jparishy

Hey, thanks, that means a lot! Yes, I love my city and I have a long to do list of things to add in honor of it. Do attend.

This is very cool. I concur on the conclusion that we'll soon see a lot more use of AI coding tools in gov as people discover what can be done with all these existing data sets. Would love to see more resources put into creating and publishing them. I'm sure there's plenty of ways for govs to make their money back on the data these days with some creative licensing.

Tangential, but I'm also a little obsessed with taking municipal data and turning it into something else. Lately I've been building an online open world game built on Philadelphia's terrain. It similarly uses a Philly LIDAR scan, the land use maps, the street data, building lots, and a few other sources to make the game map.

There's a signup but it doesn't validate or anything I just haven't gotten around to making a demo mode. Any fake email will do: https://cityrider.jpsmaps.com/. The general idea is to pick up trash around Philly to power/build other fun things like your jet pack and ramps. Buy properties and customize the facades. Run from Gritty. It's been a blast, and while not conservation, I believe what is effectively a littering PSA to be a worthy output of my time ha.

You can also click on many trees to see what they are, as most are from the Philly Tree Inventory (though more are added to fill out forest areas for style reasons).

Sports, too. Recent post from the President of Upper Deck talking about it: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jmash_everything-speculative-...

Used GRDB many times in a previous life, thank you very much for your work

to me it is just market pressure to exploit the high stress on laborers atm. the level of uncertainty today is only a problem if you don't have a ton of existing capital, which everyone in charge does. so they are insulated and can treat people poorly without repercussions. in a market that prefers short term profits, they will then do this in order to make more money right now.

companies must do this, 'cause if they don't then their competition will (i.e. the pressure)

of course, we can collectively decide to equally value labor and profit, as a symbiotic relationship that incentivizes long term prosperity. but where's the memes in that

We, consumers online, are sliced and diced on every single dimension possible in order to optimize our clicks for another penny.

As a side benefit, when you do this enough, the pendulum that goes over the middle line for any of these arbitrary-but-improves-clicks division builds momentum until it hits the extremes. On either side-- it doesn't matter, cause it will swing back just as hard, again and again.

As a side benefit the back and forth of the pendulum is very distracting to the public so we do not pay attention to who is pushing it. Billions of collective hours spent fighting with no progress except for the wallets of rich ppl.

It almost feels like a conspiracy but I think it's just the direct, natural result of the vice driven economy we have these days

I thought about that, but anecdotally i know many renters addicted to Robinhood. i think housing prices and therefore the cash necessary to get a loan have shifted this divide a bit

I agree, I think this is a longer way to say what I was feeling. It's a rigamarole by people with too much money. If they had less money, they wouldn't be able to do it. So at the end of the day the root cause to me is the inequality. it allows special treatment and the ability to manipulate our daily life (through social apps, news, etc) in a way that they are completely insulated from, feeling no pain whatsoever. Huge policy failure to let so few people have so much influence

We're on the same wavelength. To me, I find it hard not to think about our explosive growth as a country happening at the same time we refuse to expand representation of the public. These charts are very frustrating to me: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN11547

The people in power do not want to lose control, but clearly have no idea how to manage the scale of what has been built. There's an American leadership crisis going on right now that is hard to ignore, both in public and private life.

Wealth inequality is high. High enough you can feel it like a vibe in the air. The richest people in the world are telling everyone to get onboard with technology that is determined to make a lot of those same people's jobs redundant. All with an explicit goal of increasing the price of stock most of those people do not own.

IMO there's two economies, maybe divided by those who participate in the stock market and those who don't. We, Americans, have largely given up trying to improve the lives of people not in the first group. Economies are living, breathing entities and we're just grinding poorer people for fuel so richer people can have another house, another boat, another company. A lot of regular joes are really stressed out about paying rent. The loss in faith is warranted.

I suspect this ends up being pretty important for the next advancements in AI, specifically LLM-based AI. To me, the transformer architecture is a sort of compression algorithm that is being exploited for emergent behavior at the margins. But I think this is more like stream of consciousness than premeditated thought. Eventually I think we figure out a way to "think" in latent space and have our existing AI models be just the mouthpiece.

In my experience as a human, the more you know about a subject, or even the more you have simply seen content about it, the easier it is to ramble on about it convincingly. It's like a mirroring skill, and it does not actually mean you understand what you're saying.

LLMs seem to do the same thing, I think. At scale this is widely useful, though, I am not discounting it. Just think it's an order of magnitude below what's possible and all this talk of existing stream-of-consciousness-like LLMs creating AGI seems like a miss

I will sometimes do this when, for whatever reason, I don't want to capitalize that next letter. It's the 'T' in 'That'; too loud!

IMO the best innovations tend to happen when someone has their hands bound and has no other choices but to figure out a new way or die. Now seems like an incredible time for new models and startup paradigms.

To me I think VC's figured out a way to market a very specific way to build companies and convinced a lot of people it's the only way for 20-ish years. Then there was this sort of shift to selling to enterprise, I think because B2C got harder and easy money was the goal. By then a lot of enterprise design makers were probably in the networks of the people selling. There's a meme about YC-of-late being mostly companies that sell shovels to each other.

But when you optimize for enterprise, I think you end up losing a lot of diversity of opinion in where the value comes from, which leads to top-heavy companies.

My main issue is that after the ZIRP era I don't believe the money is gone or unavailable. It just seems to be hoarded for some reason. There is astronomical wealth out there that could be used for trying new economic models that compete with the last generation of VCs. But it isn't happening.

Maybe the next era of VC decision makers, the ones who themselves were funded on big bets, just don't have the same appetite for risk? Or maybe the era of "developing your brand" has made them not want to share their success? I'm not sure but it's weird to me.

Okay friend, I don’t think I’ll continue this but I hope one of us is right and the movie industry flourishes

Then you might be missing it as it’s a huge huge issue for below the line workers (actors are part of the package we’re shipping out to other countries)

my view of capitalism is that you can't remove the market. it will exist with or without you, so if you have some control you should incentivize the things that are better for everyone.

To me I think it's possible for Netflix and Amazon and whoever to exist and make a lot of money, but also not have nation-state level power. The latter is something we haven't decided we want yet, but I think we'll come around. If there were even just very small controls (that worked) on the size of a company, or how many industries it can go into, then things would look differently. But when we let so few companies consolidate so much power through money, the status quo is a pretty natural outcome. Imagine a world where there were regional amazon.com's, because we just decided at some point they got too big. Same for google. We'd have actual competition. Tech enables market consolidation in ways we didn't expect and we have to do some actual work to fix it.

The "tariff" we're talking about here would be for where the labor comes from. If a EU film company is choosing to film in the US instead of at home for cost reasons, then sure they can put a tariff on that somehow to keep it local. I don't think that's happening in any meaningful way, but it is in the reverse to the detriment of thousands and thousands of local jobs in LA, ATL, NY, etc.

you can see everyone willfully ignoring this here, which makes me nervous about actually solving this problem long term. I used to dream of screenwriting and that dream is almost certainly dead but I'd like to see others have a chance. It looks bleak now

i don't ask ppl who they voted for because i've learned it's not a good signal on whether they are nice or a good person. life is complicated. i didn't vote for trump though, so at least this village idiot has a clean conscience and just isn't interested in reliving 2017

mock the actors and builders and hvac technicians all you'd like, sorta reinforces the overall political landscape. not a great look imo

Who isn't asking for something to bring more production home? Studio execs? People in LA, ATL, etc want to work, and every year there is less and less jobs below the line in the US, even though there's more productions overall paid for by US companies. This sentiment you're talking about is at least not universal

It's about the production of movies, not the distribution of movies. I don't think people in this thread are reading the article. The original title of this submission didn't help.

The filmmaking industry is constantly flying productions all over the world to avoid paying US labor. Waste of time, money, energy. And the saved money isn't given back to the people making the movie, the unions are still constantly fighting with the industry for basic asks.

I don't see a problem here, this is what tariffs are actually for. Broken clock is right twice a day yada yada

eta: one can not like the man and not think this is a bad idea. same as we don't need more dolls from china and it's weird for us to suddenly die on that hill. /shrug

I had not, looks pretty cool but solves the inverse of the problem as I see it. I want a backend agnostic frontend toolset that is a GIS that I can customize to my needs. I don't want to implement the tools myself, that's too low level. I don't want the service to manage, control, or own the data, that's too high level. There's a sweet spot I don't think is being hit yet.

Similarly I see it as it an inevitable that you will deal with a problem related to these issues, then have a massive blocker if you aren't already familiar with the details because debugging requires more than a cursory understanding for hard problems. In the alternative, you don't know the problems exist and the code is broken. I don't think it's as simple as abstracting away the entire concept, which is what I would say is too high level like I mentioned above. I don't know the right answer here honestly, I think it will be disruptive when someone figures it out

I think we're mostly making the same point about complexity, ya.

To me, I think it's mostly a frontend problem stopping the spread of mapping in consumer apps. Backend geo is easy tbh. There is so much good, free tooling. Mapping frontend is hell and there is no good off the shelf solution I've seen. Some too low level, some too high level. I think we need a GIS-lite that is embeddable to hide the complexity and let app developers focus on their value add, and not paying the tax of having frontend developers fix endless issues with maps they don't understand.

edit: to clarify, I think there's a relationship between getting mapping valued by leadership such that the geo work can be even be done by analysts, and having more mapping tools exist in frontend apps such that those leaders see them and understand why geo matters. it needs to be more than just markers on the map, with broad exposure. hence my focus on frontend web. sorry if that felt disjointed

I work on geospatial apps and the software I think I am most excited about is https://felt.com/. I want to see them expand their tooling such that maps and data source authentication/authorization was controllable by the developer, to enable tenant isolation with proprietary data access. They could really disrupt how geospatial tech gets integrated into consumer apps.

This article doesn't acknowledge how niche this stuff is and it's a lot of training to get people to up to speed on coordinate systems, projections, transformations, etc. I would replace a lot of my custom built mapping tools with Felt if it were possible, so I could focus on our core geospatial processes and not the code to display and play with it in the browser, which is almost as big if not bigger in terms of LOC to maintain.

As mentioned by another commenter, this DuckDB DX as described is basically the same as PostGIS too.

To me this seems pretty apt, and probably more generalizable. The world is claimed. There is no glory to come from being the first anymore, and that is too big a bummer for a lot of Great Men. I think future progress will be the composition of skills, as mentioned in the article. Or we go backwards and just take things from each other.

pc has an article about a related topic in my view: https://patrickcollison.com/fast

these things were done by many people with a great vision for the collective, even if lead by one person. maybe not altruistic things but provided more good than they did hoard value. where is the vision anymore?

Generally I agree with you, but I think MLB has actually been pretty responsive to the modern-era dynamic nature of the game. Love them or hate them, they're trying rule changes in the minor leagues and bringing up the ones that work. To me in particular I found the shift frustrating as a fan, and was glad to see a game rule to address it. I also like that they are willing to admit they're wrong, like with the juiced balls. MLB has lots of issues but I think they're doing a pretty good job keeping the sport alive given all the circumstances.

Very true. I dream to be able to hit off one of the fancy ones the players have at the facilities