flâneur

Derek Yen

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on the atlas — 335

highlights — 1424

  • Data translations in decentralized systems should be performed on read, not on write.
    Project Cambria: Translate your data with lenses
  • how far can two pieces of software diverge before it becomes impossible to usefully collaborate between them? Lens evolutions cannot magically make two incompatible pieces of software work perfectly together; the goal is merely to enable developers to maximize compatibility within realistic limits.
    Project Cambria: Translate your data with lenses
  • a single source of truth describing the expected shape of data in a system
    Project Cambria: Translate your data with lenses
  • If at some point the costs outweigh the benefits, the best option might be to require all collaborators to upgrade. Cambria doesn’t force users to collaborate across versions with imperfect compatibility, but it provides the option of doing so.
    Project Cambria: Translate your data with lenses
  • When multiple elements are present in the array, the scalar value reflects the first element in the array.
    Project Cambria: Translate your data with lenses
  • Users should be able to collaborate on a document regardless of the software version they’re running. New clients should be able to open documents created by old clients, and vice versa.
    Project Cambria: Translate your data with lenses
  • There is a deep sense in which these are all the same problem. Data schemas can only change in so many ways
    Project Cambria: Translate your data with lenses
  • Each layer is a lens over its weight cell
    Bireactive Programming
  • Putting aside the fact that implementing such a parliamentary system in the US would require both dominant political parties to voluntarily give up power (which they would never do), it would also mean trading away the state-level policy continuity that gives the US its decisive economic advantage over those exact parliamentary systems.
    America Will Keep Succeeding - Inverteum Capital
  • So the next time hardliners on either side of the aisle find themselves convinced the other half of the country is destroying America, they should consider the alternative hypothesis: the other half is quietly building the parts of America that their own half cannot build. Hating the other side is optional. The collaboration is happening anyway, and everyone benefits from the result.
    America Will Keep Succeeding - Inverteum Capital
  • California and Texas could not be more different politically, yet each needs the other to prosper. California companies’ data centers need Texas energy; Texas’ energy industry needs California capital and software talent to create the AI workloads that justify the energy buildout.
    America Will Keep Succeeding - Inverteum Capital
  • The result: while professionals elsewhere spend a year of their prime career rotting on a beach, Californian employees are always building product and compounding skills.
    America Will Keep Succeeding - Inverteum Capital
  • Propagation is still acyclic despite the addition of backward edges, so cycles are as hard to create as they were before
    Bireactive Programming
  • And polling suggests that premise is, indeed, being weakened; the share of Americans who believe people are born gay has declined over the past decade.
    Opinion | I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters. - The New York Times
  • Because the word “queer” can describe any departure from social norms, it becomes an open door through which almost anyone can walk. Polyamorous? Queer. Vaguely uncomfortable with gender expectations? Possibly queer, too.
    Opinion | I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters. - The New York Times
  • This is in part because a key message behind it — that being gay is not a choice — is being undermined by those who argue that same-sex orientation is better thought of as a part of a wider rebellion against social norms.
    Opinion | I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters. - The New York Times
  • Some authors also insist on the converse condition that only events with positive probability can happen, although this is more controversial
    Interpretations of Probability (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • For example, there appear to be connections between probability and modality
    Interpretations of Probability (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • Thus, there is no such thing as admissibility tout court, but rather admissibility with respect to this or that axiomatization.
    Interpretations of Probability (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • a concept of probability will be useless if it is impossible in principle to find out what the probabilities are…
    Interpretations of Probability (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • This is often taken to be the definition of conditional probability, although it should be emphasized that this is a technical usage of the term that may not align perfectly with a pretheoretical concept that we might have
    Interpretations of Probability (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • This axiom is the cornerstone of the assimilation of probability theory to measure theory.
    Interpretations of Probability (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • The non-negativity and normalization axioms
    Interpretations of Probability (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • Since probability theory is central to decision theory and game theory, it has ramifications for ethics and political philosophy
    Interpretations of Probability (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • The name Asante means "because of war". The word derives from the Twi words ɔsa meaning "war" and nti meaning "because of". This name comes from the Asante's origin as a kingdom created to fight the Denkyira kingdom.
    Asante Empire
  • Doing so will not require repealing the state’s 2019 rent reforms, litigating the freeze or displacing a single existing tenant. The only question is whether the City can act now, while the distress is evident and there is still time to shore up building health, or whether we will have to wait for a rerun of the Bronx in the 1970s to learn the lesson a second time.
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • we must recognize that the political demand for a freeze exists because tenants in the legacy stock pay more and more every year for buildings that are getting worse because the system offers owners no revenue beyond rent increases from tenants. A rent freeze addresses tenant affordability in the short-run, but aggravates the long-term channel of viability.
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • For many tenant advocates, the poor conditions in these buildings are a sign of owner greed. However, this building stock has lower violations the higher the fraction of market rate units. The reason is that the basic economics of maintenance rely on the difference between what a unit could fetch on the open market and what the owner is legally allowed to charge. Owners face large incentives in market-rate units for proper upkeep because failing to do so loses tenants and revenue. Quality and cash flows move together, so maintenance pays for itself. Rent stabilization breaks this link. Because…
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • These buildings have more violations when the fraction of stabilized apartments is higher.
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • The underlying issue with the current system is that rental adjustments are unconditional: A slumlord who allows the building to fall apart collects the same rental increases as a property owner who successfully upkeeps the building. This is important because we see neglect concentrating in the highly-stabilized, pre-1974 segment of the stock
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • Exactly because rent stabilization has no inherent income targeting, a more targeted and means-tested rent freeze program would protect the most vulnerable tenants.
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • A stabilized rent can be $1,200 or $3,400, and be rented out to a household earning minimum wage or over six figures (30% of rent-stabilized residents currently fall in the six-figure category).
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • Somewhat confusingly, “affordability” is distinct from stabilization. Rent stabilization only regulates the rate of increase in rents, but says nothing about the level that rents start at or about the characteristics of who lives in the unit
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • with rentals paying a far higher tax rate than single-family homes, and rent-stabilized units having the worst tax treatment of all. That’s truly regressive, given that renters have incomes half that of owners, on average.
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • This process would basically replicate the basic economics at play in buildings with inclusionary zoning or “mix and match” programs administered by HPD
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • the part of the stabilized stock that works well financially is mixed-income buildings, because internal cross-subsidy is the cheapest affordable financing tool we have
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • A deep body of research finds that economically integrated buildings and neighborhoods produce better outcomes for low-income kids than concentrated low-income housing, however well-maintained
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • the mixed buildings have done quite well, while the pre-1974, highly stabilized segment of the stock has seen substantially deteriorating financial conditions
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • The lesson from the 1970s Bronx is that this process can happen faster than you think.
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • the system risks entering a doom loop: Costs keep going up and revenue does not, so maintenance is the only margin left to cut
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • the risk is that a growing number of them describe apartments for which renovation costs exceed any income the unit can legally generate. In other words, they’re apartments that it simply doesn’t make any financial sense for the landlords to keep inhabited. This represents a huge loss of naturally occurring affordable units unavailable to tenants, and, if it persists, offsets the supply increases the city can achieve elsewhere.
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • The distress is instead entirely contained elsewhere.
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • that it costs $1,250 per month to run an older multifamily building, while the Rent Guidelines Board’s data puts the median collected rent in pre-1974, fully stabilized buildings at $1,343 citywide, and just $1,212 in the Bronx
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • These buildings have no market cushion to absorb costs, with the below-median rent buildings within this segment facing particularly dire financial pressure. And, after New York State’s 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act stripped out landlords’ ability to raise rents between tenants, high rent deregulation, and the ability to increase rents to help pay for substantial capital improvements, the Rent Guidelines Board became essentially the only way these buildings have of raising revenue.
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • When operating costs rise for these buildings, as they have risen relentlessly in recent years due to the increasing price of insurance, taxes, energy and labor, the market units absorb the shock and cross-subsidize the regulated ones. A rent freeze on the owners of these buildings pinches the owners at the margin, but does not really threaten their existence. A recent Moody’s report affirmed the financial health of these buildings even with a rent freeze
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • One mistake we often make with rent-stabilized housing is to talk about it like it’s a single thing. This stock is at least two things headed in opposite directions.
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • The Rent Guidelines Board, on which I serve
    Vital City | After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
  • if I had had to lose the fairy tales in order to acquire the novelists, I would not say that I had grown but only that I had changed. A tree grows because it adds rings: a train doesn't grow by leaving one station behind and puffing on to the next.
    Library : On Three Ways of Writing for Children | Catholic Culture
  • I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two.
    Library : On Three Ways of Writing for Children | Catholic Culture
  • When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
    Library : On Three Ways of Writing for Children | Catholic Culture