davidw

Good writing and a fun trip to some really remote places. Hit me up if you're ever in Bend, happy to get a beer and chat about some of those places.

Did you see the pictographs at Hart Mountain? That's actually one bit of Oregon that I have never had the time to explore.

Have you been to Steens? That whole area is super interesting too. Besides the natural features of the mountain itself, and Alvord desert on the other side, the history of Pete French is like something out of a western. More recently, the Riddle Brothers ranch that they have preserved is worth a stop.

This is what's called the "broken window fallacy"

> People who "almost got hit by a bicycle" are extremely numerous while people who actually got hit by cars remain unavailable for comment.

https://bsky.app/profile/jwbee.bsky.social/post/3mtc2rx7hcc2...

Joking aside, I can see the annoyance, and it's important to have separate infrastructure where people feel safe to ride their bikes. That does not mean a 2 inch strip of white pain separating you from dudes in trucks staring at their phones at 40 miles an hour.

My eBike comes with a big basket and a bag that slots into it that can carry a ton of stuff. I do most of our family's grocery shopping with it. A huge upgrade from a backpack.

High quality eBikes are pretty amazing: I have nearly 4000 miles on one of ours, and nearly all of those are replacing car trips around town, including most of our grocery shopping.

While not revolutionary - they're kind of an incremental improvement - I'm pretty impressed by all the things a cheap Chromebook can do.

Yesterday I was reading about this place in Oregon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_L._Shirk_Ranch

Today, with a modern vehicle, it is 1.5 hours from the nearest 'town' and 2 from the county seat, which has 2000 people.

I can't imagine how remote that must have been in 1900. What the seasons must have looked like going by, and how far the rest of the world must have felt.

That whole area makes for a fascinating trip. It is really, really empty and remote.

Paisley is home to one of the largest ranches in the US: https://crookcountyhistorycenter.org/2022/10/one-of-largest-...

And nearby they found some extremely old coprolites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisley_Caves

The somewhat nearby Christmas Valley area saw some the world's oldest footwear discovered in a cave https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/fort_rock_sandal...

There are some inland sand dunes near Christmas Valley as well.

I think the number of people who want to use something like this when it's icy out is pretty small. You'd want studded tires, for instance... and it's generally those who are really committed who ride in those conditions. This looks more like 'dipping a toe in the eBike water'.

Hopefully part of the long term effect is people accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels altogether.

I don't know much about the production of these models. How hard would it be to 'fork' something like this and have it not be full of CCP indoctrination?

I mean that could also be true, but it is not - IMO - the cause of the fairly sudden weak market for software engineers.

Are you saying that precise thing changed 10 years ago and hasn't always kind of been with us?

I am talking about the weak market for software engineers right now and what caused it.

What is the total monthly spend, approximately, on all this; if you don't mind saying, of course?

> outsourcing, an over-reliance on degrees, LLMs, a lack of "apprenticeship" mentoring,

Which of those things changed (along with higher interest rates) in the past few years though? All the other variables did not change. They were present 5 years ago and present 10 years ago too. To me that's indicative that those factors are not the cause of a soft market for software engineers in 2026.

It also ignores the effects of having a critical tool in the software pipeline controlled by a large corporation. That is an absolute sea change from the years when you could (and some of us did) run most of our software development on open tools.

Think about all the open source the world got from some random person in Finland or Sicily or wherever hacking on a cool idea. Will that still happen with a high (for someone who is not employed... maybe a student) monthly cost?

That's not actually true; people have been complaining about this for decades, and it's never been the zero-sum game that they claim it is.

I mean, I wrote this 12 years ago in response to similar discussions on this same site, and in the intervening years, we had a great market for software engineers: https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-job...

What has changed is 1) the zero interest rate environment went away and 2) LLM's.

People have been fretting about 'foreigners' taking their jobs for decades and it never really happened. This is all about LLM's.

I mean, think about it; just a few short years ago there was a very strong market for software engineers, despite outsourcing and immigration being very much part of the landscape.

Blue Sky has 'enough' for me. I don't care if it's the biggest platform. It's got local elected officials, it's got bike racing content and people, it's got software people, and by using it I'm not supporting the white nationalist owner of Twitter, so I'm happy with it. I occasionally post a bit to Threads when I need some more 'reach'.

Meta feels more like your traditional 'greedy corporation' that's fairly amoral and as a consequence ends up doing some bad things in pursuit of more profits.

The other one feels pretty explicitly evil at this point.

Yeah, corruption hurts all of us.

There's also a lesson in there for the "this sucks, they're all corrupt" type nihilists. It turns out that it was possible to be a lot more corrupt, and that things could indeed become much worse.

I don't think Taco Bell are the villains of this story. They got right on tracing the problem down and were open about it, from what I understand. Taylor Farms... not so much.

> who these models reward/empower

The easy, straightforward answer is "the people who own the models". Who else benefits feels like a more complex question and we'll have to see...

Except no one died because Twitter malfunctions here and there.

It's a bit ironic to talk about key parts of the toolchain being open source while making black-box, closed source LLM's, controlled by external companies an integral part of all of it.

That's what 'FuriouslyAdrift' is saying. Those are the people he/she does not want in the neighborhood.

Most NIMBYism isn't about sprawl - at least in the US. It's about stopping the types of housing that use land more efficiently from being built within cities, and therefore actually reduce the demand to grow outwards.

If you are building outwards, 'sprawl', the environmental concerns have some validity, I think. But most of the NIMBYism I see is people opposing, say, an apartment building right in the middle of town. That's actual a big win for the environment ( https://www.sightline.org/apartments-are-the-climate-solutio... ) - they can be more walkable/less car dependant, require less resources, don't pave over farms or forests, and so on.

As to change, that happens when demand to live somewhere changes, one way or another. See my other comment where I discuss an increase in the demand:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126990

Meanwhile, someone elsewhere in this thread is talking explicitly about 'white flight'. For the record I think it's both racism and classism.

I explained two kinds of change, one that is more visible, where housing is built to accommodate people moving in, and a second kind where supply does not meet demand so the people change.

Boulder, CO is an example of #2 - they put a bunch of restrictions on growth years ago , so what 'change' looked like there is wealthy people moving in, and the working class being pushed out to 'leapfrog development' like Longmont, where they then commute in the serve the landed gentry.

You can easily see the first kind, but you have to look at statistics to see the second - income averages, price of housing, vacancy rates, what kinds of jobs your kids' friends' parents have and so on.

There are different things that could create demand to live somewhere - jobs, and amenities are common ones though.

This is not actually a thing that happens because 'someone built an apartment building'.