tylerFowler

In the real estate profit space, I agree, but it's been a huge boon to businesses in the area so minimally it's a good first step. It seems a decent strategy for a city to have large developers to the difficult work of conversion and then allow it to change hands over time.

Now, for KC specifically, the Power & Light District is a tad different because several completely new and large apartment towers (One Light & Two Light) were built. I'd argue, still good for the area and its residents/business owners, but less viable in cities with less space.

Tldr; idk, necessary evil?

Definitely, but invariably when the conversation about office -> housing conversions come up these other cities are never mentioned. I would argue the lessons in those cities are very applicable to SF & NYC, where the conversation has been focused in the past year or so.

The history of Kansas City is very interesting - it was well poised to be the size of Chicago until rail travel became less popular. So during the 20's & 30's it was a major landmark for Art Deco architecture.

Well.. yeah when you put that way I see what you mean. No those types of buildings wouldn't be very amenable, I suppose I had assumed we would already exclude those from consideration.

Note that none of the buildings I mentioned are this way (the Wikipedia links have pictures). Although.. I did live in an old saddlery building there that is somewhat like what you're saying, the hallways were just made wide and apartments very long to ensure window access. Still, an Office Space style building will never be that.

Fwiw it's almost exclusively international developers running the conversions in Kansas City. I think Greystar might be the one with the largest footprint there.

Indeed, I think one of the "newest" redevelopments was Commerce Tower which is an all-glass contemporary styled office building but it's still a building built in 1965. It probably helps that that building was also quite thin and had centrally located elevator banks & old style mail chutes that meant all the offices were around the windowed sides anyway.

The redevelopment of downtown did push out many of the artists and so they packed up & moved to West Bottoms. In general KC is such an arts town that people genuinely like to go where the artists go, it's a very cool vibe. West Bottoms is packed with record stores and underground (literally) event venues though the Halloween event people still take up most of the space that might be good for living/working.

Ohhh yeah, they definitely do. Usually just on weekends or for events but you have fully uniformed & armed officers riding the loops.

Yeah crime post-pandemic there is still a major problem, although typically concentrated in poor neighborhoods as opposed to downtown. When I first moved there, the inner city was considered really dangerous and I saw such rapid gentrification that you'd see people walking their dogs in the middle night without incident just within 8 months or so. So it just sorta.. moved.

I definitely wouldn't say KC has made many inroads on crime despite the massive boom it's had in the inner city core, which did increase foot traffic and makes people at least feel safer.

The key thing that KC did in ~2014 or so is that they rebuilt a "streetcar" (identical to SFMUNI light rail so that name was a marketing tactic for sure) line downtown where parking has been scarce & is being eaten up by new developments (a good thing). This was the first public transit to be totally free, and to combat the idea that suburbanites wouldn't want to use it they freed up payments on parking zones _up the street_, so that for any decent sized event it became the smartest way to park and not overpay.

They also took a ton of time painting the trains in city colors or with city designs, keeping them incredibly clean, doing things like putting live music at every stop on certain days etc... It became really fashionable really fast to ride the thing. They also policed it like mad on the weekends.

Buses on the other hand, are a different story and carry the same stigma. Though I'm still really proud of KC for making that free as well.

True - not specifically related to fleeing workers, as I understand it (wasn't there at the time) the office usage was more or less static downtown through all of that. Though, nonetheless, most of the buildings I cited (and many more) remained vacant so over the grand scale of the 150 year history or so of that city, one could say office space was largely unused.

Interesting point on older buildings being easier. I would have thought quite the opposite. Commerce Tower was one of the "newest" buildings converted and it was built in 1965. Although, I suspect older buildings are still an untapped resource in many cities depending on what we mean by "older".

I do think the simple fact of offering hyper-dense communities (especially in cities that lack them otherwise, like many midwestern cities, say) makes any downtown attractive as a living option to a certain group of people who want the "15 minute city" experience. Doing so tends to transform downtowns into actual communities as well, as opposed to places with many low quality vendors that cater to duller, less personable 9-to-5 routines.

And then of course there are knock-on effects to placing people like that (typically young professionals and artists) together like that to rub shoulders, talk about ideas, start businesses etc...

It's kind of odd to me (as someone who used to live there at its latest boom time) that nobody talks about Kansas City when it comes to this topic.

From the ~70's until the early 2010's Kansas City's downtown was in a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying historic buildings, etc... In that city 75% of the metro lives in suburbs, drives in to downtown for work and promptly leaves. Until about 2012 or so. Urban redevelopment kicked in, adding (free!) transit, boosting retail, arts district events, a new stadium, and crucially - *massive office to housing conversion projects*.

There are tons of success stories like the historic Fidelity Tower at 909 Walnut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/909_Walnut), a huge 35-story tower that sat vacant (creepy) for the better part of a decade and is now home to 159 units. Ditto with the Power & Light Building (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_Power_and_Light_Bu...) (36 stories) - largely vacant for the better part of 20 years and now home to nearly 300 units. I could go on, every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments. I myself lived in the 30-story Commerce Tower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Tower) for a while and it was incredibly cheap to do so (~$1100/month for 750sqft 1 bed on the 14th floor), I had a 10 minute commute by foot to my office, it was awesome. Even the more squat, broad midsize banking buildings have had major success with residential conversions.

These kinds of conversions have been proven out when there is willpower to do so at the city level - people will move in and prices typically get competitive fast if done at scale. I've lived in SF for 4 years now and I'm convinced its a policy problem not an economic problem.

What I love it for in particular is that it expands your vocab in ways that a book may not, or minimally adds an extra bit of "fun study" akin to casually doing flashcards.

For Greek for example, it does expose me to new words/grammatical functions that I maybe haven't gotten to yet in my formal book and then I can hop over to Wiktionary to see it's formal defintion/usage/declensions/etc...

Like with any learning experience, you get what you put into it.

I'm actually a bit surprised to see this, I've been an ardent Duolingo user for years and it works fantastically for me. Do you need to pair it with learning formal grammar rules on the side? Yeah, if you want to go deeper, absolutely, and when I have paired grammar rule learning with Duolingo it like 5x'd my learning & comprehension speed.

I'll also add that a fair amount of the advice I see here & most of the advice I've received on being self critical about things in retrospect I "should have known about" steer towards minimizing bad feelings from it at all costs. Here I disagree.

Use that bad feeling to be self critical in a new way - it's a lesson that leads you to read your own work more carefully before putting it out. It's painful, but ultimately for me it has been positive reinforcement and has actually unlocked increased levels of self-confidence for me.

Every time I put out a piece of code with a strong view, or say something in a meeting, I stress about whether it was silly or just plain wrong – and I immediately go fact check myself on it to appease that anxiety. I've worked with many folks who do not do this, and they have a bad habit of making wild confident statements that turn out to be misguided or wrong and it's often too late when that is discovered. Use the feeling to your advantage instead of running from it.

I've never had much of a problem with this - giving or receiving criticism - but I can try and shed some light on how I _don't_ have an issue with this.

I find that I naturally frame myself reading comments of my work as being inherently "with" the person. Think of it like watching a movie with someone, you both can comment on the movie you're seeing, and you naturally see yourself either agreeing with their critique or forming your own critique based on it.

In the same way, detach yourself from the work, and instead view your work on equal footing with your reviewers - this naturally leads to a more objective view for everyone involved. Reply not to their criticisms of _you_ but to whether you agree objectively or not, or perhaps suggest a different way they can look at the work. Oftentimes, after reading someone else's critique I can be self-critical in a way I wasn't before and it will lead to me refactoring a bit in response to my new perspective on my work, instead of completely taking their critique at face value. Use it as a perspective shift, but don't take this method as a way to lower your self confidence and give in to critical feedback.

Now I'll admit what I have more problems with is when someone clearly doesn't "get it". I'll bend over backwards trying to explain my rationale, when often the right thing to do is to try and understand what about my content caused them to be confused. Now of course, some people just plain don't get it right away and you should always feel free to defend your ideas.

As for snark.. defuse with humor. It's not always intentional, I've unintentionally come across this way (if you haven't you're probably holding in too much feedback!) so feel free to quip but don't go tit-for-tat. Try and cut through to the core of their feeling about *the work* (read: not you) and address that instead.

> Why are the markings on the frets and not in between them?

Those aren't frets, those be strings.

The usual line that I've heard on nonstick pans is that the leaking process happens at very high temperatures. In general one shouldn't use very high heat on a non-stick pan & certainly not an _empty_ non-stick pan.

David Chang's podcast has an interesting episode on this specific topic, though he brings on a domain expert who definitely has a lot of bias (but expertise nonetheless).

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7joCX2xx4GU50myfbtVm44?si=4...

I think learning diff3 has had one of the largest ROIs of anything I've perhaps _ever_ learned. I show it to interns whenever I can, which tends to remind me just how daunting it is to use for the first time.

The idea for most implementations of this I've seen are to colocate relatively "easy" sources of carbon neutral energy with the machines actively processing air - since you can theoretically remove CO2 from anywhere. In the case of Climeworks, their plants are often (or all of them?) positioned on or near a geothermal energy plant, which isn't something that's convenient to access in most locations.

Didn't Twitter catch this & remove it from trending fairly quickly? Seems like an example of what AWS is claiming Parler _isn't_ doing.

I moved from Austin to SF in November 2019 (horrible timing, I know). Before I left I was at a piano bar downtown and some of the bartenders had shirts that said "Don't forget to leave" written on the back, I also worked with some native Austinites, this mindset is getting stronger.

It's also regional, I started my career at a startup in Kansas City, where the situation is completely the opposite. The average age of the company was 40 or so, particularly in engineering.

Have to choose the town wisely... in extremely small towns you might find people go out of their way to interact with you more and are generally more interested in your private business. Part of my family lives in small towns and I think they have less privacy than I do.

Governments allow those but this would constitute another step in that governments would be forcing something potentially hazardous onto their entire populations without likely being able to escape its (potential) effects. Whereas your examples are all things that you can avoid if you like, though some admittedly easier than others.

I agree there are bigger issues but I'd think that that would constitute just delaying the rollout rather than seeking to roll it back if we find that it's affecting the health of large populations, which might just distract people even more from those bigger issues.

On the first point though I'll admit that it's not better for everyone. We had hired a GPU & camera driver expert and had him doing odd jobs on our Android app for well over a year, but that was more of a problem with hiring and then with management after he was hired.

Wearing many hats isn't always a con, my first job as a software engineer was at a startup and I couldn't think of a better growth experience because of that very aspect.

I'd also argue that you have more control as literally any employee of a startup because of looser power structures, proximity to upper leadership and generally more transparency. However how controlling your shareholders are will be situational.

Likewise getting squeezed out of compensation very much depends on your situation and status at the company. If you're a cofounder you'll probably be alright, if you're within the first ~10 employees you'll probably be alright, after that you'll probably still get a nice chunk of change. Though maybe not enough to make up for smaller up front compensation but that also was not my experience (outside of the bay area).

I wondered about this too, in general I think the article misses that updating state is the key to "causing" effects. Rather than latching onto the callback model to explicitly "run" effects.

Though I'll admit getting the relationship of state and effects caused by changes to that state can be more difficult to work out mentally, I think it results in a more complete understanding of what a component actually does.