On the web you can do that much more efficiently. That scares people.

As in any defense/offense situation, it’s all about balance.

So as of today, I’d certainly buy electric if I was worried about depreciation.

Then came Yamaha, who saw its potential, and made a fortune with it. So did Stanford. That patent became the second most successful patent Stanford ever had until it expired in 1996 (by now obv the university has had way more financially successful patents).

It secured Chowning his tenure; the university probably wouldn’t have prolonged it otherwise. Quite an incredible story the whole thing.

Maybe these incentives weren’t perfect. If we throw all of this away, we’re back at the original problem.

You imply that there was no original problem to be solved; I think that’s naive.

You're not dumb, of course, so your next step is to say, "if I give you the contract to build prime housing, you also must build affordable housing". That's not ideal for the developer, because the time spent on building affordable housing is time they don't spend on stuff where they make proper money, but at least they can make some money. They agree to take the deal. You think, problem solved, but turns out the developer outsmarts you: they structure the company in a way that they can chicken out of building the affordable housing. In real estate, it's very common to have every building project be its own limited liability company so that one failed project doesn't influence the others. In this case, you put the affordable and the luxury housing together in one Ltd, build the luxury housing, extract the profits by moving them to the parent company and then declare your Ltd bankrupt, meaning they unfortunately can no longer build the affordable housing.

As a mayor, you observe how you're being cheated, you get real angry but the walk through the courts is too slow, and your voters demand action now. Realistically, you do the court route in the background, but you learned your lesson and now you tell the developer "before I give you a high margin luxury contract, you must have completed affordable housing first".

Alternatively, you mix the buildout into the same building so that you cannot open the luxury flats/office space without having completed the affordable part. Either way, affordable first, luxury second.

That is basically the story of the London property market.

City development must cater to all its inhabitants, and if you have a prime estate like the Battersea Power Station, it's a failure, from the city's POV, if you burn that only on high margin development. From a negotiation standpoint, the city negotiated badly here. The city has to accommodate the needs of less wealthy inhabitants in other means now, but without the negotiation leverage that a high margin property can provide.

If you view it like this, the complaints "only luxury flats" are pretty rational. The city negotiated badly.

One of the instructions I've hammered into Claude is "Write like a human. I don't want this to sound like AI content. Your standard style of writing would fail miserably if it was reviewed by an English teacher. I want you to write prose that is nice to read. For example, write full sentences instead of bullet points."

It works wonders. Suddenly, my plan documents are something I actually understand, and something I'd be happy to share as an RFC. They still need iterating every time before they're ready to share, but I no longer have "the honest truth is" and other BS in my output. It's so refreshing for my brain to be able to actually focus on the content.

I've noticed this with my partner, too. She used Claude to draft a strategy document and felt completely overwhelmed. A classic moment of "AI did all the thinking for me, but now I don't know what I'm presenting". Once I helped her prompt Claude into writing the strategy in proper English, she understood what the AI was proposing, rejected large parts of it, iterated several times and ended up with a draft document where she edited the finishing touches herself and felt that it was truly hers. The AI was still incredibly useful: it helped her with the blank slate problem, and tremendously sped up her workflow.

So yeah, if you proofread and iterate on your AI's output until you feel you'd be proud if you had written it yourself, I'm happy to read it, too.

It’s just not the same child.

I know we’re gonna get there eventually, but still, seeing as this is their first demo image on the page I just can’t help but scream inside “HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THIS?”

It really makes me question whether the people building, or at least the people marketing this, actually understand their product. I love image generation for all kinds of use cases, but I find that particular example creepy.

It’s brutal for these people. The creative industry was always hard, but this is just plain brutal.

- yt dlp has builtin support for tor

- write the retry logic using your favourite coding AI

- spin up a cheap cloud instance and let it run