It's true that there are heavy regulations on what housing can be built where, but I don't think this is primarily driven by "investors" (in the sense of people who make their money by being commercial or residential landlords). I think it's primarily driven by homeowner-occupiers - people who own the homes that they themselves live in, who are not professional investors trying to maximize their rental profit, and who care a lot about the ways in which new construction or the ability of more people to live near them might negatively effect their quality of life in the place they live.
I agree, except those homeowner-occupiers are still investors, and profiting just the same.
The moral difference between BlackStone and the random NIMBY homeowner is that the homeowner exerts control over the planning process while Private Equity just piggybacks on the homeowner efforts.
Here in SF in particular, there are a huge number of people both at the local level and in the city government who just categorically oppose any change of any kind, leading to cases like the historically-designated laundromat [1] where the property owner had to fight the city for years in lawsuits and pay for a $23,000 historical report just to be allowed to demolish that laundromat to build housing [2].
Of course, the tone of thse first article makes the problem even more obvious, in a black comedy kind of way, with the writer complaining about "luxury prices" of the resulting apartments without considering even for a second why the prices might be so high.
Maybe the correct thing to do is to modify git so that it can track an otherwise-empty directory and then never have to worry about this problem again. Is there a reason why this is hard to integrate into git's existing model of the filesystem?
3. I guarantee that you will have colleagues that will accidentally add empty dirs. (I definitely have seen when they accidentally add built artefacts; dirs would be lesser issue as they would not increase repo size by much, but still)
4. Actually only first two reasons matter, but for nitpickers there would be also a bit dishonest but formally correct pointing to some doc saying that it is file or content tracker (and formally directory is not a content)
Git only tracks files not directories, so yeah you would need to change a lot. It is also unclear what the semantics should be. What is with a directory that is tracked as r--, but then files get added?
I actually avoid using VSCode for a number of reasons, one of which is its performance. My performance issues with VSCode are I think not necessarily all related to the fact that it's an electron app, but probably some of them are.
In any case, what I personally find more problematic than just slowness is electron apps interacting weirdly with my Nvidia linux graphics drivers, in such a way that it causes the app to display nothing or display weird artifacts or crash with hard-to-debug error messages. It's possible that this is actually Nvidia's fault for having shitty drivers, I'm not sure; but in any case I definitely notice it more often with electron apps than native ones.
Anyway one of the things I hope that AI can do is make it easier for people to write apps that use the native graphics stack instead of electron.
I definitely remember seeing Gen1 pokemon art as a kid that seemed, not washed out exactly but a bit less saturated compared to, say, the Pokémon anime that aired on American TV. To the extent I thought about this, I guess I assumed that when the original creators of Pokemon in Japan were first working on it (I doubt I had heard the name Tajiri Satoshi at that point in my life), they were doing hand-drawn experimental art, still trying to get the final design correct.
And this is a good thing, if you think that the billionaires running large businesses like CNN will generally act in their own selfish self-interest and that they need the government to hold regulatory leverage over their businesses in order to make them act in a socially-beneficial way.
But then you have to trust the government that manages the regulatory agency to act in a socially-beneficial; and only at most half the US population does at any given time.
If this person was freed from prison and then the relatives of the two dead people killed him in retaliation, how much prison time do you think it would be just for them to receive? Deterring this kind of informal retaliatory murder is one of the jobs of harsh sentences in the formal criminal justice system.
The relatives of the dead people could probably have the convicted murderers dealt with in prison if they cared enough about it. They did sue the murderers (and likely won by default) for $10m for each of the two murdered men. As the convicts have life sentences and no income they will probably never even earn back their legal fees.
I think it is harder than you think it is for people who aren't already connected to the criminal underworld to order a hit on someone in prison. But I think the desire for revenge is muted if a person is being legally punished for their offense by being locked in prison at all, as opposed to being free in public.
Yeah I assume what the news publishers actually care about is the thing where, when someone posts a paywalled news article on hacker news, one of the first comments is invariably a link to an archive site that bypasses the paywall so people can read it without paying for it.
> just like how the agricultural sector is hell-bent on scapegoating AI (and lawns, and golf courses, and long showers, and free water at restaurants) for excess water consumption when even the worst-offending datacenters consume infinitesimally-tiny fractions of the water farms in their areas consume.
When I learned about how much water agriculture and industry uses in the state of California where I live, I basically entirely stopped caring about household water conservation in my daily life (I might not go this far if I had a yard or garden that I watered, but I don't where I currently live). If water is so scarce in an urban area that an individual human taking a long shower or running the dishwasher a lot is at all meaningful, then either the municipal water supply has been badly mismanaged, or that area is too dry to support human settlement; and in either case it would be wise to live somewhere else.
The internet can't simultaneously be a place for weirdos and enthusiasts, and a vital part of the economy that everyone uses for a huge number of disparate things in daily life. Parts of the internet can be places for weirdos and enthusiasts, but spaces that cater to weirdos and enthusiasts are by necessity not popular or viral spaces.
And in a world where running a Google-like search engine is just one of the many jobs the US federal government has, why shouldn't how the government runs that search engine be a national-level political question decided by elections, just like the management of all the other things the US federal government does is? Regardless of how the government curated access to information, a huge chunk of the US electorate would be mad about how they were doing it, reflecting very real polarization among the population.
> However we left such a crucially important public utility in the hands of private companies, that changed their algorythms many times in order to maximize their profits and not the public good.
No one "left" a crucially important public utility in the hands of private companies. Private companies developed the search engine themselves in the late 90s in the course of doing for-profit business; and because some of them ended up being successful (most notably Google), most people using the internet today take the availability of search engines for granted.
Rather famously in at least the case of Google and others, with government funding:
"Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance" (January 28, 2025)
The intelligence community hoped that the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.
The Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) ... program's stated aim was to provide more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each to advance this research concept. The grants were to be directed largely through the NSF so that the most promising, successful efforts could be captured as intellectual property and form the basis of companies attracting investments from Silicon Valley. This type of public-to-private innovation system helped launch powerful science and technology companies like Qualcomm $QCOM +1.61%, Symantec, Netscape, and others.
The Internet itself (particularly its precursor, ARPANET), was also government funded, as was development of the World Wide Web (CERN). Oracle, the database company, grew out of the CIA's Project Oracle.
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