offsign

Sounds like AI is just greasing the wheels of a long established 'grandparent scam'... goes something like this:

1) voice one: young adult calls, sobbing 2) grandparent inquires with a name... "Ben, is that you?" 3) voice one: "Yes grandma, it's me, Ben... I'm in trouble, please don't tell mom 4) voice two: "Hello, I'm attorney..."

My grandmother fell victim to this almost 20 years ago, which only stopped when Western Union refused to let her continue sending wires... she was forced to call her daughter (at which point they just called my brother.)

Our takeaway (at the time)... the voice doesn't even need to be terribly accurate, since the original interaction is brief / somewhat inaudible over the tears. Typically just requires an older vulnerable adult, a lucky strike with the initial setup (e.g. grandparent actually has a grandkid), and a lot of high pressure / duress salesmanship.

Makes for a catchy headline, but you only have to go back to Jan 9, 2024* to find a similarly 'drought free' California:

https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Maps/CompareTwoWeeks.aspx

(*Technically slivers of the state in the far north/south were 'abnormally dry' in 2024, a small difference from 2026)

Didn't advocate for "more highways" -- I totally get it. More offering that maybe these problems shouldn't be viewed as a purely zero-sum game, where cities get all the benefit at the expense of the larger region due to a form of geographic tyranny. (Or at least, perhaps we shouldn't pretend that externalities don't exist through studies that largely look at quality-of-life factors in the hub.)

You can see some of these same dynamics playing out in SF with the decommissioning of the 'Great Highway' on the west side, which led to a recent recall of the local council member. Why does the majority vote of a city of 800k people get to unilaterally dictate the transportation options for a region upwards of 7MM?

One thing that irks me about these schemes is that they often ignore cities role as regional hubs -- i.e. many cities became cities because they serve as geographical gateways interlocking the surrounding region. They are happy to take the benefits of being at the hub, but (increasingly) adopt a nativistic dialogue with the rest of the spokes.

I get that no one likes highways running through their communities, but when you decommission historical arteries while aggressively adopting anti-car transportation policies throughout the rest of the hub, it's somewhat inevitable that the network get snarled.

Maybe congestion pricing is the way to go -- it can certainly work for major European cities built inland, and surrounded by ring roads. For NYC / SF (surrounded by water), I'm less convinced. Sure, I'll 'just take public transport' to go downtown, but the options significantly diminish if I want to travel from North Bay to South Bay to see my parents, or Jersey to South Brooklyn to visit my inlaws.

"he took it a bridge too far" is a massive trivialization.

The guy operated a marketplace for illegal goods in order to enrich himself. The illegality wasn't just incidental, it was literally his business model -- by flouting the law, he enjoyed massive market benefit (minimal competition, lack of regulation, high margins etc) by exploiting the arbitrage that the rest of us follow the rules.

Said a different way, he knowingly pursued enormous risk in order to achieve outsized benefits, and ultimately his bet blew up on him -- we shouldn't have bailed him out.

Title is misleading... the source Le Monde article states that use of certain bicycle paths has doubled (or tripled) in certain places, as investment has gone into improving these paths.

That's great, but kind of obvious that if you build out dedicated bike lanes, cyclists are more likely to prefer them to alternate routes.

One of things I've loved about HN was the quality of comments. Whether broad or arcane, you had experts the world over who would tear the topic apart with data and a healthy dose of cynicism. I frequently learned more from the debate and critique than I did from the "news" itself.

I don't know what is it about AI and current state of tech, but the discourse as of late has really taken a nosedive. I'm not saying that any of this conjecture won't happen, but the acceleration towards fervor and fear mongering on the subject is bordering on religiosity - seriously, it makes crypto bros look good.

And yeah -- looks like some cool new tech from OpenAI, and excited when I can actually dig in. Would also love it if I could hire their marketing department.

Water infrastructure in the west is highly fragmented and locally rate limited -- you can't just reroute water from large swaths of the state like you can with electricity. Additionally, the water consumed by agriculture is often different than the 'treated water' needed to serve residential communities.

So yes, water is major a bottleneck for residential development out west. But to solve this you need new means of transport (pipes / channels), storage (reservoirs), and treatment (plans)... infrastructure that doesn't currently exist, is hard to get approved, and would likely need to be paid for by increasing the cost of living for existing residents.

Agree that we should be smarter about how water is allocated / used out West, but 'taking from ag' isn't going to make it any cheaper for you to buy a home.

Here's how someone in the field recently explained it to me...

Let's say you have a vaccine that appears effective (great, right?) You give it to 1000 willing test subjects, and most become immune (fantastic, right?). Then, three to six months later 50 of the subjects go into terminal liver failure due to their body's immune response to the vaccine (as determined by their genetics.)

It's not just whether a vaccine 'works' for you, it's whether it's effective AND safe over the huge genetic pool that is humanity (as measured over a sufficient period of time). This kind of stuff comes up all the time with drug trials, and it's why there's a process, and things can't be rushed.

Possibly. Luminosity masks work really well for bracketed exposures, but stacking different times of day introduces new problems (shadow angles, coloring) that I've struggled to adequately resolve. (Sure it's more a reflection my ability level.)

What's fun about drone lighting is that the detail is all 'real', with most of the 'art' going in the setup / staging. Really fun to see it executed well.

Dabbled with similar photography (* not as good as Wu's), and think it would be a challenge to achieve similar results in Photoshop.

Light painting in the sky is one thing, but getting the light source to simultaneously "paint" the foreground in a realistic way -- so it's suggestive how the two physically interacted -- requires another level of PS wizardry (at least beyond me).

* https://photos.app.goo.gl/9ED17BWiRfieVrap8

Had the fortune of visiting parts of Sudan in late '17. The country has such a wealth of history, much of it completely ignored / probably much more still hidden beneath the sands. When we visited El-Kurru, they had just unearthed a tomb, and we were amongst the first few dozen people to have walked in the chamber in thousands of years (or so we were told). At some sites you can camp amidst the Pyramids, and safety assume you'll be the only visitor. If Sudan was able to get an accessible tourist programme together, suspect it would be a serious contender to Egypt.

this.

anything that restricts or impedes what you can do with a home is a liability, not an asset. Up in SF, even partially tenant-occupied homes typically sell for a sizable discount.

(also doubt that ~10k/year is going to make waves in the target market -- Bay Area homeowners with a back yard big enough to make this viable.)