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maxsilver

5,914 karma · joined January 10, 2011

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maxsilver··on Measuring the impact of zoning on housing in a city
Where are you? Generally you can petition for re-zoning, as long as your lot is urban enough to have proper power/water/sewer infrastructure, and meets the hypothetically split requirements. (They allow it maybe ~90% of the time here in Michigan)
maxsilver··on Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.
How exactly are you doing that? The average price of a standard-feature line (i.e., not a MVNO with strict deprioritization) is approximately $70 USD a month (including taxes and fees, but not including any phone subsidy or equipment plans)

Even a strict hyper-cut-down MVNO (say something like Mint Mobile) is still about $20 a month per line on average, for their cheapest plan. And T-Mobile acquired Mint, so it's pricing will almost certainly rise in a year or two. (T-Mobile did the same thing to Metro when it acquired their network + subscribers, prices were doubled after a few years)

maxsilver··on Swiss vs. American parenting: Differences according to a US mom
> , are there that many places a kid isn’t safe in the US?

It depends on what you mean by "safe".

In most of US "normal suburbs", your kid isn't likely to get like, murdered. But if they leave a bike unlocked and unattended for a few hours (the way the parent poster describes Switzerland), then yeah, it's going to vanish, even in many "nice" US neighborhoods.

maxsilver··on 'Has this guy ever made a movie before?' Coppola's battle to film Megalopolis
> The city it basically new york, which the director believes is the center of the world.

To be fair, this seems like a commonly shared belief among many real-world New York City residents as well.

maxsilver··on Not an iPad Pro Review: Why iPadOS Still Doesn't Get the Basics Right
Except for the iPad Pro (which has no fans), and the iPhone Pro (which has no fans), and the AirPods Pro (which also does not have any fans).

"Pro" meaning "has active cooling" only works on 3 out of the 6 things currently labeled "Pro".

maxsilver··on Not an iPad Pro Review: Why iPadOS Still Doesn't Get the Basics Right
Do they actually care? This sort of discrepancy has never bothered them before.

(see how the "Air" used to mean "ultra-premium thin and light", but now the iPad Air is heavier than the Pro, and the MacBook Air is just a brand they slap on the entry level MacBook, a model so entry level it's now sold at WalMart -- and the 15' Air is only 90 grams weight difference than the 14' Pro)

(see the "Apple Pencil" and how it means like 4 different things, with 4 different feature sets, and needs a product matrix spreadsheet to know which Pencil is safe to use with any given iPad)

See how "Apple TV" is both a hardware product (Apple TV 4K) and a service (Apple TV subscription) and an App (the Apple TV app, available on iOS, but also Roku and others), and a platform (the "Apple TV platform", where you can load other streaming services like Disney+ or Hulu or Paramount, into the Apple TV platform, which lives inside the Apple TV app, on your Apple TV device).

maxsilver··on The Rise of the Forever Renter Class
Sure, but in 1995 you could also get a nice house for like 40k. An equivalent home today costs about 400k.

8% interest on 40k is only $63k interest paid (A 1995 home had a total cost of $123k)

8% interest on 400k is $633k (that same home in 2024 has a total cost of $1.2 million dollars)

maxsilver··on The Rise of the Forever Renter Class
The problem is that "investment firms have a finite purchasing capability" is only true over the long term. (like, "many decades" long) Investment firms have effectively unlimited purchasing capability in the medium term (like, for the next 5 years).

Which is why "just build more housing" isn't really working, because you can't just overbuild human demand (we already do that in lots of cities, especially in the midwest), you'd also have to also outbuild the entire public and private investment appetite for housing, which is effectively unlimited at the moment.

maxsilver··on Apple introduces M4 chip
> What data do you store on an iPad Air?

Games. You can put maybe three or four significant games on an iPad Air before it maxes out. (MTG Arena is almost 20GB all on it's own, Genshin Impact is like 40+ GB)

maxsilver··on The business of takehome assessments
> It seems take homes are mainly geared towards pre-selecting young single people with a lot of free time to code on the side besides their main job and other responsibilities, or who have no other responsibilities. (snip) I question the future of my career in tech, how will I be able to compete for new jobs later when I won't be, and take homes will be normalized?

My counterpoint to this is that takehome tests are great for folks who don't necessarily do well on brainteasers, but are otherwise strong functional developers. Despite having a family and children, I always prefer a takehome assessment. (And, just as an FYI, I'm 36 and a single parent to a young grade-schooler)

I might be biased, in that I feel like I do poorly in the live programming / brainteaser style interviews, but do strongly when I have a takehome assessment. Live programming is like a completely bizzaro-land version of programming, where a real person is staring you down while you type, observing your every interaction, and deciding your fate based on a random 60 minutes of the highest-stress part of your day. ("Oh, you googled a for loop syntax, you are clearly an idiot lying about your experience" when in fact, it's more like, "I get thrown 6 different programming languages every single week, each with similar but slightly varied syntax for every single thing, and having a person stare at me and decide the entire future of my career is a little bit stressful and anxiety-inducing").

With a takehome assessment, I can think about it for a while, I can write it all upfront, I can try a few different implementations and pick the one that feels best, I can accurately and intelligently explain exactly what I did and why I did it, I can talk in detail about the problem and potential tradeoffs. I can wrap the whole thing in nice automated testing, I can setup basic CI/CD for it on GitHub Actions or equivalent. I can demo my commitment to strong well-written clear documentation and dev experience, right in my branch Pull Request -- and all of that will likely be a closer match to what real-world day-to-day work at the new company might be like, than solving your LeetCode brainteaser.

I don't love "unpaid work before getting a job", yes that part sucks. But it sucks less than having a random stranger decide your an idiot, based on watching you sweat for an hour. Even if I'm going to get ultimately rejected anyway, the takehome route still feels better.

maxsilver··on Dean Ball on the new California AI bill
> An accountant could then use a computer in service of them embezzling a serious amount of money from their employer. Should Apple be held accountable for that?

You joke, as if we didn't do exactly this -- regulate accountants and accounting software. (GAAP, DFARS, SOX, PCI DSS, etc)

And we did the same thing with say, Auto Manufacturers and automobiles (FMVSS and CAFE via NHTSA)

maxsilver··on Jeff Lawson buys The Onion
Or maybe an MSU grad with a sense of humor?
maxsilver··on A morning with the Rabbit R1: a fun, funky, unfinished AI gadget
> I’m very unclear on why these (rabbit and humane) aren’t just apps.

That's the one thing that seemed really clear to me. People's phones are too locked down so these can't be apps, you'd either hit Apple restrictions right away, or would inevitably hit them as you developed further. (The first time you, for example, wanted to always listen transparently for a wake word the way an iPhone or HomePod does for Siri, and Apple blocked you for it. Or the first time you wanted to show your UI while the screen is locked, Apple is allowed do do this for Maps, but you definitely aren't allowed to in your own app).

At this point, if you want to do anything big on mobile, you have to also re-invent (or copy a pre-OEM android) smartphone, just for the chance to try it out. Just like Rabbit does here.

maxsilver··on Rabbit R1 source code [part 1]
Fun tidbit: There's a point in the tech demo where he asks the rabbit device to "filter job candidates to ones that are LA-based"

When the r1 address replies to him, it attaches a new spreadsheet, and he opens it on-stage. But the spreadsheet it sent, that they then show on screen, has not filtered any candidates to LA-only. (The column next to their names shows labels on screen like "NYC", "Austin", "Miami", "Seattle", etc)

https://youtu.be/22wlLy7hKP4?si=tBt9szqE_AbJPRqW&t=1169 (exact timestamp)

maxsilver··on No one buys books
> public libraries in Michigan are thriving (another place I know well). I have no idea why the difference is so stark.

I can't speak for Philly, but Michiganders have a long long-standing community tradition of fighting to defend our public libraries from an onslaught of various attacks. And while the quality of the library system can vary (based on location and local funding authority), Michiganders generally have majority support for public libraries as an institution, and pass successful votes for them regularly.

(historic Library voting records) https://www.michigan.gov/libraryofmichigan/-/media/Project/W... (be careful reading this, not every red/failing vote is bad -- for example, May 2023's red line is a success for that public library, that something bad did not pass)

maxsilver··on Meta Horizon OS
> The Meta Quest app can connect to a headset and show what the player is seeing, both video and audio. Been watching my kid play various games for years.

You don’t have your kid on a child account, you have your kid using an adult account. Child accounts can’t screen share —- it’s acknowledged in the Quest FAQ - https://www.meta.com/help/quest/articles/in-vr-experiences/o... “only the primary account can cast”

> Not sure what state reset you’re talking about.

Setup a child account. Let your kid login. Have the kid take the headset off. Congrats, everything just got killed, and it’s now PIN-locked to the adult account. When the adult types in a PIN, it trashes the child’s session, and starts an Adult session.

(We work around this by gently holding the face sensor with a finger while moving the headset around between people, to trick the headset into thinking it’s still being worn -— but this is ridiculously broken, no one should have to do that just to get it to work)

maxsilver··on Meta Horizon OS
The Quest is insanely good, for a single person in isolation, once it's up and running. But there's a ton of friction that shouldn't exist before that happens, and Meta hasn't nailed most of the UX here yet. For example:

- App sharing / libraries doesn't work properly yet. (The owner has to secretly log in to each individual app themselves, before anyone else can use it on the device. There is no documentation informing anyone of this requirement)

- Add/ons or DLC also don't work properly yet. (You have to 're-unlock' each individual DLC, for it to share to anyone else on device in something like Beat Saber, for example)

- Child permissions don't work properly yet. (The notification does work, but a parent is not allowed to approve an app from that notification, the child has to entirely shut down and restart the whole device, before an approval takes effect)

- Screen sharing doesn't work, at all. (If you have a child, you just can't ever mirror their view onto a TV or Tablet -- full stop, no exceptions. Which also means, there's no way to help a child who is wearing a headset -- ever). Note that "taking the headset off" triggers a state reset, so a child can't hand the headset over to their parent for help, since the face sensor will kill state the second a face is removed.

- Windowing UI doesn't really work yet. (You can have windows, but only three, and only side-by-side, and only for a select few apps) -- it's more usability-restricted than even stage manager on an iPad. You can tell the Quest is designed around the expectation that you will be in one-and-only-one full-screen game, pretty much the entire time your wearing the headset.

- Online sharing is app-dependent, a bunch don't work. Many more don't work at first, you have to spend 30 to 60 minutes "unlocking" the right to match-make. (making the online/networking more seemless is critical because of the nature of the device -- you can't both look at it the way you might with a TV or PC or Laptop or Tablet, since it's a worn device)

None of this is dealbreaking stuff, none if it needs any kind of "new invention" or anything to fix. But as a product, friction is still really high here, and I can see why it's not necessarily super popular outside of techie/gaming scenes yet.

maxsilver··on Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
Farmers (i.e., Farmers, Ranchers, and Other Agricultural Managers) make a lot more than $450 a week. Average salary for these folks is $70k/yr.

A farm hand only makes like $15/hr on average, which puts it on par with a job at McDonalds or such.

maxsilver··on Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
> people don't actually want to tradeoff their labor time for leisure time all that well. They value consumption too much.

We don't actually know that. Most people don't have the option.

For all but a select few industries, there is no such thing as "work a part time job, and trade the rest for extra leisure" since almost no part-time job can sustainably cover cost of living. (Heck, most full time jobs don't really cover basic cost of living today).

> There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. But you'd need to have a smaller apartment, an older car, and eat more lentils.

The average wage in Michigan is currently $21/hr. ($36k/yr after federal, city, and state taxes). The average basic 1-bed apartment here is about $1300/month or $15k/yr. Minimum income requirement to qualify for an apartment is usually 2.5x to 3x times monthly rent.

Math that out and you can quickly see that the vast majority of people simply aren't going to ever afford basic housing on 15hours a week. Or even 30hours a week.

--

And on the flip side, when it was actually possible to pull this trick off, more people used to use it. In the 60s and 70s, when you could actually live off a part time 20hr a week job, people routinely did so (and then used their free time to do things like enroll in college and pay for it on the side).

You don't see that anymore, because wages have fallen so drastically, and costs risen so drastically. It simply doesn't math out for the vast majority of folks.

maxsilver··on Meta Llama 3
> but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing.

I'm not convinced he's actually done that. Pretty much any 'profitable, sustainable business' can afford software developers.

Software developers are paid pretty decently, but (grabbing a couple of lists off of Google) it looks like there's 18 careers more lucrative than it (from a wage perspective), and computers-in-general are only 3 of the top 25 highest paying careers - https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/best-pay...

Medical, Legal, Finance, and Sales as careers (roughly in that order) all seem to pay more on average.

maxsilver··on Student debt is haunting Americans from graduation to retirement
> I have a chemistry degree that's technically from a liberal arts college and it was super confusing to my immigrant parents how that could happen.

I kind of get it. The english words "liberal" and "arts" used to mean entirely different things for hundreds of years, and have been redefined into something else only recently (past ~30 years) via common usage.

My degree program was in "Liberal Studies", and my parents consistently assumed it meant "studying how to become a Democrat voter", when in actuality, what it meant was "if you can justify it well, we give you permission to merge two-or-more different degree paths into one"

The university eventually had to rename the program to "Integrative Studies", because too many people simply don't know what "Liberal" means in an traditional academic context, and couldn't shake the modern-political framing of the word.

maxsilver··on Student debt is haunting Americans from graduation to retirement
> there are oodles of ways to get a libarts degree without incurring student debt.

For folks who don't know, would you be willing to elaborate? Is it a real degree (fully accredited, so you can actually use it?).

Even using residency status at a community college for your first two years, and then transfering in to a public state university, still puts the cheapest bachlors degree around here at close to $40k (not including room and board). (And for maybe half of the careers, you can't do this, and it costs even more)

maxsilver··on Student debt is haunting Americans from graduation to retirement
Well, where "liberal art degree" often means "high-skilled labor". People struggling to pay off college debt includes:

- teachers and childcare workers

- special education and/or disability workers

- librarians

- social workers, therapists, mental health workers

- cnas, medical billing, and other heathcare admin

- and many more not listed above

People often seem to assume "liberal arts" translates to a fake profession, like "underwater basketweaving" or "economist" or something "silly". And while that's occasionally true, most folks with a Liberal Arts degree are hard-working career-oriented people, who society just pays terribly, arbitrarily, because they can. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education#Modern_...

maxsilver··on Rents are soaring. Is RealPage to blame?
> No, they did not.

Yes, they did, and you can see it in the metrics.

If "new housing" is "not legal", how are we at a 30-year-high in new residential construction? - https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-housing-starts-surge-1... and https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-20/us-housin...

Note that we're also at a nearly 50-year record-high on urban apartment construction as well https://www.axios.com/2023/09/07/apartment-building-construc... -- the kinds of dense multi-family units that urbanists insist cities "haven't legalized".

maxsilver··on Rents are soaring. Is RealPage to blame?
By this broken logic, "Movies are fungible". Because you can turn money into a John Carter, and you can turn Dune: Part 2 into Money. You can borrow against Star Wars, and you can license out Barbie.

But everyone knows, movies are not fungible, because they are not interchangeable. I can buy oil, or unleaded gasoline, and it's basically the same everywhere, it is "replaceable by another nearly-identical item, mutually interchangeable" -- oil and gasoline are fungible. But "Movies" are not fungible, because "Lord of the Rings" is not a replacement for "50 First Dates", which is not a replacement for "The Matrix", even though they're all movies.

Housing is not like Oil, housing is like Movies. It's not fungible, because a 2bedroom row-home in Foster City, CA is not "nearly-identical/mutually interchangeable" with a 4bed,2bath home in suburban Louisville, nor a 1bedroom condo in the Chicago Loop.

Even when the housing is all in the same zip code, much of it is still not fungible with it's alternatives, because housing is so regularly different and unique in a myriad of different ways. ("this one is on a hill, that one is in a valley, it has a higher risk of flooding. This one is in School District A, this house across the street is School District B, this house is in a city with income taxes, this house on the next block over is in a township with no income taxes, that house will need a new roof sooner, this house is in a HOA neighborhood, that house is near the bus line, this house is close to the freeway onramps, that house has fiber but this one is only Comcast Coax, etc")

maxsilver··on Rents are soaring. Is RealPage to blame?
> The macro picture is still supply and demand and we have to intervene there if we want housing to be more affordable in the places people want to live. legalizing a variety of housing is very much a step that your local city council can take.

We already did this ages ago -- most cities have already made all the changes you are requesting, years or even a decade ago. Your talking points are like 10 years behind the times, housing is already legal in 99% of the US right now. (basically everywhere that isn't SF / Bay Area). And you can see brand new 5+1s all over every city, as proof of it. (so much so, that press even writes about it - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-ameri... )

Yes, neighbors complain and complain, and it's easy to focus on them, cause they're loud and annoying. But they don't win -- they complain, and then the investors win anyway, and still get to build almost anything they propose. (I'm in the Midwest, and I can count on one hand the number of times an investor lost a proposal -- they get to develop anything they want 99%+ of the time)

> People are so desperate for some bogeyman to blame. Institutional investors! RealPage! Short Term Rentals!

Well, because those are actual issues, and "NIMBYism" isn't. "NIMBYism" is maybe 2% of the overall housing problem, while private equity, investors, illegal hotels ("Short Term Rentals"), pricing collusion ("RealPage"), and such are, collectively, probably ~50%+ of the problem.

There's dozens of problems at play with crazy-high housing prices. "NIMBYism" doesn't even rank among the top ten of them.

maxsilver··on School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere
We are seeing a similar effect across all socioeconomic backgrounds. Or at least locally here, Hospital admissions for Winter 2023-2024 almost hit another all time high (nearly hitting the same numbers as peak COVID) - https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2024/01/covid-on-the-r...
maxsilver··on Deeply Unhappy Gen Z and Millennials Cause U.S. Drop in Global Happiness Ranking
Most people use the term "artificial inflation" to reference the price of products going up for no real-world reason, or when the company lies about the reason. (As in, the price increase is explainable entirely -- or almost entirely, in higher margins for the company), but that the company blames on "inflation" anyway.

If "Company X" is publicly saying "our prices are higher because of inflation", but you can also clearly see that their costs are not meaningfully different and their margins are higher, simply because the market has no alternative but to eat them, that's "artificial inflation".

maxsilver··on People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one
> I'm curious how this is otherwise an improvement on the old planning model of swathes of detached homes?

It's not. (Or at least, I'm not arguing it's better). My only point is that "more density" isn't the magic bullet fix people sometimes think it is -- because the US is doing a lot more density than we historically have in the past 60-ish years, and it's not meaningfully different in terms of lifestyle or planning.

If you want good alternative public transit, you have to just decide to build it first, and you kind-of have to do it almost everywhere nearby. (not just Division St, not just Woodward Ave, not just Hiawatha Ave, etc).

"Crank up density" doesn't magically result in a "car-free" city. You can't townhouse your way into having the Chicago Elevated, you have to actually decide to build the L. (similar to, say, Seattle SoundTransit)

maxsilver··on People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one
> There should be (light) commercial development.

There is. (both example pictures above have a commercial development less than 10 minutes walk away).

The problem is that there isn't enough commercial need for every single development to have it's own commercial block -- we already have a large overabundance of commercial space in the US as it is, adding even more of it inside each residential development doesn't magically spring forth a business to fill it.

(this is true even at city-level densities -- as lots of urban 5-over-1 developments are struggling to keep their ground-level commercial/retail units sustainably filled)

And since we do need more housing, pressure builds to just convert the commercial back into residential anyway...

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