InefficientRed

Github issues vs. articles must be a generational thing; I have never used Github's issue tracker even for FOSS projects (admittedly not because we had better alternatives). I'm not even particularly old, but I am old enough to pre-date GH issue trackers as the de facto FOSS issue tracking solution.

Certainly, I would reach out to the author of a project -- especially a personal not-for-profit FOSS project -- before putting them on alert with a highly critical blog post. Except in exceptional circumstances (eg intentional spyware or backdoors embedded into the project).

But I don't think of articles as better or worse than GH issues in terms of form.

This kind of reminds me a tame version of the "disclosure debate" in security in the 90s/00s, I guess. Just because a lot of that debate was claimed to be about protecting users but was actually often about protecting egos (and "look how smart I am" zine articles that weren't entirely written in good faith or professional ethos). Except, of course, that in this case I think a simple cultural difference could explain a lot without any ill intent on either side.

(FWIW I'm not saying either of us is right or wrong. Perception is inherently subjective and all culture is relative. But I think I better understand how this project became so controversial...)

(FWIW I'm a native US English speaker.)

You have the "badness" ordering here totally the wrong way around. Soundness is about trust.

A known-unsound system is not necessarily bad. I use C and Python. I know the tooling can't give me very many guarantees, and that I have to do the book keeping myself. "Caveat emptor".

In a much, much stronger sense: there is absolutely nothing wrong with a sound system with explicit escape hatches. Bothing. I use sorry in Isabelle and admit in Coq. I do type casts in Java. I know where I can and cannot trust the tooling, and there are clear flags where I need to do my own book keeping. FFI in Rust is an explicit escape hatch.

I can't think of a single system that doesn't have some sort of explicit escape hatch from soundness. As long as it's explicit and understood and above all intentional, this is a feature rather than a bug.

But it's very hard to justify using a system that's supposed to be sound and isn't! I don't know where to trust the tooling.

And the blog's examples are not contrived. They are actually very straight-forward mistakes as far as type systems go... most production type system bugs are much subtle.

I have no horse in this race, have never heard of V, and frankly find the emotional charge in this comment section extraordinary... odd.

But I am a PL person.

Bugs in the type checker are pretty unambiguously a big deal. I totally understand why the examples in the blog post are alarming. The point isn't that they can be fixed by 3 lines; the point is that there were obvious soundness bugs in the type checker implementation and the language designer's attitude seems to be "NBD if the patch is small enough". Given the post and reaction, I would not be surprised if there are many more soundness bugs lurking. So, that's an issue if I want to use the language for anything serious.

That said, it looks like a hobby language in its early stages of approaching maturity, so the degree of divisiveness is seriously confusing. My reaction to all the drama is closer to "yup some soundness bugs; type systems get subtle fast, what a great thing to learn from" than "I hope V dies / the V critics are terrible".

I'm guessing there are weird personality/politics at play, but don't care enough to find out.

Anyways. I liked the Android examples.

But, to be fair, the Google-as-front-door internet has become totally useless for these types of tasks as well. Those wiki-style pages with huge walls of text offering nonsense advice are a plague.

Video does particularly well with this segment (as opposed to text) because of the nature of parenting and housekeeping -- lots of time spent on your feet with busy hands and occasionally available eyes. The same reason radio/long-form podcasting is popular with truckers. Or text with office workers (relatively speaking). It's entertainment you can engage with during work hours between or during tasks.

> That's... decidedly not true.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95DPkPW5_PE [link to video of animals becoming intoxicated on rotting fruit]

I'm confused. Perhaps you read this as "isn't"?

My brain organizes things as "beer, wine, and alcohol (aka spirits)" as opposed to "alcohol, including beer and wine". And an "alcoholic beverage" is just either a spirit alone or a spirit mixed with something.

Probably because that's how my state organizes the stores (with wine/alcohol in separate stores from beer, so if you say "we need to buy beer" that means going to a different place than "we need to by alcohol").

Ethanol is naturally occurring.

That said, I agree that including alcohol here is bizarre. As far as I can tell there has never been a monotonic increase in ABV; instead, there is a large selection ranging from high alcohol content to even alcohol-free (which is so unpopular in the US as to be barely worth mentioning, but quite popular in Germany, and I'm now seeing large and even regional breweries in the US produce AF versions of their most popular beers).

> Unless they're talking about distillation

Most alcoholic beverages are made through some sort of distillation process, so I'm not sure what difference you're alluding to here.

This is only true for small sums. No one leaves a job over a 5% raise. Some will jump ship over 20%. But most people absolutely will jump ship for 50% or 200% raises. And, unfortunately for small companies, that's often the wage differential between FAANG and the Small Co.

The numbers you are using here -- 180-250 -- are illustrative; total comp for true Senior at FAANG is comfortably in the 400s.

> The third, deeper, more cynical truth is that posting salary bands probably signals to employees internally that they are being underpaid, and can provoke discontent and departures. Rather than fix the problem with a long-term solution of unilaterally issuing raises internally before posting salary bands, most companies take the shortcut and keep the salary band private.

People talk. They're going to find out eventually. If you're having trouble hiring seniors, ensuring that you retain your existing seniors is probably step zero.

Says the guy who LITERALLY proposes that he be compensated if dense housing is built on land that he doesn't fucking own because it messes up his morning walk.

I'm not asking for anything free. I'm asking that rightful owners of property be allowed to build on that property that they own without writing a random old man a massive check for ruining his morning walk.

Strategic advice for lurkers:

0. OP is common, and people like this are NEVER going to compromise. You have to crush them with pure electoral force. This is possible.

1. Attend a few meetings and do 1:1s with every seatholder, but don't get too bogged down. Either you have the votes or you don't, and this is an issue where many council people have huge personal financial vested interest. Figure out what they do for a living, any rental income streams they have, and how they got their seat.

2. If you have seats on your side, work with the most senior friendly councilperson to draft a plan of action. They'll know how the local law works and what there are likely votes for. Contrary to parent's cloud yelling, there is no one golden solution. The levers available and the impact those levers will have is highly contextual to your community.

3. If you don't have the seats, focus on flipping seats and crushing NIMBYs. Again, work with a friendly councilperson on a strategy and figure out if there's already organizing happening.

You likely have the votes; the key is turnout. One good strategy is to target renters, who tend to be pro-housing. Be smart and use your skills.

"Does the person who owns this property live there" is the question to ask, and there are many different ways of answering that question. You'll likely need a quiltwork approach, using public property records as your starting point. In many states you can obtain county-level voter rolls for free or for a small fee. Names and addresses.

Then canvas. Don't pitch, listen. Don't try to convince or debate; that's literally doing turnout work for t he other side. Just listen, ask a couple open ended questions, walk away, and at the sidewalk tick "yes" or "no" or "doesn't care". Find your base. Make sure they know how to vote for and make sure they vote.

Only start doing the hard work of convincing people to change their minds if you don't have the votes in your base. The good news is that you likely have the votes in your base. Look at numbers from prior elections. Turnout is low.

4. Likely don't run yourself; find a candidate who is passionate about YIMY and anti-rentier. But also embedded in the community. Churches, school groups, grew up in the area, etc. Well liked. It's possible you're a good candidate, but much more likely that you can find a better candidate who agrees with you on these key issues.

5. Regarding meeting attendance: stuff like "big groups at city council meetings" only works when you have the votes anyways, or when a councilperson doesn't really GAF, which makes it kind of silly. Especially for this issue where there are likely well-formed opinions and financial conflicts of interest. Don't waste your time if the votes aren't there. Until you have a majority of friendly councilpeople, ignore the city council boomer circus. (And it really is a total circus of retired nutjobs many weeks...) Ignore it. Quietly do the work of flipping seats. Turnout in local elections is low; getting even 20% of renters in your community to vote 100% pro-housing is likely enough to flip every at-large and a good number of precincts.

6. This will likely take multiple election cycles, but if you can find one cycle where all the seats you need line up, go all in. Spend money, spend time, don't squander a rare opportunity. Slating can be incredible effective, especially with a really good at-large candidate who can carry multiple precincts on his/her coattails.

This year is an especially good year because of massive rent increases. People are angry. Capitalize.

7. If you think this helpful, thank OP. Without the strange condescension I wouldn't have bothered typing this up.

If my employer said this to me, I'd think: "Wait... am I the mark?"

Do you lose candidates at the 4h assignment stage? If so, that is probably the issue. Otherwise, look elsewhere.

1. Title inflation. Many here are making glib comments about "not actually senior". Great! Call it a "Principal" role and see if that helps. You can always promote any existing Principals to Senior Principal or Staff or God or whatever the new better-than-old-senior title is ;-).

2. Actual inflation. What are you offering? Are you sharing that in a job posting? Hard truth: if you're not FAANG or a handful of other companies, everyone assumes you can't afford them. If you CAN afford them, share numbers in your job posts!

Senior at my FAANG is around $500K at the moment. If you can't beat FAANG, the best way to get people is to offer them more autonomy than they can get at FAANG. But at the Senior level that means making them part of leadership (assuming you're small); Senior at FAANG likely already has more technical autonomy than you can offer. So management and strategy autonomy is a great carrot.

Good luck!

The FACT of the matter is that people who can't afford housing don't care about any of that.

Good point, thanks for the criticism. There are many ways to solve this problem.

> Instead, you'd want to actually incentivize selling if you're not living on the property. Make the capital gain tax very low, that makes selling it off the most attractive option.

No.

First, that incentivizes treating property as an appreciating asset.

Second, fuck low taxes on capital gains, period. The tax rate on any capital gain should not be lower than the highest rate on labor. Ever.

> realistically, it's just a customer list.

I'd pay decent money to never interact with a BAYC owner. So there might be a market for this list.

TBF to BAYC holders, there are benefits to being on a "promising suckers" list. In this case the price seems high for those benefits, ofc.

> So, no this proposal is preposterous, aside from being a nonstarter. Young people who might want it are great at making noisy protests and notoriously bad at bothering to vote - the one thing that matters, while older people, and especially those who own property, tend to reliably vote.

In other words, "let them eat cake". The "anyone under 45 doesn't deserve to afford shelter" attitude strikes me as a "fuck around and find out" situation.

With no restrictions on use of the land, this is obviously unsustainable and impossible to make fair. Not all land is equal and if someone trashes their lot then it can't be used by the next generation.

> Even if they lived in a tent

This already exists -- it's called public lands.

You can already do this on BLM and some USFS land. 14 days in any 25 mile radius. If you have a car then it's hard to go unnoticed but moving around to stay in compliance is easy. If you only have a tent then you could go unnoticed basically forever if yo aren't stupid so the 14 day rule doesn't really matter.

Incidentally, most homeless folks have issues that make it impossible to live out of a tent on public lands. Deeding them a small plot that is technically theirs wouldn't really solve that issue.

Also, the purchaser is sometimes on the hook for the back taxes (in his case $6K). I'm not sure how MI law works, but if the purchaser is on the hook then he's actually selling a lot with a condemned house for $6,500. Which is not an amazing deal, since vacant land in nicer rust belt cities goes for $10K-$30K and demolition is expensive. Again, not sure, but if that's how it works in MI then it makes sense that he's having trouble selling a lot with a condemned building and $6K in back taxes at pretty much any price. You're going to burn mid five figures before you have lien-free empty land, which can be had at that price with much less hassle.

In some cities, a condition of sale for city-owned property is that the buyer rehabs or rebuilds within a given timeframe.

> Giving an acre to a homeless person and relocating them there though would be a death sentence.

That's probably a massive over-statement -- even in the most dangerous communities in the US a homeless man probably isn't going to be killed for no reason. And this is Detroit, not the Alaskan wilderness, so there are shelters and so on. But it is true that the land would be totally worthless to a homeless person.

Landlords will figure out how to setup wash sales, or as close to a wash sale as they can legally get, or trade property between entities owned by the same real people, or engage in swapping behavior with other large holders in a cartel-like fashion, etc. Closing all the loop-holes would be difficult.

Tax the net proceeds of rental properties at 90% and slap a 100% capital gains tax on any property that is not owner-occupied. Also, simply rule out renting for huge swathes of property (especially single family homes).

Renters are close to out-numbering non-renters by double digits.

Those are incredibly new phenomena. It's hard to over-state how different things are now compared to even 5 years ago.

I will be surprised if there isn't an open electoral revolt against land owners in my community over the next 10 years. And not just pro-housing policy, but policy explicitly designed to punish.

I don't have an opinion on LVT, but the idea that home owners are the primary organized electoral power base is, I think, shifting quickly in many communities. Landowners, I think, I have two options: find ways to fracture/disempower the rent base in the communities where they invest or else find a way to keep the number of non-renters well over 50%.

Gotta find a walmart or especially target. They're saunas :)