It depends on a lot on your timing with the market. This guy (from TFA) sold in 2007; I bought my first house as a (fairly dire) fixer-upper in 2008. I sold it in 2016, after it had more than doubled in value (partly due to improvements we'd made, partly due to market improvements). I bought the next house as a (cosmetic) fixer-upper in 2016, and sold it in 2020, after the pandemic had multiplied its value by 1.5x. Now I own outright, pay no mortgage, and my property tax is less than 1% where I live. Yes I got lucky on timing on both ends of the 12 years, but not selling into a down market (if you can help it, of course), buying with an eye to potential increase in value, and being willing to take advantage of market conditions are all things that can work in your favor.
There isn't resistance. It comes from development patterns.
A developer buys 10 hectares of land and wants to max out the returns, so they pack it full of houses. Another developer buys the adjacent 20 hectares and follows the same strategy. Rinse and repeat. Purely market driven housing development orients towards developer profit, not long term quality of life of the neighborhoods being constructed.
I am sure that they could better maximize their returns by making room for local businesses and increasing the appeal of the area. And who says that a house will be worth more than a shop?
It sounds more like “this is the way you do it” momentum.
You need about 10 houses per shop (anyone with better numbers? this works for discussion but it is likely wrong). However everybody needs many different shops and so it isn't a case of 10 houses 1 shop - since you always need to go elsewhere anyway wouldn't even think of the local shop when it would do and so they fail. Even in dense cities it is common to see one street of ground for retail then several streets of no retail.
Shops do better when clustered together. People combine trips and so if they need to go one place for any reason that will often enough "drop in" to a different one.
All this is to say, in most cases a shop is worth less than a house on those developments even though a shop would get higher rent when it is rented!
That doesn't matter to any given one because they rarely need multiple types at the same time, so they just go to the nearest one of whatever they currently need. If you could build them in the suburbs then for many people in the suburbs, that would be the nearest one and it would get enough business to be sustainable. While reducing traffic because now some subset of the customers can walk to it instead of 100% of them needing to drive.
> Even in dense cities it is common to see one street of ground for retail then several streets of no retail.
Isn't that mainly because of zoning? The area with all the shops is the area where shops are allowed, or the area where something that pays higher prices for space than shops isn't.
> All this is to say, in most cases a shop is worth less than a house on those developments even though a shop would get higher rent when it is rented!
You should be able to have the shop and a housing unit or three on the same piece of land, which not only allows you to make more valuable use of the land, it also puts more people (i.e. customers) near the shop.
Broadly speaking, that sounds super low, and it also doesn't echo the business density I typically observe. I think even for lifestyle businesses you need hundreds of homes actively using your services, maybe thousands total. Suppose you really could live off just 10 houses; you'd need something like $2400/yr/person in revenue at 100% cash operating margins to turn it into a reasonable income (which, given your risk exposure via rent, capital, etc, I don't think most people would start a business with the intent of the owner making less than $60k/yr in income, perhaps scaled down in much smaller, cheaper towns). There aren't many kinds of businesses where I spend that much money, and those definitely don't have anywhere near 100% margins. Just right off the bat, 100 or 1000 feels closer to correct than 10.
Most small businesses have fairly low margins. Even when you factor the cost of owner labor at zero (common for "lifestyle" businesses -- splitting it out this way so that we can look at COGS and then compare to a single family's income), you might see 10-20% cash operating margins for various shops, cafes, restaurants, 5-10% at groceries and pharmacies, 20-40% at bike shops and gyms, and 50%+ at barbers (details, especially for higher-margin industries like barbershops, depend a lot on the exact terms of rent and local tax laws, but this is a halfway decent ballpark).
Let's run some numbers.
The average person waits 2 months between hair cuts. Let's assume a moderately expensive cut at $40. The owner keeps $120/yr/person, or $300/yr/house. In the sort of town likely to have $40 be a reasonable baseline haircut price, $60k/yr is probably the bare minimum you'd want the owner to make to call this endeavor successful, especially when you factor in the increased financial risk they're taking on, so you need 200 homes actively frequenting your establishment in particular.
The average grocery bill for a single person is $300/mo, or $750/mo per household, of which the grocery store owner keeps $37.50-$75/mo, or $450-$900/yr. You need 66-133 homes frequenting that establishment in particular to keep its lights on, but I'd argue $60k/yr, while low for a barber or hair salon, is extremely low for a capital-intensive business.
Suppose you have a local cafe or bakery you visit every weekday on the way to work, or maybe every weekend on your morning walks. You spend $10 on a couple nice croissants, a single stuffed croissant, or something to that effect -- averaging the two customer types together, you spend $5/day, $1825/yr, $4562.50/yr/house, and the bakery keeps $456.25-$912.5/yr/house. You need 65-132 homes actively supporting that business. If you have customers like me who basically only stop in to the bakery when extended family is in town (preferring to cook my own), I might slightly bolster the grocer's margins (not a ton if I'm just buying flour, yeast, butter, and salt), but you need 1249-2500 homes like mine to support the bakery.
Retail shops (bookstores, local artwork, etc) have a pretty dismal outlook too. Used books are dirt cheap, I don't read as much as I used to (picked up other hobbies like playing the piano), and I do a lot of my reading online nowadays anyway. I spend maybe $100-$200/yr on books. I think that's above average, though I don't really know. The bookstore owner keeps $10-$40/yr though after rent and other expenses and needs 600-2400 homes filled with people like me (and who also don't share their books) for its support structure.
Instead of looking at rough estimates based on profit margins and usage, you can look at towns you understand reasonably well. One county I know of, for example, which does all of its business in a single, central town, has around 15k people, or 6k households (or if we're just counting the town population itself for some reason, 1200 households, but I think that's a significant underestimate). It has two grocery stores, two hardware stores, two music stores (instruments, lessons, etc, and another store outside of town), 15 restaurants (and another 5-10 in the rest of the county), and three pharmacies. Depending on how you slice and dice the numbers, it takes 400-3000 households to support most of those businesses, and 48-400 to support various kinds of restaurants. When factoring in just the county population, it's 2000-3000 households for normal businesses and 240 for a restaurant.
You are not running the same numbers I am. If there are 1000 houses I'm claiming there should be about 100 retail shops. That people only get a haircut every few months is why those can't spread out.
You can run the numbers relatively exactly. 35% of income is spend on housing, which "disappears" (we can assume this will support some banks and realtors or whatnot), some is spent on this and that, and the remaining spent on "household, groceries, entertainment, etc" would be what can support retail shops. Then you just need to know how much it costs to run a shop, and you know how many houses you need to support it.
That sounds plausible. If you're talking about total shop count of any kind, then as a conversion factor between my numbers and yours we're saying there are 20-100 types of shops people visit with any regularity in a year. That sounds about right.
The issue highlighted in Linus's message isn't that the LLM is hallucinating fake bugs; it's that 100 people running the same LLM on the same codebase find the same real bug 100 times, and if they all send it to the private security mailing list, it's (1) unmanageably high volume and (2) stupid security theater [because by definition any bad actor with the same LLM would find that bug — it's effectively public at that point].
You don't need an LLM to deduplicate bugs, just categorize by files affected. The real security problem is LLMs have a ~499/500 false positive rate and the new 'security research' post this slop and DDoS the mailing list.
>We're exploring using the SAR data for conservation / deforestation monitoring. Anybody else working in this space who has blazed the trail?
Dr. Naomi Schwartz and her lab at the University of British Columbia comes to mind for remote sensing applications in relation to deforestation monitoring.
If it's anything like suno, it probably takes you 30 to 40 attempts to dial in what you were looking for. (And don't get me wrong, the results can be great with suno - there's just a lot of trial and error, and dice rolling.)
Is formulaic pop music produced by a corporate label that's designed to push all the right buttons more "human" than the average track you find published on Suno? I wouldn't say so. Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.
Actually, it is more human, because there are humans involved at each level. Doesn't matter if you think the music sucks, it's definitionally more human than AI music.
I feel like the more important distinction might be whether the creator(s) are expressing themselves or are solving an optimization problem of maximizing audience approval. The latter seems true for both some human and AI pop songs.
One is a form of communication that requires (at least to some extent) meeting both sides to meet in the middle, the other is unidirectional broadcasting.
It is sort of a blend now. Beats and rhythm tracks are often generated. Vocals are auto-tuned. There's still some humanity in it, but it's not what it used to be.
I mean, maybe in the sense that any other corporate activity is technically “human activity” because humans happened to be the ones doing the formula-dictated tasks, but it's ultimately the formula at the helm, not the human.
AI music is generated from the result of training on far more human-made music than any human could ever consume in their lifetime, so there are even more humans involved in its creation.
> Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.
The commodification of humanity predates human history. It may be a negative trend that alienates us from each other and from the products of our labor, but it is truly ancient.
What's the exact definition of third-party harnesses? They have an Agent SDK in Claude Code that can be used. Are they trying to say that only Anthropic products can use pro/max plans?
Compare with and steal any ideas you like from mine if you like. I've got a semi-decent curl|bash pattern covered, and also add network filtering via pasta (which may be more robust than rolling your own). https://github.com/reubenfirmin/bubblewrap-tui
Ohh! thanks for sharing this. You are using DNS proxy which is interesting and useful if a process doesn't respect the HTTPS_PROXY/HTTP_PROXY/etc. env vars that I'm injecting. I will take a look, very interesting.
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