Spent 20+ years in software doing a whole lot of things. Now selling real estate. HN used to be a place for software entrepreneurs, now it feels like eternal September.
Because historically, HN was fully of interesting people with interesting things to say, where the article was a catalyst to something even better: human connection and dialog. But HN has fallen off pretty hard the past few years.
I'd be interested to see how that is measured... dogs and cats are significantly different, but I'm not sure I'd call cats less intelligent. Case in point with mine - she figured out how to weaponize my electronic stand-up desk as a way to get me to stand up so that she could steal my chair. Another figured out how to open doors so he could go wherever he wanted in the house. No, they don't go around sniffing out mines or earthquake victims - they instead have convinced people to give them a total life of leisure.
There's another part to their intelligence I wish we could study... multiple times I've had cats show up on my front porch as though they somehow know my house is safe. Example: several years ago a cat knocked on my door and by the time we got things detangled we understood that it lived several blocks away and likely had been in a really abusive situation. Somehow that cat understood that if came to my house it would be safe, whereas my neighbors on either side would have at best ignored it. I've now had this happen multiple time such that there is some kind of pattern - pheromones?
I hear this anytime orange cats come up in conversation and I don't quite get it - I had an orange cat when I was in high school and he was a very clever cat. I now have an orange female cat and she's got a big personality - very take-charge in her demands.
Not a subscriber, but the headline alone caught me off guard... knitting and fishing? These are some pretty affordable hobbies. My 14 year old has taken up knitting in a big way just using her birthday money and some needles from the local thrift store. Fishing? Sure maybe you can't afford a chartered deep sea trip, but the equipment for your local river or creek is nearly free at somebody's yard sale. Now if you want to talk about things like skiing or golfing...for that matter I've been a beekeeper but am feeling just about priced out of that as well.
We have some pretty interesting family records, and if I look back 200 and 500 (and sometimes longer..) years ago, the information we have about family members feels remarkably current. There were divorces, economic and political challenges, times of prosperity and times of struggle. Property changed hands, taxes were levied, sometimes family members quarreled and sometimes they started new ventures together. The particular skills one might need in any one era or the social and political environment might change, but the human condition is remarkably common throughout the ages.
I am a realtor and sit on my state's realtor association legislative steering committee, which this year sough to work with legislators on a bill that would limit mass corporate control over housing units... it's surprisingly more complicated than it first appears, and an area where realtors take a view that might be contrary to consumer expectations - we generally like the idea of limitations on corporate ownership, as it in theory creates the greatest opportunity for individual homeownership...
Anyway, some of the scenarios we ran into are things like the 2008 mortgage crisis - what happens if you end up in a market where there is a lot of inventory that no one can afford to hold? In my market, it's starting to look like a lot of builders (read: corporations) built too many houses either that weren't what consumers wanted or demand has shrunk (it is a town with a lot of federal jobs that are evaporating at the moment...). So can a builder hold that inventory indefinitely (assuming they can afford that) as a corporation? Likewise, people often don't want to hear this, but landlords do create efficiencies in the market - there are people out there that either don't want to own a home or can't qualify for a mortgage, and a landlord makes it possible to provide housing for those people as a kind of intermediary. We can argue over what it takes to qualify for a mortgage, but that's really a separate issue. We of course get into the issue of vacation homes or even situations like can I as an individual own a place for my business and a home - after all, they are both real estate, so how tight can we make these rules around ownership? Point being - the basic idea is sound, and some states like CA apparently already have laws on the books, but it's a more complicated matter than just one person == one house.
I'm writing this on a ten year old Mac with specs in line with what I see on dell.com as still available in new systems, with Apple still delivering some software updates yearly. All the apps I use have been available in both Intel and Apple Silicon flavors. I'm not sure how much more I can expect from Apple / the Apple ecosphere.
But it doesn't need to be! If you want to put out a nice charcuterie and cheese spread for a social occasion, you have so many options at multiple price points. You can make a great spread with even a generic cheddar, colby, "mozerella" etc. If you've got a restaurant supply store near you, bet you can find some basic sausages, salami, etc that won't break the ban on a charcuterie board. I've seen $20 spreads and $200+ spreads, and while they were different, each made the guests happy.
This is such an underrated experience - a bottle of wine (doesn't even have to be particularly expensive, just pleasant), some cheeses, maybe a few slices of sausage or cold cuts, maybe a baguette or a salty cracker. Jazz or perhaps a some easy listening music in the background - pure bliss! The best things in life cost so little and yet are so perfect.
You are completely missing (or perhaps reinforcing my point) - billboards? Great, we'll create a fleet of vehicles with mobile advertising on the back. Outlaw that? Great, we'll pay private citizens to put up signs in their yards - can't outlaw freedom of speech after all. It's whack-a-mole.
Here's another thought: I just wish more businesses had some class. Maybe your logo and product doesn't need to be smeared across every inch of physical and digital real estate. I realize the article is focused on digital advertising, but for example, am I really inclined to buy life insurance from the guy whose face is on the back of the shopping cart? NIL has ruined college sports and at its heart it's about being able to slap a logo on the back of a college kid. Prudent to say, gee, maybe there are more tasteful ways to get the message out to the world about our produce or service would be a nice thing.
You nailed it man. My first response even to the headline let alone the article was to reflect on the first line spoken by my professor in my first marketing class: "Marketing is about educating the consumer." Advertising is just one way we attempt to do that, and taken to an extreme, I have no idea how you could ever make it stop. The article is clearly focused on one part of advertising, but even then, someone will always build a better mousetrap.
Sitting here at supper, I just watched one of my cats use some pretty strong language with one of my other cats. It was some very measured chattering to let him know she didn’t enjoy his presence. Chickens most definitely have a language - the egg song, the danger song, the rooster call, the check-in with each other, the check-in with the farmer. My point being, animals all around us use language if we are willing to accept that it is different from our own.
>they've enabled the really talented people to take things to a level previously unimaginable
And I guess that's where I wonder if golf might be a sport where equipment should be restricted at the professional level, the same way that metal bats are not allowed in MLB. Here's another weird way to look at it - you can ingest whatever you want and go play on the company softball team, but an Olympic athlete takes an aspirin and they might get a lifetime ban. It doesn't seem unreasonable to deliberately restrict professional athletics in ways that might constrain it and yet allow us to gauge the athletes in their purest form. Some in the world have advocated for the idea that we should remove all constraints - take all the drugs, use all the physics and science to enhance performance, and let's really see what we can do. It's a fun idea, but like one of the parent posters alluded - we might not like where that all ends up.
So much this - the game is better when the focus is on getting the ball in play. Likewise, I prefer the WNBA these days because it's a game of fundamentals rather than the 3-point shootout of the NBA.
>The American sports system doesn't allow this because there is no relegation system
A few years ago a friend of mine from the UK made the observation that American Football would benefit greatly from a relegation system... every season I have the same reaction. By about the 4th week of the season, the NFL bifurcates into legitimate contenders and everybody else. You end up with Thursday nights and late season games that nobody gives a shit about because it's gonna be a blowout. For that matter - the last 2-3 weeks of the season the playoffs are already set, so half the league has no reason to even play - and the quality of the product on the field matches this. Some kind of two-tier system would go a long way to fix this, and might also help with the larger problem of the bridge between the college and pro games. At the moment, the NFL is maybe the only league that doesn't really have a "minor league" or development league - its the colleges, and between NIL and the portal system, colleges aren't necessarily producing pro-ready players.
>that make it easier to do something that is hard, that is making it easier to hit the sweet spot.
I agree completely with your synopsis, but I'm still a bit torn on whether it is a bad thing... I first golfed using my parent's 1970s era wood headed, aluminum shaft clubs that were extremely limited - it really was entirely about the golfer, not the equipment. Years later when I picked the game back up a bit - it's clear the equipment is doing a lot of work to make the user better. That said, at least at the amateur level - most of us still aren't great golfers, and given that many golfers are older and have physical limitations, it is a bad thing if better equipment improves their game and potentially gives them a few more years of enjoyment over the old stuff?
I have a parallel view on skis - man those old straight long skis were hard on knees and so many skiers were lucky to still be charging after 40. Lotta knee surgeons made good money in the 80s! Then along came parabolic skis and made us all better and safer skiers - almost anyone can shred in today's skis because they are frankly easy to ride. In that case - the technology was a positive innovation.
Your last paragraph nails it - the magic of baseball is its simplicity. Baseball games should take a long time and be an act of leisure. The idea of putting a baserunner on third to speed up a game is an abomination in the same way the addition of something other than a wood bat would detract from the skill of the player swinging it. So I'm with you - this could be some kind of equipment arms race that won't end well.
> Afterwards, "programming" was solidly a domain of professionals, not regular users. I don't know about MacOS, but Windows didn't even ship with anything resembling a programming environment until 2010s.
I'm not sure I agree completely...back in the day on the Mac we had Hypercard, RezEdit, and I do recall various code builder tools that someone could kinda wire up small tools - think things we called "4GLs". On Windows, Visual Basic was a full programming language and tooling, but I distinctly recall lots of non-programmers creating small office scripts and tools. In the late 90s we had things like FrontPage where non-programmers could wire up a simple web page and make it do things they wanted...
Today? Open up Xcode and stare into the abyss of confusion. Apple has made these "Playground" tools - man, that's a big jump for someone who isn't serious about programming to get from there to a full-fledged Swift app ready to deploy. Can generative AI tools bridge this gap for non-programmers? Possibly, but I think we're aligned that these tools aren't likely to replace us anytime soon, because of something you allude to - what's possible today is so much more complex than what we were building in the 80s and 90s, and AI isn't close to being able to replicate all of layers of stuff a professional programer wades through every day.
My small city in Washington is the template for the state's ADU law and multi-family density law. When the ADU law passed, we saw a lot of people convert garages into ADUs and anymore any custom builds almost always add an ADU. But to your point - it isn't clear how many have become rentals. What I observe is that many people saw it as good resale value, as multi-generational living, or simply a place to put guests when they came to visit. It was about the same time we put a moratorium on VRBOs, which had been another reason people saw these as beneficial without becoming a full-time landlord. Personally I have one and it has been beneficial income while also giving my tenants a good transition point (college students, people escaping bad marriages, people who need a place to land while they look for a place to buy, etc)
What an absolutely unqualified statement. "Politicians" aren't just the attention seekers in Congress who make outrageous statements to keep their names in the headlines. There are quality people in Congress, in state legislatures, in government at all levels who are there because of a calling to public service. Not only that, but there are people around the world in every nation's governments with the same calling to not only make their countries better, but often too with an eye toward protecting all humanity and civilization.
You need to meet more politicians, they come in all shapes and sizes just like the American people. Are there a lot of born-with-a-silver-spoon, never-worked-a-day-in-their-life types? Absolutely. But across this country at every level, even in Congress, there are people who overcame remarkable odds and chose to work in public service to make their communities, states, and country better. Look deeper than just the people who grab the headlines.
Now, an elected official friend who is a former teacher is fond of saying the following: when people get elected, they come with three tiers of knowledge. There's what they know personally - their career field, maybe their hobby, maybe they are ex-military, etc. Then there's secondary: something they observed in a parent or spouse. Finally, there's everything else. In any given session - legislative, congressional, etc, there are going to be thousands of complicated topics thrown at these people, where the issues are way outside their wheelhouse. The best politicians are the ones who not only are really good at synthesizing information, but they surround themselves with quality policy staff - that is, they build a good team to overcome their own lack of background.
We all know this is the likely outcome, but Congress should use its powers to force the Trump administration to be public in not prosecuting and in pardoning, for the purposes of upholding rule of law to the extent possible. And the forth estate needs to throw both in their face to ensure the public understands both how everything about both what they did, and how the Trump administration will respond, is both unlawful and harmful to our country.
This is a good perspective - the books that were written in the early 2000s were documenting a lot of the practices that had evolved through the 90s, and giving them a nomenclature. There was a period from roughly 1995-2005 where it felt like we were evolving a real discipline of software engineering, with patterns of how to build things and a language to communicate with each other.
The irony being that the whole thing is political theater: the basic outline of the ACA was a Republican bill before Obama ran with it, at which point the Republicans no longer wanted to visibly support it. And, the real net benefit of the ACA has been to further entrench private health insurers, which at this point is not a Democratic goal.
I'm not really disagreeing with you, but it seems to me like the insurance company already has all those blood panels, etc that they paid for - they know what my issues are long before they get around to caring about what 23andMe might tell them. And this government will come after me for being a Democrat and my neighbors for being melanated long before they care about my DNA.
I have the best story on this - they didn't believe I wasn't Swiss, because my name is clearly Swiss and I was speaking German. My (American) passport had been amended so it took an hour and them making some calls before they were convinced I wasn't some kind of spy. Love the idea of my ancestral home not believing I wasn't one of them, even if they were quite rude about it.
When I went through it years ago, it was mostly about making sure you had all your paperwork in order - had the company sponsoring you provided the relevant information regarding the role and why you were needed, did your resume and experience match at all with the work being performed, etc. Basically I showed up with a list of documents and a very nice border guard looked it over and said welcome to Canada. Each time I traveled up there for work, the border guards were polite and professional. Each time I traveled home, I got pulled aside for advanced screening like I was a drug mule. Just loved all the America trivia questions and deep dives into the history of where I live, just so they could feel good about their jobs.
The thing is, even if you are making good money, most of us are one sick family member, one divorce, one strange set of circumstances, one recession away from being on the streets. You can do everything right and still end up screwed.
Well, I'm sure when your neighbor gets their 8-page letter in Spanish, Vietnamese, Russian, or whatever their language might be, they too find it annoying that the government finds it necessary to send them a letter in English. I mean, what a waste, right?
The logic of how you get from there to road maintenance... my god, the mental gymnastics it must take.