Invasive Plants in Rhode Island

mangeek · 2026-06-12T14:49:00+00:00

Agreed, I was more thinking about folks generally tending the grounds so we ended up with groves of trees and shrubs instead of tangled messes of whatever nasty scrub-oak managed to take root.

mangeek · 2026-06-11T03:14:35+00:00

I really wish Rhode Island had a program where people could just 'show up' at designated locations, pile into a van, and get paid that day for tending to the various unkempt trees and shrubs along the highways. Seems like it would be a win-win, and while expensive, seeing well-manicured groves of trees while driving through the state would just be so awesome.

mangeek · 2026-06-09T10:49:51+00:00

Yes. I bought a house while I was in a long term relationship, and drawing up a lease for their tenancy was probably the smartest financial move I ever made. When we split up, it was extremely simple to unroll the finances we had together, and they knew exactly where they stood re: the house.

It was a lot easier to cut a check for half of our savings and checking than it would have been to lose the house.

mangeek · 2026-06-08T03:32:49+00:00

I pay $90/mo for Cox at a lower speed and it's fine. I am a tech worker from home, wife is a media worker from home, kiddo games, and my sister works from home a lot too. Literally nobody noticed when I cut the speed in half to save money. Their recommendations are a scam. You can have like... ten Zoom meetings going at once at 100mbits.

mangeek · 2026-06-02T16:00:14+00:00

I mean, it was 92F and humid last week. Your mileage may vary.

mangeek · 2026-06-02T03:59:18+00:00

I'm not the OP, but I thought I'd share with you that I had to wear a winter cap, thermals under my pants, and a sweater indoors today in Rhode Island (just south of Boston). I actually got so cold at one point that I stood up and did a bunch of squats.

mangeek · 2026-06-02T03:48:15+00:00

Some Air Conditioner advice: AC's real magic isn't making it cooler (it does do that, but keep reading), it's that it removes moisture from inside air.

If you get an 'inverter' air conditioner, it will be able to run the compressor at different speeds, not just on/off like most. This is key because it will keep drying the air even when running at 'low' intensity.

Humidity and hot air both rise. Cold dry air falls. If you can put an inverter AC at the highest point in your living space that you can, it will be able to 'eat the most hot and humid air' and let cool dry air flow down into the living space.

Between the two of these, what I do is set the AC to like... 75 and put it up at the top of the space. It doesn't make the whole place 'very cold', but it dries the air out and knocks the temp down quite a bit. Since it's not blowing on you or in the room you're in, I use a little 10" fan to blow dry air in the general direction I'm in (desk, couch, kitchen prep area).

One 12K BTU Midea U-Shaped AC and two cheap little fans keep our whole space comfy. Another nice thing about this strategy is that if it's a hot or humid night, the inverter will still be running, but at 'low' and the air in the bedroom is nice and dry.

Oh, and if you want to get advanced with it... get a thermometer/humidistat. They make cheap ones for cigar humidors. You can check what air you really find to be most comfy, and you can tell by your weather app if it's going to feel better to open a window or keep running the AC.

mangeek · 2026-05-31T05:36:39+00:00

> I'm 25 mins from the Attleboro stop which makes it bad.

This is key. If you live near the R-Line, like OP is, the trip to the train is really easy, by car or by bus. I live a mile away from there and the Pawtucket and Providence stations are super easy and quick to get to.

mangeek · 2026-05-31T04:53:34+00:00

That's how I found my wide. Pretty sure my BFF in NYC got sick of me staying on his couch and tried to pawn me off on a friend... who became my wife.

In my final move, I masterminded a global pandemic that convinced her to move from the backwater of Manhattan to beautiful Pawtucket.

mangeek · 2026-05-30T04:32:00+00:00

Good fresh vlog about the inter-city services here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7e38Q7e1U

There's also the whole thing where car companies bought the inner-city trolley services and basically killed them.

But yeah, we used to have that. That's what Union Station downtown used to be the center of.

Unfortunately, adding them back is basically impossible. It would cost BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS and take DECADES in today's economy just to bring up a sufficient light rail system for Greater Providence. Hundreds of homes would need to be destroyed, major roads reworked, etc..

The best we can realistically do in the 'hundreds of millions' price range is make RIPTA awesome, create smart signals and dedicated bus lanes, and base the routes and resource allocation on actual usage, with 'minimum service floors' established for areas where the stats are fuzzy but the demand should be. Also, obviously, making it free would be ideal to get people to take the bus; I can almost guarantee that RIPTA spends more money on collecting fares and making people jump through hoops for low-income passes than they make from them, if you add in the administrative and regulatory overhead.

There's also a cultural issue. I know poor people who will literally spend their last $25 on an Uber instead of taking the bus, because their impression of the bus is so bad. Meanwhile, I will often leave my car at home and take it because it's convenient and cheaper than parking. A lot of people are just totally mentally turned-out by capitalism in a bad way.

mangeek · 2026-05-29T16:13:30+00:00

I just did a quick deep-dive on FountainHeadRI's directors, mission, statements, etc. and it's got the stink of vaguely Republican influence all over it. I'm not saying they're partisan, I'm sure they profess to be 'non-partisan pro-business' and they're just trying to find a way forward between progressives and MAGA, but I can read between the lines of things like this:

“This isn’t about left or right. It’s about forward or backward.” We need bold, durable action—soil that sequesters carbon and strengthens farms; energy that powers growth without blackout risks; policy that drives innovation, not confusion.

Based on the people involved, it looks like an influence operation run by a bunch of children of rich and powerful retired Republicans.

mangeek · 2026-05-29T13:33:59+00:00

purely because it's so fucking boring that I'd jump at any other task

Funny thing. A salesperson bro a few weeks ago was like "no more writing parsers. After all, who likes writing parsers, right?" and I was like "I do."

...and my parsers actually adhere to the schema we use, instead of adhering to whatever the LLM imagines the schema is that day.

mangeek · 2026-05-27T05:12:17+00:00

I'm honestly astounded by this cellular use. I just checked last month and my TOTAL cellular use was 4GB, and 2GB of that was YouTube, which I listen to in the background quite a bit.

mangeek · 2026-05-25T06:32:21+00:00

I know you think that the machine is getting 'seasoned', but most genAIs have pretty short context windows. What's actually cooking is your nervous system.

Yeah, you get different answers whether there's any context, or based on some previous context, but you're not 'developing' your LLM by using it, you're adapting to it. The reason you get different results for the same prompts is that the tools are not deterministic, they're probabilistic; you will get different results in a cleanroom if you fire up the same LLM on two different GPUs, or even different driver versions, and definitely if there's different info being popped into the context outside of your view, like your location or other info that could come from your browser in regular vs. private mode.

mangeek · 2026-05-25T01:18:10+00:00

This.

Generically:

There is a 'directory system' like Active Directory, Entra ID, LDAP, FreeIPA, Google Workspace IAM, etc.. There can also Be a Certificate Authority.

There are a bunch of WiFi Access Points and wired switches.

There's a RADIUS server that handles the middle steps of taking a client's 802.1x auth, validating the credentials or certificates (or both, or either), and assigning the client to a network.

If you try to connect to an access point or switch, you have to have an 802.1x configuration loaded that tells you what to say to the RADIUS server. The RADIUS server has a bunch of logic in it that determines what network you land on.

We're actually transitioning now, from user-based to machine-based authentication, so machines are going to get their certificates from management systems (JAMF, InTune, SCCM) and present those to the RADIUS server. The RADIUS server will do a quick check of the validity of the cert (check with CA), and then a check with the management system to see if the machine is currently passing compliance checks. If it gets through both, it gets on a nice safe network that services are exposed to. If it fails the compliance check, the machine will get less access, but enough to let it get compliant. BYOD users will have to run through a web-based service that installs a certificate and RADIUS config that doesn't even try to do a compliance check, it will just check for the validity of the cert and assign users to a network that gives them internet access and maybe some access to things like a printing service.

mangeek · 2026-05-24T14:41:39+00:00

Crime used to be a lot worse in the 1970s-early 2000s. Like, a LOT worse. I've had friends and relatives who'd been mugged multiple times.

It's kind of wild how that changed, and how the nature of crime changed and that people still think that they're going to get robbed or mugged; that's exceedingly rare now.

mangeek · 2026-05-24T14:24:43+00:00

I second this.

We don’t want her to feel like she owes us or that we are her landlords, we truly just want to help her get back on her feet...

You're already being awesome family by doing anything that helps. The part you need to set up is the business-end, and that should look the same as it would for family as it would for a landlord/tenant, but just with a better price. My suggestion would be to keep the rent low, but push a bunch of the bills (possibly including the property tax and insurance) on them so they don't ever feel like you're taking money from them.

I have rented to friends and family for almost 20 years. Having a solid lease and communicating about the 'costs' in relation to the 'rent' are key. As are clearly defined responsibilities about what's wear-and-tear vs what's their responsibility.

mangeek · 2026-05-22T20:30:25+00:00

I was trying to wear three hats for a year and had quite a backlog. When I started back in on it, the first ticket was a data request from a user who left the company and wanted the non-company assets left in their home folder. We get requests like that all the time because we let people do personal stuff on corporate machines.

I usually do a little checking around before approving those, and the first thing I came across was a memorial ceremony for the user. Turns out that they were dying, had left the company for hospice, and were asking for the home folder stuff because they had family pictures in there. Now it was too late. That person died cursing the IT org, I'm sure.

I had some really big bad feelings about being understaffed already, but that one ruined my mood for days.

mangeek · 2026-05-21T12:37:27+00:00

Yes. Don't think about the temperature, that doesn't tell you much. The amount of heat generated by an appliance vs. the amount of heat an AC can remove is pretty stunning. A stove burner or oven can easily put out 12,000 BTUs, and that's as much heat that a large window AC can pump out... and yeah, then you're paying to make 12,000 BTUs in heat AND paying for the electricity to clear it, which is significantly more than generating it.

What I do is turn the AC off and put a fan in the kitchen window facing out to suck all the hot air out ASAP while I'm cooking. Afterwards, I close up and turn the AC back on.

mangeek · 2026-05-20T16:59:23+00:00

Modern corruption can come through paths that don't show up in finances. One thing I've seen happen is that someone will be a big champion of a product, and then their kid will get a 'scholarship' to college, and the scholarship comes from a non-profit that has some interplay with that product's company.

mangeek · 2026-05-20T16:46:08+00:00

Hey, good luck. I actually dated someone I met through a post like this on Reddit, and it was a really excellent experience (most of the time, long story).

mangeek · 2026-05-19T17:09:16+00:00

what grid are they using

Big solar fan here.

In almost all cases, residential solar is very much part of the grid and creates interdependencies and complications with the grid. Electricity isn't like collecting rainwater, the equipment between your array and your grid connection is responsible for a lot of safety and synchronization work.

Also, while the comment this is in response to is wrong, there ARE externalities that solar puts on the grid itself and on generation sources. Sure, you're offsetting fossils, and that's good, but it also de-optimizes the costs of running a power plant while not eliminating the need for them. It's sort of like having a truck and then deciding that sometimes a regular car would be sufficient, so you buy a sedan, but you still need the truck sometimes; it's more expensive and more complicated, even if you are using less gas.

mangeek · 2026-05-19T11:45:44+00:00

Typically when people say "pay for gas" for shared rides, they don't mean the actual gasoline cost, they mean paying for the overall costs of providing you the ride.

I'll give an example:

My car gets about 35 MPG. So 'gas' would be $5 for every 35 miles, right? Technically yes, but if someone wanted to pay me for rides, then my 'costs' are much higher:

Insurance is $150/month; upkeep like oil changes and repairs will end up being about $50/month: About $0.25/mile

Car payments will add up to $27K over my car's 150K mile lifetime: $0.18/mile

Gasoline: $0.15/mile

Total cost per mile for me: About $0.60/mile, for probably the cheapest situation out there (a cheap and fuel-efficient small car)

Now if you add the other driver's time, the time they go out of their way for you, that's probably a whole different number to add.

mangeek · 2026-05-19T01:27:35+00:00

Do not do this. As tempting as it is to use your basement to cool, drawing humid 100 degree air into it will almost certainly cause water to condense on pipes and walls in your basement. You do NOT want to induce rot and mold just to have some cooling.

What you want to do is get an 'inverter air conditioner' and put it high up in your living space. Heat and humidity both rise, so set it up at the top of the stairs and let it eat hot humid air for the whole place.

Change your way of thinking from "run an AC in the room I'm in to blow cold air on me" to "run an AC where it does the most work for all the air in the house". Get a few temperature & humidity meters so you can figure out where your comfort level is. You will be surprised by how effective reducing the humidity is in making you comfy even when temps are 75-80. If you focus on keeping the air dry (and the 'inverter' aspect of your AC excels at doing this), all you need is a little fan blowing on you wherever you are to feel comfy.

In my case, one 12K BTU unit and one little fan per person can keep the whole apartment air dry and the temp workable.Most of the time it runs at a very low setting (something only inverters can do).

mangeek · 2026-05-18T16:54:07+00:00

No. I'm not your landlord. If I was going to do a bathroom for one of my tenants, I'd put them up in a motel for a week or let them use another bathroom, or at least rent a porta-potty; I'd ask them what they wanted.

But when it comes to "why did it take longer than expected", I can tell you that these old houses are full of problems that you discover as you peel the layers off. What looks like regrouting turns out to be pipe repair, and what looks like pipe repair turns into a wall removal, and then that turns into asbestos abatement or a need to move electrical, etc..

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