Contacting me:
www.linkedin.com/in/mahoneymatthew
Alternatively, via email, contact mahoney dot mattj at gmail.
- This was kind of true for Spain: they imported so much silver that they had inflation causing massive economic destabilization.
- In your mind is 700 files a lot or a little? It feels very small to me, and Xcode really ought to be able to handle that tiny scale on modern machines with ease.
I struggle to imagine a team of more than 10 people writing an iOS app with less than 700 files.
- It’s probably the lawns and yards, primarily. Including things like pools: in Arizona there’s about one pool for every 13 people. The US averages much larger lot sizes, and those yards consume water.
I’m not saying the US isn’t profligate in other areas like appliances or taking longer showers, but in most the country there’s so much land, such cheap water and very little regulation preventing you from using however much water that you want. Some of the land even comes with a guaranteed quantity of water for irrigation guaranteed, at little to no cost.
- Most code I’ve seen is written in an environment where people can’t afford to “intuit”: thinking through the repercussions of specific language or algorithm choices comes second to solving a problem “well enough”. Building an intuition takes learning how you’ve built something poorly, and for a specific problem can take hours to gain context and walk yourself through many paths.
Bring in a performance expert and their intuition can quickly identify many performance improvements. The tough part for the business is when and where do you pay for the experience of performant code, and when is good enough to leave alone?
- It’s reasonable for people to take either approach: are microplastics more like asbestos or are they more like cellulose in terms of harm?
The answer being unclear means it makes sense to treat them, from a regulatory standpoint, closer to asbestos. It also makes sense to treat them as an unknowable and not regulate, because any alternative might be worse.
But it does point to there being a dearth in research and answers, and we should solve that as quickly as possible and maybe limit our exposure when viable, known to be non-toxic alternatives exist.
- Couldn’t the school just build taller too?
- No. In most American suburbs you can get more density by taking 2 single family homes and replacing them with one 6-plex. You’ll also have more open space, because a 6-plex takes up around one single family lot. Especially if the 6-plex can be 4-6 stories tall. Everyone can have more (private) interior and more (shared) exterior space if the neighborhood allows a little bit of density.
As a bonus having more neighbors means things like grocery stores within walking distance become good businesses, so you need a car dramatically less and less space needs to be taken up by parking lots.
- “Half one” is archaic English, and common German, for 12:30. Similarly “my 27th year” just sounds archaic to me: I wonder if you went through a bunch of 19th century writing if you’d see ages more often be “Xth year” vs “X-1 years old”.
There may be something cultural that caused such a shift, like a change in how math or reading is taught (or even that it’s nearly universally taught, which changes how we think and speak because now a sizeable chunk of the population thinks in visually written words rather than sounds).
- So long as only 10% or less of your incremental successes are mirages, and so long as the downside of shipping a mirage is only a small incremental harm, then shipping 9 success and 1 harm should still get you an overall ~78% win vs just shipping the 9 successes (assuming the bad result is an equivalently negative result to the good ones).
How much are you willing to spend to reduce the downside risk, and how many “good” experiments are you willing to throw away in the process?
- In your scheme, how do I transfer money from my bank after my phone is stolen and I need to get a new phone without access to the original sim? Or access my email?
If that’s just impossible, how do I fix the issue? A “fallback 2FA” what is that exactly?
- On the parks/“natural land”: would you rather land exist as an empty razed dirt field for speculators to wait to sell, or given back to the city?
Taxing the land value means there’s no incentive to own land that won’t be productive. The city or municipality can guarantee land it owns can have natural growth on it, whereas when private individuals own it the state can’t really stop the land from transforming into a parking lot.
As to how to value the land: the market decides. What is the price for the land, if you took away all existing improvements on the land itself? There is usually enough vacant similar land around where this is pretty easy to figure out.
The government can charge for services like upgraded electricity and keep the land value low, or they can bring the electricity to the land and count “lots of electricity available” as part of the value of the unimproved land.
- There is absolutely not an oversupply of apartments in my city, nor in Seattle proper. it should be non-controversial to let the market supply as many apartments in the locations people want to be as people are willing to rent. Especially any regulatory changes that enable family sized apartments to be built at relatively lower cost should be encouraged.
Even if there were an “oversupply”, if someone could build new apartment buildings at 50% the cost with larger, safer, more comfortable units than most apartments nearby, it would drive rents down for existing buildings while still allowing the developer to make a profit. We should be enabling these opportunities as much as possible.
- More accessible. People with walkers can access the apartment, as can people in smaller wheelchairs, if there is a small elevator. In NYC plenty of older people live in pre-war buildings with tiny elevators. Few live in third floor walk up apartments.
My point is exactly that the ADA, in this case, lets the perfect (fully accessible elevator) result in worse outcomes (brand new apartments in 3-5 story buildings require walking up stairs). This is especially harmful in cities where many homes are on small, 12-20 ft wide lots.
As an example I know people who had to move out of their home when they tore their ACL, whereas with a small elevator they would not need to. To be clear I think we need many many more ADA-accessible apartments, but wherever you are allowed to not have an elevator at all, you should also be allowed to have a small 1-2 person elevator in addition to the stairs.
- Which ties into a second problem: the US especially requires elevators to be too large, which limits how many are built because they take up so much square footage, which drives up the cost to install.
In Spain and France you’ll find single staircase, 4 story buildings that have one meter-by-meter sized elevator. Often even as retrofits in older buildings! In NY you’ll find these too, but they’re only in pre-war (1930s and older) buildings. It would make many apartments much more accessible and desirable to live in if we could drive down the cost of elevator installations for smaller buildings.
- Double loaded corridors fundamentally change the composition of buildings. If you look at example floorplans, single staircase buildings typically feature 2-3 bedroom apartments, because giving every bedroom a window is easier, while double loaded corridors end up mostly with deep studios and 1-beds.
Building new housing in the US is not cheap, and reducing the leasable or buyable square footage by 10% can move projects from being profitable to build to not. Especially when the quality of the remaining square footage goes down (as it does when you have 30’ deep units with only one wall with windows).
- A key advantage of trains is they can be fully electric and don’t need to carry their entire fuel load on board.
An electrified train running on nuclear or wind supplied power basically can’t be beat for low-environmental-impact long distance travel. And even for non-electric trains, diesel trains with a mere 23 people per car have a BTU per passenger mile of 2,000, compared to a typical 30mpg car’s 4,000 BTU per mile.
And even if it’s not yet electric, buying the right of way and building the rail lines is better preparation for that future all-electric world. Plus the more trains exist, the more full they’ll typically be, and the better we’ll get at making them more efficient.
- Right, we have 50+ years where motor vehicle involved deaths are like 15-20% of all deaths for people under 50, not to mention how many more people are permanently injured due to motorists.
The status quo is really bad and we are doing a terrible job of making them safer for anyone besides the occupants of the vehicle causing a collision. So yeah, we should really focus on pushing technology that can reduce the danger of distractable drivers. That mostly should mean investing in public transit, walkability and speed-limited small vehicles like bikes or golf carts. But the bar for driverless cars is basically: do they speed? Do they drive on sidewalks? Do they kill a few people a day? No? Then they’re better than the status quo, because the status quo is awful.
- I feel like the biggest thing the US could do is remove means-testing from our disability aid programs. Means testing usually does not feel like an effective way to distribute services.
I want millionaires to be using government aid to help their children: just like with free education, when everyone who needs help uses it, the richer parents will demand, and ensure we pay for, higher quality for all. Everyone who is currently able to can all just pay a bit more in taxes to cover everyone’s accessibility and aid needs. I don’t want it to be possible for a child’s needs not to be met just because the state thinks the child’s family has too much money.
Aid services should be treated like sidewalks and fire departments: almost everyone is going to need them at some point, why would you want to make it difficult to access?
Once you start using JNI or Objective-C++ to hand off “computationally expensive” work to common C++ (now Rust) libraries, you end up needing to become an expert across a lot of areas.
If 95% of your competitive advantage lies in doing things everywhere with low memory, then taking on an additional 2-3 stacks (SwiftUI + React + Compose) as well as all the bindings and build system and etc overhead can be pretty gnarly.
If 95% of your value add is in your web-based UI, consolidating to a single JS stack of React + React Native + Node can greatly reduce your idea-to-market time, I’d imagine a full Rust stack could do the same if your value add requires maximum performance and only a little UI iteration.