stellar678

The discussion of open source was pretty anemic. The author seems to think open source is only GPL copyleft. In reality the vast majority of open source is permissively licensed, and the development was funded by for-profit companies. That seems like a crucial thing to consider when discussing how our information commons has come to be.

Near the end they include a paragraph claiming we should interpret this piece as being about more than self-interest and resistance to change, but it doesn't really feel like the piece offered a taste of what that "more" is.

The most thought-provoking part for me was considering that AI companies have used pretty much all available data for training while "they spend more and more money to create proprietary training data". That seems to break a sort of intuitive social contract - like, well you all used everyone's knowledge. Send yours back out too.

Grant from 3brown1blue released a video exploring the economics and mechanics that enable careers in math, in light of the AI company releases over the last couple weeks. Overall it was a lot more hopeful, and it didn't need to strain awkwardly like this piece to apply an ill-fitting historical framework like enclosure. Worth checking out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKrwhjOI8Nc

Apple continues to Microsoftify themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvX3laQlg14

Thing about Doctorow is, his primary driver is rage-based attention on himself. He seems to have very little regard for evidence or facts if that gets in the way of a rage-inducing story.

His appearance on Ezra Klein's podcast a couple months ago surfaced a fabricated story about nurses being offered lower pay based on their credit report: https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/1qzp3sz/doctorow...

If we're going to have an effective movement checking bad behavior of big tech companies, we better start policing people like Doctorow who put themselves at the center of things with made-up shit and risk blowing the credibility of the whole movement.

Presuming that conventions, standards, best-practices will continue to evolve as people do this work - whether with or without AI - I can't see any reason why the resulting advancements wouldn't be published in a way that builds a record for the future.

My documentation tends to be more thorough and well-maintained when I'm building software with a coding agent. A million tokens of context tends to be better at that kind of thing than my own brain when I'm neck-deep in solving a difficult problem.

And presuming the best practices are adequate and don't need to evolve (which seems unlikely) - then the current public historical record is also adequate.

Why not just buy Apple if you’re looking for a company focused on extracting profits from a cash cow rather than risky innovation with big potential upside and downside?

I kinda wondered about this forever as well. Then one day I was chilling in my local worker-owned cooperative bakery when the Brinks truck came by to do the bakery's cash pickup. Armed driver. Guard waiting next to the truck holding a long gun. Two guys (presumably armed) going into the business to get the cash and take it out to the truck. That's all pretty expensive!

Smaller family-owned businesses will just take cash to the bank - but it's super common for somebody to eventually surveil them long enough to rob them one day as they're transporting the cash to the bank.

It's pricey to handle cash!

> Fulfilling a contract they've executed several times before? slow clap

More than you can say for the Boeing launch that took the astronauts up last summer.

There's active research suggesting that taking MDMA re-opens "critical period" learning where you lay down reward circuitry relating to the value of social interaction. It's potentially a way to have a do-over of important developmental social experiences. Apparently more than a party drug!

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190404094832.h...

Sprawl patterns are not caused by natural market forces.

They are caused and enabled by land-use zoning that uses state force to limit the use of private property, along with massive market distortions like government-funded freeways and the building of low-density infrastructure without a sustainable mechanism to pay for maintenance and operation of that infrastructure.

But I'm also not a free-market absolutist and I'm not sure I believe there has ever been an unencumbered free market. Markets are just a mechanism to organize and manage a complex system. There are always forces in place which nudge the overall behavior in one way or another while still leaving the market interactions to hash out the details. That's fine - we just need to nudge things is the "right" direction.

Thanks for the link, very interesting. The maps that I see are presented as possible candidates for how to meet the housing goals, not a fait-accompli - and they're overwhelmingly concentrated near 101 and the Bay.

I doubt that Marin County is very interested in trying to provide public health and other county services for a bunch of low-income folks moving way out to rural coastal communities. Seems likely that most of the housing going into unincorporated Marin will be smushed right up near 101.

But what about local low-income folks in West Marin like your friends, or the service workers in tourism, hospitality, etc...? Has anybody in your village association talked about what it would take to preserve local control but with a serious commitment for Point Reyes Station to provide housing to meet the needs of local low-income folks?

History has shown that basically once a community exists in California, residents start using local control to blockade housing - with the result being that new housing is mostly built in exurban sprawl by developers who pave over and then subdivide wild lands. These big hammers coming down from the state are basically a self-inflicted wound on the part of supporters of local control.

To provide some personal context: I grew up in the Russian River area. Housing is silly expensive and yet basically nothing gets built, so the towns are turning into retirement/vacation communities. There's roughly no housing that's accessible to people working local jobs, unless you inherited property from your family. I don't think those communities should be sopping up the housing demand for people working in San Francisco, but something's got to push them to build housing for the people who work right there.

Can you describe a bit more clearly what the state is requiring of towns around Point Reyes?

Looking at the top line numbers of the Regional Housing Needs Allocation plan - the Bay Area needs to make space for an additional 440k homes in the next 9 years. Presuming that gets allocated evenly based on population, Point Reyes Station with 1,000 people needs to build about 6 homes per year for the next decade.

Even one huge apartment building would massively overshoot the needs for Point Reyes Station. But I suppose the requirements would be more sensibly met with townhouses or small apartments or some kind of senior housing.

Am I missing some numbers, or maybe there's another program or changes that I'm not aware of?

I generally agree that our low density places should stay low density. Point Reyes is not a job center, not a sensible commuting destination, and a difficult and expensive place to build basic infrastructure like power, water, sewer - so it doesn't make sense to build a lot of housing there.

Hmmm. I grew up in rural Northern California and we had propane that would be trucked in. Is that what you mean by having a tank? I don't live there any more, but my old neighbors tend to be buying backup generators now so they can keep their fridge and internet running when PG&E cuts off power so their distribution lines don't start fires. (This cuts into a whole other issue about people who want to live in the forest asking for extreme subsidies on all the costly electric infrastructure it takes to serve their low density lifestyle.)

Electricity is overall more plugable, versatile and evolvable than appliances that directly consume hydrocarbons. You can meet your source needs using some combination of grid connection, solar, backup generator, backup batteries, etc... - and you can evolve this source side of things over time without being forced to constantly retrofit the load-side systems in your house.

I feel like we live in the same building with an ancient boiler and HOA neighbors who are extremely cost sensitive!

I do wonder if there's a reasonable heat pump retrofit for old buildings with boiler-based heating. Ultimately you're just heating up a liquid and pumping it through everyone's radiator, right? Seems like a sensible product given the number of old buildings with this kind of heating.

Edit: And here it is! https://electrek.co/2022/01/05/these-new-affordable-electric...

The thing is "I absolutely must have gas installed in my house for cooking" turns into "well let's buy the gas water heater, and the gas central heating, and the gas dryer" and all of a sudden you're using was more piped-in gas for for non-cooking things than you are for cooking, but "cooking with gas" was the hydrocarbon foot in the door at your house.

Otherwise you might opt for an electric tankless water heater, a heat pump HVAC system, and just an electric dryer.

You can just make your own! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuWNKMy2yKA&t=239

I'd venture that you're looking at hundreds of people at harvest time for 720 acres of lettuce. I suppose the spikey nature of the labor demand is another reason why automation could be a better approach.

In other news, water is wet.

Is it surprising to people who are working from home, that the office they used to work in and cannot yet return to is now vacant?

People have been calling the collapse of San Francisco since the gold rush. It's clearly had its ups and downs, but the overall trend is clear too.

Cities only operate under authority delegated to them by their state anyway. So seems pretty reasonable to think of it as state owned/controlled, even if the municipality is the legal entity that owns the land.

The Bay Area could host the entire population of the United States with ~850 sq ft of land area per person.

As it is, we currently allocate ~29,500 sq ft of land area per person.

Surely we can find a middle ground somewhere in the name of access to opportunity and in the name resolving our severe housing shortage.

There actually is a company that has a microorganism-produced casein that's on the market and can be bought as vegan ice cream at Smitten in the Bay Area: https://www.perfectdayfoods.com/

Then there's the Real Vegan Cheese project in the East Bay, which isn't venture funded and therefor seems to be moving a bit more slowly: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/real-vegan-cheese#/

My sleep study with Kaiser just involved wearing a wristband computer thing on my wrist that recorded data from an optical sensor on my finger while I slept at home. Nobody was watching.

Among other things, I'd expect this is because YC is trying to break free of the idea that the only way to be a successful startup founder is to be a young, single, attachment-free man.

Successful startups are created by all kinds of people in all kinds of different life situations, and YC needs to be careful to be inviting to as broad an array of people as possible.

At the same time, I agree that dorm-style living (along with other nontraditional styles of living like mulitigenerational or multifamily units, cohousing, coliving, etc...) is a great idea and our culture should work to be more supportive of experimenting with housing. Especially, as you said, in areas with severely impacted housing markets.

I loved seeing 10 year old kids riding their bikes around the parks of Stockholm after dark in the summertime. Hell, I see the same thing in the recently-fixed Snow Park in Oakland.

There's no natural law that says kids can't play safely in nature in an urban environment. Plus the added benefit of meeting and interacting with other kids from all different walks of life.

We just have to prioritize it - and unfortunately the "got my own piece of nature and I'll drive everywhere else" suburban mindset is part of what forces our cities (and suburbs) to remain dangerous asphalt wastelands.

It would be great if people writing articles like this (I hesitate to call them journalists these days) could take the time to provide more context.

According to the county dashboard, Alameda County had 2,564 cases on May 20, 2 days after Tesla reopened: https://ac-hcsa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html...

With a population of 1,671,000, that means about 0.15% of Alameda County residents had been diagnosed with covid-19 at that point.

So we could reasonably expect 15 cases out of the 10,000 employees at Tesla's factory.

Why the breathless article about 2 cases?

Yep, pretty much exactly that. The supermarket basil (I think it's Genovese Basil) feels a bit more delicate than the ones he shows there, the result being that maybe 1/3 of the cuttings just rotted away in the water. But 2/3 success felt pretty good!

I finally figured out how to keep a supermarket basil plant alive, how to promote new growth and slow down flowering.

And I've also succeeded at rooting and planting it - so now I have 5 supermarket basil plants!

It's really gratifying - but my windowsill definitely won't be enough to grow the amount of herbs I'd like to consume. Perhaps I'll have to take my new knowledge to the back yard.

I'm super curious - what were symptoms of your sleep deprivation that you took to be positive qualities?

Facebook/Twitter/et al created the systems which focus people's attention and incentivize the production of divisive poor quality information in the first place - why shouldn't they take responsibility for fixing their mistakes?

I think the whole point of hacking a CPAP is that it's already got the control and sensors that could allow a doctor to use it without injuring a patient. It's just a matter of exposing that via the software.