pclowes

I think Detroit is well past its “bottom”. I have visited there every year (briefly) for the past 14yrs and it has some really vibrant and cool aspects now.

My anecdotal evidence is backed up by Detroit Metro real estate outpacing the national average significantly over the past 10 years. The people and culture are great too.

Also if America is ever going to greatly increase manufacturing, Detroit (and the rust belt overall) will be a big player because the navigable waterways have not moved and it is still 10 times cheaper to move things by water than land.

I don’t think that is true. I know several very high-performing engineers (some who could have retired a long time ago and are just in it for the love of the game) who use AI prolifically, without lowering any bars, and just deliver a lot more work.

Yes, and those houses are by definition the traditional architectural vernacular of the area. Traditional architecture in each area evolves from survivor bias and navigating delicate trade-offs in the climate they are placed over long time frames.

I get what you’re saying but Falling Water is notoriously damp, rusting, and uncomfortable. Most of his houses are form over function.

Pale Blue Dot subtly shaped my perception of Earth.

We are not standing on earth looking up at the stars.

We are being held by earth as we look down into an infinite abyss of death.

Everything we are depends on that fragile bubble holding us.

> “The house is a work of art”

I really disagree with this and think this sentiment lies at the heart of a lot of our current architectural and housing issues.

Yes, houses should be beautiful and inspiring. However, they should not be “art” they should not be trying to say something. They should be trying to mesh with and improve the neighborhood they are in. They should be rooted in time and place. Every traditional form in a region is there because of tradeoffs of housing design in the area. Trying to build modern blocky houses and violating these tradeoffs with tech and materials always feels bad. Theres a reason New England farm houses are the way they are and so sought after.

Houses as sculpture made by architects trying to impress other architects results in a disjoint aesthetic. Nobody wants to visit a hodge podge of houses in the style of whatever was in vogue when they were last remodeled. See all the blocky and angular, white, black with some wood tones built/remodel in the past 10 years that already look dated. They ruin beautiful traditional neighborhoods.

Buildings as art/fashion is inherently unsustainable as they have to be bulldozed whenever tastes change.

Architectsagainsthumanity has a lot about this.

I need to visit it in person I guess. The photos always leave me feeling like I am looking at a very small conference center and the feel of it seems off to me for a house. I dont quite get the appeal of a lot of his work. It sometimes feel everyone has decided its incredible and it persists on its fame over substance (not uncommon with art, eg. The Mona Lisa was just a small painting on a wall with a lot of arguably better paintings for a long time before we all decided to obsess over it)

Exactly, I am very bearish about the prospects of any new languages post-LLM era gaining traction. Unless they are highly specialized or somehow better for LLMs.

We use markdown because LLMs are great at it.

Markdown in the same directory as the code it documents is very readable by humans and LLMs.

Given LLMs proficiency in markdown and that reading it in view and edit mode is comparable I bet many engineering teams ditch confluence/Google docs for documentation in favor of just markdown plaintext docs adjacent to code (my team has moved design/RFCs to this as well, get feedback via PR commits, turn an LLM loose to implement design)

Also if you really don’t like it I bet you could just ask the LLM to translate it. No point wasting the human input characters or tokens on a ton of <></> etc

> “His manifesto obsesses over abundance, over the elimination of material suffering, and a future in which technology has lifted constraints that currently limit human possibility. These are goals I can get behind. But "forward" presupposes that you know where you're going, and knowing where you're going presupposes that you know what you want”

Want we want is often in direct opposition to our flourishing.

I sincerely doubt a humanity without constraints will ever be fulfilled or happy. The more “free” we make ourselves the more miserable we seem to become.

Across cultures and history the things that limit our freedom the most are where humans find meaning. You cant have duty, responsibility, honor and also be full detached and unentangled. Nothing significant is not also (at times) burdensome.

Anecdotally talking to teacher friends they have significant app fatigue. Multiple apps, crappy chrome books in the class room, they are basically a low grade system admin and IT support on top of trying to teach. Everything is benchmarked and thus gamed.

The older teachers often would rather retire than learn yet another ed tech system. They just want to teach kid not be screen dispensers.

Really feels like all the ed tech is snake oil. Education outcomes are dropping. Elite college are needing more and more remedial classes. Obviously there are multiple factors at play but we should remove complexity unless it delivers decisive results.

Fair but almost everything in almost every industry is downstream of interest rates. Capital allocation gets much harder in a 7% market than a 2% market.

I still strongly feel all layoffs to date have much more to do with interest rates than AI. This may change but I am deeply skeptical of massive RIFs being caused by AI at this point.

Look up FRED data in Interest Rates, SWE job postings over time and then look at the stock price of one of these companies claiming “AI layoffs” over the same time frame (eg. Block). Then read reports of 0 discernible AI impact to US GDP in 2025…

I do hand tool woodworking as a hobby. Aside from rough dimensioning, all the final cuts, planing, mortising, carving, dove tails etc are done by hand. Sometimes using tools over 100yrs old, not out of some fetish for the past, they are just better and cheaper than hand tools today.

It takes forever but I want to work the wood and develop actual skill. I don't want to just push wood through a series of saws, sanders, jigs and other machines. It has also made me much better at building “we need this now” type things (decks, cabinets etc) with power tools in general. I am much more precise, sensitive, and detail oriented.

I hope and feel there is something similar with coding and LLMs. A way to repurpose that hard earned sensitivity and recover some of the zen aspects as well. I am still figuring that out, part of it has been tiring but honestly a lot of it has made programming more fun too.

Hows that working for SF so far?

I dont understand your solution, houses are expensive because there are too few of them in desirable places (otherwise we have plenty). The govt becoming a command economy wrt to housing does not fix the supply. If the govt is just supposed to handle all the supply and demand aspects of housing well I have good news, there is a lot of very cheap housing in former Soviet Republics just not desirable housing.

Also taxing homeowners harder doesnt really solve the problem. CA has insane taxes, SF especially has a giant budget. They just waste it. I dont believe that once the govt raises taxes they will suddenly become efficient and competent.

The idea that the more spread things out the more expensive they are is sound theory. However in practice, per capita taxes in a city are often higher than the rural or suburban regions. One water main should serve more people in a city and its cost amortized across the population should be cheaper.

In practice, cities tend to have tons of programs that drive taxes up. They are free to do that, not necessarily bad, but also not efficient from a tax payer perspective.

See San Francisco. Also generally anywhere else where prices are rising and developers can’t develop and yet there are a lot of affordable housing policies. CA as a whole has mismanaged this so badly they have a net migration outflow.

Also removing other housing restrictions that ostensibly were put in there by constituents is a valid reason for constituents to oppose AH. They get called NIMBYs for this but if the local populace wanted more high density development then the density limits wouldnt be there to be excepted by AH

NYC is fairly high density. Has stopped building massive new skyscrapers and has water on two sides. It is also a tier 1 global city culturally AND economically. Its not really reasonable to expect to be affordable.

Affordable housing in a vacuum disincentivizes development and results in worse affordability.

Affordable housing used as an incentive or way to overcome other barriers to housing (density limits, height limits, zoning etc) that makes the market more “free” net is will produce more development.

You don’t need it for development but it can be used effectively depending on other policies. As with all things it depends on what policy makers are optimizing for. These are all tradeoffs. But affordable by itself all else equal limits developer upside and incentives less development meaning less supply and higher prices.

But where do you draw the limit on moving the line in?

Do I get to demand affordable housing overlooking Central Park in NYC? Beachside in Malibu?

If you want large incentive for development at scale you need to allow developers to make fat margins or else you wont get too many of them. Yes you can use affordable housing to do that. Eg: in the article they got higher density and exceptions (aka “fat stacks”) for building affordable housing units.

This is all policy tradeoffs at the end of the day. Eg: a tent is not “housing”, why? Because of reasonable policy. Same thing with housing codes etc. All directionally wise/good. But at the same time you can have bad affordable housing policy.

I do think housing is elastic and a cities policies around that elasticity determines if they will thrive or stagnate.

I would expect the development of Austin to continue until market equilibrium and then pause. Decreasing margin does not mean equilibrium. Obviously austin is not at equilibrium because we still have price data on developer activity and that would be near zero if developers couldn’t make returns given risk etc.

I guess I don’t see where we disagree?

In this case affordable housing nets out as a way to overcome policy barriers to market rate housing. So it actually makes the market freer.

Many other implementations of affordable housing further raise the barrier and thus even if any is built it doesn’t help widespread housing affordability issues.

Rent control is just another flavor of housing affordability policy that often (always?) backfires.

Crime, social peace, and economic opportunity are very linked. A lot of house prices in urban areas are wildly distributed and often the increase cost is to buy distance and safety (often just a couple blocks) from high crime areas.

At scale banks only win as a facilitator of economic growth. As the adage goes they can only 3-6-3 if someone is making at least 7.

For the everyman banks not winning is catastrophic.

I dont think its just that. Nimbys also see:

- many new building being very ugly (side note: ugly buildings no matter how green get torn down and are this not as green as building that are beautiful)

- increasing density bringing increased crime

- increased density actually turning out to be less efficient on a per capita tax basis (this is always wild to me, cities should be spending much less per capita than rural areas but arent)

Its wild how the solution to housing costs is really just:

Build more housing. Keep law and order.

No it doesn’t need to be “affordable”. Yes rent control is a terrible idea.

Just build more housing.

Note: that the US already has plenty of housing and housing costs basically go up in areas of low crime relative to economic opportunity. If you build housing, but allow crime to rise, you have wasted everybody’s time.

If you are visiting nature in any vehicle you are messing it up.

Gas prices are pretty much trivial unless you: - drive a lot (which in that case you’re really messing up nature regardless of ICE vs EV) - own a fleet - are really tight on finances (not buying a new car anyway)

Everyone is saying EVs are the future but most EVs cannot compete with many of Honda’s offerings.

Eg. I need to move 6 people and significant gear (skiing, camping, biking etc) long remote distances.

There is no EV that can do that really. And the ones that come close are easily $20-30k higher than an Odyssey. Plus the durability of large EVs is far from proven while the 300k mile club of Odyssey owners is large.

I need Suburban/Minivan functionality out of a proven OEM at a competitive price point. (I also need to see my friends with Rivians etc not having to schedule their vacation around charger availability. Have seen this waste hours and hours of time)

I am uncertain of the utility of any mandated screen based technology or app in K-8 education. We keep investing in it and the standard scores keep falling. Teachers are often juggling multiple apps and now have an IT job on top of their work. None of the efficiency or adaptive promises are coming to fruition. Teachers have less time and more stress.

Something is broken. Lets go back to paper and pencil.

“Hell-ya brother”

100% agree even with half your experience.

I don't recall any recession with respect to tech in 2020. It was a hiring frenzy.

Any commentary about tech jobs that does not include the interest rate environment and the massive over hiring that occurred between 2019 and 2022 is borderline dishonest.

Look at federal data of SWE job postings and look at the federal funds rate for the same period. Jobs is giant mountain peaking in ‘22. Interest rate is zero for the pandemic and then spikes right when SWE jobs start to collapse.

Tech hiring is all downstream of interest rates. AI has had almost no impact, at least not yet. (Block layoffs were not AI, look at their stock, they basically can only succeed as a financial company when money is free, very misleading and a convenient excuse for terrible management to now say they need to be “AI native”)