OpenAI is diversifying a lot, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
It’s great to ship fast. But you need to maintain things as well. And that requires even more time and engineers and money in the end.
There’ll definitely be projects within OpenAI that will be shutdown in a few months, just because it hasn’t caught and/or engineers want to work on something new.
That’s how Google worked in the 2000s - shipping new things fast - but then there was Reader and now they lost everyone’s trust.
> OpenAI is diversifying a lot, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
I'm not sure if I'd use term 'diversifying'. At least not in the sense of spreading themselves wider across more projects to reduce overall company risk (if that's what you meant).
I think that we're still very early into AI and because we're still not sure what kind of applications people will want to use in the future, it makes a lot of sense to experiment.
Now the next question is why? Why the houses prices have surged in the past decades. And why is it a worldwide situation (at least in developed countries)?
too many people and not enough land in areas where people don't have to drive 3 hours to work.
Want pricing to go down then we need to build more dense housing even an hour drive from the city. The days of wanting a big backyard are coming to an end for most home owners.
Luckily, density is what makes mass transit viable. It's more cost effective to run a driverless metro every three minutes in an urban core than to run a mostly-empty bus once an hour in a distant suburb.
What if we put the jobs closer to the people instead of making the people get closer to the jobs? Just drop a big ol’ tech park in the middle of Oakland?
Who is the “we” in that sentence? Is there a Central Planning Bureau that forces “jobs” to be placed in certain locations? What jobs would you place near the people, whatever that means?
I was born, raised, lived in dense cities. I've lived in semi-suburban life as well. Unless you're into some hobbies that requires such tools, you just never use it? And when you have to... you just use it? I live in an apartment building in a city, and once a month or so, during daytime, people use tools and it's no biggie.
To each their own though. I definitely grew to understand that if someone was raised in rural or suburban life, it would be extremely hard to adjust to hardcore city life, and vice versa. But I don't think we should be blocking build ups for one, if there's demand.
We just bought a place in a dense area of The Hague, and I run a table saw + shop vac frequently as we renovate. No complaints yet, just keep my hours between 10-6. Lots of other neighbors doing similar stuff too.
There are lots of benefits to density. Our grocery store and day care are less than ten minutes away on foot, because there's a ton of people so we can support these kinds of businesses (also weed, hair salons, bars, cafes, boutiques, secondhand stores, restaurants, play cafes, etc etc.)
More people want to live in the city than ever in the history of humankind for various reasons. See gigantic rental price drops in mid-2020 when people briefly thought city-life will never return to normal. Housing prices mostly went up during the year, but they're much stickier than rental and that flight didn't last long enough for people to sell their homes (well, it's much easier to drop your rental for another, than sell and buy somewhere else).
When demand starts slowing down or supply is caught up (it's happening everywhere outside of Tokyo in Japan, and somewhat in HK and other places as well), they stabilize or go down.
New home sales are at a near 30 year low at this very moment, at least in the US. No one is really buying, but prices are still inflated drastically. The people that -are- buying homes, are people that already have them. Houses in rural and suburban areas are also super inflated as well. It's not just a city phenomenon. There is clearly something very broken in the market. It really comes down to NIMBYs, entrenched interests and ZIRPs massive distortion of the market that locked a ton of people into a low rate.
Many current homeowners have their wealth in their home, they want it to (in some cases) to continue to out-perform the S&P 500. Since they live there, they bully the local governments to not allow more building so there is less supply to compete with their asset. State and federal agencies are going to have to step in at some point to incentivize local governments to upzone. Not even mentioning this isn't remotely sustainable as a tax base in most instances, because subdivisions and infrastructure to deal with the sprawl this a bill that will come due in a harsh way making higher property taxes inevitable pricing out many of the people that were in. The #1 reason people are fleeing California and New York is due to costs...and in turn they are about the lose electoral power in Congress and Electoral college.
People who intend to continue living somewhere don't care about the price of their asset per se (they're not going to sell it), and dense zoning tends to increase land prices anyway. Opposition to density is about quality of life.
In a related phenomenon, people will pay more to be around better neighbors (which you can see reflected in price differences across similar houses in similar areas but in different school catchment areas). It makes some sense that people will pay as much as they can to be in a better area with better kids when you look at the state and direction of public education. If you can't afford private school, that's basically your only lever to try to buy quality. If you can, you still have a tradeoff that you could spend ~13k/yr/kid on tuition or add 200k/kid to your home budget to live in an area with better public schools. Living in a more affluent area carries other QoL benefits as well of course.
Yeah I agree with basically every statement. But house prices are extremely sticky with 30 year mortgages. Less stickier in Canada because of 5 year mortgages. There’s actually a big drop in rental prices in my very-in-demand city. SFH still sell like hotcakes though. Since rates might be coming down again, it’s incentivizing people to move and lock in for 5 years.
My take as someone living in the northwest and witnessing exponential growth over my lifetime:
- We clearcut 95% of US timber, now the remaining 5% is in states like Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Some wood is an order of magnitude more expensive or simply unavailable, with prices held artificially low by importing wood and deforesting Canada, for example.
- Good, fast, cheap (pick any two). We build homes good and fast, but little effort is being made to reduce costs by an order of magnitude by using materials like hempcrete.
- Zoning laws have been changed so that row houses and 3-4 story apartments can be built right up to the road, maximizing profits but externalizing urban decay. High price/low value.
- The US adopted a service economy when it sent 100,000 factories overseas under the GW Bush administration in the 2000s after Clinton signed NAFTA in the 1990s. Now a smaller fraction of the population does the work of building homes, with most everyone else pushing paper, so charges what it wishes.
- People with high carbon footprints had more children. Bigger houses for high consumers left less housing for thriftier people.
- Garages, lawns and commuting wasted immeasurable resources after we could/should have transitioned to sustainable energy and transportation in the 1980s but chose to double down on the nuclear family, trickle-down economics, etc.
- The cost of those unnecessary roads was factored into property taxes, driving home prices higher.
- Nearly unlimited financing was available for home loans, while almost none was devoted to startups and other disruptive industries. We got what we paid for (McMansions instead of, I don't know, 3D printed homes).
- Modern techniques were almost never adopted into building codes. So rather than running wiring conduit through walls or encouraging similar practices to make additions and remodeling easier, we encouraged tearing down and building from scratch, which wasted countless trillions of dollars.
- The tax system doesn't value trees, existing structures, previous money spent on remodels, etc. So developers profit from bulldozing homes and razing lots in a day to build houses in a month. The human and environmental cost of that can never compare to moving homes, remodeling them, etc.
- Our culture and entertainment tell everyone they need granite countertops and $50,000 gas guzzlers. Things are expensive because other people consume more and more and more with insatiable appetites and expectations.
- Wealthy people who could have steered our culture in a positive direction chose to do nothing. Or worse, actively encouraged extractive and vulture economic policies to enrich themselves further.
2. a lot more equipment in it: electricity, plumbing, AC
3. zoning restrictions reducing supply to increase the value of existing houses; owners benefit from that, local government benefits even more from higher property taxes and also from permitting taxes
4. increase of demand due to different factors, like lifestyle changes (back then almost nobody lived on their own in a house, single people were very rare by comparison), unequally distributed immigration and internal migration to some cities)
5. very different and more expensive safety requirements for new houses
6. more expensive workforce building the houses
7. huge reduction in self-building houses and price gouging by the developers
It's not just "developed" country problem any more. It is also happening in developing countries, like India and Vietnam for example. In India, real estate prices have sky rocketed over the past 30+ years. Part of this is because of the rise of property development firms. Government encouragement too has played a role, I think, because construction (and the construction industry) does create a lot of jobs. Real estate is also a vehicle to hide black money, and that's another factor here in India.
(I wanted to strangle Trump when he once commented that real estate in India and other parts of Asia, are still "undervalued"!)
That’s the guy who created TinyPilot. Since then he wrote yearly articles about it’s IndieHacker journey. Some of them have been shared on HN. Worth reading!
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
That’s likely due to the improvements made to the AI models. I don’t think ChatGPT 3 could have made me changes my search habit. But recent models are really impressive now.
Also, I know you shouldn’t trust what the AI says, but you shouldn’t trust either what the Internet says.
As a European user, it’s kind a frustrating. You search for a place in Google Search, lose a few seconds to find the maps, only to open Google Maps after a few seconds…
- In many cases, CRDTs didn’t improve upon last-write-wins, i.e. a CRDT update followed by another user’s CRDT update 10 seconds later is the same as last-write-wins
- Often the challenge was less technical, and centered around what a conflicted state means in the absence of a human discussion, i.e. how would you resolve a git merge conflict without human intervention, or if two people reschedule the meeting simultaneously one of them is likely to miss it unless they talk it out
The UI built by Tldraw is different from a chat interface. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good fit to interact with an AI/LLM.
I definitely see this in the hands of kids, just like they are great interfaces to code video games without writing a line of code.
reply