Hey, I just went to Kann to try it. It was very… smooth
Readit Newsalexose commented on Lab-grown salmon hits the menu smithsonianmag.com/smart-... · Posted by u/bookmtn
alexose commented on Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment? nber.org/papers/w34033... · Posted by u/lxm
Seattle seems to have its own particular issues (somewhat shared by SF in my experience): there's no longer any compelling reason to go to downtown. There are plenty of reasons to avoid downtown. Restaurants in Woodinville seem very busy. Similarly restaurants in Sonoma are also very busy. I think the customers went elsewhere.
Online shopping has removed some proportion of the reason people would visit a city downtown. Remote working has removed some proportion of the reason people would be in a city downtown. There has to be some unreproducible draw to get people to go to a city: The Vatican/Mona Lisa; food and culture not available elsewhere, etc. Conversely the city has to be not a s.hole.
Portland, too. The neighborhoods are doing OK, but downtown still feels empty.
It’s interesting to me that it hasn’t depressed commercial real estate prices all that much. Rents are still crazy expensive, with many vacant storefronts and even entire buildings along the light rail lines. The market forces around commercial real estate seem disconnected from reality in a surprising and unintuitive way.
Still, downtowns can be cyclical. NYC in the 70s is a prime example. The days of Taxi Driver are long gone. I guess the question is what stimulus needs to be applied to kickstart the turnaround process.
Portland is kind of weird because it has big yards for two Class Is in town. But they're both right on the waterfront (which is bad for urban transit, since it means half the walkshed is wasted). The BNSF line doesn't go anywhere useful on the west bank of the river. The useful parts of the UP line on the east bank of the river are essentially duplicated by the MAX lines to Expo Center and Milwaukie. The main useful thing you could get out of the Class I lines in Greater Portland is a S-Bahn-like service to Vancouver, WA IMO.
They said to keep Portland weird, but I don't think this is what they meant :)
I do think an S-Bahn style service would be interesting to pursue. Or even just regular commuter rail. The MAX is too slow for long distance commuting (it's usually faster just to sit in traffic), and it crucially doesn't go into Vancouver yet.
[flagged]
> you seem to not understand how America functions
> you can rage against the system all you want [with] wishful thinking and obsessions
> people like you are still not satisfied
> you either wanted to control people’s freedom of movement
> want them to also be miserable with you
I was just ideating on Portland traffic, dawg
The rules that govern American railroads are impressively weird and arcane. They seem almost impossible to unravel at this point. Which is a shame, because so many American cities sacrifice the central corridors of their city to huge railyards and slow-moving freight trains.
I think of Portland, Oregon, where the tracks run north/south along the river. You can see them sitting there empty while you're stuck in traffic on I-5, which runs parallel. Running a commuter rail or light rail on those things would make life a lot less miserable trying to get around the city.
There's a ton of research happening (99% of it in China, as far as I can tell) around turning CO2 molecules into useful multi-carbon molecules.
This one describes an interesting thermal pathway that uses barium. It stands alongside calcium looping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_looping), although this is slightly better in that the temperatures involved are lower and the materials are easier to regenerate.
I'm personally interested in electrochemical pathways to generate fuels, although it seems like these are even further away from commercialization.
Being a designer myself, but in the interest of public good, I will share my design here and urge anyone else to copy it. The ideal form factor for this device is a cowboy hat. Here's why
1. Such a device will require significant local compute, generating a lot of heat. It cannot be too close to the body, and require efficient cooling. In the cowboy hat, the processing can be placed above the head in the bucket of the hat, and the cooling dispersed in a large surface area around the brim
2. Such a device requires 360 degree camera vision, thus cannot be a backpack or vest type design (which also bring heat too close to the body). It also must be close to eye level (cannot be shoes).
3. Has to be able to be worn in any environment, with any style. A cowboy hat is great for sun protection, and in the rain.
4. Allows for future product tiering, e.g., a sombrero-style "plus" model
alexose commented on The Beauty of Having a Pi-Hole (2024) den.dev/blog/pihole/... · Posted by u/mpweiher
I really don't understand why people go to the trouble of using Pi-hole that only blocks at the DNS level, instead of using uBlock Origin which can block at the DOM level.
uBlock Origin is easier and cheaper to set up, less maintenance, and more effective.
I agree. I don't want to be a hater, because it's a cool idea... but I find that this is just the wrong level to operate on.
When I ran it, I ran into various hard-to-diagnose compatibility issues on different devices. Or, guests coming over and having their various websites be broken in ways that I'd have to troubleshoot.
alexose commented on Teaching LLMs how to solid model willpatrick.xyz/technolog... · Posted by u/wgpatrick
As a huge OpenSCAD fan and everyday Cursor user, it seems obvious to me that there's a huge opportunity _if_ we can improve the baseline OpenSCAD code quality.
If the model could plan ahead well, set up good functions, pull from standard libraries, etc., it would be instantly better than most humans.
If it had a sense of real-world applications, physics, etc., well, it would be superhuman.
Is anyone working on this right now? If so I'd love to contribute.
Also, the dish itself was really cool. Kann served it as sashimi, along with a bunch of small pickled things and a hunk of smoked watermelon.