hibikir

Oh, it's a far worse problem than having the property tax base to create the district, but avoiding the students that would need extra support, and might disrupt the classroom because they aren't getting it. Those students are incredibly expensive to handle mainly via the school district alone. The amount of money to provide sufficient support without parental involvement is beyond what even the wealthiest districts can afford. The shortcut to avoid said students isn't to have immense funding then, but to make sure parents that aren't rather wealthy don't even get into live in the district a all.

That's the real dirty problem of the suburb + school district marriage: You turn parents just thinking of the school district of their children into raging NIMBYs that end up wanting just rich people that speak perfect english nearby.

Large parts of the floor would be illegal to hand to anyone due to lack of natural light: They are only reasonable for offices because most of the floor doesn't have full walls, or said walls are transparent. They are also in locations where you might not want to live anyway, as there's minimal commercial support around the building for the services you would need if living in a weird, limited apartment.

It's a bit like how suburban commercial areas are now in trouble because there are fewer companies interested in the big box anchors, and without them many a strip mall stops making economic sense. But there at least the anchor is just a big empty box, not an 8 or 9 digit investment.

And you see a similar connection in he other direction in northwestern Spain. Regions with redheads and bagpipes. It's not a majority, but you can see it from families tracking their roots to that area from 700+ years.

It depends on the lived environment. In my US suburban house, a 20 minute drive from the warehouse/Costco, absolutely. In the Spanish town I am in, where I can do 10 errands in an hour ln foot, as basically every street level space is a store, and streets are themselves narrow, Amazon's logistics advantage loses to the Asian bazaar.

It's a geographical difference, but it has little to do with the deserts, and more to do with the actual density of where people live, where the US is also among the least dense in the world. Those suburbs with 0.3-0.5 acre lots, roads that need to be everywhere and quite wide, extending every distance, just aren't standard worldwide, and increase bespoke infrastructure costs. In a denser place you need more capacity in the fiber bundle, or larger pipes on a sewer, but that's a much smaller problem than the miles of infra. Go look at a density map by the square km, and compare any American metro to, say, a Spanish metro. You find denser square miles in Spanish towns under 500k than you would in Kansas City, Phoenix, Houston... and that lowers all kinds of infra costs. It's not really the miles of desert, farmland or anything like that.

It's not unreasonable to mandate that one should try it for some of its safer uses, or to spend time teaching people what the good uses are, which keep growing... but mandating a significant part of the day-to-day is telling employees they have no agency in how they achieve objectives. For people that aren't technical, it shows they aren't good at the social either.

Ultimately animation is built targeting a budget: From the oldest animes with massive animation reuse and very low fps to complicated things that mix 3d and 2d. It's all a multi-decade race to make anime people enjoy for a budget the studio will pay. Almost every animation project done today (barring, say, the failure of Blue Lock S2, or Uzumaki past ep1) is has more animation per episode than most series in the 90s. Something like Witch Hat Atelier looks competitive with Ghibli movies, but it comes in 12 episode seasons: So far more animation total!

It's precisely the competition, and the quest for more quality for the buck, that leads to more foreign animation, more AI, or more 3d models. If people were animating like the old days, with hand-drawn cels photographed in complex rigs, we'd not get the same actual amount of animation made, and it'd be worse, just because the cost per series would be so high very little animation would be funded, and it'd be just for smash hits with big worldwide audience potential, not, say, series about rakugo. We optimize for output, and it often meands outsourcing and higher level tooling, which will include AI in one form or another.

We are in tech here, we have to understand there's big advantages to this for consumers.

Inflation is an average of many things. Computer components have a huge spike in demand with insufficient increase in supply, which is going to lag for years, so we might as well be buying at auction. It's not a price that flows through the entire economy, like the price of oil.

So yes, inflation on average is nowhere near as high as in RAM prices.

At the very least, a different account for your password manager at work, hopefully paid by the company, which you don't install outside of company-controlled devices.

Because it is speculation, with no special evidence. Could it be for just money? You can sell access to exploited systems in interesting companies for quite a bit of money. Or maybe it was for general use to twist public opinion in the future, not tied to those specific elections. Or just plain spying, We can't be sure, and the net was cast quite narrowly.

One could research where those repos are coming from, and do forensics on who controls the trojan network. But that wasn't done, so right now, it's all speculation. Something can be very worrying without us knowing exactly what the use cases for it will be

We don't even have to go that deep: If anything accelerates our rate of code change, but doesn't lower our incidents per change, we are still stuck in a larger pile of incidents, and that's if the code quality is exactly the same as before.

Without more, better testing, hopefully more invariants stored in type systems that are easy to reason about, and more recording of the reasons why we change things, we get a more unstable system in practice. One were fewer people can work at once.

The very beginning was. Most japanese comics are designed to be serialized for a long time, and are built to change direction if needed: Getting serialized is difficult, and low enough reader scores get you kicked out of the magazines, so it's common for a story to be built to swerve. Early Dragon Ball is a light thing like Dr Slump but a little more some fighting, but anything related to the old folk tale was dead and gone by, say, the second time there's a martial arts tournament. Most of what most people think about regarding dragon ball is past the moment where we randomly learn, through the power of retconning, that our main character was an alien all along, and people of his race are invading earth. Not quite the kind of thing from Journey to the West

I once worked at a place where a VP in charge of software teams would look at sprint reports in JIRA, and complained if the burndown charts didn't look similar to the sample, ideal trendline. Managers would be chewed up when their team didn't have a pretty enough chart. So you might not be surprised to hear that ultimately the tickets were doctored to meet the demands of the chart, whether any actual work actually ever closed when the ticket said.

You don't even have to go outside engineers. I have teammates that get very little out of Claude Code because the way they integrate their own knowledge doesn't allow them to think of what Claude might not know. They'd say a task was impossible with the tooling, and I'd get instant answers, because I understand what is weird internal business logic sitting 6 repos away, and what is knowledge claude has by default. I can commit Claude.md files for them, but I have to include EVERYTHING, because otherwise they'll let Claude make assumptions and waste minutes, if not hours.

It's a big part of what, in my experience, is separating the very good engineer from the iffy one: Do you have a good mental model, and can you put yourself in the shoes of people sitting in a different mental model? It makes you a better dev, and even more so when it comes to AI tools, which have their own kind of alien brain.

Once you start from destroying democracy, the chances that the results will quickly put keeping the owner in power ahead of anything good for humanity are high. Autocracies are, in practice, inefficient messes that put loyalty ahead of competency, so one cannot really get prosperity in exchange for no representation. The loss of representation will get us the loss of prosperity real quick.

This also applies within companies. You can get temporary lucky with a CEO that isn't accountable to anyone, but then that brings sycophancy, leading to degraded decisions. It's how it always works.

So it's very clear cut, because you are offering a trade that cannot actually happen in practice. The economic growth will turn into zero sum status games, like it always has.

Sure, but as far as the people that are going to be professional, and good enough to play for a national team, you'd already be playing in the top levels of soccer by 19. Lamine Yamal was playing for the A team in Barcelona when he was barely 16, and was a starter in Spain's eurocup win at 17. More "normal" players, likePedri and Messi, played their first minutes for Barcelona at 17.

So if you even smell a college varsity team, you are already in the slow track. It's really rare to find a star that wasn't at least in a farm team at 15. I have a friend that was already there at 10, and his ceiling was just starter in a low tier team in La Liga.

It's a core question to public choice theory, and why people are generally very unhappy with politics in general. You end up with aggregations of baskets of goods that aren't just suboptimal for you, but suboptimal for the bast majority of consumers, but where there's no practical opportunity to offer the alternative. The barrier to even begin to compete is so high, so the agents (the owner of the newspaper, the retailer, or the politician) end up twisting the available options in their favor.

This kind of knots get solved automatically in markets that are very easy to enter, or by regulation. That's why for the commercial examples, we can have consumer protection laws that create little distortion and have a better equilibrium. Good luck trying to use that lever to fix politics though.

The massive misalignment in large companies is no secret. But neither is the fact that when someone comes to cut, they also have no idea of who is doing load bearing work that matters, and who doesn't. I look at recent cuts around my large corp, and it's clear they are made at levels that have no visibility of the ground, and are uninterested in said visibility. Obvious mistakes that are worse than what claude would have told you (yes, I asked Claude to pretend to make the budget cuts in our org y looking at the same data an exec could probably get. They were better than what happened)

I think it's a general problem, but in my rare conversations with execs nowadays, they seem rather uninterested in improving their decision making there. The actual performance of the organization does not appear to be all that relevant to them.

Scala has no immutability encoded in its runtime either (as it's the same as Java), but yet syntactically it's immutable in practice. Will the JRE technically allow a val to be edited through some third party thread inspecting your code and messing with memory? Sure. But it's not a reasonable fear in any real world environment, where I cannot remember, in 15+ years of professional scala, a case where anything I expected to be immutable (everything) to be mutated under me. Nowadays people using in in an FP style don't even think of the physical threads, as green thread libraries are taking care of all the scheduling.

So focusing on the runtime's guarantees doesn't seem like a practicality focused argument to me.

From the time of very early viruses, malware has spent effort modifying the tools that make the system transparent to lie to you. So your approach demands that there must be things that are absolutely impossible to change. I have yet to see a system where that is actually true.

3 tests was already better than the traditional Spanish university class: 1 exam. which is probably written by the department head, not your teacher, and he isn't in any way interested in a high pass rate. Failing 90% of the class might even be positive for them. At that point classes aren't even important: You purchase the tests from the last 10 years, and then you have a prayer of knowing what the bar might be this year.

Teaching, fairness and measuring student performance might seem like similar goals, but it's just so very easy to make sure you succeed at one while messing up the others.

So man companies that are doing RTO are in no way trying to reorg to make teams stay colocated, it's rather puzzling. I know a UK manager with only reports in the different parts of the americas, and there's never more than 2 in the same city, so for all intents and purposes, the teams are just fully remote but stuck badging in. And that's after a reorg this april, where many US managers got laid off.

Along with trends like having line managers be in charge of 20+ direct reports, it leaves people scratching their heads.

From that perspective, development has always been harder since I started. I left college with a copy of K&R and remembering courses that applied to real life immediately, because data structures and such were just what we had. In my first job, I ended up writing a code generator to help serialize a large number of data structures, straight from a compiler design class.. which right now you don't need to know a thing about, because serialization and languages with introspection are everywhere. The knowledge you need to be a professional engineer just kept going up through the last 30 years, while most of the basics became far less relevant, because the libraries just did it.

AI raises the bar again, as its probably at least as good as me, if not better, at anything I learned in college. I've spent years living off of random trivia from the last 30 years, as I saw computing grow with me. How do you know this?! Because everything built on top of it didn't exist when I was your age, so I had to learn it! But well, nowadays the AI is better at that trivia too.

The world moves, we do what we can with what we kno. It's not just programming, but what innovation and automation has done to the vast majority of things humans have done to be productive for each other since humans are people. We'll have to cope, like the guy that bred oxes to pull the plows.

Ricardian models of trade seem to hold well in real life, and they'd work well too if a lot of work was done by not just AI, but robots. As long as there's limit to the production capacity of the high tech population, there's something that is worth doing where the disadvantage of doing it by hand is lower. It does lead to lower wages there though, and that would basically require investment as to make real necessities dirt cheap, like they are in places where labor isn't worth much.

There's still the fact that claiming to be the owner of the automation, while other people aren't, will be untenable in a world with sufficient inequality. We've seen that happen before when the only justification for the difference in wealth was basically inheritance. Nobles losing land and rights, churches being dispossessed an such things. It'd be a likely outcome if 5% of the people claim to own all automation ever. But that's not about having everyone be unemployed because nobody has any economic value: That's what is unlikely.

Note that China is where it is because of efforts to do this, on purpose, over decades. 20 years ago, their urban percentage was somewhere in the 40s. We are even seeing more migration to cities in Europe and the US, even though it's unplanned, and it leads to big changes in cost of living thanks to this lack of planning.

So if China took 30 years, give or take, to get to where it's at, with its state capacity, I suspect India will take quite a bit longer.

I basically agree, just adding context.

As companies grow, it's the natural state of things, as any hope for goal alignment goes out the window. I am OK dealing with situations where the good for the company's long term might not be the same as my personal preferences. But we often see situations where what is decided isn't good for the company, or for most workers, but great for a decision maker, and we all know that at those layers, talking about the misalignment to the layer above is a great way to get canned. A decade or that, and the company is a zombie.

I've enjoyed tech in environments where there was alignment, and in a few cases it made me serious money, which is why I have said optionality myself. But nowadays AI has led to much higher capital costs to do innovative things, so the number of companies with the right size and potential has shrunk, and that makes fulfilling careers far less likely.

The question is how long Apple will be able to maintain those prices, given the run for memory that there is. Someone is making a lot less money selling to apple than elsewhere, and while the long term contracts are worth a lot in stability, there's a limit to it. Not everyone gets hit equally by a demand shock, but nobody is immune.

Someone like Nintendo or Sony is making a whole lot more devices, so they probably have not just longer term contracts, but the scale to negotiate prices down. Valve might not even contract a line making it all the time: Theri total sales are in the low single digit millions, while Nintendo selst 15+ million a year, and expect 5+ years of a console's lifetime.

So it's unsurprising that when prices of components go up, a company that has a much lower scale ends up facing worse production problems. Just look at how the price of consumer RAM has basically tripled in the last year. And the Steam deck has to pay for the ram and the internal SSD, and those are also going way up. It's not a cost of goods situation anymore: Prices are now basically set at auction.

It will continue until AI demand for memory goes down, or Micron and such manage to get a whole lot more manufacturing capacity online. And just like during Covid, anyone raising capacity is taking big risks on how long that capacity will need to remain online. See the companies that upped production in 2020 and were wrecked in 2022 because demand collapsed.

If this has a problem, it's the difficulty of application: 2nd homes, and only if you have X amount of money, instead of just a flat increase. Property taxes (or really, in NYC land taxes, as most of the property tax is really the value of the land) are just very efficient, and make much less of a difference on the price of rents than you'd think.

Unfortunately, doing that is very unpopular. Unpopular enough that we see states trying to get rid of property taxes, and those providing limits to increases, which basically guarantee misallocation and rising prices. But what is economically reasonable and what the voters like have very little to do with each other.

Eventually the maintenance comes back again: The turn-key homes have typically had most of the things that needed maintenance replaced, but they eventually come back, and they can be quite the headache. See the wonders of having a plumbing stack going past its useful life, land resettling leading to having to do regrades, or lift concrete slabs, or just general tree maintenace.