I'm curious how this would work with LLMs increasing the speed to prototype. Low stakes changes to try something out, learn from it, and pivot.
My company is fully remote so all meetings are virtual and can be set to have transcripts, parsing through that for the changes needed and trying it out can be a simple as copy-paste, plan, verify, execute, and distribute.
It's a trade-off. I love the convenience of ebooks, but not owning my books is just categorically unacceptable to me. I want my daughter and anyone else coming after me to have free access to them, not to have to jump through Amazon's hoops (if such hoops even exist) for access.
I have a Kobo that I use to read the non-DRM ebooks I'm able to acquire. One such source is downloads from the Kobo store, when publishers make the non-DRM file available.
I use a kindle but I have never bought a book on the kindle store ever (been using it for 10 years). Totally doable and not hard to avoid... especially since the smaller stores not only have better sales but the author typically gets more money too.
As an app developer it comes down to the full access to phone APIs and the smoothest app experience. The more biased opinion is rooted in preference for the native language over web languages. And I recognize this is an opinion that is self-preservation in nature but it is what it is.
But I'll also say some apps don't really need to be apps (like ordering food from one specific store) but I won't complain about having those apps if it is a convenience.
Another layer of AI tooling is the cost of spinning up your own version of some libraries is lowered and can be made hyper specific to your needs rather than pulling in a whole library with features you'll never use.
> Another layer of AI tooling is the cost of spinning up your own version of some libraries is lowered and can be made hyper specific to your needs rather than pulling in a whole library with features you'll never use.
Tell me about it. Using AI Chatbots (not even agents), I got a MVP of a packaging system[1] to my liking (to create packages for a proprietary ERP system) and an endpoint-API-testing tool, neither of which require a venv or similar to run.
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[1] Okay, all it does now is create, sign, verify and unpack packages. There's a roadmap file for package distribution, which is a different problem.
I work mostly on the tech side of things but my corporate limitation has always been writing up documentation, communicating/translating to stakeholders, and recalling everything relevant when writing PR descriptions. AI has been a breath of fresh air. I actually communicate more information efficiently than I would have ever put the effort into before. I still maintain my own writing for more casual things like social media (HN included) and low stakes Slack conversations but AI for getting across ideas and then proofreading it is great.
"I actually communicate more information efficiently than I would have ever put the effort into before"
- this is subjective and evidence seems to point to the opposite in my view. In reality most people who think they communicate better with AI don't actually read what the AI has written for them and just puke it out on the world, expecting their readers to do the work.
The Ai almost always writes boring, repetitive garbage and very, very often includes redundant information. But saying it creates more efficiant communication is a great excuse for being sloppy and lazy.
I have had the same experience, personally. i.e. asking Claude to simplify things for c-suite has gotten (1) extremely positive feedback from c-suite and (2) actually relevant conversation about decisions. It's certainly not a one-shot but iteration with Claude is so fast that it takes just a few hours vs plotting weeks about how to clarify technical decisions. But Intend to work in a "try it this way" sort of iteration where I need to rewrite things and see what they look like. But using Claude/ChatGPT for options about whether things make sense is very helpful (for me). The speed of iteration is great.
Which one is it? Subjective or evidence based? I'm sharing what I know is true for my experience as well as the fact that I proofread what I send with AI and am aware of how terse I usually am.
As an amateur astrophotographer, I am both so envious and so happy for you. What a wonderful recognition of your talent and dedication to the craft. Kudos!
I've been to Copenhagen in the dead of winter with snow on the ground and my mind was blown by how many bikes there were on the streets. It really is an adaptable activity.
I believe they prioritise clearing snow/ice from the cycle lanes.
Personally, I enjoy cycling on snow as it's often not that slippery and due to the cold, I'll usually have a fair amount of clothing to act as padding for if I do come off. Black ice is worse as the rest of the road may be fine, so you go fast until suddenly you're sliding down the road.
Tax rates under 2% of property value should not "flabbergast" anyone. I prefer a state having a high property tax rate and cheap housing over an income tax. I'm sure most Texans do, too.
> Tax rates under 2% of property value should not "flabbergast" anyone
The national average effective property tax rate is, IIRC, below 1.5% for all property and below 1% for owner-occupied homes. It is really not surprising that people coming to Texas under the popular illusion that it is a tax refuge whose property tax expectations are set by the places they are coming from are flabbergasted by Texas’ property taxes.
They tend to size up when moving here and are expecting the rates from back home. Not saying it's a logical thing but what tends to happen. This is more of a comment on how people aren't really taking everything into account when just moving because "no income tax".
The current governor is proposing cutting property taxes in ~half by eliminating the school district portion and instead funding schools directly via the state's budget surplus.
Remains to be seen, as the next legislative session isn't until 2027.
I mean, most property developers are playing shell games to avoid the requirement of having to build school districts anyway in Texas from my experience living there. Build small developments up to just short of the line where it's required, then continue development as a different legal fiction with what turns out to be ultimately the same beneficent owners. Texas education system leaves much to be desired.
The system is simple. Your development hits a certain size, you have to build and fund a school for the community through fees if you're renting. So they go just short of the line, and crap out two developments and no schools, and leave the populace to figure out the rest. That isn't following incentives. That's being an asshat.
Cliffs in policies will always lead to players working around the cliffs.
E.g. in NYC there is an additional 1% sales tax on home sales above 1 million dollars.
So nobody in the market would ever sell a home between 1m and 1.01m as the tax increase is greater than the sales price.
These are failed policy implementations (in the above example the tax should be marginal, not thresholded)
Any policy which does not account for individual actors optimizing financially is a badly designed policy.
There are numerous similar examples re: CRE when requiring subsidized housing units for certain sizes of development. Often it's more lucrative to build smaller and get around subsidized unit requirements.
You can call them "asshats", but I'd rather live and discuss policy in reality.
Many of these new, clearly strictly punitively intended, taxes aimed at the wealthy will have the same logical outcome.
Show me the incentive and I'll show you the result
>Show me the incentive and I'll show you the result
Ah, you're one of those.
See, this clever little aphorism of yours is the constantly reached for salve of the "wiseguy". "Everyone would do it if they were in my position; so I'm not going to bother myself about it. Let's work around it."
Problem is, in reality, that isn't the case. Most people will sit there, look at the regulation, realize the development is likely going to attract families or soon-to-be-families, and would realize, yeah. Okay. Need to accommodate that. They approach it in good faith. Then you come along and start acting in bad faith. Your bad faith implementation for maximized extraction creates knock on problems, that create knock on problems, that now are everyone else's problem to solve. Eventually, with a high enough concentration or frequency of such agents, we enter game theory territory, and escalation tends to happen quickly from there.
Historically, this comes with a brand of solutions for people like that. It'd stew to a point, then generally involved an entire community not seeing a damn thing while someone came to physical harm in a tragic accident. Or just straight up Wildcat demonstrations.
Communities/ planners don't want that. So they make regulations that are a good faith attempt at curtailing spirals of reasonably foreseeable problems. A wiseguy comes along and creates reasonably forseen problems through non-compliance.
Are you noticing a pattern yet? You being a bad faith asshat isn't the policy's fault.
That's your fault for being a garbage human being, and maybe just a bit our collective fault for making the world such a comfortable and safe place for humans with garbage mindsets drawn to bad faith in all things business. Nevertheless, the gradient is clear. Do good faith business. Everyone wins. Do bad faith, and you win til it's worth someone's time to ensure you lose.
Too damn smart to learn the virtue of self-restraint, too damn stupid to recognize the threat too many of you pose to everyone else. Or how quickly things go bad once people start catching onto the games you seem to delight in playing.
I don't understand your point or why you are sure of that? New Jersey consistently ranks as having the highest average property tax rate of any state, and it also has relatively high income tax rates.
This is mainly caused by having a ridiculous number of tiny towns and tiny school districts, each with redundant services and employees.
My small NJ town has its own school district, containing a single K-8 school. Yet it has both a superintendent and a principal.
Grades 9-12 feed into a regional high school, which also has its own school district containing just that school. It also has its own superintendent and principal.
I don't think "redundant" is a strong word for this situation.
Sorry but I'm not spending an hour doing math on employee counts just to satisfy an HN commenter. There's no universe where it is sane and reasonable to have 4 separate highly-paid school superintendents in a 3-town area (towns feeding into the regional HS) with total population of only 25k, especially as these schools don't even rank particularly well.
And that's not even accounting for the principals. Think of it this way: if a country's navy has only a single boat, does it really need both an admiral and a captain?
TX: Average Effective Rate: Approximately 1.36% to 1.6% (some estimates range up to 1.8%) of a property's assessed fair market value. The typical homeowner in Texas pays a median annual property tax of $4,108
WA: Effective Rate: The average effective property tax rate in Washington is approximately 0.75% to 0.79% of the home's value. State mean the median annual property tax payment is roughly $4,361 to $4,729
Take this into account. People move from places with high cost of living where their 2 bedroom house nets them easily $1mil. They sell that and move to Austin where they can afford a much bigger house. They think they win not paying income tax and then their property tax bill drops and they are paying $16k per year. Enter the flabbergast.
If the house is paid off it can be a lot cheaper to support it than you probably expect.
For example my house is paid off. My total yearly spending comes out to under $25k/year. That omits irregular things like the occasional need to replace a broken appliance, or upgrade to a new computer/phone/tablet/watch, or get a new car.
Looking at how often those irregular things happen and how much they cost, another $7k a year reserved for that would be sufficient, assuming in any years where that is not spent the left over is carried forward.
That's $32k/year income needed to live comfortably in my house. My house is worth a little less than half a million according to Zillow. I'd guess a million dollar house would cost about twice as much to insure, and is bigger so costs more to heat or cool. Assuming 2x insurance and 2x electricity costs would add another $3k, suggesting $35k/year income needed for a million dollar house, at least if my standard of living is acceptable.
It's more nuanced than that. Say someone moves from California where their property taxes were based on the purchase price of the home, they then buy a home in Austin where it based on the property value and they size up. It is a sticker shock of the taxes. Not justifying it, it is just a reality of what happens here.
My company is fully remote so all meetings are virtual and can be set to have transcripts, parsing through that for the changes needed and trying it out can be a simple as copy-paste, plan, verify, execute, and distribute.
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