That is a good idea that requires careful attention to make sure it has near-perfect execution. Because we do that, and they are called 'the projects'.
Sure if that's all you care about, it will do that. At the price of making people's lives miserable due to substandard housing if it's done wrong. I said it's a good idea, let's just make sure we do it right.
> At the price of making people's lives miserable due to substandard housing if it's done wrong.
I'm curious to see how Austin will do in the near future by that same metric. More people can afford a place that will let them pay rent, although now at least some of those people will be living in someone else's basement or garage. These may not be very nice places to live, but they may be all some people can afford.
They've also removed the regulation requiring a second way out of a burning 5 story building. Austin faces an increasing number of red flag warnings and has the 5th highest wildfire risk in the US. It remains to be seen what removing that second exit route will cost in the charred corpses of families.
Austin is also cutting corners on permitting which is great news if that was all needless red tape that can be rushed or skipped without cost, but if new apartments built today are (or soon become) deathtraps due to lax code enforcement that could be a major problem down the road.
Austin has already lowered rents which is great, but hopefully it was also done right and it doesn't result in more people being forced into substandard housing or increased deaths. As long as it doesn't, other cities should look into trying some of the same things Austin has done.
The Center for Building in North America has been aggressively pushing for these single stairwell reforms all over the country. Stephen Smith, writer of that report, is the founder of that group as well as the founder of Quantierra a real estate tech company.
The real estate industry is in huge support of this particular reform, and they stand to massively profit from it, but the people who are strongly against it include The International Association of Fire Fighters, the National Association of State Fire Marshals, The International Association of Fire Chiefs, and The National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. These are the people who are most informed about the dangers and risks involved and in what safety measures are required to save lives and fight building fires effectively.
The report itself does make some very good arguments like how much safer modern construction has become, and also some rather weak ones (for example it ignores the poor quality of data on fire and smoke related fatalities in the US, as well as important differences between the US and Europe) and I'm not even saying that single stairwell buildings can't ever be made safely, but if safety really wasn't a problem we wouldn't see a lack of support from firefighters who are the actual experts in this space. Until they are convinced of the safety of these reforms real estate developers are going to have a hard time convincing me.
Not really? "The projects" are a consequence of a very specific approach to government housing construction.
There's an alternative approach which mirrors the public healthcare concept of "public option". Instead of restricting government housing to means tested individuals or specific low income populations, you develop a public competitor to drive prices down and to eat costs in regions where housing is needed but the economics just don't make sense yet.
i.e. the US Postal Service model. It works extraordinarily well as long as you don't repeatedly capture and handicap the org/agency (like has been done to the USPS). And even with the USPS despite being severely handicapped it still provides immense value by driving prices down while maintaining the essential service of last mile delivery.
A similar approach could be envisioned for a public construction agency.
Any program created by the US government can be captured and handicapped, like has been done to the USPS.
Also, the Postmaster General was on Capitol Hill today saying how this time next year the service won’t be able to afford delivering to all addresses in the US.
> Any program created by the US government can be captured and handicapped, like has been done to the USPS.
Agreed but even despite that they generally are a net positive.
> Also, the Postmaster General was on Capitol Hill today saying how this time next year the service won’t be able to afford delivering to all addresses in the US.
The same postmaster general who is a longstanding board member at FedEx.
And the US Post was still an extremely effective agency for well over 150 years, only truly beginning to become shackled when Nixon transformed it into the USPS in the 70s, and even then it retained most of its efficacy until the 2000s and 2010s when it truly began to fall onto its last legs.
But also despite being shackled the way it currently is, it's not exactly nontrivial to reform it provided there was any political momentum towards doing so. So it may get its legs back in the days following this administration.
There are multiple city and state housing facilities in my area that are perfectly fine. They are not huge or luxurious but they're safe, clean, and well maintained.
When the options ar homelessness or subsidized housing, subsidized housing is absolutely the best option, which is backed up by decades of data.
"When the options ar homelessness or subsidized housing, subsidized housing is absolutely the best option, which is backed up by decades of data."
Not quite. That's only true if you are housing people who ended up homeless due to bankruptcy or similar reasons (lost jobs, medical issues, etc). If you have people who are homeless due to sever addiction, you just end up with more OD deaths. You have similar issues with people with sever mental illness.
The homeless are not a monolith and different parts of the population need different solution unless you really really don't give a f*ck about them.
I’ve seen some housing projects around my city that are actually quite nice. They didn’t end up being shabby because they were built poorly. They were shabby because they were reserved for the very poor and, consequently, became extreme concentrations of poverty and crime. This makes people unwilling to invest in maintenance and continued improvement of their homes.
If the government just went on a building binge of housing to be sold at market rate, or even set an upper bound before qualifying to buy them at a middle class income, it’d work out fine. That’s basically how Singapore does it only they couple it with somewhat aggressive policies to encourage people to downsize their living situations once they’re empty nesting to free up family dwellings for people with families. We probably wouldn’t need to do that second part since we’re not a claustrophobic island, and could just count on natural turnover.
I took as beyond sarcasm, just a simple explanation of how they manage to keep going written in the first person. From my perspective it is incredible anybody could misunderstand.
That's how I took it too, and didn't realize someone might read it otherwise, but I can see how it could be misunderstood if someone isn't paying as much attention.
Another perspective: we should install whole house surge protectors if we can afford them, not only for ourselves, but to help our neighbors - even if in reality the help is minimal and they need their own as well. In the best case scenario, if everybody in a neighborhood has them, each individual house will be more resistant to surges than if they were the only house with one (five houses with surge protectors nearby is a lot better than one) - everybody wins.
They are trying to hurt innocents in retaliation for the US murdering their children. I understand the sentiment, but strongly disagree with acting on it. Ukraine has done a much better (of course not perfect) job of retaliating against military targets in response to russian war crimes.
I'm sure that if Iran had the backing of the Western world, and had their surplus of armaments funneled it's way, it would be bombing army bases and refineries and airfields and factories and port facilities in the US.
Unlike Ukraine, it does not, so it seems to be focusing on cyber vandalism and blowing up oil infrastructure in US vassal states, and other low-cost, high-ROI activities.
That’s not the motivation for these attacks at all. They’re waging asymmetric warfare against a much larger and more exposed opponent.
Their goal is to make it too troublesome for the US/Israel to continue attacking them, like a swarm of bees attacking a bear to keep it away from their honey.
Iran is in it to win it and the US is so very obviously not.
The question is if the pressure that Israel can put on the current administration greater than the pressure that Iran can put on America as a whole.
Trump and republicans are now all-in in this war and this administration can tolerate a huge amount of chaos if it allows them to keep winning. It doesn't matter wether Israel pressures the administration or not. I'm not confident that the regime will fall but I am confident that it will be put in its place internationally even if it means closing the iranian borders from the outside indefinitely. BTW the US and Israel are not alone in this war.
Trump is never all in on anything. There's a reason that "TACO" became a meme. This administration is much more likely to lose interest and declare victory while oil facilities in the gulf states are still on fire.
> closing the iranian borders from the outside indefinitely
Are you proposing to disrupt China-Iran shipping? Intercept even Chinese-flagged oil vessels? (not that there are many, most are still under flags of convenience)
>There's a reason that "TACO" became a meme. This administration is much more likely to lose interest and declare victory while oil facilities in the gulf states are still on fire.
Do you think Trump's going to lose interest and declare victory while bombs are still flying over Bibi's head?
The English language has the ability to be ambiguous, but I bet AI use will change the way we use the English language colloquially, to say more specifically what we mean. I worked as a home inspector for a while. Writing for an LLM is very similar to writing a home inspection report or legal brief (or talking to a group of teenagers). Navigate the minefield with very specific intention.
I love how the root cause is always the opposition, never the perpetrator.
Focusing on the Democrats (who are hot garbage) is such a wonderful way to keep attention focused anywhere but on the almost half the country still supporting a murderous cabal filled with people covering for a bunch of (other??) people who raped children to get pleasure from the sexual torture (yes, it's pretty clear from the Epstein files that they did everything they could to destroy those young children's minds and hearts for sport, and that was the real 'game' they were playing).
But by all means, carry on about bad tactics in the election, surely that is the 'root cause' here.
I don't disagree with you, but I also wonder what exactly the Biden justice department was doing with these files for four years. It seems to me like they were covering for the same people. Being "in the club" is more important to them than party.
1) You seem to think I'm some sort of GOP-pedo-billionaire sympathiser; nothing could be further from the truth. I'll help you slam the prison door and throw away the key.
2) No-one mentioned Epstein in this part of the discussion until you did - I thoughts we were discussing tariffs. I was responding to someone saying that, in the context of the tariff mess, they blame the people who voted for Trump, and "the people who supported such a horrible Democratic candidate that she couldn't even win against Trump". My point was simply on this specific issue, the root cause was the hubris and chain of events that led to Kamala being chosen, almost at the last minute, rather than that people "supported" her in that situation.
(And if you need someone to explicitly state that, yes, they also blame the people who voted for Trump or you get triggered, then consider it confirmed.)
You made a choice to focus on one (less important) half of the equation, and that choice comes with consequences - including obfuscation of the actual perpetrators, who commit crimes against humanity. We have had years of this which enabled our current situation. I don't think it is the right choice to make.
I was not going to pretend to understand your motives via text - not enough information. So I was responding to the concrete effects of your comment whether intended or not, and not to your personal opinions. I was pointing out the other (more important) half that you failed to acknowledge. It's so horrible that just stating it makes it seem like I am 'triggered', when I was just just stating facts.
The conversation is not strictly about tariffs, that was just the starting point. Once it was expanded to Trump and Kamala and the election, the context was far larger and naturally everybody reading would reasonably understand this. You contributed to expanding the conversation, it is normal that discourse would follow from that.
In brief, I think we need to be quite careful to explicitly mention specific evils at this time, particularly because a major tactic of those perpetrating them is making a lot of noise to drown out focus on their crimes.
I focused on the part of the comment that I was replying to that I disagreed with.
Without wanting to be overly reductive, this is the point of discussion: to focus on the points of disagreement, for the purposes of understanding, alignment, or persuasion.
I would have thought that this was obvious, and how people expected discussions to work. I would have said that needing to be thorough and explicitly state each point of agreement, alongside addressing the points of disagreement, was frustrating and unnecessary. But maybe I'm wrong on this, so thank you (genuinely) for giving me this to reflect on.
(RE: "triggered" - maybe re-read what you wrote. Responding to an ostensibly benign comment about the background cause of Kamala being chosen as the candidate, with "such a wonderful way to keep attention focused anywhere but on the almost half the country still supporting a murderous cabal filled with people covering for a bunch of (other??) people who raped children to get pleasure from the sexual torture" certainty comes over as disproportionately and inappropriately emotional and angry in word and tone, to this observer.)
> Imagine if your grandma had wheels! She'd be a bicycle.
I always took this to be a sharp jab saying the entire village is riding your grandma, giving it a very aggressive undertone. It's pretty funny nonetheless.
Too early to say what AI brings to the efficiency table I think. In some major things I do it's a 1000x speed up. In others it is more a different way of approaching a problem than a speed up. In yet others, it is a bit of an impediment. It works best when you learn to quickly recognize patterns and whether it will help. I don't know how people who are raised with ai will navigate and leverage it, which is the real long-term question (just as the difference between pre- and post-smartphone generations is a thing).
1000x is ridiculous. What are you doing where that level of improvement is measurable. That means you are doing things that would have taken you a year of full-time work in less than half a day now.
EDIT: Retracted, I think the example given below is reasonably valid.
I understand, but the improvement is actually more than that. It is not directly programming, but look at this page [1] for example. I spent years handcrafting parallel texts of English and Greek and had managed to put just under 400 books online. With AI, I managed to translate and put in parallel 1500 more books very quickly. At least 2/3 of those have never been translated into English, ever. That means I have done what the entire history of English-speaking scholars has never managed to do. And the quality is good enough that I have already had publishers contacting me to use the translations. There are a couple other areas where I am getting similar speed ups, but of course this is not the norm.
Of course they are not perfect, but no translation is even close to perfect. The floor is actually incredibly low. All I can say is that many doctoral-level scholars, including myself and some academic publishers, find them to be somewhere between serviceable and better than average.
Knowing the quality of LLM translations between the two languages I speak, hearing it used like this by supposed academics invokes a deep despair in me. "Serviceable" is a flimsy excuse for mass-producing and publishing slop. Particularly given that slop will displace efforts to produce human translations, putting a ceiling on humanity's future output - no one will ever aspire to do better than slop, so instead of a few great translations, we'll get more slop than we would ever even want to read.
I guess it does depend on the languages involved; one study suggests that it's even worse than Google Translate for some languages, but maybe actually okay at English<-->Spanish?
> There were 132 sentences between the two documents. In Spanish, ChatGPT incorrectly translated 3.8% of all sentences, while GT incorrectly translated 18.1% of sentences. In Russian, ChatGPT and GT incorrectly translated 35.6% and 41.6% of all sentences, respectively. In Vietnamese, ChatGPT and GT incorrectly translated 24.2% and 10.6% of sentences, respectively.
I wouldn't have put it online if I didn't think it was a major improvement over nothing. Realistically, if we haven't translated it in the last 500 years, there is no point for the next several hundred years of history to stick with nothing as well. It takes a bit more than pasting sentences in chatGPT to get a serviceable translation of course, but significantly better results than that are possible. I have not tried translating into other languages, but I am sure having English as the target language is a help.
It's all right there on my website in parallel text, everybody can check and come to their own conclusion rather than driving by with unhelpful generalizations. And really, that is the primary scope of these translations: as aids in reading an original text.
This is my favorite type of interaction to see when browsing HN. I feel like this respectful mosh pit of ideas and practitioners is uniquely rad. Thanks for the serendipity dopamine this Sunday
I second this request. It would be wonderful to be able to test the rust implementation since it easier to call from other languages in my typical setup. I have a couple uses cases I have never fully resolved, just implemented partial work arounds and accepted a restricted feature set. This would probably allow me to deal with them correctly.
Only if its js initiates downloads (even if just injecting other js), in which case, I guess yes??? Or does that fall onto the browser??? Sounds simple to figure out. Maybe everybody will abandon the term webapp now.
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