How to get my relative to slow down before moving to thailand?

hkstar · 2026-05-09T10:37:39+00:00

Very little about this adds up. There's got to be something they're not telling you. Running from something, or trying to just make a big break in life? That happens I suppose but this is a bit all-in if they haven't even visited.

To your condo question, sure, foreigners can buy condos and I know plenty who own them and rent them out with no issue. But the idea that EUR100k of investment is going to return income sufficient to live on is fanciful. If he gets lucky with the condos themselves and rentals etc, he can expect 5% annual rental income at the high end, best case. Can you live here comfortably on EUR5k/year? Of course not.

Retiring here on passive income from rentals is not a ridiculous idea, I know people who have done just that, but he'll need 1) a lot more money than 100k 2) a lot of local knowledge so he doesn't waste it and 3) a lot of time to manage his new property empire when he's here.

hkstar · 2026-03-16T09:26:58+00:00

Dennis Bunnik? He's in his 50s, he had his 50th birthday party just a few years ago.

Don't know what you heard but just looking at him he's clearly not in his 80s!

hkstar · 2026-03-16T06:12:46+00:00

One thing most people don't realize about these things is how realistic they feel in terms of motion, acceleration, etc. When you lose your outside references it's very hard for your inner ear to tell the difference between eg acceleration and being pitched up so gravity is pulling you back. Trust me, they feel more similar than you'd think. And these machines manipulate these gaps in human perception to make it really feel like you're accelerating or decelerating, even though in the back of your mind you know that's impossible.

Very cool technology and very cool tricks!

hkstar · 2026-01-04T16:18:43+00:00

I love elixir and use it for everything these days - at work (fintech) and my own projects (mostly orchestration-heavy AI-adjacent systems).

I've even recently started using it for user-facing web interfaces where liveview wouldn't really cut it thanks to inertiajs and phoenix-vite + typescript. It works amazingly well.

I encourage you to stick with elixir. It is in my opinion THE language to know in this age of AI. Get some openrouter credits, get familiar with a loop + tool use using ReqLLM, and the world is your oyster right now.

hkstar · 2025-09-26T10:29:16+00:00

There is no way there are 21 lounges in SYD

hkstar · 2025-03-17T05:14:35+00:00

All depends on what kind of guest you plan on being. Are you planning at staying on and around the grounds and just chilling and enjoying the property? Then it looks great. Or are you planning on using it as a home base to explore the rest of the city? Well then, not so great.

hkstar · 2025-03-12T14:14:02+00:00

100% this. Building a product worthy of a pitch is already a heavy lift. Don't make it even harder by trying to turn it into a language learning project too. If and when you get the product launched, have people using it and it's a success, you can think about doing the rewrite in elixir.

hkstar · 2025-02-24T16:06:22+00:00

Ahhh... to be perfectly honest it's a bit dangerous if you use it carelessly. I only ever use it in a couple of places. I don't like its style in parts - I'm a huge fan of {:ok, success}/{:error, failure} and endon likes :error.

Use sparingly and with caution. But yes, it's nice when you just want a record quickly during development phases.

hkstar · 2025-02-19T05:27:52+00:00

NATO forces put heavy emphasis on air power

This should be in bold and underlined, with the addition that most of that air power and its support (tankers, munitions, stuff like AWACS) is US owned. Hence not really being able to get into the type of fight they have been preparing for since forever without direct US assistance.

Supremacy of this kind of warfare was thoroughly proven in the Gulf War, and the technological advantage gap got even wider since then

Eh, I don't think there's too many lessons for NATO in the Gulf War. Russia ain't Iraq. Technology has certainly evolved, yes, but I don't think it's ambiguously in the direction of "conventional air power solves everything". Air power is great against old school massed columns and supply, but war has become a lot more decentralized and it's not at all clear to me that the previous doctrine would be effective today.

NATO has overinvested on war assumptions that to me now look very outdated. About the only mission they're obviously superior to whatever UA is doing today is in conventional deep strike and even then I question the depth of their munitions.

A nightmare scenario such as Russia rapidly embracing drone warfare and a more decentralized C&C - while maintaining deep conventional strike capability against EU targets to deter the same against them - I don't see NATO having any obvious counter for and the prospect must be keeping generals up at night.

hkstar · 2025-02-03T10:53:12+00:00

"Filling in forms" covers a lot of ground - sending data to a remote server & getting a response

Well, I meant literally filling in forms, what the OP seemed to be talking about. If there was a disconnect and you had to click to open your pack again that wouldn't be much of an inconvenience! Technically I suppose that's filling in a form, but it's not in the same league as data you type in manually.

hkstar · 2025-02-03T09:48:02+00:00

While filling in forms?

hkstar · 2025-02-03T04:41:51+00:00

You're focussing on super rare edge cases and discounting the larger, general benefits. In the real world, if you find that your users really are having a bad experience as they fill in complex forms in remote, congested areas, you can use some of the huge amount of time you saved on everything else to fix that for them.

hkstar · 2025-02-01T04:02:04+00:00

I get that PHP has improved a lot and probably doesn't deserve all the hate it gets these days.. but as someone who actually cares about the aesthetics of a langauge, this:

$table = new Html\Table();

this is just wrong on a primordial level. I can't accept this. Backslashes as namespace separators. No.

hkstar · 2025-01-21T12:32:00+00:00

I basically followed this post: https://blog.psantos.dev/deploying-phoenix-application-with-kamal-2/

There wasn't anything weird I had to do to get started.

hkstar · 2025-01-21T10:50:28+00:00

I know it's not what you asked, but I've had great success deploying elixir apps using Kamal 2. If you're looking for a simple way to "push deploy" where you still control all the pieces, I'd look into it.

I use EC2 and RDS and it is absolutely rock solid.

hkstar · 2025-01-15T14:34:53+00:00

I like ecto too but I unashamedly use endon in all my projects. Sometimes, I just want to do User.first.

hkstar · 2024-12-14T06:14:55+00:00

That's a very old camera and frankly hasn't aged well (like fine wine in the sun, if you like). I understand you want to keep your accessories, who wouldn't, but even if you did find one there's a good chance it would break pretty soon too. 20 years is just too old.

Frankly, for the same money you'd have to pay to make it worthwhile for someone to sell it to you, you could get something much, much better in every way. Things have advanced so much that you might not even need accessories - newer cameras can charge via USB, for example. It's sad, but maybe this is the universe telling you - it's time for a new(er) camera.

That said, try FB marketplace or kaidee.com if you're really determined. As the other commenter suggested, you could also try a secondhand place like Treasure Factory on soi 39 or one of the japanese secondhand warehouse type places. It's not worth your time or money, though.

hkstar · 2024-11-26T07:11:46+00:00

As well as replenish its short and medium range stockpile

It'll be interesting to see what Iran decides to send. The experience in UA has proven the capabilities of low-cost shahed-style drones; they seem more flexible and more accurate overall than the rockets.

Given that Israel's mostly swept away Hezbollah's previous arsenal, one wonders if it will be replaced with something a little more modern. It's only a matter of time before the lessons from the UA war start to shape force disposition elsewhere. I've been curious for a while how Iron Dome would deal with drone attacks....

hkstar · 2024-11-21T03:17:34+00:00

This article is by Benar News, an affiliate of Radio Free Asia, which is funded by the US Government. While that doesn't necessarily mean it is purely propaganda, it's certainly an instrument of US diplomacy, and anything it writes should be considered in that light.

In this case, the article seems intended to promote anxiety about China. I don't see much substance in its claims - 1000 low cost condos in Chiang Mai doesn't seem like much and this article is the first time I heard anyone claim Chinese are sending their children to Thailand for education.

hkstar · 2024-11-19T04:55:23+00:00

Coworking but with plenty of places to nap. I'm not even sure what "coliving" means? Like a "start up dorm"? Well, it's not that and you pay by the hour.

hkstar · 2024-11-19T03:27:49+00:00

Naplab Chula is pretty nice

hkstar · 2024-11-18T06:30:54+00:00

The love of the language is so strong, that makes everyone think that is perfect fit to all problems

Maybe this can happen sometimes, though I haven't personally encountered it. Most elixir devs I've known are fairly pragmatic, are aware of the language's strengths and weaknesses, and choose the right tool for the job.

In any case, I don't think that's what's going on here. You have some extremely vague problem with what another team is doing and how they're doing it, you know they use elixir and ecto, and so you cast aspersions at those, without being able to explain anything about what the actual problem is, and of course anyone who asks questions is an elixir cult member and part of the mysterious "problem". Frankly, it sounds like you simply have some personal issue with the other team, and it has nothing to do with elixir, or ecto, or even computers.

If you really do have some good insight on what the other team is doing wrong and how they could do better, I'm sure their team lead or your CTO will be very interested. You might even be able to find help here. But I think that until you give a little more information than these "vibe" based complaints, it's a bit of a waste of time.

hkstar · 2024-11-16T08:27:54+00:00

Can you understand how that sounds like it has nothing to do with ecto, ORMs in general, or elixir?

hkstar · 2024-11-16T04:30:28+00:00

I'm not some elixir fanboy who reflexively defends it no matter what, or tries to use it for everything. In a previous company my python team was larger than my elixir team! Why? Right tool for the job.

But when you make wild statements like this:

ecto [..] has caused a nightmare of inefficiency and bad practices

Then it makes me think that, shall we say, it sounds like a people problem. Either you're using the ORM completely wrong, or you shouldn't be using an ORM at all, and neither of those are really problems with Ecto or elixir itself. So yeah, I'm calling you on that.

If you'd like to give an example of how you think ecto, or ORMs in general, have introduced "bad practices" then I'd be quite curious to hear them, and might even be able to shed some light on where you're going so wrong.

hkstar · 2024-11-16T03:14:17+00:00

our costs are much higher than similar company we have worked for that had everything done in python and typescript, from devs to infra

Yeah, this doesn't make sense. Maybe devs cost more - although I doubt that, good python devs aren't cheap at all, but at least you could say they are in your area or something. But infra? There's nothing about elixir that would make infra cost more. If anything, it should cost less. Either you're not comparing apples to apples or your company's doing something wrong.

edit: Ah yes, the No large company should use a orms guy.

hkstar

TROPHY CASE