us.


  • Manufacturers are not off the hook. If they are not reliable then the expected runtime is low and their monthly payments go up.

    If you’re a manufacturer and you’re not sure whether your product can last 10 years then you’re free to contact an insurer and hash something out with them. Still, the buck stops with the manufacturer everything else is pointless bureaucracy. Shit broke? Manufacturer is on the hook, replace it. Simple as that. Not “customer now has to deal with a bank and the manufacturer and a rating agency”.

    However we should prepare ourselves to prevent the appliance market to become like the housing market.

    I don’t see much speculative capital flowing into home appliance rentals and turning regular home appliance rentals into short-term high-profit rentals.

    There’s not even an oversupply of luxury appliances at the expense of reasonably-priced ones.

    Quite literally nothing about the housing market issue has anything to do with what’s going on on the home appliance one, or with overregulation. Sure, in places there’s regulations to re-think or even straight abolish, e.g. parking minimums, but generally building codes don’t make stuff more expensive. Least of all on a macroeconomic level. The issue, for a long time, were ROI expectations of investors. It’s a general problem in the economy: Too many rich fucks with too much money, not knowing what to do with it, where to invest it, but still wanting their 8% because… why. They’re already filthily rich. I totally get a starving artist rent-seeking, “then I can let go of my day job and focus on my art”, but a billionaire? Get the fuck out of here.