The irony is our reaction to the Urban Renewal era was to introduce so many veto points and red tape to projects (both public infrastructure and private property) that we are nearly incapable of fixing the problems that era introduced.
When the NIMBYs of today work to protect and even double down on the bad decisions of that era it makes you wonder whether we've really moved on from it.
I fully reject this POV. There's currently a bill working through ATL City Council to rehash our Zoning laws. The people who show up regularly to the council meetings are not community members - they are lawyers representing private development firms, many of whom make five to six-figure political contributions to sitting council members. They're the ones pushing against any pro-social, community-oriented zoning practices (like ADUs, parking lot restrictions, and public transportation and pedestrian requirements).
Believing that neighborhood units are the largest impediment to effective and efficient planning is to believe the corporate landowners at their word. There's so much astroturfing that happens in these spaces, largely rejecting density and public transportation.
I can name off the top of my head a half-dozen community-oriented projects blown up by the very same groups, and even one instance where a former state ACLU director came in, pretended to be a movement-aligned mediator, and then proceeded to torpedo the drafted neighborhood deal. This same director later went on to be hired by the same private firm for a six-figure job.
The rot is real and rarely gets reported. David Simon was a rare one in his coverage of Baltimore, not all cities have skeptics like him who dig deep.
Not my experience at all in my neighborhood. Development gets torpedo'ed by current residents. Parking and traffic almost always being the primary one. As in, more parking minimums. Developers showing up are the only people trying to actually build anything at all, most community members are NIMBY.
Not sure what a private developer would have to do with public transit though. That's the city's job to provide and figure out the routes for. Developers bring projects accordingly, and the local residents veto 12 story apartment buildings built on current strip-malls 2 blocks away from train stations. Residents using transparently bullshit environmental and walking/biking infrastructure "concerns" as just another way to block things.
I'll take building stuff - even if flawed - over the current state of never building anything ever any day of the week.
> Developers bring projects accordingly, and the local residents veto 12 story apartment buildings built on current strip-malls 2 blocks away from train stations.
This one kills me. It's so common and yet there's wide agreement among the local populace that there's a housing shortage.
So it sounds like perhaps this community process is not working to advance equity as you might hope?
Because I can assure you with 100% confidence, never having been to a single one of their meetings, that all the wealthy suburbs around you are using this "process" to keep their suburbs extremely exclusionary, while they siphon their fraction of the economic productivity from Atlanta into their own hands, and keep their tax dollars sequestered away from the city that allows them to make their high incomes.
What you see with your personal experience is only part of the picture, and the same process that seems to get abused to allow "non community" to exert development pressure in Atlanta is simultaneously used to keep middle class and poor people out of the wealthy suburbs.
"The people who show up regularly to the council meetings are not community members"
They are community members just not the ones who share your point of view. Those community members who might share your point of view don't show up.
I've never seen community members fight for density either. We want to tear down our housing so large buildings blocking the sky can be built by corporate landowners. You know who owns large buildings? Corporate landowners. The people with little houses are average citizens.
Public transit doesn't need density. Public transit exists in places with little density.
One, they quite literally do not live in the city. Most of them live in the very rich ex-urbs. Their retainers, too, do not live in the city, not even in the penthouses. They live in places like Alpharetta and Cobb.
Because the datacenter setups serve multiple users concurrently while your mac mini only serves one. You would also lose money hand over fist renting/buying 4xH200s just to serve deepseek flash to yourself.
It's a shame the infrastructure is so poor in most of the US that a high end electric cargo bike isn't an option most people will consider. I love mine for exactly those use cases.
The credential itself is usually irrelevant, most jobs that require a degree will accept any degree. In those cases it's being used as a class filter more than an indication of merit or training.
Is this still true? My understanding was that that was a thing in the 1990s and into early 2000s but not really any more.
Obviously some degrees still matter, if you're doing real engineering or practicing medicine or practicing law or other STEM things you need the proper education to do so.
But I think for a lot of the jobs that wanted "any degree" to like, be a sales rep or work at a rental car place or whatever entry-level office job, that the college degree requirement has gone away.
This comment has me confused. The first sentence reinforces my point, the second one contradicts it (and isn't true in my experience, many companies want a degree, any degree). Say more?
I guess I don't understand what you're trying to say, especially after your reply.
Here's what I am saying: most top companies require degrees but will only take a degree from a select list of colleges, while government jobs that require degrees will accept a degree from any college.
Protip: university was always mostly a class filter - sure it had other functions too but access required years without substantial earnings, prior education, money, and cultural familiarity with academic institutions, so basically only rich people could go to university
this, people need to just focus on "computer program did thing". Its irrelevant how complex the program is. If I write a worm "for testing" and then it escapes my system and does massive damage, that's possibly a negligent crime, despite it being "too complex to understand" or "having its own motives".
In practice, like many things, it's a matter of preference. I'm firmly a novice, but find I prefer an angle while chiseling but can't tolerate it for any other use of a hammer.
Do you use your lump hammer (aka mini-sledge as I know them) for chiseling much? I know masons like them but they use steel chisels, I've been taught to avoid using metal hammers on wood chisels.
As with everything in woodworking and Perl, theres more than one way to do it :-) If it works for you, that's what matters.
I do use my lump hammer when chiseling. Not hitting wooden tools with a metal hammer/mallet is one of those things people get all worked up about, but it's not really a big deal. For my money, it delivers a firmer strike than a beech mallet.
I have destroyed a chisel handle that was well on its way out when I got it used at a flea market, but turning a chisel handle is within my modest turning abilities.
If a 20 minute telehealth visit with a PA is a sufficient level of screening for a medication, it's hard to imagine a compelling reason why an AI system would not be.
Amazon's pharmacy prescribes a large swath of medications over text.
No call or video necessary.
To make things more complicated, every message I sent was responded to by a different nurse practitioner. So it seemed everytime i sent a response or question, it would get routed to a random NP and she would respond without reviewing the full conversation.
Works if you know what you need, and I can't imagine AI being a worse process than whatever Amazon is doing.
Isotretinoin (formerly sold under the brand name Accutane) is not one of the drugs which can be prescribed by the system. Also, the reason you know its name is precisely because it is abnormally associated with increased risk of suicide.
It’s not game over because AI doomers are wrong in their projections. LLMs are a transformative technology like the internet, but they’re also overhyped and the useful applications aren’t as broad as people think they are. They’re also not Skynet.
I’m also skeptical about some projections, particularly for robotics, but on the Internet at least, it does seem like AI is automating most things, more or less as predicted. We already have botnets and had one notorious AI botnet swarm, fortunately easily shut down without doing any real damage. I don’t think we’ve seen the last AI botnet.
AI-automated warfare is looking pretty scary too. I don’t think it will stay in Ukraine.
Time will tell. I think the problems will come from humans automating things that shouldn’t be automated, like the disaster of the Minab school targeting, not out-of-control superintelligence.
Viruses don't need to be intelligent at all and smart viruses (or AI internet worms) won't need to be superintelligent to be a real pain to deal with. DoS attacks due to scraping are bad enough already.
The situation is sort of like the Internet before broadband. There probably aren't enough AI-capable home machines to have big swarms of bots that run autonomously. If the swarm depends on an LLM API, it will be easier to cut it off once it's noticed.
I think it's an even chance that we will see a bot swarm in the wild (rather than coming from an AI lab) by the end of next year.
Right, but the internet survived the Melissa virus and other early widespread worm attacks. They caused widespread disruption and economic damage, but they weren’t the end of the world. And besides, at present people are using AI to find and patch software at a faster rate than they are using it to compromise software (more dollars are allocated to security these days).
IMHO the biggest problems will be with poorly written AI slop software, probably small business crapware produced with minimal investment (maybe entirely without an experienced developer) and legacy equipment that’s been abandoned by the manufacturer. This will lead to disruption but not catastrophe.
I didn't say I don't trust anyone. Don't put words in my mouth, it's a sign of bad faith.
Other countries have governments that have earned that level of trust. I believe the US could get there eventually, but it will take a very long time because it has a very long way to go.
When the NIMBYs of today work to protect and even double down on the bad decisions of that era it makes you wonder whether we've really moved on from it.
reply