yonran

> Singapore, Dubai, Rwanda—they're all copying the Chinese model: authoritarian capitalism

I don’t know much about China, but I’m not sure the Chinese model of economic modernization today is much different than post-war US model that worked of defense-led capitalism, strategic resource stockpiles to maintain price stability, and strong antitrust. I think the Chinese economy is probably more free-market (in the sense that it is easier to start a business, and the Econ 101 model of pure competition that drives down prices applies to more markets) than the US is today.

> why is it that higher local wealth/economic productivity increases homelessness (especially if you control for public services to counteract the effect)?

May I suggest the book Progress and Poverty by Henry George https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55308 that asks almost the same question. The answer is that private land ownership allows landowners to capture economic growth of prosperous places, so wages barely cover rent at the margin. This is particularly relevant to California which passed a disastrous constitutional amendment Proposition 13 (1978) which slashed property taxes from around 2% to 1% and declining, especially for older estates, which is pretty much the opposite of the ideal policy to deal with the problem of rising rents.

What a disappointment that this “Silicon Valley Pain Index”—where the pain consists of things like high rents and homelessness—is headlined with an irrelevant scapegoat of 9 billionaires. The 9 billionaires named in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525) do not own the vast majority of residential zoned land and are not active in land use politics as far as I know. It’s the few hundred thousand millionaires who use regulatory capture (zoning) to prevent abundant multifamily housing.

You can hate billionaires for other reasons, but urban land use is mostly a problem of your own neighbors who vote, not some tiny minority of super-rich.

Putting a few important metrics in the logs every 10s is something that the Aerospike datastore also does (https://aerospike.com/docs/database/observe/latency). This is useful because when you contact support, they run a script to generate a table of historical latencies from the log without depending on you having set up Prometheus, CloudWatch, etc.

Why do AI agents need to scrape so often, vs. aggressively caching or using archive.org or their own crawls of the internet?

What would it take for an individual or small business to run a version of this locally? To file, you need an MeF account with IRS; does the IRS grant those freely? And to import W2s and 1099s, it seems that there is a DataImportService interface but unfortunately there is no implementation and the APIs to IRS are not public.

If the Biden administration wanted to break the tax software oligopoly, they should have focused on making the government’s own interfaces open.

Proposition 13 was 1978 (99 years after the publication of Progress and Poverty).

The vehicle code not only permits cars to enter the bike lane prior to a turn, it requires them to do so (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....). My brother failed his first driving test because he didn’t know that he had to enter a bike lane on the left side of Fell St right outside the DMV (back before they separated the bike lane).

Yes, perhaps the government should subsidize (or allow states to subsidize) the fixed costs of mail, just as we subsidize the fixed costs of roads, so that our business can be competitive. Is this what China does domestically, or what the US does when we charge for international shipping? Point is, we should at least list all the ways that we can be more competitive, rather than cheering isolationism that makes us all worse off.

> The temu/shein loophole should been closed ages ago.

Or the US should figure out how to get domestic shipping rates to be as cheap as the rates that Chinese shippers pay to ship to the US.

I ran into this issue too since I implemented an --rsh wrapper script (based on https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/13776) and the options passed to ssh are different (samba rsync passes in -l user host command, openrsync passes in user@host command).

> openrsync accepts only a subset of rsync’s command line arguments.

I have not upgraded to MacOS Sequoia yet so I cannot verify but from the source (https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/rsync/blob/rsync-...) it appears that there is a wrapper and they ship both samba rsync and openrsync and fall back to samba if you use an unsupported option?

I think the parable of Squanderville and Thriftville is interesting and it reminds me of the chapter of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty that also warns that renters can be a slave to the landowner (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/55308/pg55308-images.ht...). I’m wondering to what extent is Squanderville a warning against monopolies and private property in land, as opposed to a warning against debt and trade deficits? Would Land Value Tax fix this?

See also Dwarkesh Patel’s interview with two of the authors of this post (Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo) that was also released today: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/scott-daniel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htOvH12T7mU

That’s a good idea to automatically upzone to double the sqft and units of neighbors (and height too). The previous BoS president, Aaron Peskin, had the opposite idea: he proposed an ordinance that apartments should be capped at the 1× the average sqft of the neighbors within 300 ft (https://sfgov.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3781286...). Fortunately, that ordinance did not pass, but it gives you an idea of the nonsense that he promoted: scarcity in the name of affordability.

Yes, Kevin Erdmann’s writings were what I was thinking of when I said that lending has been restricted since the Great Recession. He does identify “Closed Access” supply restrictions as the original sin that the Fed misinterpreted as a speculative bubble. I highly recommend his blog and books.

It’s surprising that they took measurements at 2000 and 2020 and did not mention the Great Recession at all, which severely reduced ability of households to get a mortgage and disrupted both demand and supply. I don’t think their attempt to control for the “kinked” supply curve by dropping the bottom 25% of metros by income growth is sufficient to eliminate metros that were devastated by the Great Recession.

Also, I am not sure whether comparing to median value of constraint index (e.g. Wharton residential land use regulation index) is a particularly good way to categorizing metros into constrained and unconstrained, since it’s hard to know which specific constraints of the “regulatory hydra” are important for future development (https://twitter.com/TheJakeSchmidt/status/157220787234744729...). One metro may need to reduce minimum lot sizes to allow the next increment of development, whereas another metro may need to allow lot mergers and relax density limits instead.

So I think this paper is basically concluding that land use constraints are harder to measure than income growth.

Is this optical phased array beam steering hardware supposed to be affordable for ISPs such as Monkeybrains to use for end users, or is this just for backhaul connections?

Thank you. I am disappointed that almost none of the comments here discuss the OpenAI proposals on the merits. I do hope that the federal government heeds most of these ideas, particularly recognizing that training a model should be fair use.

To respond to a question in the blog post:

>> The motivation is that the <form> element from HTML 4.0 (which predates cross-site fetch() and XMLHttpRequest) can submit simple requests to any origin,…

> Question to readers: How is that in line with the SameSite initiative?

I actually added that little paragraph to the MDN CORS article in 2022 (https://github.com/mdn/content/pull/20922) to clarify where the term “simple request” from CORS came from, since previously the article only said that it is not mentioned in the fetch spec. You’re right that the paragraph did not mention the 2019 CSRF prevention in browsers that support or default to SameSite=Lax (https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-httpbis-rfc6265bi...), so cross-site forms with method=POST will not have cookies anymore unless the server created the cookie with SameSite=None.

It is quite confusing that SameSite was added seemingly independently of CORS preflight. I wonder why browser makers didn’t just make all cross-origin POST requests require a preflight request instead of making same-site-flag a field of each cookie.

> I think Google moved it from AOSP to the Google Play Services several years ago, but the old source is still available.

For the curious, here is the source of ExactCalculator from the commit before all files were deleted: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Exac..., and here is the dependency CR.java https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/crcalc/+/...

No, according to this article by Chris Elmendorf and Darien Shanske https://www.spur.org/news/2020-12-18/how-solve-transit-budge..., Proposition 218, 26, and the California Vehicle Code probably do not prohibit market pricing of residential parking permits as endorsed by Donald Shoup, since street parking is not just a fee-based service, but city-owned land that the city has the right to rent at market rate. San Francisco just hasn’t tried.

It seems that the bulk of the savings for making an urban municipal utility come from not having to pay for upgrades in fire-prone regions. And the end game is that cities will have their own utilities with lower rates, whereas rural people will be adverse selected to be stuck with PG&E and pay thousands of dollars per month on energy. Wouldn’t it be easier for PG&E themselves to implement this desired rate schedule where urban rates are cheap and rural rates are expensive? It seems odd that the PUC would not allow PG&E to charge extraordinary rates for rural areas today, but they do allow cities to buy up the good parts of PG&E which will inevitably lead to the same outcome in the future.

I think a better analogy than railroads (which own the land that the track sits on and often valuable land around the station) is airlines, which don’t own land. I recall a relevant Warren Buffett letter that warned about investing hundreds of millions of dollars into capital with no moat:

> Similarly, business growth, per se, tells us little about value. It's true that growth often has a positive impact on value, sometimes one of spectacular proportions. But such an effect is far from certain. For example, investors have regularly poured money into the domestic airline business to finance profitless (or worse) growth. For these investors, it would have been far better if Orville had failed to get off the ground at Kitty Hawk: The more the industry has grown, the worse the disaster for owners.

https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1992.html

Google could take their scans from the library (which they did not pay publishers for) and train an AI model on that, right? They won the Authors Guild v. Google lawsuit because snippet view is transformative fair use, and I think teaching an AI model common sense and facts is even more transformative. Should Meta do the same?

Legally, would it be any worse for Meta to download works that someone illegally copied and repurpose it for a transformative fair use than if Google had taken their scans of snippet-view Google Books borrowed from the library to train their model in fair use?

Places with a higher vacancy rate are correlated with lower rents and less homelessness e.g. Indiana and Texas have a higher rental vacancy rate than California and New York (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CuFs) so whatever causes a higher vacancy rate seems to be good for affordability (not sure what you mean by “efficient”).

The parser for tsconfig.json (typscript.parseConfigFileTextToJson(fileName, jsonText) or parseJsonText) seems to be what you want; I wonder if there is a name for that format.

Here’s one example: In 2015 Planning Commissioner Christine Johnson was swayed by popular opinion to vote for a provision requiring registration numbers on short-term rental listings (which was later ruled to violate the Communications Decency Act until a couple more years of revisions), but then she changed her vote after a text from the Mayor’s office who appointed her. The newspaper sunshine’d the texts (https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/planning-commissioner-change...). It wasn’t corruption to take advice from the Mayor (who was right that it was not enforceable), but it was embarrassing and in 2018 she lost her election for supervisor.

Here’s another article based on sunshining web browser history during a meeting that I thought had questionable newsworthiness https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/facebook-food-reservations-f.... Imagine if someone had compromising website visits such as porn.

On the other hand, I do see the importance of making records auditable. The school board wasted $15 million switching payroll providers and no one has published an investigation into who exactly made the key decisions. I imagine that emails would be very useful but they are probably all deleted. https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/12/san-francisco-may-dump-tro...

I think we need to strike a better balance such that text messages and personal browser history is not sunshinable, but design docs and official decisions and work are retained.

It’s not only corruption that can get you into trouble with an adversary who is fishing for trouble, but also mistakes, imprecise language that can be taken out of context, speaking out of ignorance or partial information, unprofessionalism, unpopular opinions, etc.

If you know that anything that you say to your coworkers will be publicized by a third party with the intent to ruin your career, then you either should self-censor to use corporate speak any time you text anyone, or you and your coworkers should delete your texts and emails to reduce liability.

Governments have similar problems too: activists/journalists can make sunshine requests of day-to-day communication on a daily basis to find any written mistakes to turn into PR nightmares. This incentivizes politicians to delete their texts regularly to avoid the hassle https://missionlocal.org/2024/10/s-f-mayor-city-attorney-bro.... Willie Brown also famously told people that the e in email stands for evidence.