I’m just a guy, my dudes.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Gross, awful, terrible. Buuuuuut…

    Hard to swallow pill: This will probably get tweaked and eventually be very successful. Most people do not like or know how to mess with settings on their phones. You, on this website, are probably an exception but deep inside you know that. How many friends and family members have you had to explain how to change something on their phones? How many have you noticed that NEED to change something on their phones but didn’t even know it, much less think to ask? Now think of all the people whose phones you’ve never even seen.

    Of course I’d love to see it go the way of touchscreens in cars where consumers reject it, but I just don’t see it. Assuming they can get it to where it does the 5 or 10 tasks the average user would want to do, this will probably be the new norm moving foward. Don’t believe me? Look at modern macs or windows and how many settings they hide.





  • Hear hear! The government should completely get out of marriage and leave it to religion, or completely go in on encouraging marriage (actually domestic partnerships) between whoever if we think it’s going to be good for communities. Before Obergefell I would’ve said marriage is old, let religions have it. Encouraging people to take part in their community, have close ties with benefits like hospital visitation, tax breaks, etc should all be domestic partnership based, and we should’ve made everyone get domestic partnered - marriage should have conferred no civic benefits. As is, we have a weird hybrid religious and civic thing called marriage but at least everyone has access now.

    But yeah as far as encouraging families we should do the same incentive wise with having kids and immigration to help with our birth rate problems, and continue trying to make home ownership more affordable (and more varied - looking at you missing middle housing) and encouraging it to again, incentivize investing in local communities. Civic policy like this stuff gets jumbled and we should be more clear about what we want to incentivize and why.


  • I am shocked I had to scroll this far to find someone saying this stuff exists. Literally look around on Lemmy, check the comment section of the Washington Post, like half of TikTok, a huge portion of twitter, etc. All of it full of angry radical liberals, actual communists, people crying for guillotines, deriding uneducated hicks and rednecks. Mocking all christians instead of just the fundamentalists, constantly deriding white men for existing, even just dumb infantile names (e.g. Repug-licans). Literally last night at my local college, some portion of protestors started calling for lynching college administrators. Now I’m not saying pro-palestinian protests are full of those people, just like the average liberal would be pretty ok with universal healthcare but miiiight not favor seizing the means of production or banning landlords. But even though these people are a minority, they’re just like the crazy right wingers - they are loud, and paint with the same wide brush that hardcore conservatives do, just using a different color.

    And I want to be clear, this isn’t some enlightened centrism bullshit where I’m saying “both sides suck.” I am actually very, very left wing (though on Lemmy sometimes it seems like that makes me a moderate because I’m not calling for guillotining the rich, but I digress), and I probably agree with 90% of the angry people’s actual policy views. But at least anger and vitriol wise, and even a tiny portion of radical policy-wise, the fringe of “both sides” do kind of suck. Not everyone who is angry fits that profile (certainly I get angry thinking about climate change, but I’m not out there telling everyone who drives a truck they’re evil). But many people like that absolutely exist, and OP not seeing them likely is a result of our fractured echo chamber world, certainly not because they aren’t there and angry.


  • YAML might be more readable than JSON, but it’s absolutely not easier to work with, either to write from scratch or troubleshoot. And honestly, for my purposes that doesn’t even make it easier to read. It’s easier to read if I’m showing it to my wife because there are fewer semicolons. As soon as you want to do anything with the information you’ve read, it’s garbage. YAML sucks, and I’ll just link to a much better rant than I can ever come up with: https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

    Second off, if you’d been using Zwave in Home Assistant for many years, you’d know they’ve changed their integration (no wait! It’s an add-on now! No wait, it’s also an integration still too!) multiple times, including breaking changes. That’s what I’m talking about. Of course I know Zwave is a protocol - it’s a protocol that Hubitat supports better. They also support Zigbee better (yes I use both). Admittedly part of that is built in hardware, but also it’s a better UI, a consistent UI, and not just… changing how things work so old hardware doesn’t work anymore.

    I dunno man, we can disagree on HA’s choices but maybe make sure you even know what you’re talking about before being a dick for no reason. Then again, you opened with being a dick about me being the problem because I “can’t grasp YAML” when I said I don’t like it so I don’t even know why I’m engaging. Just piss off.


  • drphungky@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe little smart home platform that could
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    8 months ago

    I’d argue it’s a bear and I still use it. YAML is just fucking awful and I’m glad they’ve been hiding it more and more over the years but it’s still there. Zwave is still wildly confusing compared to something like a Hubitat which is just plug and play (guess who has to just rebuild his Zwave stuff from scratch). It’s also insanely organized where add ons are different than integrations, and are hidden in different menus, as are system functions and just… It’s a mess from UX POV. It’s also a nightmare to try to interact with the codebase or documentation or even ask questions, much less make a suggestion. As an aside to address the point of the article, I have absolutely zero worry that they will ever forget about power users, because I, and many other power users who have interacted with Paulus on boards before agree he is kind of an asshole who absolutely does not understand why anyone would want to do anything different than how he imagines it - including documentation or UX or whatever. Home Assistant is totally safe for power users.

    Now of course I’m not trying to say it’s bad, just that it is kind of a bear even for the tech savvy. You can’t beat HA for being able to interface with absolutely anything. There’s almost always already an integration written. It can do anything, and if you’re persistent enough you can kludge together a solution that works in exactly the way you need. You might even be able to hide all the kludge from your spouse. It’s also all free, because Paulus and a hundred other devs contribute their time for free and they’re amazing for it. Absolutely awesome for power users. But being simple or easy just isn’t one of its many, many pros.




  • In my experience, at first managing is always harder than doing it yourself, because you’re usually put in charge of managing people who do what you used to do.

    Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve had to do something at work, but you were hamstrung by your tools or timelines? Like, oh man this would be way easier in Python but you are only approved for MS office, so you have to struggle through some VBA. Or man, I could whip this together super fast in Ruby but for some reason this has to be in plain JavaScript. Or maybe you could make this really well, but not in the two day turnaround they need. All that is frustrating, but you usually find a way to perform given these imperfect scenarios.

    Now, imagine VBA has feelings. You can’t even really complain about VBA, because it’s not malicious. It’s just bad at its job. So now instead of quickly coding a workaround in a new language (but you learn fast so not the end of the world), you have to help someone get there and do it on their own. And you can’t just do it for them because you have 4 VBAs. Oh, and by the way, JavaScript is malicious. It’s actively trying to avoid work, or maybe trying to make VBA look bad. So now you have to convince JavaScript that it’s in its best interest to work. Sometimes its a carrot, sometimes a stick, but you’re responsible for getting functionality out, and it’s more functionality than you could possibly create on your own.

    That’s what managing people is like. A deep desire to do it yourself because it will be better and faster, but you don’t have time, and also you need these people to be better. So you have to learn to teach instead of do, and support emotionally and intellectually and motivate instead of just bitching to your manager when someone else isn’t getting their work done and it’s affecting your work - now you’re responsible for getting their work to be good. It’s really hard, and some people who were amazing achievers and doers can’t hack it when they have to help other people achieve and do. It’s why you have so many bad manager stories. The skillsets are nearly completely different.

    The nice part though is when you get good enough at managing that you start managing people that do things you can’t do, or do things better than you ever could. Suddenly there’s some whiz kid straight out of college who knows more about data science from their degree than you did your whole career actuallydoing it, and all they really need help with is applying it. Then you start helping with vision and the “why” of things. “Yes, you could do it that way, but remember our actual end goal is X, so that’s all we really care about.” Or you help people work together to make a cohesive whole. That’s when managing gets really rewarding. It can still be harder than doing, or it might be easier if you’re a big picture thinker, but it gets different eventually.



  • The problem with that is there is a very clear policy purpose and interest in making housing an investment - the vast vast majority of people will eventually own a home, and it is a forced savings vehicle because people are REALLY bad at saving for retirement. Even if you fix our lack of a social safety net, home ownership is generally seen as a public good because it encourages people investing more in and caring about their community, being willing to pay higher taxes to support more services, etc. It’s not a no brainer to make housing an investment (there are arguments against in a society with a good social safety net), but it is very purposeful through good public policy. It has little to do with the recent (very recent, relatively) buying up of single family homes by investment banks, etc, despite people implying all the time it’s some secret cabal and shadowy wealthy figures doing it for their own benefit. Everyone sees conspiracies everywhere these days.

    Of course, if we’re going to say that home ownership is “good” and keep doing all the tax incentives for it, we do need to stop corporations speculating and driving up housing costs, and could do so by some targeted taxes on unoccupied properties in the same portfolio. But there’s an argument to be made that that’s a relatively small portion of the problem, since a lot of our housing stock issues can be traced back to single family zoning issues, as well as road and highway funding leading to suburban sprawl and unaffordable newly developed subdivisions while cheaper starter homes don’t exist anymore…but either way affordable housing stock just hasn’t kept up.


  • Wealth tax is a terrible idea. People think it will solve the problem with billionaires taking out loans collateralized with their stock and not paying income tax, but the solution for that is far simpler - just treat loans as income. You can even add an exception for an owner occupied mortgage if you want to keep encouraging forced savings into property. We have existing solutions that don’t have the massive disincentives a wealth tax would create.

    A wealth tax actually discourages investment through stocks, which is what keeps the economy moving (and before anyone says publicly traded companies thinking about short term profits is destructive, that’s a separate, but serious, issue). Worse, it discourages savings of any kind. The problem with saying “oh we’ll just start it only a billion dollars” or whatever is that allows for later expansion of the tax to 100 millionaires, 20 million, and boom suddenly you’re taxing people with 5 million dollars which is what you’d expect a middle class elderly couple from a high cost of living area to have squirreled away for retirement. And if you don’t think that would happen, you should look at the history of the income tax - because that’s exactly what happened.

    Also, a wealth tax is really hard to enforce, and would require a huge increase to the administrative state that itself would create a need for more taxes. That’s not inherently a problem (obviously we have legions of IRS agents, etc) but we already have that infrastructure set up for income taxes and are just underutilizing it. Take how many lawsuits and hearings we already have JUST with tax assessors for property, and then try adding that to cars, boats, art, luxury clothes, appliances, privately held companies, anywhere you can hide money or that has a questionable value. It’s a boondoggle we don’t need to mess with when all we have to do is just reclassify collateralized debt as income because it is functionally the same as selling something.

    I like taxes. I even like my high taxes because I know they pay for good services since I live in a blue state. But a wealth tax is a bad idea when we already have income taxes and can add VAT taxes for luxury goods.