presentation

In major high cost of living American cities, the majority of cost is in land and regulatory uncertainty especially in California - years of lawsuits and public comment hearings etc for any changes to the built environment, zoning restrictions, large parking requirements causing more land to be needed, inability to produce dense housing (and therefore more units to rent out) on any parcel of land, and so on.

It’s hard to change these policies in part because the basis of American wealth for most people IS the value of their real estate, so anything that would reduce the cost of a house will also reduce the wealth of a large swath of society. And rent control warps thing, by making existing renters also benefit from the status quo by locking in their rents, leaving only new renters as those who demand cheaper housing - the very people with the least electoral influence given that they’re usually younger and not established in the communities they’re moving into.

We need ways to align incentives so that these people can clearly understand their personal benefit from the good that densification would bring, alongside a reorientation to base their wealth on something that isn’t shelter.

USA is not the only place with inflation, but it still ends up with housing far more expensive than other countries. That’s because of policy primarily, material costs secondarily.

Yeah, I’m biased since my startup is a very non-AI payroll app, but trusting my finances to an LLM sounds frightening and the money saved is not much since just hiring an accountant whose neck is on the line to get it right just isn’t that expensive.

China actually has quite a bit of public debate and discontent around air quality at a minimum. They definitely care in that they don’t want to piss off the populace.

Sounds like you wouldn’t be a fan of React Server Components in general then since blending domains is its whole point.

Don’t think it’s semver.

Developers would love to develop factories, they’re not the NIMBYs in this equation

I think this is actually a good example despite how stark the differences are - both the nuisance AI scrapers and the drug addicts have negative externalities that while possible for them to self regulate, they are for whatever reasons proving unable to do so, and therefore cause other people to have a bad time.

Other commenters saying the usual “drugs are freedom” type opinions, but now having lived in China and Japan where drugs are dealt with very strictly (and basically don’t have a drug problem today), I can see the other side of the argument where in fact places feeling dirty and dangerous because of drugs - even if you think of addicts sympathetically as victims who need help - makes everyone else less free to live the lifestyle they would like to have.

More freedom for one group (whether to ruin their own lives for a high; or to train their AI models) can mean less freedom for others (whether to not feel safe walking in public streets; or to publish their little blog in the public internet).

To be fair, most homes are replaced everywhere in Japan, since houses themselves are depreciating assets with all the earthquakes and everything. It is how things go here.

Other lines have some bangers too - used to live in Koenji and Asagaya, love those.

https://youtu.be/wpw1MWH0AZI?si=ELfOL6QdgYCxHRyU

https://youtu.be/4qFHVCMUrto?si=daYuWZWK_aQizbha

They changed the melodies for a lot of the stations recently, I’ve noticed.

Traffic rules do require some discretion though - if eg you don’t allow crossing a double yellow line but a car is broken down blocking the lane, does that mean that the road is now effectively unusable until that car is towed? Lots of examples.

But I’m with you on more enforcement. I’m totally fine with automated traffic cameras and it was working great when I was in China - suddenly seemingly overnight everyone stopped speeding on the highways when I was in Shanghai, as your chances of getting a ticket were super high.

Read the fine text

> You'll pay $1.99/month beginning today for 1 month. Then your subscription will automatically renew at $39.99 every month after the first month, unless you cancel before the 1 month intro period.

lol 20x increase after the first month

Because some people eat salmon more than once a month, care about the environment or animal welfare, and don't think that processed foods are inherently disgusting.

Another five over one (which is what I think you mean) is not the same as a whole neighborhood getting razed and replaced with towers in the park.

By the way, the whole point of streamlining permitting and zoning processes are to get rid of the unreasonable watering down of every proposal because as you state the end result is worse for everyone, aesthetics included.

Also it isn’t just about historic structures, there’s situation like that San Francisco Mission District strip-mall-esque laundromat steps from the BART station, that can’t be replaced because NIMBYs are afraid of “changing the neighborhood character.” If crap architecture like that ends up in the same historic bucket then whoever is declaring 80% of every city as being “historic” has done a disservice to anyone who wants to actually protect historic architecture by diluting the name for their anti-change cause.

Ideally NIMBYs wouldn’t have an incentive to block housing construction because while the total number of houses goes up making the average house cheaper, the land itself gets more valuable due to the increased density/development/amenities; so those same homeowners can sell their lots for bug bucks. I guess this misalignment of incentives is a problem of zoning, permitting, and taxation distorting things?

For Netflix and YouTube I actually use a language learning chrome extension called Migaku, that has this feature - but if there don’t exist subs, can also sometimes pull it off with a chrome extension for dual subs - forget what it is called but I can download SRT files and load them up alongside a stream. Both are not reliable and require significant fiddling.

I have another problem, which is that my wife is Japanese and I’m American, and if we watch a French movie then I want the English subs and she wants the Japanese subs. Making that work with streaming services is very painful.

In this case, the money and power are there precisely because people perceive AI as having the potential to reshape society, resulting in its creators receiving money and power, so it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation.

The USA tends to invest a great deal of legislative power in the courts, and as you mention the legislature isn’t very responsive nor effective, so this is what we get.

Because there is arguably more societal value in commercial AI being able to do tasks well than there is in users being able to avoid looking at ads on an ad-supported platform.

Maxwell Tabarrok has a take on this, basically in his words:

> The confusion of intellectual property and property rights is fair enough given the name, but intellectual property is not a property right at all. Property rights are required because property is rivalrous and exclusive: When one person is using a pair of shoes or an acre of land, other people’s access is restricted. This central feature is not present for IP: an idea can spread to an infinite number of people and the original author’s access to it remains untouched.

> There is no inherent right to stop an idea from spreading in the same way that there is an inherent right to stop someone from stealing your wallet. But there are good reasons why we want original creators to be rewarded when others use their work: Ideas are positive externalities.

> When someone comes up with a valuable idea or piece of content, the welfare maximizing thing to do is to spread it as fast as possible, since ideas are essentially costless to copy and the benefits are large.

> But coming up with valuable ideas often takes valuable inputs: research time, equipment, production fixed costs etc. So if every new idea is immediately spread without much reward to the creator, people won’t invest these resources upfront, and we’ll get fewer new ideas than we want. A classic positive externalities problem.

> Thus, we have an interest in subsidizing the creation of new ideas and content.

And so you can reframe whether or not IP rights should be assigned in this case, based on whether you believe that the welfare generated by making AI better by providing it with content is more valuable for society than the welfare generated by subsidizing copyright holders.

[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/ai-copyright...

Yeah their startup times aren’t great. They’re making a trade off by loading a ton of data up front, though to be fair a lot of the local first web tooling didn’t really exist when they were founded - the nascent Zero Sync framework’s example project is literally a Linear clone that they use as their actual bug tracker, it loads way faster and has similarly snappy performance, so seems clear that it can be done better.

That said at this point Linear has more strengths than just interaction speed, mainly around well thought out integrations.

Since it’s so easy then I’m rooting for you to make some millions with performant replacements for other business tools, should be a piece of cake

Communism is a more specific term than that

IMO it’s an incentive problem - it takes effort to be knowledgeable but the practical benefits are next to nothing. But being in a group of ignorant people is actually probably pretty fun, not to mention the dopamine hit of outrage.

Ideally being informed would be both easier than it is today (less misleading crap, more trustworthy structure to think about what issues are relevant) while also being more rewarded somehow.

No wonder I could never get past the cloudflare human check pages!

I see things as incentive problems, including this.

People are incentivized to be intellectually lazy since there isn’t really any personal reward for making the effort (your vote is on the margins practically meaningless, even if you’re “right,” whatever that means).

But there is great reward for staying ignorant (dopamine hits from outrage media and camaraderie with the large plurality of similarly intellectually lazy people).

How do we make it so that having well reasoned opinions is actually rewarded commensurately?

That’s democracy though, everyone gets a vote, even if you’re a doofus.

fwiw i use em-dashes

I haven't used it for a few months but in my experience, its package/monorepo management features suck compared to pnpm (dependencies leak between monorepo packages, the command line is buggy, etc), bun --bun is stupid, build scripts for packages routinely blow up since they use node so i end up needing to have both node and bun present for installs to work, packages routinely crash because they're not bun-compatible, most of the useful optimizations are making it into Node anyway, and installing ramda or whatever takes 2 seconds and I trust it so all of Bun's random helper libraries are of marginal utility.