jacobajit

The article points out that land value is intensely concentrated downtown, while outlying single-family areas typically have low land values. While this naturally results from agglomeration effects, isn't it also a partially an artifact of the low-density zoning itself?

Ie. if we implemented an LVT but also loosened zoning restrictions, the net development (and net taxes) on the single-family areas may well see the highest growth. The interaction between these two reforms performed simultaneously seems unclear.

This is a big underutilized dataset for mapping features, eg. parking restrictions on a given street or building entrances. With something like Gemini Flash, it's cheap to systematically extract map features from that imagery. Surprised that even Google doesn't extract much useful street view information into their maps.

Interestingly enough, there were a lot of cumulus clouds in the Bay Area this week as part of a rare late-season storm system. https://x.com/NWSBayArea/status/2060155061796299251

You really need both.

Channels are a great first level, and iOS absolutely needs to implement an Android-tier version of this.

But channels continue to be abused, even on Android. When all deterministic controls fail...

Secondly, channels are set by the developer (or platform). In an ideal world, I want to define whatever channels I care about, and turn them on/off at will.

iOS really needs LLM-based notification filtering. This would take care of promotional notification spam overnight. It would even enable fine-grained user filtering like "notify when - someone is messaging me about plans for today."

Not to be confused with Vancouver Island, British Columbia (which does not contain Vancouver, British Columbia).

The distinctions drawn here are particularly interesting in China.

Somewhere like Shanghai, you'll see ~70% of traffic in "bike" lanes are what appear to be electric mopeds.

But if you look closer, all of these mopeds technically have tiny attachment points for pedals. Government regulations allowed e-bikes to be driven unlicensed (but with a special green license plate, unlike the US!) and wherever bicycles are allowed. At the same time, the delivery industry and commuters wanted something stable, capable of carrying cargo/passengers. So the form factor adopted was that of mopeds, while vestigial pedal attachments were provided in order to pass as "e-bikes" under the regulatory criteria. Example. [0]

In practice, using pedals on these made for a clunky experience so they were not usually attached at all. The other main regulatory criterion was that these have to be limited to <= 25 km/h, unlike true mopeds/motorcycles. In practice, these speed limiters were also removed, setting up a cat-and-mouse game between police and riders.

The rule requiring the vestigial pedals was finally removed a few months ago, meaning that the ontology of "e-bikes" is pretty different in China now. [1] (Pedal-assist traditional bike frames also exist, but they share space with the larger mopeds in bike lanes and bike parking. True electric mopeds and motorcycles also exist, but they are effectively regulated out of existence in big cities.)

At the end of the day, top speeds are more determinant of whether different modes of transportation can coexist than pedals or form factor.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/r4HAUJDQT1w [1] https://chinamotorworld.com/chinese-e-bike-new-standard/

Cowork actually uses skills under the hood that give it various knowledge work abilities, so that abstraction seems to be working well:

"in Cowork we’ve added an initial set of skills that improve Claude’s ability to create documents, presentations, and other files" https://claude.com/blog/cowork-research-preview

I wish there were a way to “archive” cards and passes in the Wallet app. I’d be much more likely to pass-ify my life if that were the case.

The Wallet app is just too important and used frequently in time sensitive actions to clutter with cards/passes that I use once every few months. That is, when I’m about to tap to pay, I don’t want to infrequently used cards to clutter my payment experience. Likewise, when I’m about to board a flight, I don’t want random loyalty cards to clutter the interface.

At the same time, I would really like to keep these occasional cards and passes in Wallet, just not on the main screen. It definitely beats hanging onto these physically, especially because they are in fact infrequently used so I would never carry them around.

It should be a similar distinction to Apple’s Home Screen vs App Library for long-term archival.

I feel like street-view data is surprisingly underused for geospatial intelligence.

With current-gen multimodal LLMs, you could very easily query and plot things like "broken windows," "houses with front-yard fences," "double-parked cars," "faded lane markers," etc. that are difficult to generally derive from other sources.

For any reasonably-sized area, I'd guess the largest bottleneck is actually the Maps API cost vs the LLM inference. And ideally we'd have better GIS products for doing this sort of analysis smoothly.

To be clear, wordplay seems to be all the author's doing.

From the README:

> When you simply open thisaidoesnotexist.com, the model names you'll see are hand curated and pre-generated by me.

Moving to a subscription fee model is dangerous for a service that's reached saturation point. They can no longer project infinite growth in value extracted from eyeballs going into the future, and are stuck with whatever they choose to charge (along with some limited increases in fees. Building a better service cannot be fully leveraged into higher fees, since there's only so much YoY increase in costs users will stomach.)

On the other hand, subscription models are fine for new entrants, even with VC hyper-growth expectations - there are still billions of users to capture even if per-user revenue is fixed! Then the game becomes delivering as much value to these customers as possible to attract more paying users.

Perhaps this is another malincentive that comes about from monopolies.

There is in fact significant doubt among climatologists as to the veracity of this record.

While the 1913 hot spell was certainly significant, all recorded weather information at the time from surrounding locations, in combination with the dynamics of local microclimates, imply that the 134 degree reading was "essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective." [1]

Observer error stands to be the most plausible explanation, implying that the the recent 130 degree reading in Death Valley may actually become the location's, and the world's, hottest verified temperature.[2]

[1] https://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/an-invest... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/07/09/death-vall...

This reminds me of the product-infrastructure spectrum of dev specialization. [1]

[1] https://www.michellelim.org/writing/stop-using-frontend-back...

The usual problem with this pedagogy is that kids get confused when presented with improper fractions (eg. 11/8), and so on. I guess this is probably still a good intuition to start with, but how did you tackle those extensions later on?

I'm a little concerned about the new Safari interface [0], which very smoothly integrates the tab/address bar with page content. For example, the background color of the page flows behind the open tabs such that it looks like one unified interface, rather than browserchrome || pagecontent.

This is all great to experience as web apps increasingly take over the functions of native apps. It does help them feel more like first-class citizens, rather than plain documents pulled up through a program.

But it easily brings up new potential abuses by phishing sites, spammy notifications, and other bad actors. The new design seems to start breaking down the browser UI's Line of Death [1], at least in perception.

[0] https://www.apple.com/v/macos/monterey-preview/a/images/over... [1] https://textslashplain.com/2017/01/14/the-line-of-death/

Naspers' market cap is 98B, yet they own 31% of Tencent which is worth 775B - am I missing something? I'm aware of conglomerate discounts but I suspect there's something else going on here.

As others have mentioned, it does depend on what exactly you're defending against.

Preemptively opening the link as the sender will send a request to TikTok, but they're not really gaining any useful data there since you just watched the video, hit share (this is what they know so far), and now you opened the link that you had generated. So their database only learned that you shared a video with yourself, which you immediately opened.

The more valuable data is when various intended recipients open the link, allowing TikTok to associate you with them to serve more targeted videos based on implicit social graph, etc.

Moreover, opening the link yourself to get the "canonical url" protects yourself if you're sharing the link broadly since others can't obtain your name [and potentially more?] from the shortlink.

Now, if you're the recipient, there's not much you can do to avoid the tracking link, besides opening it up in as much of an anonymous environment as possible. But interestingly enough, I find the privacy threat greater to the sender. The sender has a TikTok account to aggregate data quite straightforwardly, unlike the recipient. The sender is also being associated with a number of recipients, vs. the recipient with only one sender, and again only through cookies, IP, or something of that sort.

A particularly bad instance of link tracking I've found is in TikTok's link sharing feature.

If you share a link from the TikTok app, it gives you a vm.tiktok.com/[xyz] link to send/post elsewhere. It gives you no indication that this isn't a generic link to the post, nor does it give you an option to expose the generic link to the post.

Instead, when you share that link and someone clicks on it and does not have the app, it opens with a header saying "[First Last] is on TikTok." On the other hand, once you do click on that link (if and only if you don't have the app installed), you get redirected to the static link to the video and finally obtain it.

This is an anti-pattern that enables further tracking and potentially unknowingly exposes user data when links are shared publicly. And there's no indication to the user that this is happening, since the link is structured as if it does not contain any tracking. Ie a tool like this wouldn't be able to "strip out" the tracking since it isn't tacked on in any way, but embedded as the generated link itself.

I don't think we could come up with a standard x axis bounds for such a graph, since n=1000, or 1,000,000 may not be zoomed out enough to showcase the behavior approaching infinity.

I mean, Python is the de facto beginner language and also used for professional software development (and of course intermediate data science work). Are you suggesting this is an unwise or unstable equilibrium?

Hudson Yards in NYC is probably the most notorious example of this trend. Seems to be emblematic of a shift toward real estate as a luxury commodity investment, combined with massive developers having free rein to set up inorganic star mega-blocks. All this in close cooperation with cities that have an incentive to improve what were once brownfield sites and are now the most valuable undeveloped sites into tax behemoths.

See also: Seaport in Boston, Navy Yard in DC, Mission Bay in San Francisco

Not all indoor fireplaces are ventilated in the US, actually. (Source: have one unventilated fireplace that is probably mostly for aesthetics and not to be used for extended perios of time)

What is the reasoning for this rule?

In these scenarios I usually make sure to pan over the map to see if the routing recommendation looks sane, and use satellite view to determine road conditions. I don't feel comfortable blindly following the turn by turn directions as if I'm being led by a malevolent AI.

I've always wished for an external trackpad and keyboard combo in this layout, basically a Macbook without the screen to use with your monitor setup. Reaching to the side for the trackpad frequently seems much slower and less ergonomic. Plus the fixed relative layout of the trackpad and keys helps orient myself.

They’re not hosting it, so that’s not a direct concern. It’s hosted on arcgis.org