It's interesting to me how different the tone sounds if every time he said "users" you substituted "people" (or if that didn't make sense in context, substitute "customers"). I find the post positive and encouraging as written, but I've realized that "users" has become a tainted word in the mass public.
This is presented as an interesting and kind of positive take on the AI going to surprising lengths to “solve the problem.” But I couldn’t help thinking of the paperclip factory while I was reading this :/
Property tax is the workable wealth tax. There's no such thing as a perfect policy, but in the context of NYC this seems worth trying. I'll be interested to see if it helps create some liquidity in the housing market (the goal), or if it only functions as revenue source.
One wrinkle I haven't heard much discussion of -- cities respond to incentives too. NYC is a global destination for the mega wealthy. If it turns out the uber-rich don't mind paying and this becomes a cash cow for the city, that creates incentives for the city to cater to them and try and get more uber-rich people to have second homes in the city.
What I said is this is what I struggle with. In general I think too much regulation is what caused this problem. And the question on my mind is, from where we are today, is there a liberalization of the rules that would also help maintain a mixed income neighborhood, rather than the current trajectory (quickly becoming an uber-wealthy country club).
Traveling cross-country at age 10 and 6. Amazing that all they needed was a letter saying they weren't runaways, and people seemed to think this was a neat adventure for them.
The thing about status pages is they have to be up when you're down, and (if your service is non trivial) they have to be able to handle a traffic profile that basically looks like DDOS. So, you're paying for the hosting infra more than the software.
There’s a huge difference. Everyone sees the same front page on CNN, or HN for that matter. Nobody sees the same page twice on YouTube or TikTok. That’s a fundamental distinction between human curated media (even with A/B testing), versus machine curated media.
Each blog you follow in the RSS model you opted in to. And each post comes from a person, or a publication, who can be held accountable for what they publish.
Ordinary media, like newspapers, books, radio, and TV, have worked this way forever — people publish “channels” and you decide what channels to follow. A channel can be held accountable.
The algorithm model is different. People just publish “content” into the platform, and the platform makes a custom channel for each viewer, inserting content from people you’ve never heard of and didn’t ask to follow. And it optimizes that custom channel for whatever addicts you the most. That’s fundamentally a different beast than opt-in media consumption.
I think a better solution would be to repeal section 230 protection for any kind of personalized or algorithmic feed. The algorithm makes you a publisher, and you should be liable for what you publish.
That would make it very hard, nigh impossible, for a platform like YouTube or TikTok to exist as it does today, and would instead favor people self-curating mechanisms like RSS readers etc.
I think it's fair to say that, if not for Heroku, I would not have had a career in software. I learned how to code web apps from books, and had a breakthrough when I discovered Rails (in 2009 I think?). But for the life of me I did not understand how to deploy a Rails app.
I bashed my head against that wall for a while, then found Heroku, and it just worked. That let me ship a product when I barely knew what I was doing, which let me keep building and learning, until eventually I didn't need Heroku anymore. But I still always liked it, because I never enjoyed thinking about infrastructure.
I have a 4-5 year old ultra wide monitor which is a lot of pixels but low dpi. I really like the single monitor containing two screens worth of pixels, but I wish it was high dpi. At the time there weren’t really high dpi ultra wides available, and they’re still expensive enough that upgrading isn’t a high priority for me… but I’m sure I will at some point.
But also I pretty much never use the TV button to turn it on, I click a button on one of the connected devices to wake it and the TV turns itself on with that input selected. Even if it’s already on, if I want to switch from one device to another I can just wake the other device and it will switch inputs for me. It works really well, I almost never have to use the input selector and it just does the right thing reliably.
https://airtable.com/shrdtCXsJfbzZ719W