kky
1hr ago
I appreciate that you brought receipts! It let me look at the area you’re talking about. It’s about 2x as dense as the areas I’m familiar with, meaning the rules obviously change. Looking at Parkdale, it’s clear that all the antique shops cluster at the end of Queen Street where there’s a big parking lot. I’ve never been there myself, but this doesn’t seem coincidental! The rest of the street appears dominated by entertainment, like restaurants.
you are aware it's this exact attitude that is causing the housing crisis right?
Wrong, actually. The housing crisis is a migration crisis: from old factory towns in middle America to the cities where prosperity seems to cluster. Why is that the case? Is that an inevitable property of reality, or is that the changing conditions of American markets driven by “knowledge economy” interests? There is an incredible amount of land in America. Why can’t people make a living in most of it any longer? This was not always the case, but it’s easier to talk about spoils in the few areas people have decided to fight over than the destitution of the rest.
kky
2hr ago
No, the streetcar suburbs around where I live are definitely not downtown, and a very sizable fraction of the customer base for all the little squares comes in by car. It’s very visible. Thankfully, a sizable portion of that traffic can overflow onto the reasonably-but-not-overwhelmingly dense residential areas, which mostly have off-street parking and can absorb the surplus. This works in most mid-density suburbs and creates a nice environment, especially if you can take advantage of public transit on major commuter corridors to lower congestion at the worst hours.
There's no reason we can't have smaller retail units in condo podiums that mimic the way small storefronts on streetcar suburbs are.
I hate to say it, but the reason the small storefronts are better is that they’re managed independently. Centralized control has a way of making things anodyne and unpleasant. I’ve watched the million corporate developers try to ruin my homeland, and it makes me more certain than ever that such things should be left to the small.
kky
6hr ago
You know, I don’t really feel the same way. I commute through the streetcar suburbs, and businesses there deeply need some kind of readily accessible parking for their customers, or they’re going to be forced to decamp for the malls and get replaced by walk-only substitutes like boba shops. That would leave major swaths of these areas unserved by any remotely niche businesses. I’ve seen this happen; I know a guy who lost his in-front parking to a bike lane and is considering moving for it. And I know this street well! Traffic doesn’t really back up around there, and there are extremely regular bus services for commuters.
This idea makes sense for max-density areas, but most of where I am is very old and divided in lots too small for any underground parking, unless you want to undermine small ownership in favor of the ubiquitous big developers. Personally, I like distributed decision making better.
kky
7hr ago
You mean traditional bike lanes, next to the parked cars? Sure, it helps a lot with the standard problems. When I’ve cycled in the past, I prefer routes with bike lanes. Where I live, they’ve extended them such that, at traffic lights, there’s a “bike box” ahead of the stop line that left-turning cyclists can use. So you don’t have to merge with traffic, you just get over when the light is red and mosey ahead in full view of the cars before getting back in your lane. It certainly helps that the vast majority of cyclists are commuters running predictable routes, so you can get away with skipping infrastructure on most streets.
Unfortunately, they’ve also pioneered a new kind of lane that goes behind the parked cars. This is supposed to protect you from getting doored, which I admit is scary. A lady almost managed to get me when I was around 20; turns out my reflexes work just fine. But they introduce two new problems: first, traffic from side streets has to cross over the bike lane in order to merge; second, turning traffic and cyclists are obscured from one another by a screen of parked cars. This is part of what actually stopped my work commutes. The added tension of having to slow at every intersection to figure out what cars were doing was unpleasant enough to make me just give up and find other means.
Can’t imagine it’s fun to be a responsible driver in that part of town either, which is why I avoid going there by car too.
kky
10hr ago
Maybe it was me that was missing the context. I wouldn’t worry about it either way.
kky
11hr ago
And the menacing component. A cyclist who stays in their lane is no concern, but one who leaps around erratically is seriously worrying to drivers.
kky
11hr ago
What speeds were you going, out of curiosity?
Zipper merge works fine at 20mph - lots of lanes in my area do it. That much is an everyday maneuver, especially when everyone is synchronized by a red light. Highway speeds, I’m less convinced.
kky
11hr ago
That only works when cars are neatly spaced at double the safe distance, such that they can just move in without anyone dropping speed. In moderate traffic and above, doing something similar requires progressively greater slowdowns in order to merge successfully, frequently resulting in a jam.
I’m guessing it’s not a coincidence that the video is from Idaho?
kky
12hr ago
- Yes.
- Under 5 for stop signs. Full stop for lights.
- Nope. Follow the flow of traffic. 5 over is almost always fine. Reduce heavily on quiet residential, out of respect.
- Only real rule is: don’t match pace with someone on your right. Speed up or slow down. Getting over is the best thing to do. Don’t ride anyone’s bumper, because it’s an obvious way to get in an accident and get stuck paying all the bills.
- It’s a little more nuanced. When you need to get over, be assertive, but be safe. Don’t play chicken or fuck around with physical law. But you don’t need someone to lay down the red carpet before you move.
- Follow the rules.
- If you realize you’re in the wrong lane at a light or some such, is it OK to break the flow of traffic to go where you meant to go, or should you continue as designated and course correct later?
FWIW all these questions are, to me, subsidiary to the real rules of driving, which are, in order of importance:
- Be in control of your vehicle.
- Keep yourself and others safe.
- Do not menace others, especially those who are more vulnerable, but also don’t worry people who are at risk of hurting you with your own vulnerability.
- Proceed in an orderly and predictable manner, following the customs and laws of the road.
- Ensure that everyone can get to where they’re going swiftly and cleanly.
Everything else is just a logical consequence of the above.
kky
1d ago
Agreed. I generally like these, because they’re fun and quirky rulings on edge cases for the law, unusual things that come up from time to time but which you wouldn’t really think about. The weird ones are the best.
This case is not that. It’s a bog-standard murder case where an unprovoked attack wound up killing someone, where the murderers did not obviously intend for the death but just as obviously did not care about whether or not it happened. There is a specific class for this kind of killing in every jurisdiction that I’ve bothered looking at, because it’s how you classify the casual killings committed by people who think violence is funny or a normal means to whatever end. The only thing unusual is how on Earth the trial judge dismissed charges in the first place, and any speculation there either stops at concluding ignorance or continues on into Culture War territory.
kky
1d ago
I really don’t get the proposal here. Is it that we naturalize the children of foreigners generation over generation for the service of doing work no one else wants to do, or that we maintain a permanent underclass of legally distinct residents who are restricted to such work? Those are the only two iterated versions of the model that I’m aware of, both have been tried in American history, and the second crashed and burned in a famous way while the first is currently in the process of doing so. So saying, in effect, “we already have a solution” seems a little strange here.
kky
2d ago
He’s not cynical, not exactly, or possibly just in a more original sense of the word. Obviously he’s got a biting tongue, and is quite funny and engaging, but his style goes further than that. He smoothly switches registers from that sharp humor to dispassionate but engaged explanation to quiet compassion to thundering moral imperatives. And at the heart of it, the beating heart that gives the writing meaning and purchase, is a sincere and rich if off-beat and cantankerous sense of what it means to be human, and a good one at that. He believes, and believes so strongly that those who read him often can’t help but to believe as well. It is, in my opinion, the core characteristic of the best artists (whatever the medium). Weak artists communicate their raw skill, or the popular views of the day, or self-interested navel-gazing, or shallow platitudes (sometimes positive, often negative). Great artists have a perception of the world, an almost indescribable richness of essence, which they strive to share. They see the clean and the corrupt, the fractures in the simple and uncomplicated views, and try to communicate what they see. And especially they love the goodness of it, which impels them to expression, however imperfect. I find that this imperfection is actually the hallmark of great art, a certain roughness around the edges, a strange and stilted section here or there, the part of a novel or movie that drags on a little long, a corner of a painting that is not perfectly lovely, an awkward sidebar in a thesis: this is the uncomfortable, indescribable real poking through. It is not necessarily in full contribution to “the point” or what have you, but it is necessary nonetheless. And Alone, for my money, is one of these serious artists, probably the only real and powerful thinker I’ve read in the 21st century. There are some pretty acceptable second-rate writers, who are quite good for the time, and perhaps Alone will wind up being too focused on contemporary issues to be particularly worth remembering in a historical sense. But my sense is that he stands with the best.
kky
2d ago
I happen to rather like that Alone post.
I think the original poster has it right, even by the lights of shuffling people from one program to another. What is SSDI to SSI if not a recategorizing of benefits?
The concept of "SSDI is just SSI, but targeted at a slightly younger and more blue-collar workforce" seems to be borne out by the second chart here (look at the small, pale blue bars). The numbers keep going up the closer you get to retirement age. In a somewhat more proper sense, this could be explained as: this is quite specifically the cohort you expect to get disabled, as they're manual workers who get old enough for all their little injuries to come back and bite them. Either way, not nearly as knee-jerk offensive as Alone's example, except in the sense that no matter how you decide who gets what, you're still creating a large class of people who are drawing on entitlements from the labor of unrelated others. But that's a far deeper topic.
The race-based charts just line up in the traditional poverty order. I dunno if there was ever any possibility of it being otherwise.
kky
3d ago
Preach, brother. Software is made to be clear and predictable. Learning to make it that way, one line at a time, is our craft. You can always tell the brilliant programmer apart because 99% of that code is simple as can be and 1% is commented like a formal proof. Worse than LLMs, reliance on LLMs risks undermining this skill. Who can say if something is correct if the justification is just that it came from the machine? There needs to be an external standard by which code is validated, and it must be internalized by humans so they can judge.
kky
3d ago
The Turing Test ain’t simple pass/fail. It doesn’t specify an amount of time for the interaction, for instance, or whether it iterates, or whether people know the characteristics of the AI. I’d say that current LLMs could fool Turing himself, on the first go, but given a few iterations and enough time he’d notice something was up. Look at how our mods play spot the LLM. This would be a blanket yes/no if the Turing Test were pass/fail, but in reality it’s an evolving thing.
kky
3d ago
But when it was written, the US made its own ships, on colossal scale. Getting US ships was no issue. It’s only after US shipbuilding declined that any of this became a problem. That’s why I’d lay the blame more at the feet of deindustrialization.
kky
3d ago
I’ll give a description of what I do.
I manage servers. Or rather, I write code to do this, in accordance with some rather specific customer contracts. The times we take action, and the actions we take, are highly constrained. Even the basic concept of updates is not especially simple. I’m sure you remember Crowdstrike taking most of the Windows world down in a day. What I do is not so apocalyptic on the world scale, but our customers would find a similar event devastating. So most of my time is spent figuring out every possible path through server states and ensuring that they all lead back to places where faults can be cheaply recovered. These properties lie above the code. You can’t understand them, for the most part, just by reading the code. But they are incredibly important and must be thoroughly safeguarded, and even highly intelligent humans who just happen to be ignorant of the problem space or are a little careless have made really, really bad mistakes here. The code compiled, the tests passed, and it even seemed to work for a little in our integration environments - but it was horrifically flawed and came within an ace of causing material customer damage. So I don’t much trust an LLM which has a much more constrained sort of awareness, and in practice, they don’t much deliver.
I realize that’s a little vague, but I hope it explains a little about a more backend perspective on these problems. If I were more clever I’d give a clear example which was not real, but barring that, I hope a characterization helps.
kky
3d ago
I mean, my full opinion and experience with LLMs is much harsher than my comment suggested, but I don’t want to start fights with enjoyers on the net. (At least, not this time.) Chances are their circumstances are different. But I would be seriously offended if someone sent me AI-generated code in my main area of expertise because it would be subtly or blatantly wrong and be a serious waste of my time trying to figure out all the errors of logic which only become apparent if you understand the implicit contracts involved in the domain. Goodness knows it’s bad enough when merely inexperienced programmers ask for review without first asking advice on how to approach the problem, or even without serious testing…
Why are you “it’s said”ing? We have genomic data. Wikipedia:
A 2013 study of Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA by a team led by Martin B. Richards tested all 16,600 DNA units of mtDNA, and found that the four main female Ashkenazi founders had descent lines that were established in Europe 10,000 to 20,000 years in the past[165] while most of the remaining minor founders also have a deep European ancestry. The study argued that the great majority of Ashkenazi maternal lineages were not brought from the Near East or the Caucasus, but instead assimilated within Europe, primarily of Italian and Old French origins.[166] The study estimated that more than 80% of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry comes from women indigenous to (mainly prehistoric Western) Europe, and only 8% from the Near East, while the origin of the remainder is undetermined.[167][165] According to the study this "point to a significant role for the conversion of women in the formation of Ashkenazi communities."
They’re just Europeans, albeit from a parallel, ancient strain. The men are the ones with strict Levantine ancestry.
The pale eyes are a dead giveaway. Northern latitudes are perfectly compatible with dark eyes.
Edit: kept reading, and more recent studies estimate more and more European ancestry. So it goes.
kky
4d ago
Jones Act
I don’t think that’s true. The Act doesn’t put any restrictions on US shipping, only foreign shipping, and US shipping was strong for about a half century after it passed. The decline in US shipping instead seems linked to the decline in US industry post-war. Unless you’re taking that decline as a given and talking about the death of small American ports that can’t be serviced by foreign shipping?
kky
4d ago
Haha, I really, really don’t think there’s any dark leisure here. None of the best performers rest much at all, and I talk with them pretty openly about their habits. Plus, our direct manager is bullish on AI and got the most enthusiastic guy on the team to do an AI demo a few weeks back. Using AI as a force multiplier would get you a raise, not more work.
The more I have to babysit the LLM, the less time-efficient it is for me. I don’t know what everyone’s experience is, but typing out code (even SQL) is just not that time consuming. I know, logically, what I want to happen, and so I write the statements that correspond to that behavior. Reading code for validity, rewriting it to make it more elegant and obviously correct, that takes more of my time, and LLM output is (like a junior dev) unreliable enough that I have to read deeply for (unlike a junior dev) no chance of it improving future output. Plus, the code I write tends to be different enough that the prospect of reprompting the LLM repeatedly is pretty unpleasant.
That said, I absolutely use it for Bash, which is arcane and unfamiliar to me. I still have to go through the slow process of validating its suggestions and rewriting pieces to make them more proper, but the way you perform simple logical actions in Bash is so far outside my wheelhouse that getting pointed in the right direction is valuable. So if you’re in a position where you’re doing more regular and rote work with particularly obnoxious but well-documented languages, it makes sense we’d have different opinions and experiences.
kky
4d ago
Speaking from my own experience with literal top-of-class LLMs.
LLMs are good for getting overviews of public, popular, highly documented technical systems. They can meaningfully reduce ramp-up time there. But it’s not too significant for the overall job, for most jobs. I’d estimate ramp-up time to be a modest fixed cost that is already effectively ameliorated by existing resources like Stack Overflow. So maybe a 2x speed up on 2% of overall working time.
They are also good for writing repetitive boilerplate. Copy/paste features are cool and helpful. This takes maybe 1% of my overall working time. I just don’t wind up repeating myself that much.
They can be good for getting code coverage, but that does not equate to good testing. I can elaborate if needed, but figuring out which system properties are most likely to need explicit coverage is an art that requires a high-level perspective that an LLM will not have for the majority of serious projects. This is around 10% of my job.
For lesser-known or internal APIs (common at larger companies), the LLM will hallucinate at extraordinary rates. This is around 5% of my job.
For anything technical, like refactoring class hierarchies, the LLM will get way out of its depth and is likely to produce gibberish. This is around 4% of my job.
It simply will not understand the larger requirements of a project, and what would make one solution valid and another invalid. This is about 15% of my job as it relates to code, and maybe 8% as it relates to design specifications, and 20% as it relates to talking with other people about said requirements.
The rest of my job is code review and progress updates, which maybe could be automated but which feels a little cheap to do. So I stand to save about 2% of my working time with AI, which is pretty marginal. And on my team, you can’t tell any meaningful difference in output between the people who use AI and the ones who don’t, which ties into my general assertion that it’s just not that helpful.
Then again, I’m a backend engineer in a pretty gritty ecosystem, so maybe this isn’t true for other software roles.
kky
4d ago
Sorry to reply so late; my actual life imposed.
Your idea of a “national divorce” is tempting only inasmuch as there are two distinct groups that will have no more internal conflicts once separated. But this is not borne out by reality. Look at the tenuous Musk-Trump alliance, which has already fallen apart. Would they have to share part of America? Why would they not simply fall into factional infighting? Why isn’t it divorces all the way down?
Loving thy neighbor, or at least tolerating him in a modestly political sense, is a difficult thing to do, and when it breaks down there is no limit to the breakdowns. There are no Blues without Reds, no Reds without Blues, and the spirit of the age is one of malice seeking an outlet. What I have argued, am arguing, and will continue to argue, is that opposing this malice in itself, not through some subset of its mortal proxies, is both right and the only hope we have.
I have friends and family who are much, much more politically attached than I am. I oppose them in many ways, and I’m fairly open about that. But I still have good relationships with them because that opposition is braced by the much more real and human love and trust we share. I believe this is what’s at the heart of what one might call a homogeneous nation - this sense of trust that permits differences and arguments. And that trust, when it exists, exists on the smallest scale and percolates upwards as a simple expression of the way we live our lives, day to day. And part of that trust is the trust that we will do what is right and proper even when it is inconvenient or disadvantageous, that we will keep our word. Will you keep your word? That’s what’s really there, in the rule of law. It’s the rule of law over one’s own heart. And if you repudiate that in favor of advantage or passion, who can trust you - on any scale?
No shit the progressives have overstepped. But that’s not what’s at issue here. The real question is, and can only be, the safety of one’s own soul.
I agree it’s complicated. My area is in fact building, if slowly, and localizes said building to defunct industrial zones. I certainly don’t oppose that, and even certain renovations to older areas. Obviously it’s better than unending penury for people on the margin. And just as obviously, new things need to be built for realistic amounts of money. You have my full deference on these points.
But it gets on my nerves a little, the YIMBY assertion that these population shifts are just a fait accompli, that there’s nothing to do but adjust. Because from my perspective, there are large companies which have an easy time justifying investment and expansion in these specific major areas which have generated the crisis as a side effect of their operations. Which, you know, I get, it’s just how things go, the strong will crush the weak without noticing, it’s just a matter of size, and at that scale you can’t care about every little feeling. Believe me, I get it. But at the same time, I expect more of our leaders, you know?
There’s one software company, out in WI, whose founder decided to just stick in the area. So they have, and have pulled money in. There’s a town close to me, fairly cheap, lots of universities, where you could probably stick a cool tech campus. Pull in some kids out of college for reasonably cheap, do good work. Short train ride from the big city. Why don’t we have that here? Is it just that this one founder was part of the Ubermenschen and everyone else is stuck with Last Men? Don’t we deserve more? Actually, don’t answer that last one.
I appreciate the conversation, by the way. You were respectful on the differences, brought receipts, and read what I wrote over just using it as a way to launch into polemics. It’s very much noticed and appreciated.
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