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How old were the homes when you were a kid?

They were all new-ish builds at the time, built a couple years before I was born.

Asking because I’ve seen the same dynamic in multiple subdivisions over several decades. I have very little love for subdivisions and the suburban built environment, but I wonder how many vocal urbanists’ opinions are colored because they experienced the aging of a neighborhood’s inaugural population. If you look at the neighborhood again in 50 years maybe it will have a healthier age variance.

> What? What kind of city would limit the age of who can use the bathroom? Sounds bananas.

I think this was another comment about homelessness, not an implication about the law.


Hmm, in what way? How is homelessness related to public bathroom besides the fact that homeless people use public bathrooms? Not sure how that's related to the age of the person using the bathroom, but surely I'm missing something here.

They are saying that homeless people are scary or messy. Or that drug use happens sometimes in a bathroom, etc.

Obviously, this attitude is born from some incorrect assumptions, but it's a pretty standard feast from folks out of town.


So homeless people use bathrooms to do drugs and somehow that means there is a age limit? I'm sorry but this makes no sense, how are they at all related? Why would it matter what someone does before you use the bathroom, it's not like drugs stick around in the air and impact people entering the room afterwards...

The last time I was in a major city with my kids I went to a major, nice park. They had to use the bathroom. There were ample bathrooms but every single one of them was filled with human feces, covering practically every surface, and littered with needles.

There is absolutely no reason to tolerate this in a civilized society, and it’s completely unheard of in the region I’m from, a major culture shock - along with the attitude that I should just get over it.


> There were ample bathrooms but every single one of them was filled with human feces, covering practically every surface, and littered with needles.

What the hell? No offense, but was this in a slum somewhere or something? Not saying it doesn't happen in other places, but I think I've came across that once in my ~35 years, visiting countless of public bathrooms, cities and towns, admittedly mostly around in Europe, South America and Asia, but still...

I don't think that's a "city" thing, that might be very local to the specific city you visited, or the specific area.


I’ve definitely heard that other countries don’t tolerate this sort of thing, but the thread is about US cities. Of course YMMV, my understanding is many European cities have very few or only paid public bathrooms.

Ah, yeah, going back I see the "big US cities", my context was just "big cities" when I was reading the thread, my bad!

> my understanding is many European cities have very few or only paid public bathrooms.

Not my experience living here, but I'm sure it differs a lot based on the country and the city, some will have free public bathrooms, some paid public bathrooms, some no bathrooms at all.


Do you maintain a system in which punch cards play a critical role?

On the topic of warfare, wars are fought differently now. Compute will be mentioned in the same breath as total manufacturing output if a global war between superpowers erupts. In highly competitive industries this is already the case. Compute will be part of industrial mobilization in the same way that physical manufacturing or transportation capacity were mobilized in WWII. I’m not an expert on military computing but my intuition is that FLOPS are probably even more easily fungible into wartime compute than widget makers, and the US was able to go widgets->weapons on an unbelievable scale last time.


There are plenty of military uses for computing, but I also find it hard to believe anything but a handful of datacenters are or could be a major factor in anything but a completely 1 sided war. They are very vulnerable targets that are easy to locate and require large amounts of power and cooling. I also just don't see the application, encryption capabilities far exceed the compute available needed for decryption and computing precision and speed with even 20 year old tech far exceeds the precision of anything you would want to control. Even with tangible banefits, say 10% more or less casualties than there would be otherwise, in an exchange with anything resembling a peer military force im not sure it matters because everybody already loses.


Is that in terms of data centres or chips on the battlefield? Surely the latter is most important. Or will war alwys have perfect connectivity.


You could argue that compute was a decisive factor in World War II even (used in code breaking and designing nuclear weapons).


They’re unclassified public cloud GPUs today, much the same as the massive industrial base of the United States was churning out harmless consumer widgets in 1939. Those widget makers happened to be reconfigurable into weapon makers, and so wartime production exploded from 2% to 40% of GDP in 5 years [1]. But the total industrial output of course didn’t expand by nearly that much.

I think it’s maybe plausible that private compute feels similar in the next do-or-die global war.

[1] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...


The United States has almost no domestic capability to produce advanced semiconductors. There is no abundance of industrial capacity cranking out GPUs that can be quickly diverted from AI companies into weapon systems.

Even if private compute was at a level of maturity where you could use it for classified workloads, knowing that the infrastructure is being managed by someone in India or China, securely getting data into and out of that infrastructure is still a mostly unsolvable problem.


My point is the existing private DCs can be reconfigured for a different use. Building new gpus is not required to on-shore compute. We already have it. Obviously if the military started contracting out compute onto the hyperscalar clusters it would involve a host of changes. I wasn’t aware that they were letting India and China manage their infrastructure… That seems exceedingly unlikely? That relationship would obviously be severed if the compute was reconfigured for the military.


The US is one of the very few countries with the ability to produce advanced semiconductors.


US is probably second only to Taiwan in terms of capacity to build advanced semiconductors and the gap is now closing as Intel gets back on track.


wut? Intel with 18A can do it


Its low yields and tiny volumes are part of what gets the US from “no capacity” to “almost no capacity.”


yields are constantly improving on monthly basis, according to executives around 7% per month, so the capability is definitely there, but yields still needs some time


A gated, premium-tier product differentiation strategy only works when you sell the differentiated product. They went to market with 4.7 nerfed at security work and aren’t letting even large, vetted corporations pay more for the Mythos model… sentiment is quite negative where I work right now. There’s a real possibility that open source will give them a hair cut in the interim. And if the SWEs start modifying their CLI flows to avoid lock in to `claude`, it’s probable that the hair just never grows back. Losing strategy.


It's going to be quite a while until open source models catch up. And, as long as Anthropic maintains the perception that Opus is even slightly better than the best OSS models, they'll still be the preferred tool for professional developers.

Even if the best OSS model is only 1% worse than Claude, do you want to risk your codebase on it? When you're working through a tough bug in your code, and an OSS model just isn't grokking it, wouldn't it be only natural to want to cast it away and say "I should only be using the very best tools, dammit! My time is too valuable!"

That said, I agree with your point about SWEs modifying their workflows to avoid lock-in. That's a good idea, no matter what.


Have you ever reviewed an AI-generated commit from someone with insufficient competence that was more compelling than their work would be if it was done unassisted? In my experience it’s exactly the opposite. AI-generation aggravates existing blindspots. This is because, excluding malicious incompetence, devs will generally try to understand what they’re doing if they’re doing it without AI


I think the issue is not that the patches are more compelling but that they're significantly larger and more frequent


I have. It's always more compelling in a web diff. These guys are the first coworkers for which it became absolutely necessary for me to review their work by pulling down all their code and inspecting every line myself in the context of the full codebase.


I try to understand what the llm is doing when it generates code. I understand that I'm still responsible for the code I commit even if it's llm generated so I may as well own it.


This article could’ve been written 20 years ago with only minor revisions, and it would’ve been true then. But it’s not now. It is trivial, literally a day of work, to set up a build system and CICD environment using Verilator if you are already proficient with your build system of choice. Learning TCL to script a bitfile generation target using your FPGA vendor’s tools is a few extra days of work. And regarding IDE support, the authors complain about the experience of writing code in the vendor GUI. They should look at one of the numerous fully featured systemverilog LSPs available in e.g. VS Code.

The real argument for open source toolchains is much narrower in scope and implying its requirement for fixing a nonexistent tool problem is absurd


I did write this 20 years ago https://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2006/05/methods-for-recon...

The vendor tools are still a barrier to the high-end FPGA's hardened IP


I agree about with your claim, but the answer to your question is that “weeds” is a set of species that contains both invasive, ecologically harmful species, and crucial native annual and perennial forbs+grasses.

From the universalizability principle, if everyone merely let “weeds” propagate, because of the ecology of invasives that are in that set, we would be MUCH worse off for the next few millennia than we are now. Until the ecosystems healed and the “invasives” become “keystone species”. Not sure how long that would take but we won’t see it :)


It depends on the target and the surrounding soil. It’s often easier to pull especially for the random weed that sprouts up around your landscaping. However if you are trying to manage an infestation of invasive species, where the surrounding soil will have a seed bank heavily contaminated with seeds from the years of invasive reproduction, it’s usually a bad idea to merely pull. You can expose soil to sunlight and cause an explosion of dormant seeds. And some nasty invasives are nearly impossible to remove by hand because of their root structure — some species even leave little rhizomes broken off in the soil along the root structure when you pull off the foliage causing a hydra effect.

tl;dr targeted herbicide is a much less evolutionarily selected-for offense, as opposed to hand cultivation which mimics attacks plants have evolved to survive for eons


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