burlesona

Zipline is growing fast… it’s drone-based, but it definitely delivers packages to your front door. (https://www.zipline.com/)

It's interesting to me how different the tone sounds if every time he said "users" you substituted "people" (or if that didn't make sense in context, substitute "customers"). I find the post positive and encouraging as written, but I've realized that "users" has become a tainted word in the mass public.

This is presented as an interesting and kind of positive take on the AI going to surprising lengths to “solve the problem.” But I couldn’t help thinking of the paperclip factory while I was reading this :/

Property tax is the workable wealth tax. There's no such thing as a perfect policy, but in the context of NYC this seems worth trying. I'll be interested to see if it helps create some liquidity in the housing market (the goal), or if it only functions as revenue source.

One wrinkle I haven't heard much discussion of -- cities respond to incentives too. NYC is a global destination for the mega wealthy. If it turns out the uber-rich don't mind paying and this becomes a cash cow for the city, that creates incentives for the city to cater to them and try and get more uber-rich people to have second homes in the city.

One nice thing: Denver has already repealed parking requirements, so, they don't have legal standing to complain about it.

I’m pretty sure those were drawn in SketchUp

What I said is this is what I struggle with. In general I think too much regulation is what caused this problem. And the question on my mind is, from where we are today, is there a liberalization of the rules that would also help maintain a mixed income neighborhood, rather than the current trajectory (quickly becoming an uber-wealthy country club).

I think the case is well-made, but it's not a game of chicken, it's an arms race.

Mind blown. Thanks for sharing!

Traveling cross-country at age 10 and 6. Amazing that all they needed was a letter saying they weren't runaways, and people seemed to think this was a neat adventure for them.

The thing about status pages is they have to be up when you're down, and (if your service is non trivial) they have to be able to handle a traffic profile that basically looks like DDOS. So, you're paying for the hosting infra more than the software.

There’s a huge difference. Everyone sees the same front page on CNN, or HN for that matter. Nobody sees the same page twice on YouTube or TikTok. That’s a fundamental distinction between human curated media (even with A/B testing), versus machine curated media.

Each blog you follow in the RSS model you opted in to. And each post comes from a person, or a publication, who can be held accountable for what they publish.

Ordinary media, like newspapers, books, radio, and TV, have worked this way forever — people publish “channels” and you decide what channels to follow. A channel can be held accountable.

The algorithm model is different. People just publish “content” into the platform, and the platform makes a custom channel for each viewer, inserting content from people you’ve never heard of and didn’t ask to follow. And it optimizes that custom channel for whatever addicts you the most. That’s fundamentally a different beast than opt-in media consumption.

I think a better solution would be to repeal section 230 protection for any kind of personalized or algorithmic feed. The algorithm makes you a publisher, and you should be liable for what you publish.

That would make it very hard, nigh impossible, for a platform like YouTube or TikTok to exist as it does today, and would instead favor people self-curating mechanisms like RSS readers etc.

Sad, although I guess I'm not surprised.

I think it's fair to say that, if not for Heroku, I would not have had a career in software. I learned how to code web apps from books, and had a breakthrough when I discovered Rails (in 2009 I think?). But for the life of me I did not understand how to deploy a Rails app.

I bashed my head against that wall for a while, then found Heroku, and it just worked. That let me ship a product when I barely knew what I was doing, which let me keep building and learning, until eventually I didn't need Heroku anymore. But I still always liked it, because I never enjoyed thinking about infrastructure.

RIP Heroku, you were legendary.

Feels like watching emergence in real time.

I have a 4-5 year old ultra wide monitor which is a lot of pixels but low dpi. I really like the single monitor containing two screens worth of pixels, but I wish it was high dpi. At the time there weren’t really high dpi ultra wides available, and they’re still expensive enough that upgrading isn’t a high priority for me… but I’m sure I will at some point.

My recent Sony TV does this.

But also I pretty much never use the TV button to turn it on, I click a button on one of the connected devices to wake it and the TV turns itself on with that input selected. Even if it’s already on, if I want to switch from one device to another I can just wake the other device and it will switch inputs for me. It works really well, I almost never have to use the input selector and it just does the right thing reliably.

I don’t know why websites even bother having text when it is this badly destroyed by advertising.

Airfare in the US costs less today than it did in the 90s, adjusted for inflation: https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/2024-annual-average-domestic-ai...

The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff.

This seems to be one of the brutal truths of the modern world, and as far as I can tell it applies to everything. There's always a race to the bottom to make everything as cheaply as possible, and the further the industry goes down that "cheapness" scale, the more "quality" loses market share, the more expensive "quality" must be in order to operate at all, and finally things that used to be just "normal" and not too expensive are now luxury goods.

Consider textiles, carpentry, masonry, machine tooling, appliances, etc. etc.

This doesn't feel like a good outcome, but I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about it.

I LOVE this idea. I’ve specifically been looking to buy a tiny truck or van, “can hold sheets of plywood” being a major criteria. I love the idea of that being a simple electric I can charge at home. Beautiful!

I feel like Haskell is easier to use than it is to explain, and in my experience a lot of these kind of tutorial / explanations actually make things seem harder and more complicated than just working with the concepts and observing what they do. (This one included.)

Neat! I made a library very similar to this once, and I know there are others. Must be one of those itches that’s fun to scratch.

https://github.com/burlesona/html_rb

They charged us for our next month of service the day before they shut down. That’s fraud.

Infrastructure for automation is happening: https://www.cavnue.com/

I think you’re over generalizing. I understand you’re speaking from your personal experience, and I believe that’s what you encountered, but still, n=1.

There are, unfortunately, a huge range of people with widely varying beliefs who refer to themselves as “Christians.” Some of them are indeed not actually interested in theology, only in their own subcultural tradition.

But there are also Christians who are extremely interested in textual analysis, understanding the original languages of the texts, seeking out archaeological evidence to understand events better, etc. In my experience these are also the people who follow Jesus’ teaching to love their neighbor, not judge others, and to “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” (ie. don’t be a political movement).

I once heard a story of a family living abroad feeling quite bent about this extra taxation that they were paying no reason. But the story ends with the family being rescued by a USMC helicopter and airlifted to safety after a natural disaster, at which point they supposed they had been paying for something after all.

The bathrooms are already mandated by the government, they just aren’t required to be free. But in the overhwhelming majority of cases they are free.

So the Author is based in Spain and writing about life in Spain. My experiences traveling in Europe have been that bathrooms are often hard to find there … but, as a tourist, I’ve definitely not seen enough of normal daily life to know.

Meanwhile many comments here seem to be reflexively decrying the situation in the US. That makes no sense to me. Every business has to have a bathroom, and in the overwhelming majority of the country these bathrooms are not locked and nobody minds if you come inside and use one.

There are two exceptions, that most of us aren’t visiting very often:

(1) some of our city centers where there are concentrated disorder and mental health problems

(2) the most crowded tourist destinations

These places tend to keep bathrooms locked, but you can usually just ask and get the key or code. Many have signs saying you need to make a purchase but few try to enforce that.

These exceptions are indeed annoying, but I believe the solution is better mental health care and generally more effective community policing so that businesses in those locations could follow the norms of the rest of the country.