akgerber

The Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York is also unfinished, with construction in fits & starts since 1892: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_St._John_the_Divi...

My desktop is from 2012, so 13 years old so far, but is still very capable at any task I throw at it. It was originally a high-end workstation, but by 2020 was worth so little that I got it for free from someone moving out of town. Last year, upgrading the CPU to the top of the line part that fit the motherboard socket cost $17 (versus an original MSRP of $2300), and upgrading it to 128GB of RAM cost $40.

When even top-of-the-line older hardware is nearly free, it makes little sense to optimize for bottom-of-the-line older hardware.

It does very well on any modern internet task, as well as playing modern video games with a few-year-old used graphics card.

Nearly all large cities today are large cities because they historically were one, leading to economies of scale in infrastructure and agglomeration economies in the production and exchange of goods and services. Ease of sea access is not a major determinant of a city's growth & prosperity today.

Many cities historically grew around ports due to the labor intensity of break-bulk shipping and the difficulty and expense of overland goods transport but modern container ports require relatively few employees and can easily move freight intermodally. The old piers in London and Hamburg and New York and San Francisco and their adjacent factories have all been redeveloped, and the working container ports have all relocated away from the city center to places where rail & highway access is easier, to places like Newark, Oakland, and Felixstowe.

The car market in the US is pretty much designed to rip off people who fear minivan stigma & instead buy extortionately-priced pickup trucks that often don't even have a big enough bed to carry plywood or drywall.

There are plenty of things that people would be happy to do with cheap urban space in deep/narrow apartment conversions in post-WWII office buildings. I'd enjoy having a workshop and lots of bicycle parking.

The problem is that the current owners of these buildings, as well as their creditors, made plans based on these buildings being expensive urban space. The same is true of city governments, which often have budgets dependent on city center commercial space paying a lot of property taxes. It will take years, and likely lawsuits and ownership changes, for people to accept that prices for these buildings are unlikely to recover.

Delivery-oriented ebikes like the Arrow models in NYC use very large battery packs, and some deliveristas carry a second battery on a rear rack. My impression is that, as deliveristas have moved to working for apps rather than specific restaurants over the past few years, the expected delivery radius has expanded, which drove a lot of the range issues that have lead to widespread adoption of gray-market motorcycles with no plates.

Said unlicensed mopeds are current subject to widespread seizure in NYC, so it does seem like ebikes are coming back.

One major delivery-oriented ebike importer, 'Fly Ebike', has gotten a model UL certified.

Yann Lecun's name is listed in the model card: https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/blob/main/MODEL_CARD.md

Martin Kleppmann is an advisor to the Bluesky distributed social network, which has an open protocol and open source code that one can browse, run, and connect to as a supplement to the book if one desires: https://github.com/bluesky-social

I have a Shimano middrive bike that weighs 50lbs that I purchased on closeout for $1500. It rides like a nice, albeit heavy, bike with the motor turned off.

The quality of individual cells does not necessarily have any bearing on the safety of the finished battery/BMS/charger.

I don't think there has been any sort of reliable survey on the quantity of ebikes in NYC, and 65,000 is likely to be extremely low. There is no registration or point-of-sale reporting requirement.

There are also large quantities of unregistered electric and gasoline mopeds and motorcycles, many of which are also labeled as ebikes by either their manufacturers/importers or public authorities when involved in an incident.

One can purchase custom-made ebike batteries in NYC from shops similar to the one in this article, often with substantially worse finishing/packaging quality and unknown BMS quality. And said batteries are often run hard in delivery service in 4-season conditions, including exposure to temperatures well below freezing and salty slush spray, then charged via chargers and cords of unknown quality plugged into what are often pre-WWII electrical systems.

The FDNY is appropriately raiding custom battery shops in NYC, since there doesn't seem to be an appropriate regulatory system yet for custom-manufacturing this sort of energy storage device in a dense urban environment yet: https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2024/02/09/queens-biz-...

I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us — don't tell! They'd banish us, you know.

I would certainly look upon the company more fondly if their local dealership didn't park trucks all over the sidewalk.

The other advantage California has is how fresh & delicious the produce is, year-round.

Prince Street genuinely is very good, especially the square pies. It's just a pain in the ass now that the lines have gotten long.

I live, in many ways, by the standards of 90 years ago— apartment in a 1907 tenement house (a new law tenement, much better than the old law kind!), no laundry machine, clothing often bought used & which I often repair myself, most transportation on foot or on train/bike for longer distances. I have nicer electronics, of course, but that doesn't consume a big percentage of my income.

But there's no easy way to opt for a four-hour workday, which I would prefer— instead, I save most of my income.

Housing costs are a basket of the cost of the housing unit itself and land costs. Regulation limiting how densely housing may be built atop land, when this limit is lower than the number of housing units demanded, is what causes the Red Queen's race dynamic.

2000kg+ EVs still have substantial lifecycle carbon footprints even if their local emissions are much lower than a gasoline car. They are certainly useful for 200 mile trips, especially with a group of people, with well-developed road networks & underdeveloped transit networks, but the relative development/utility of different transport networks is a political choice. And 200 mile trips are a small percentage of trips — most are short & local (with the specific radius of local generally depending on a locale's land use regulations).

The massive state, federal, and local bureaucracies shaping the public & private realm to always guarantee easy parking for automobiles & a network of high-throughput roadways between them yet only occasionally & reluctantly doing the same for other modes of transportation. Note that guaranteeing easy parking for automobiles also results in destinations being so far apart that other modes of transport usually become impractical.

It was very good to be able visit my 98-year-old grandmother at Christmastime (and I did a lot to be able to do so safely last year) — at this age, there can't be many left.

The Discord backend is built on Elixir: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...

NYCT was, until this year, operating R32 trainsets still limping along from the 1960s that were repeatedly life-extended as newer (1970s) train types experienced structural failures & delivery of their planned replacement trains was repeatedly delayed. It's obviously possible to maintain old trains, but generally expensive & challenging, especially when they're still doing 100,000 miles a year, and things clearly slipped.

Especially because the trains were operating well past their planned lifespan because their replacements were ordered but not delivered, so the major overhaul that would that would normally be done to life-extend a train kept running for decades didn't happen.

Grids are not made for cars. Grids are made for the legibility of a centralized administration and ease of property subdivision. They are common features of Roman and Greek colonial cities as well as Chinese cities unto time immemorial (in all cases, only in locations where topography allowed):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_plan#Ancient_grid_plans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Chinese_urban_planning

Here is a post with an Jupyter notebook producing such visualizations with the OSMnx library: https://geoffboeing.com/2018/02/street-network-orientation/

Many old neighborhoods were originally literal wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction, with Brooklyn brownstones being a prime example. My Brooklyn block was originally basically 4 different groups of identical buildings, with the new-law tenement I live in being substantially identical to 10 others it was built in a cluster with (except, now, to one that has had two stories added on top).

Nevertheless I find the area pleasing — partially due to wide sidewalks shaded by mature trees, partially the ways the buildings have changed over time ("How Buildings Learn" is a classic book) and a few vacant lots have been infilled with different buildings, partially due to the wear & texture that come with age, and significantly due to the uninterrupted-except-by-parks walkable street grid for miles in every direction.

Plenty of 1950s suburbs have gotten pretty aesthetically interesting with the texture of age and mature trees grown in at this point, but very few of them are particularly walkable for daily needs.

Very few American cities were unplanned, and many historic gridded neighborhoods sprung up at a shocking pace (many American cities grew at 50% or more a decade for decades on end eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chicago#Popula...) with a ton of cookie-cutter repetition. The city often engaged in extensive redrawing of farm field property lines and regrades before a street was opened. But such cities were designed primarily for pedestrians at a pedestrian scale, rather than modern 'master-planned communities' that are at best islands of walkability in a sea of car-oriented roadways designed to be incredibly unpalatable to traverse by any other means.

Much of this is due to modern American zoning, which is among the strictest in the world in terms of separating different uses from each other — "residential" zoning in other countries almost never differentiates single-family housing from other housing, and usually permits quiet auxiliary uses like corner stores, doctor's offices, childcares, etc. (Interestingly, such zoning is known as "Euclidean Zoning" not for any geometric reason but with the town of Euclid, Ohio as its namesake, the plaintiff in a Supreme Court Case establishing such zoning as a legitimate use of the police power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_Euclid_v._Ambler_Re....)

Interestingly, some large buildings in NYC also use a "steam chiller" hooked into the city steam system to provide air conditioning: https://untappedcities.com/2021/07/09/new-york-city-steam-sy...

The work of a famous law professor is very different from the work of a defense lawyer, and generally involves very little interaction with the business end of the justice system.

There is plenty of dense housing in prewar sections of Midwestern cities. Not as much as there used to be, unfortunately, but quite a bit, and available very affordably.

A dense environment also has a lot of daily destinations within walking distance. That's also very nice when one works from home— either working from home in my Brooklyn apartment, or working from home at my parents' house in a Midwestern streetcar suburb where restaurants/coffeeshops/grocery stores/parks/bars are also a pleasant walk away.

Interesting and worthwhile idea. Costco's clothing is mostly ugly even if well-made.

The general concept appeals to me, but I already have my own specific taste in materials & cuts and would thus like more details as to what 'high-quality' means without having to go through a signup process. Uniqlo is a also pretty challenging competitor in this space, with no membership required.