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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Sales taxes vary based on city, county, and state rates. They can also be waived if you, the buyer, have a reseller permit or are purchasing for a non profit.

    It’s not underhanded and is annoying for sellers too because they have to know a lot about sales taxes as well. They could show you the price with local taxes included but then most customers would think their prices are too high comparing to other merchants.

    So the price shown on the product in a store or online is only what the merchant is selling it for. The price at the register is what the merchant is selling it for plus the taxes they have to collect (unless you’re excluded for the reasons mentioned above).

    The tax is a buyer obligation, not a seller obligation but sellers have to be an intermediary. So buyers should be educated about the tax laws that apply to them (in this system).

    The receipt should be clearly marked so you know exactly how much went to the product and how much went to tax. You can itemize and deduct your sales taxes from your federal income taxes if you’re so inclined to track it (and it’s a better result than the standard deduction)

    It’s more complex than a VAT system but enables local jurisdictions to levy taxes to pay for various things applicable to their area.

    🤷‍♂️





  • UBI is probably a good idea but it’s coming too slowly for anyone to rely on. Even if UBI is fully implemented, I suspect it will be life sustaining but not a life fulfilling. So humanity still needs to find purpose.

    It’s hard to imagine a scenario where someone cannot be trained to do something new. Isn’t that a core feature of humans?

    Next, how shall we define value? I argue that humans can always create some kind of value that machines cannot, even if only because a human is involved.

    We still value actual art over AI generated art. We value uniqueness and rarity. We value the faults that are inherent from things that are natural and organic.

    Tons of the jobs people did a hundred years ago in developed countries are now gone or have been streamlined down to require fewer people. Yet there are more people on earth now than there ever have been before and arguably worldwide hunger is at its lowest point. So somehow we have figured out how to survive despite vast amounts of automation already. It seems unlikely that our new “AI” tools are going to somehow dramatically disrupt this balance.








  • Having electric stability issues this week in Bangkok - several 2-3 hour outages, which are too long for a UPS to cover the gap. I have several mid range but older PCs running docker, virtualbox, etc for various things including a postfix server for the family email, immich, QBittorrent, pihole, paperless, huly, postiz, a Minecraft bedrock server, a flightradar24 ads-b collector, and a variety of other homegrown projects.

    Thinking about getting some or most of this over to a service like hetzner, perhaps even splurging on a baremetal dedicated system.

    Recently I’ve been reading about/trying to learn qemu and proxmox, but don’t understand them yet. Is that where it’s at for managing a bunch of your own VMs? Or kubernetes/k8s?

    I’ve been a little out of the loop for a few years and of course coming back up to speed IT wise judge take weeks. Looking for recommendations on offloading my home stuff to a cloud that I control.




  • It seems like the most significant new feature is called anti-gravity which is kind of an allow list?

    We’ve had white lists for a long time so I’m not exactly sure how this will impact the system. That being said I read through the release notes and there are a lot of changes and improvements throughout the system, so congrats to them team on the 6 release.

    I’ve had pihole running on my home network for years and I love it.



  • Hah, I installed Postiz just yesterday, interesting to see this thread. It’s like buffer or one of the other paid tools to schedule your social media posts and track engagement. Of course, of particular interest to our community, Postiz is self hosted.

    It doesn’t have as many features yet as the major SaaS businesses, but the software is looking good and quite usable right now. I’m sure the more people who use it and support the developer, the more this tool can grow.

    For example you can plug in your OpenAI API key and get an LLM chat interface inside the software while writing social posts. But I don’t think it learns your style or creates posts using any kind of system prompt yet unless you type it in each time.

    Another thing I couldn’t figure out so far is how to limit which social media channels individual users can see. For example my business has several different units and there’s a different marketing team on each unit, so they shouldn’t be able to post into other channels.

    If you’re in the business of needing to post regularly on a lot of channels I think postiz is worth checking out.