When regulations are reduced to allow more density, the value of the land goes up because its productivity increases. The land can do more now, e.g. hold 10 apartments vs 1 house. The same land generates more rent so developers are willing to pay more for that land.

Meanwhile, the value of housing units goes down due to increased competition among sellers/landlords.

Consider two zoning changes.

1) You are a homeowner and more units are allowed on your parcel, e.g. single-family -> duplex. That increases your land value.

2) You are a homeowner and there is more density around you, but not on your parcel, e.g. apartments are allowed nearby but not on your street. Your land value does not increase. Your home value decreases due to increased competition. (Of course, there may be long term effects like the increased density actually leading to economic windfalls in the area, increasing its desirability, and then increasing your home value.)

If it were so useful, just tell me in the first place! If you say “Yes” then it’s usually just a regurgitation of your prior conversation, not actually new information.

This immediately smelled of engagement bait as soon as the pattern started recently. It’s omnipresent and annoying.

I have many programs I use that I wish were a little different, but even if they were open source, it would take a while to acquaint myself with the source code organization to make these changes. LLMs, on the other hand, are pretty good at small self-contained changes like tweaks or new minor features.

This makes it easier to modify open source programs, but also means that if a program isn't open source, I can't make these changes at all. Before, I wasn't going to make the change anyway, but now that I actually can, the ability to make changes (i.e. the program is open source) becomes much more important.

Example: https://ebay.us/m/tN1UfJ

    It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs. The language alone was evocative. It suggested that the embryo—DNA making RNA, RNA making protein, protein regulating the transcription of DNA into RNA—was like a small Lisp program, with macros begetting macros begetting macros, the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth. Could anything more interesting be imagined?

    Someone should have said this to me:

    > Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.
    >
    > This is biology.
   
    –Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”

https://chatgpt.com/share/680b8a7b-454c-800d-8048-da865aa99c...

What is the infimum of the set of all probabilities p for which Aaron has a nonzero probability of winning the game? Give your answer in exact terms."

From [0]. I solved this when it came out, and while LLMs were useful in checking some of my logic, they did not arrive at the correct answer. Just checked with o3 and still no dice. They are definitely getting closer each model iteration though.

[0] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/tree-edge-triage-index/

“An insult to life itself”: Hayao Miyazaki critiques an animation made by artificial intelligence

https://qz.com/859454/the-director-of-spirited-away-says-ani...

I keep seeing this thrown around, but did anyone actually like go out and do this? I feel like I could distinguish between an AI (even the latest models) and a person after a text-only back and forth conversation.