drderidder

I'm genuinely curious: in the mid / long term will this lead to more affordable housing, or just more densification? If duplexes are the new norm, wouldn't standalone single-family houses just become more expensive? Are there any case studies to show how densification relates to housing prices? I've been reading that in places like Vancouver for example, factors such as speculative real-estate investment and money laundering have been found to be driving up housing prices and are having to be addressed with other specifically targeted measures that go beyond simply allowing more units to be built. If densification is one part of the solution, are there others, and what are they?

It's not that hard to make programmable / re-assignable physical dials and switches to interface in a tactile way with changing software applications.

I like the point "The function documentation is its contract". I experimented using JSDoc instead of TypeScript on a recent javascript project and have found it so enjoyable, partly for that reason.

It used to be a commonplace (and interesting) to see Japanese people frequently take out their stamp for anything requiring a "signature" but in recent years I really haven't seen it happening much. I was always able to use a signature on any official document and I think this has become a much more acceptable form of verification for Japanese people nowadays.

Also, it's a shame those episodes are geoblocked in Japan since some of the people who'd most enjoy and benefit from them are people who're visiting Japan for an extended period.

I agree. People tend to forget that their "rights" end where another person's rights begin. Every right comes with responsibilities. While freedom of speech is important, the right to live peacefully free from hateful invective is probably even more fundamental.

Dave Thomas, one of the original authors of the Agile Manifesto [1] wrote an article called "Time to Kill Agile" [2] a few years ago (which he subsequently re-titled "Agile is Dead"). He has some good insight on how Agile (the methodology) got to be something very different from what they intended. Originally they were trying to break away from a rigid methodology, not introduce a whole new one. Unfortunately, if you don't codify something into a set of rules, it's pretty hard to get people to follow it, and it wasn't long before "experts" were building formal processes out of it. I've never seen it work well, and the more ardent the adherents are, the worse it seems to get. I think every team needs to find the approach that works best for them to itemize, prioritize and communicate progress. In my experience the two most important aspects of moving a project along are simply communicating what needs to be done and recognizing effort.

[1] http://agilemanifesto.org/

[2] https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html

Driving is fun. Being a passenger is not so much fun. Technical issues aside, for this simple reason I don't see self-driving cars becoming popular.

It's those multi-client scenarios for which the API-first approach is a perfect fit, actually. Once the API is hammered out, it forms the common foundation for building gui's, cli's and even machine-to-machine interfaces. As a stepping stone, web applications can be deployed as hybrid mobile apps using something like Apache Cordova, even as fully native apps for Android and iOS are under development. Once you've implemented something like this, it's hard to go back to monolithic codebases. Caveat: this is predicated on having an API server and requiring an Internet connection. Writing a connectionless app this way would require some additional effort, though still quite do-able.

Exactly. At the very least, they shouldn't be monetizing content they haven't vetted.

Compile-to-JavaScript technologies have come a long way and seem well-suited to porting certain legacy applications to the web as proof-of-concept projects, but I think an API-first approach supporting a lightweight, HTML/JavaScript web framework would have required a justifiable, moderate additional effort, and would not only run faster, look and feel more contemporary, and be easier to maintain, test and deploy, but would put you in a better position to add new functionality going forward.

I don't know if this is still common practice, but radio edits were often mastered differently back when I briefly studied music production. The station also likely uses signal processing to compress the dynamic range and increase the "loudness". Listening in a car is quite different than listening on home audio equipment, hence the different processing.

The typescript fever smells like most of the other herd stampedes over the past several years. Check out this talk from a few years ago by Eric Elliot "Static Types are Overrated". He goes over how types don't mean fewer bugs, and if you're getting a lot of type-related problems it's probably got more to do with your testing hygiene. He also just wrote a summary of 2+ years using TypeScript and why it turned out to be more of a liability than a benefit.

Which is why it makes sense for a boat, but as for this article about van life, not so much.

Yeah, I have one of those on my boat and they do work fine but you definitely can not wait 27 craploads to empty it out. Those "27 flushes" is how much the clean water tank can hold, not an indication of the waste tank capacity which is nowhere near 27 jobs. It's more of a daily thing - every time you dock if it's been used you gotta lug it down to the clubhouse, and emptying it is no fun either. For landlubbers a composting unit that separates solids and liquids would be way better for anything that you don't want to empty on an almost daily basis.

The first example being related to typography reminded me that Jan Tschichold was one of those influential typographers who's book, The Form of the Book, along with Raul Rosarivo's Divina Proporcion Tipographica, re-popularized the "Secret Canon" of medieval incunabula and brought the Golden Ratio to bear on book layout. Unfortunately we've lost a lot of that beautiful layout design but it can still be found in a few places. For a while, MacBook screens very closely approximated the Golden Rectangle.

> “There is an all-too-real possibility that other nations will attempt to leverage our actions in China in order to demand our compliance with their security demands.”

.,.. And the country to make the most demands for private user data, according to Google's transparency report is ...

That article by Joel Spolsky was one of the few I can't fully agree with. The greatest successes of my career have often been in creating "next generation" implementations of software using newer or better technology and designs. Those re-implementations have resulted in very significant performance and productivity gains. While rewriting things from scratch can definitely be a naive impulse, there are times when it's the right way to improve a product, and if you fail to do so, your competitors will. The trend towards microservices tacitly recognizes this, I think; one of the tenets being it should take a small team a couple of weeks to rewrite any component of the system from scratch. When software was written poorly to begin with and has grown unmanageable by layering hack upon hack, it can pay to take a step back, look at the actual requirements, and consider if there's a better way.

It's becoming a common occurrence to fall victim to false positives from algorithmic filters. False positives are just always going to be part of any kind of machine-learning algo. In the end it's statistical probability, and probability doesn't equal certainty. Sure there are techniques to reduce false positives, but I sincerely think that any user-affecting policy based on ML / algos should always have a real-live human based support fallback to get real resolution to the real issue of false positives.

It's an interesting visualization but gives only one side of the picture. Emigration away from the US happens increasingly as well.

Releasing the data to corporations creates a different Big Brother.

Thanks for saying that. Somewhat related, inspired by John Robbin's "Diet for a New America" [1], since 2015 going mostly vegetarian for breakfast/lunch was one of the better ways for me to reduce my footprint.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_for_a_New_America

Several years ago I joined a stealth-mode spinoff of a large telecom equipment manufacturer, and worked on deep-packet inspection (DPI) on 10Gb/s fiber-optic networks. The initial motivation for the project was a desire by telecom companies to obtain personally identifiable information and profiles for targeted advertising, and as we learned, a number of other interesting use cases, like reducing customer churn. At the NOCs there were a number of various servers in racks that were getting a feed of raw traffic for a variety of purposes. It wasn't a free-for-all, but it was eye-opening. I recall reading through a Cisco router manual for example (not the company I worked for) and seeing its port-mirroring capabilities blatantly promoted as a means for customer profiling and targeted advertising.

Outside of the telecom industry itself there was quite a bit of resistance to this sort of thing, and we had to go before the US Congress to explain what we were up to. Profiling for the sake of profiling was not smooth sailing, but if it was for the purpose of "security" then it was more or less a free pass. The forcus of our DPI technology turned to the task of network-based threat detection as its primary raison d'être, with customer profiling being an opt-in service by which users could obtain the security service in exchange for targeted ads.

In the years since, I don't expect that Telecom's desire to be much more than a "dumb pipe" has diminished in the least. They view the traffic they carry on their networks to be their property, in a way. They feel entitled to inspect it, throttle it, slice and dice it any conceivable way they can to maximise their profits. Its one of the reasons I quit.

Imagine the US postal service steaming open every letter and opening every package that went through their system, so they could plug your mailbox with targeted special offers or increase the delivery fees for certain things. Its all similar BS with ISPs, but it's all techie stuff and heavily lobbied so the public gets bamboozled.

You raise a really good point about wide-spread encryption being an impediment to ISP profiling. But there is a LOT you can surmise from user traffic even if you don't know the exact content of the encrypted payloads. Just analyzing IP addresses and times can reveal a ton of information about a person. My first patent [US20100161795] was in fact a NAT session detection and tracking technique to identify and track individual users within a household through TCP/IP analysis. Using this technique someone could get a pretty clear picture of how many people were in a household, their ages, genders, interests and patterns of activity, even without delving into the http payload of the packets. We didn't, but this kind of thing is most definitely possible, and I wouldn't trust other shady entities not to do it.

I’ve always thought self driving cars are a monumentally dumb idea. There, I said it. I feel better now.

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Congratulations, you just described 99% of pop music.

You miss an important point, JSON is a subset of valid parseable JavaScript. This is a huge win when working with the web stack.

Thanks for the recommendation!

It's disappointing that the company with the Xerox PARC legacy, that spawned many of the innovations people take for granted in modern computers, couldn't figure out a way to carry on. One day I'd love to read a rise-and-fall story about that place.

I read A Wizard of Earthsea around age 12... it opened the world of fantasy/sci-fi. Sad for her passing and reminded that I always wanted to read more of her books... RIP.

What could possibly go wrong. coughthatshowyougottrumpcough.