I think another part of neighborhood design that influences this feeling is how walkable a neighborhood is — anecdotally, I feel like I've had way more run-ins and conversations with neighbors when I've lived in places that had grocery stores and coffee shops within walking distance, as opposed to when I've been in neighborhoods that required driving 10-15 mins to get to anything.
For sure, walkability is an important factor. Although I think even with that it depends on what sort of shops are within walking distance.
Years ago my current neighborhood of Williamsburg had mostly local shops -- a locally owned grocery store or two, cafes, bagel shops, bookstores, pharmacies, bodegas, etc. Now it's mainly a corporate wasteland -- Whole Foods, Apple, Sephora, Hermes, Chanel, North Face, Trader Joes, etc etc. By all measures I live in one of the most walkable parts of the most walkable city in the country, but as this corporate takeover has happened the small third spaces are dying or have fully died out (depending on the block). And I find that the feeling of community really has evaporated as that process has unfolded over the past 15-20 years.
Congrats on the launch! Seeing this reminded me of building and launching a high-altitude weather balloon with some buddies back in high school - one of the coolest projects I've gotten to work on.
If it's not proprietary, I'd love to know - how do you "steer" vertically between different wind layers to move in the direction you want to go?
So I can't get into exactly how we do our altitude control, but the Google Loon project has a really great explanation of how they made their (very big) balloons go up and down: https://x.company/projects/loon/
Loon made all of their research public after they shut down, and we're obviously heavily inspired by their work. Our systems use a lot of the tech they pioneered, just on a much, much smaller scale (for reference, Loon's balloons were the size of tennis courts) Here's the PDF in case you're interested in checking out the 400+ page writeup: https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/The%...
Yep. The assumption is that two flips are independent and identically distributed but that's a fair one: your flips don't change the coin, it does not have memory, etc.
I definitely see value in this, but it's currently too much of a hassle to use. It requires lots of tedious code duplication and requires the user to manually set positions and lengths for the arrows and annotations, defeating the purpose of allowing writers to focus solely on the content of their work. However, this would be a great thing to try to encapsulate in a package.
