ProfessorLayton

Almost everything you said is a typical NIMBY talking point:

Dozens of “luxury” units built cheaply, selling for 4,000$ for a 1 bedroom

A nebulous definition of "luxury", and totally ignores the fact that people with money can get what they want anyway, pushing those with less out. So yes, more "luxury" builds help.

They get subsidized by the local government for including maybe 5 units that are “low income” and probably still cost 2k

Many purportedly want more low income housing, often at absurd rates like "100% affordable" knowing that projects like that will never pencil out. It's a way of saying "No" without actually saying it.

I want lots of high quality, dignified housing for myself and my community, not wealth extraction pods.

Okay, so build some? If you can't build what you want then why stop others from building what they can with the budget they have?

As it stands now the land is being squatted by mega corporations seeking to extract as much profit from the community as possible.

It's literally illegal in most places to build more densely due to height, parking requirements, discretionary reviews, etc. impacting everyone interested in building more units (Like for a multigenerational household as seen in elsewhere in the world). This is not just impacting corporations seeking to extract profit.

iOS uses way less ram than android, plus has memory compression. That’s why Apple gets away with less ram and much smaller batteries with equal or better performance.

Yeah, by aggressively purging all my Safari tabs (and Apps) unexpectedly, during the most convenient times, like when I'm going through a tunnel on the train and my cellular connection is at its best. Still infuriatingly common on my 17 Pro with 12GB of RAM.

Yes, this is solved. Samsung makes rugged IP68 phones with user swappable batteries that are thinner than an iPhone 17 Pro when factoring the camera bump [1].

It's kind of comical how accurate this comment is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48807174

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_xcover7-12784.php

Again, solved problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairphone_6

Correct. This used to be done before on flip phones, and is still currently being done for dedicated cameras.

This is a solved problem and not an issue.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say? The replaceable battery is either thicker, or it isn't. There's not much to accommodate.

This is already a thing for some [dedicated] cameras like the Canon EOS series.

Not only that, but if phone batteries were user replaceable, they could be sold in multiple capacities. So people that want "thin" phones can keep their camera protrusions, and the people that want more battery capacity could get a pack that allows the phone to sit flush on a table.

Literally win win win.

Yes? Read that sentence again: "...how we build infrastructure"

Removing onerous parking requirements, like the ones that have resulted in countless strip malls and unwalkable cities with inadequate housing stock.

I'm not suggesting that's all that's necessary but there are indeed simple steps we could take.

It's also proven over and over again that people are okay with "good enough" 99% of the time:

- Smartphone cameras > dedicated cameras

- "UHD" streaming video > UHD Blueray @3-7x the bitrate

- 128kbps music streams > CDs

- Airpods > equally priced but much better sounding headphones

Sure the nicer stuff still exists and is indeed more performant, but it's not cheap and it's also not what's driving the market. I don't see why this won't apply to AI once local models become "good enough" too.

After 5 years, you'll have an extra $1M in savings, and you can safely pay yourself 4% or $40k each year in perpetuity without doing any work.

The only way this could be remotely true on a 400k salary is by saving +80% of take home pay. After taxes that's only 40k/yr to live on.

In a HCOL area. This doesn't even touch on the fact that tenure at most tech places is well below 5y, especially at Meta.

I sincerely hope you've had your 2.4 kids to support yourself. that's what the boomers managed and it is hard to measure in dollars or debt.

Oh you mean the same boomers that pulled the latter up behind them via NIMBYism that caused housing prices to explode, starved education funding and made universities expensive, and pushed back on universal healthcare while also getting tax-funded healthcare themselves?

Now they're mad we don't want to have more kids to fund their elderly care and retirement? Those boomers?

That's a lot of SV-speak. How exactly do people step into an entrepreneurial phase?

Almost half of U.S. employment is from small businesses (250 or less employees). That's means there's a lot of entrepreneurship happening already. I have lots of family running their own small businesses (trades), and it's a lot of work, and doesn't necessarily pay as well as a cushy corporate job, but what I'm trying to say is lots of people can and do start their own enterprise.

Yes, lots of them will fail at running their own business, but it's not like corporate jobs are getting any safer either.

800k for 5y taxed at salary rates will not net you 200k/yr in perpetuity. Not even close. And certainly not in real dollars.

Assuming you manage to save every penny.

Adults aren’t the target market.

Adults are VERY MUCH the target market: See page 10 of Nintendo's investor relations doc.

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2022/221109e.pdf

The base mac mini I got has been one of the best tech purchases I've ever made, and of course as soon as I wanted another [loaded] machine for more serious work this happens.

It's absolutely wild that Apple's desktop machines now cap out at less ram than their portables which can't sustain an intensive workload without throttling!

Also storage has gotten super expensive lately, and rather than upgrading my machines/consoles I've been offloading games and downloading them as needed and now am routinely downloading dozens of GB just to play a game.

My gaming time is limited so the faster the better.

While I agree that there's a lot of fraud in online advertisement (As someone who's spent modestly on it), ultimately what advertisers are looking for is positive ROI, and how it compares to other spend.

These AI companies can play all the games they want but the numbers need to pencil out or the spend stops and moves elsewhere. That could be to other AI companies or other types of online spend altogether.

Ah yes, Golden Gate Park, famously the only option for building new housing on the west side of SF!

right after you knock down the 100 yro Victorian homes and historic buildings

BS, there's ~400K housing units in SF, and only ~10k of those would be considered victorian. These units couldn't (And shouldn't!) be destroyed for new housing because they're protected, and that's not what NIMBY's or YIMBY's are arguing about anyway since almost everyone loves victorian homes.

More than half of the city's housing was built after 1940, mostly on the west side, and it's where NIMBYism is at its worst. There's little reason someone or even a developer shouldn't be able to build up there.

Yet the rent in Paris is still too high for an average French resident

It's obviously not just about more housing, but more housing per capita.

3% of the French population lives in Paris proper, and roughly 20% in the metropolitan area compared with 0.42% in San Diego and ~1% in San Diego MSA [1].

More hosing will help Paris along with San Diego to put downward pressure on prices.

[1] Wikipedia

Aren't they? The last Intel macs were being sold less than 3y ago, and by the time macOS 27 releases they'll be less than 3.5y old.

The broader point is that a "Snow Leopard" release has historically resulted in a lot of hardware being left behind, and many of the devices that could have benefited the most from optimizations were cut off.

A major reason Snow Leopard was well received was because of how performant it felt along with the bug fixes. What isn't mentioned anywhere near as much is that it dropped a lot of hardware (PPC). The last G4 Powerbook got about 1.5y of OS support before it was dropped.

iOS 26 is slated to drop a bunch of iPhone models. macOS is dropping all all macs with Intel CPUs.

A Snow Leopard release isn't great news for a lot of people.

This is true until it isn't though. Blackberry was doing great with enterprise users until people refused to give up their iPhones even at work.

I rarely visit the webpages before anymore.

And what do you think this'll do for future LLM models that need to train on new content if web page traffic collapses?

You don't. Use various other LLMs to check each other's work.

It's not about preference, but about being able to see the differences in the first place, so any sufficiently contrast combination should work.

If you turn on the color filters in accessibility settings in macOS you can see what the contrast could look like to a colorblind person.

Well we just went from "6x" to "40%" and "good" so, yeah... not quite as exciting.

And in the last 4.5y it's up 70% while the S&P500 is up 51% in the same time period, not quite as exciting eh?

Where does it stop?

I don't know but macOS is making it ever more difficult to manage storage, with lots of random things under "macOS" pushing ~40GB or "System Data" that gets a crapload of unrelated things like podcast [1] downloads, with no easy way to purge.

[1] I spent too much time hunting down ~250GB of missing disk space, and it turns out it was the Podcasts app's cache, while the app itself reported no downloads. I fully expected this to be managed automatically, but was getting out of disk space warnings. It's a mess.

Somehow, with 12GB of RAM, I can't get my iPhone 17 Pro to keep more than a few safari tabs open without having them refresh when I come back from an app or two, and it makes me want to throw my phone across the train (Where the internet often cuts out!).

A lot of software has been squandering the massive hardware gains that have been made. I hope this changes when it becomes a lot harder to throw hardware at the problem.

I also wonder what this means for smartphone-esque devices like the Switch 2. If this goes on long enough I won't be surprised if they release a 'lite' model with less RAM/Storage and bifurcate their console capabilities, worse than what they did with 3DS > 2DS .