I'm a retired computer programmer so this is spur of the moment, but it occurred to me reading this thread that I'd like to help anyone using AI in the sobriety and recovery community on a volunteer basis. I've been using Claude Opus as a sponsor, sobriety coach and recovery therapist (CBT,DBT) to amazing effect. I'd like to share what I've discovered and formalize the process. If you know of any opportunities like this please let me know.
Readit Newsmwattsun commented on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2024) · Posted by u/whoishiring
mwattsun commented on How fuzz testing was invented (2008) pages.cs.wisc.edu/~bart/f... · Posted by u/fanf2
I used a program called Monkey extensively in 1986 while performing final testing of Microsoft Works for the Macintosh to shake out the last bugs in the program. I found a quite a few bugs that would probably never occur in real life, but it made the program much more robust. Nobody ever complained about Works crashing.
Deleted Comment
There have been some buildings on Water Street in recent years too.
But that's the "plan" I was talking about: all other areas are banned from having apartments. It's right there in the city general plan. No more housing, except for a few tiny areas.
A few years ago we proposed housing along Soquel in the commercial area, and millionaire homeowners bemoaned that we were destroying their poor "working class" neighborhood by allowing apartments and affordable housing. Meanwhile these same wealthy homeowners would never consider selling their homes to anyone who is not extremely wealthy or with an astronomical income. They cater to the wealthy while blocking more affordable housing.
This is the plan continuing its execution.
Recent state law will change this, slowly, over the coming decades by making such unfair plans illegal. More housing must be allowed in city general plans, and it can't all be stuck in the poor areas, or that will violate the states interpretation of Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing provisions, as enforced by state HCD.
The city will delay as long as possible, and block as much as possible, but it will happen eventually. And if the city delays too long in updating the plan to allow for more housing, the Builders Remedy will allow developers to build without city having any discretionary approval.
Good to know. Thanks for the info.
I love the green belt! But talk to the Greenbelt's original proponents, like Primack, and you will find that the city left out the other part of the green belt proposal that was necessary for environmental protection: allow apartments to be built up.
So instead of building taller, we have decades of people living further out, building into the urban wild land interface outside of the greenbelt. That results in massive ecosystem destruction, more car pollution, and of course tons of traffic everywhere.
The solution is to merely allow apartments and 3-4 story buildings. It only takes three four story buildings to equal that 12 story building, for example.
They're doing that outside the city limits, in Live Oak for example, but inside the city limits, the Beach Flats is the only place I can think of until recently, when they started building downtown Santa Cruz. As unsightly as the downtown buildings are, if they revitalize downtown it won't be so bad. Maybe Logo's used books will come back.
As a Santa Cruz homeowner, I wholly support building more and making Santa Cruz more affordable. It's incredible how expensive it is to live here - renting or buying. I'd love to see more young people and young families be able to enjoy this wonderful area - its truly lovely here and I don't see any reason that the great culture of Santa Cruz and responsible, tasteful and affordable housing can't co-exist.
But where? Therein lies the rub. Would you go up the North Coast? There's plenty of farmland there. Would you go into the forest, requiring felling a lot of trees? Please don't say you want to build out Lighthouse Field.
This was the explicit plan for Santa Cruz, to stop all housing after the 70s and 80s and see a massive rise in property values.
It's all there in the opinion articles and letters to the editor from the time, this future was predicted. It was the plan that was accepted by leaders at the time.
I'm not aware of any such plan. The plan was always to preserve open space such as Lighthouse Field and the green belt around Santa Cruz. I'm grateful for both of those. Property values would have risen even if they had built on Lighthouse field and the green belt. It just occured to me that I could think of them as the equivalent of NYC's Central Park or SF's Golden Gate Park.
Santa Cruz is certainly an outlier, but we're definitely seeing it all over the country.
I'm in a small town in southeast AK. Most of the buildable land has already been claimed. Tourism is growing faster than local people can support the industry, so there's all kinds of pressures: housing for summer employees, an increased temptation to do short term rentals to tourists instead of long term rentals to locals, and people buying second and third homes that they don't use most of the year.
Many of us watch our young people leave to go find their place in the world, and then find they can't move back even if they wanted to. The ones who do are paid really well, or have their housing largely subsidized by being given property their family bought a long time ago, or some similar assistance that isn't generally available to everyone.
For the past several years, multiple schools in our town have been unable to fill empty teaching positions because the people who are hired spend all spring and half the summer looking for housing, and simply can't find it. They bail and go somewhere that's willing to hire them and has some kind of housing available.
It's really a mess.
I feel a certain kind of sadness about it. There's not a word for the loss of your home town in English that I'm aware of, but there's a song that comes close to it.
Pretenders - My City Was Gone
There’s a ton of land that can be developed around Santa Cruz, it just can’t be developed due to public policy and local opposition.
Huge empty tracts all over and especially around Ben Lomond etc.
The flip side of all this is that a lot of long term residents love that their 100-200k houses are now worth a million+ with their property taxes capped at essentially nothing. They don’t want to give that up to allow their nieces and nephews to afford to grow their families in Santa Cruz.
You forgot to mention that UCSC sits on a huge tract of land that they refuse to build student housing on for reasons I can't fathom.
Deleted Comment