Hypertext to the rescue! Here's the lede sentence:
> In [Structured Query Language (SQL)](https://example.com/sql/), you can solve Unusual Complicated Problem with Super Advanced Thing.
That said, one time I had in mind a reader archetype, for whom I added an appendix of one basic concept, which ideally they'd already know, but likely didn't.
I could've linked the some mentions of "association list" to a chapter of some textbook they'd never seen before-- and maybe they would read it, and maybe they would come back.
But instead, I decided to give a quick overview, in terms of an example relevant to what I was documenting, and leave them with a code pattern they could use, to get on with programming a robot like they came to my document to do.
(Though I wish I'd put an accessible showing-off demo example near the beginning of the document. After the intro, it reads a little too much like the glorified inline API docs that it is.)
> There are other ways to get rich than by starting startups. Some of those do require you to exploit people. But startups are the most common way to become really rich, and if you want to start a successful startup, the key is not exploitation but empathy. What do users really want?
To have illegal hotels that then help keep a generation out of home ownership?
To have an exchange for cryptographic tokens that are used almost entirely for financial scams and organized crime payment infrastructure?
To have an online forum that made so many long-time contributors who built the content and appeal feel so betrayed, that often the top solution to a posted problem (you find in search) has been deleted in protest?
To have a non-profit spun off, ostensibly for the benefit of humanity, and attract talent and funding that way, then coup and rug pulled?
"To have illegal hotels that then help keep a generation out of home ownership?"
To solve this, New York City (basically) banned Airbnb's and home ownership is now famously more accessible in the City? I am not even asking for home ownership + rentals to be solved, I am asking whether it got even slightly better because of this ban?
Meanwhile, I can't visit my sister because the regulation cartel..I mean Hotel Lobby has spiked pricing to the high heavens.
Maaaybe we need to revisit some of these easy assumptions on your list?
>I don't know about home ownership - but not having random strangers I
I mean, this is just garden variety NIMBY-ism. Having a quiet farmhouse in the middle of midtown would also be a definite improvement just for you, but you're choosing to live in the most economically productive center in the world, and there are practical tradeoffs for that.
Or you can get to know me! Visiting from another city. New friends are good! <2% of most cities are Airbnb's, they by no means preclude having permanent neighbors.
And parties are banned on the platform, I know because I had enforcement against me for even having my sister's family over when Airbnb's were legal in New York City.
Hey man no offense but I would much prefer to know someone for 365 days than for 2. That’s awesome you want to visit, stay in a hotel and maybe I’ll run into you at some event in my city but I don’t need you staying in what should be permanent housing.
The Airbnb isn't just about the cost of homes but also the comfort of people living in them. Would you want to live under an Airbnb? With the constant rotation of people, parties, etc?
I know it might shock many but a lot of people (I would say most) buy a flat to live in it and making it into a pseudo-hotel lower the quality of life at the benefit of the airbnb owner.
This is what HOAs are for. To ban the model of home sharing city wide is heavy handed if you're simple goal is to make existing tenants more comfortable. In a free market, people should be able to shop for what they want and make tradeoffs on the basis of price.
Sure, it is logical that opening a previously restricted or infeasible product space is an easy way to produce business opportunities. Like the legalization of gambling in Nevada.
> Maaaybe we need to revisit some of these easy assumptions on your list?
Nobody said that banning Airbnb would by itself make buying housing in New York more accessible. It’s not an assumption that anybody in good faith ever made.
When you put oil on fire, it will suddenly stop burning as soon as you stop putting new oil on it.
The housing crisis has multiple causes, regulatory framework which benefits existing homeowners is one of them, capitalists treating houses like the stock market is another, and Laissez Faire hotel market did only make it worse (like a gasoline on a burning fire). Now that the thing that made a bad thing worse has been banned, that does not mean the damage it caused has been fixed, nor does it mean that the other causes have been resolved either.
The housing crisis has one problem and it is identical to this one:
Taylor Swift is coming to the local stadium to play a concert. There are 1,000,000 fans in the area that would like to see her live. The stadium seats 100,000. How do we reconcile the imbalance between demand and supply of tickets?
Solve this problem, and the housing crisis is also solved.
It is not identical to this one. There exists enough land and construction material to build housing for everyone. Many cities have enough money to buy or construct social housing for anyone who wants, but they don‘t for multiple reasons (including ideological dogma in favor of capitalism; but also conflicting interests; outsized political influence of existing homeowners; etc.).
In this analogy we could use our shared funds to hire Taylor Swift for 10 subsequent concerts, and the only issue would be who gets to see her first.
Sure, she can cancel on 9 other cities so everyone here can get a chance. A fix for us, but really just taking from someone else.
But that's fine, lets ditch the stadium, and move to a park. The park measures greater than 1,000,000 sq. ft., so we should be good. But now we severely downgraded the quality of everything so we could accommodate everyone. The stadium, although limited capacity, is purpose build to accommodate that capacity. The park, is just Earth, and in no way was designed for a concert, much less 1,000,000 people. This has happened before (not sure if with 1,000,000 but maybe) and I don't think I need to spell out the negatives. Taylor gets icey on the show because of the non-low chance it goes in the record books as an absolute disaster.
No because Airbnb bans are basically political bike shedding. Yell at the guys sprinkling oil on the fire because taking on the NIMBY's flooding the region with oil is too difficult.
"Multiple causes" is just mealy-mouthed pussy-footing, there is one big cause and then a bunch of other distractions as the numbers now prove.
You're theory about some NIMBY conspiracy is significantly worse on every metric then your strawman's theory about Airbnb causing the housing crisis. Both are bad, but yours is worse.
Complex problems seldomly have a single cause not a simple solution.
It's not a conspiracy, they aren't meeting in smoke-filled rooms. It's just a systemic problem, a classic tragedy of the commons. An individual neighborhood move to protect an old church is noble and courageous, but do that all across society and you basically have a construction standstill that is difficult to visualize and effectively regulate against. So yes, it is a complex problem, but the cause is singular, and because of its multi-dimensionality, I find these causes to be far more insidious than "profit-bad" problems.
I think the second more prominent cause maybe costs, labor, material, interest rates etc. But Airbnb's are far..farrr down the list so as to be completely irrelevant, as the natural experiment in New York has proven out.
AirBnBs are not responsible for the housing crisis. Voters that vote to block development at the municipal level are responsible for the housing crisis.
naaa... not really. they forget really quickly where they come from. Money corrupts everyone, no difference if you have a few million or a few billion.
A few million means you own your house outright and could retire right now. It's success for yourself but it's not political control the way a few billion is. You couldn't afford a big misleading media campaign to change a law. It's not even generational - your kids will have a good upbringing but won't be set for life (other than housing maybe)
For players who are new to the game, there should be a 1/4 chance you go to bed proud of an honest day's work with your hands, and wake up the next morning having strained a muscle you didn't even know you had, and you can't chop wood for the next couple weeks.
If the article's description evoked applications like old missile guidance system methods based on geographic features... this Wikipedia screenshot's imagery looks like it would also be good for precision drone attacks against urban small civilian structures and select individuals within/around them:
Wartime propaganda poster: "Loose Surveillance Capitalism Children's Game Apps Sink Your Own Darn City, to an AI autonomous drone swarm assault that surgically neutralizes whatever the worst people want to neutralize".
AI, please rework that into a catchier slogan, and render it as a printable US WW2 OPSEC poster style PDF, but without storing my prompt and-- Hey, what's that buzzing soun--
> I am sure it is not perfect (I only spent an hour working with the results), but a software engineer would iron out the remaining potential bugs that I could not find quickly [...]
People have said things like this many times in the past, and, in the past (perhaps not now), it's always been a misunderstanding of what is good and bad, what's difficult and easy.
For example, someone would draw a UI in a GUI painter that generates code (or a resource file), and a manager would see it and think the majority of the work towards the product is done. (Incidentally, then there seemed to be a reaction, towards making your UI mockups look abstract or otherwise different from runnable code, helping the nontechical to understand that this isn't 90% of the finished product.)
Or a student intern hacks out a homework-grade demo, and a manager who understands neither software engineering nor product domain says "we just need some engineers to polish it up for production", and thinks the student is a star and why can't their engineers be as brilliant and productive. (I might have once been that energetic intern, who was happy for the encouragement, but then learned more, and saw it was a thing.)
This common misunderstanding was sometimes self-correcting -- when trying to ship became a disaster of misery and regretted-attrition, or the product was poorly received by the market because it wasn't thought through nor implemented well, or building subsequent functionality atop it was a nightmare. (But adverse effects of bad approaches is one of the reasons for management and ICs to job-hop, before the unwanted effects affect them personally.)
What might be different now is that some of these AI tools are outputting better-engineered work than some software engineers, and much faster.
At the back of my mind, I'm wondering how the really great software engineers will continue to stand out, as the discipline is being devalued in the minds of most leadership, and anyone can prompt an AI to generate something that superficially appears to them like what they assume a great software engineer would produce. (Even if the great engineer would do much better quality of implementation, have innovative ideas that ML from open source code would not, and maybe arrive at better product concepts as they worked through the problems.)
This was the secret sauce of my best startup idea: something that once existed, but had been forgotten.
(Because, I believe, either the flood of people into the market space never knew it, or it wasn't the dominant model for exploitation of the user base.)
Import-only is the lazy way. :) If you want, GnuCash also has features to support manually entering each transaction as it occurs.
Then GnuCash has features to match up financial institutions data exports against your transaction splits, see the discrepancies, and then reconcile against their PDF statements.
It's a way of life, but you always know what money you have, where. Although that sounds like something for wealthy people, I'd say it's actually more important the less money you have.
When I was a poor student, I carried around a small notepad in my pocket and a pencil and wrote down every transaction. Only way I ensured discipline to not waste money and then go hungry later.
But now I am ruined by smartphones, which are way too slow to type in every transaction manually.
OK, just please be careful how you frame what you're asking for.
For software development use of Claude, I'd be happy if the `claude` CLI executable does everything I need, within the Linux KVM VM sandboxes I create for the work, without a desktop client. The cleaner and more trustworthy, the better.
Also, for random interactive use of Claude for asking questions, I use it from my host desktop, sandboxed within the Web browser, and I want that to be well-supported. Someone marketing/product person at an AI company will naturally want to dark-pattern push people towards a proprietary desktop client, but that's one corner of abuse potential that we can still keep in check.
For agentic automation of my host desktop things and the things they have access to... no, thank you, the state of the art is not ready for that.
Does anyone know how easily you can do "copyright clearance" for these supposedly public domain images?
For example, the page for the first image I clicked on said:
Date
1833
Underlying Rights
Public Domain Worldwide
Digital Rights
No Additional Rights
* Source states “no known restrictions”
* We offer this info as guidance only
If, for example, you design the cover of a self-published book around such an image, is Amazon KDP going to reject it, because they don't accept that screenshot as sufficient proof of rights?
Search for public records about the image. If you can confirm the author is dead for at least 70 years (in case the author originally held the copyright) and the work is at least 120 years old or was published more than 95 years ago (in case this was work for hire) you are good
For younger works other conditions might make a work public domain, like the work being created by a US federal government employee as part of their duties
I know this is a joke, but just as a note, in some european countries, the person who digitized the artwork may have a copyright. It varries a bit by country.
Exactly. The site mentions that and some other problems, and just disclaimers their liability. One problem I didn't see mentioned directly is that some venues have additional bureaucratic rules.
For example, I saw a writer-artist complain that they couldn't show the big ebook store proof that they'd licensed the art for their cover, since they painted it themself, and there was no documentation licensing it to them.
So one could use practical advice from someone who's figured out the rules, and has the battle scars, like: "With public domain art, just make sure you do X and avoid Y; otherwise, there's a 50% chance that a random copyright check the first week will result in your book temporarily being shadowbanned, and you won't get the crucial early sales while the algorithm is trialing exposure of your book in searches and categories, and then the algorithm will pretty much never show your book to anyone ever again."
What I'm wondering is -- although an item would be found to be legally considered public domain in all applicable jurisdictions when examined by law clerk -- what are the practical rules for passing copyright clearance checks/challenges by Amazon, Kobo, etc. for public domain art.
You don't want a book's carefully choreographed launch sabotaged by various companies' Kafkaesque bureaucratic processes, while you're trying to finesse the algorithm and the publicity you've scheduled.
(I should've said upfront that I know a bit about public domain and copyright law as a layperson. And I also know that I can't necessarily point a CSR to law surveys if something gets flagged. I need to know the "do X and avoid Y" that is proven to actually work smoothly with all these companies' ideas of "copyright clearance", so that I hopefully never have to talk to a CSR.)
> In [Structured Query Language (SQL)](https://example.com/sql/), you can solve Unusual Complicated Problem with Super Advanced Thing.
That said, one time I had in mind a reader archetype, for whom I added an appendix of one basic concept, which ideally they'd already know, but likely didn't.
<https://docs.racket-lang.org/roomba/index.html#%28part._.Ass...>
I could've linked the some mentions of "association list" to a chapter of some textbook they'd never seen before-- and maybe they would read it, and maybe they would come back.
But instead, I decided to give a quick overview, in terms of an example relevant to what I was documenting, and leave them with a code pattern they could use, to get on with programming a robot like they came to my document to do.
(Though I wish I'd put an accessible showing-off demo example near the beginning of the document. After the intro, it reads a little too much like the glorified inline API docs that it is.)
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