Jake Auchincloss emailed me about my recent post For the greater good: the game theory of zoning and made the constructive point that a homeowner's mindset is "situation-dependent, not ingrained". At the end of the post, I had written that "Individualists and Regionalists are odd bedfellows". Jake pointed out that there may be tension at the abstract level of the Individualist-Localist-Regionalist framework, but that in practice people don't o...

I was in London for a conference for a few days in late October. The city was lovely, an unexpectedly nice place to wander. I came in with low expectations, expecting a drab, grey metropolis congested with traffic and filled with suited financiers scurrying from place to place. What I found was an agglomeration of charming urban villages, each with their own specific flavor. They were pedestrian-friendly, spotted with parks, and draped with tr...

This is a Spanish translation of notes from about a year ago. You can find the original in English here. Estas notas provienen de leer dos publicaciones del blog fantástico Urban Kchoze:Urban kchoze: Japanese zoning (aquí está la copia anotada)Urban kchoze: Euclidian zoning (aquí está la copia anotada) El sistema japonés es inclusivo, distinto al sistema americano que es exclusivo. La forma típica de zonificación en America se llama zonificac...

A debate I’ve come across again and again is whether language is objective or subjective. It tends to crop up in moments like when dictionaries update the word "literally" with contradictory definitions or when people argue that Ebonics isn't "correct" English. The working definitions we'll use:objective: something that can be correct or incorrect, i.e. really out there in the world independent of whether or not you perceive itsubjective: so...

Pro-housing advocates criticize "NIMBYs" as being uncooperative and selfish. However that's not how the so-called NIMBYs see themselves. The difference is a question of the granularity of your analysis. Individualists vs Localists A question I hear a lot is: "Why do NIMBY homeowners support zoning laws? Isn't it in their best interest to allow for the highest and best use so that they can sell their own property for the maximum price? Don't t...

Update: A few people have criticized my spending only a single Friday night in Manchester. I meant to highlight the fact that that my experience isn't comprehensive, not to imply I think I have some deep understanding of the place after just one short weekend. However I realize it may have come off as the exact opposite. So to clarify the limited scope of this post: I was in Manchester for a short time, and some specific differences in culture...

Epistemic status: High confidence about my own experience, mid-high confidence that it generalizes to others'. Epistemic effort: Low-to-medium effort. It's a concept I've had in my head for a while, then I did a stream-of-consciousness oral draft with Otter.ai, and then I then read it over once for minor editing. I have received a lot of positive feedback for noting my epistemic status and effort at the top of my posts. This is hilarious, bec...

In a recent conversation, Sebastián pointed out that there is a dearth of words to talk about cities. I gestured to a building while walking around the Fillmore and said "That's some nice urbanism!", and he grumbled that that's equivalent to pointing to a shop and saying "That's some nice economics!". His point was that the word "urbanism" is overloaded, and he's right. We use it to describe everything in the lexical space: concrete physical...

This was originally published in Oct 2015. It's a controversial question whether streetcar (also known as trams, trolleys) or bus rapid transit systems (BRT) are a better investment to solve cities' challenge of offering short-distance transit options. The two offer similar stop spacing, and both share the road with cars. However, they differ greatly in their cost structure, flexibility, and public image. Some notes on the subject... The arg...

This was originally published in Nov 2015. When I first stumbled across the streetcar vs bus rapid transit (BRT) debate, I was strongly biased towards streetcars. My opinion was largely shaped by the few weeks I spent in Berlin this past summer. While I was in Germany, I relied most heavily on Berlin's friendly yellow Metrotrams. I really only used the U-bahn and S-bahn when I had to make long, cross-city trips, where the travel time differen...

Given how much time I spend producing text, I've spent shockingly little of it considering the tradeoffs of various modes to input it. I had a vague sense that typing is faster than handwriting and that, despite this fact, I still prefer writing drafts by hand in my notebook. Recording audio notes while walking and using Otter's automatic voice-to-text transcription is fantastic for getting thoughts down in a steady flow, but the result is ne...

When I started learning about thermodynamics, I was shocked to learn that the typical engine converts only about 35% of its energy into useful work. Just the theoretical maximum efficiency for a typical car is ~73%*—converting all of its input heat into work would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time. And in practice engines operate at an actual efficie...

I gave in to my paranoid tendencies today and wrote a little backup script for Twitter, which I figured I'd share here. Two requirements: github.com/sferik/t: A command-line power tool for Twittergithub.com/wireservice/csvkit: A suite of utilities for converting to and working with CSV, the king of tabular file formats To install these from the terminal: Here's the script to do the backup itself (which I plan to run ~1/mo): For some rea...

Sergey Zavadski emailed me today asking for advice on how to start writing, and I figured I'd share my response here and open an invitation for suggestions from others! The biggest advice I'll give is to find ways to hold back from self-censoring. There are three key tools I use to do this myself, though there are probably other clever ways I haven't considered. One is called The Most Dangerous Writing App, which deletes your writing if you ...

I spent Friday, 9 March 2018 in Bangalore, India, the last of the cities I visited that week. Of the five, Bangalore was the one that pleasantly surprised me the most. I had never been to India before, and I prepared myself for an underdeveloped, hectic urban experience. Its infrastructure was substandard, and it was not a sparkling metropolis like Singapore or a viscerally ambitious culture like Beijing, but it had a dynamism and cosmopolitan...

A common argument against spaced repetition goes something like this: If an idea or fact is useful enough to memorize, your brain will retain it anyway. If it's important, it'll just stick, because you'll use it enough times.There's some validity to this. If you find it is really difficult to remember something, you may want to examine whether it's really worth expending that memorization effort. Maybe you just don't need to know it that badly...

Epistemic status: Pretty sure of the structure of the argument (~80%), not so sure of the valence of the coefficients (~60% that agglomeration does not overwhelm the supply-demand effect). Epistemic effort: Medium effort. This idea has bounced around my head for almost a year, and over that time I spoke with several friends about it. Then, I had a long conversation in which I formalized it a bit more, at which point I decided to write it down....

Zoning, occupational licensing, and immigration are all the same problem, just in different forms. They all reduce individuals' ability to move to the places with the greatest opportunity, and a few concentrated interests are overrepresented, trouncing the broader social interest. In the case of zoning, NIMBYs constrain the potential of a neighborhood or region for the sake of their own stability, comfort, and home values. Future residents are...

Epistemic status: High confidence about the pros/cons discussed regarding my own experience, fairly low confidence about the parts I heard secondhand. Epistemic effort: Low-to-medium effort. I realized these things were connected while I was in the shower last night, then I spent two hours stream-of-consciousness writing to get them onto the page. I then read it over once for minor editing and shared it with a friend to sanity check. 1. "Bik...

Today I learned of the existence of Copenhagen Suborbitals, the "world's only manned, amateur space program". From their website: Since 2011, we’ve built and flown 5 homebuilt rockets and space capsules from a ship in the Baltic Sea, and some day one of us will fly into space. It’s all crowdfunded and nonprofit, and has only come this far because people all over the world donate money that pay the materials, tools and rent. Our goal is simple:...

I originally published these notes in April of last year in one of my old blogs. These notes come from reading two blog posts from the wonderful Urban Kchoze blog:Urban kchoze: Japanese zoning (here is the annotated and cached copy)Urban kchoze: euclidian zoning (here is the annotated and cached copy)The Japanese system is inclusionary, as contrasted to the exclusionary system common here in the US. The typical zoning form in America is calle...

I originally published this in May of last year in Idea Collector, one of my old blogs. Epistemic status: This is a quick write up of my personal experience wandering Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo last May. I'd be curious to learn how it compares to objective measures, models, others' experience, and so on! Epistemic effort: I noted my impressions in bullet-point form while wandering around the cities, then when I returned from the trip I spent ~1h ...

I originally published this in May of last year in Idea Collector, one of my old blogs. Epistemic status: This is a quick write up of my personal experience wandering Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo last May. I'd be curious to learn how it compares to objective measures, models, others' experience, and so on! Epistemic effort: I noted my impressions in bullet-point form while wandering around the cities, then when I returned from the trip I spent ~1h ...

I spent Thursday, 8 March 2018 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Of the cities I visited during this trip, Jakarta was the one I disliked most. I try to be as positive as possible on the internet (it's just too easy to be negative), but in this case it would be ingenious. The parts of Jakarta I explored were unpleasant and a bit depressing. If Las Vegas and Mad Max had a baby... The main thoroughfare felt more like a highway than a street. This combine...

Epistemic status: This is a quick write up of my personal experience using Evernote as a PKB. The ideas/processes mentioned in here might work for others too, but I'm not prescribing them! There may be something that would work even better for you, and perhaps for me for that matter. (If you have suggestions please do tell me 🙂) Epistemic effort: I wrote up an email response to Nick quickly, and then I went back through it once to make sure n...

Cities are fractal. You can always go a layer deeper and there’s just as much complexity. Following this principle, I sometimes think it might make sense to just stay in San Francisco my whole life and explore the infinite levels of that fractal. It’s cheaper than interstate or international travel anyway, and according to this framework you get the same amount of interestingness no matter how many levels deep you go. The catch is that whe...

A while back Daniel Frank emailed me about the essay I published about Singapore, and he was skeptical of the idea that the international community would act as a deterrent against authoritarianism in Singapore:First, I don’t think this applies to most countries (for example, look at the muted Western protest to changes in countries like Turkey and Poland). Secondly, I specifically think doesn’t apply to Singapore. The two most influential n...

Epistemic status: My personal impressions from wandering the city for a day. Very likely that I'm missing important nuance in lots of places. If you notice a gap, please let me know! I'm so curious to learn more about Singapore. This is more of a diary entry than a worldview. Not sure how to put a confidence interval on that. 🙂 Epistemic effort: I jotted down notes throughout the day in the city and wrote up this post without lots of editing...

California's housing crisis is not a new problem, but for the first time there's a proposal facing the state legislature that could make a dent: Senate Bill 827, known as SB 827. The bill would change zoning around transit to allow for mid-rise housing. To get a sense of its potential, some friends and I created renderings to illustrate what the bill would make possible. Here's one of them: You can find the rest of the renderings plus more...

Effective software developers know how to manage their ignorance. Studying the inner workings of each dependency and every layer of your stack is a luxury you often can't afford, so it's important to know how and when to make leaps of faith. More than any explicit technical knowledge, this intuition is perhaps the biggest thing that differentiates experienced programmers from inexperienced ones. When I first started coding, painful awareness ...

I spent Tuesday, 6 March 2018 in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. I like the city’s pre-war name better (not a political statement—I just think it’s prettier ☺️), so I’ll use that throughout the post. Most of the signs around town used "Saigon" rather than HCMC, and some of the locals I spoke to called it that too, so I think it’s kosher. As with Beijing, I was also excited for the food, to get a sense of daily life, and of course ...

I spent Monday, 5 March 2018 in Beijing. The urbanist nerd inside of me was thrilled to see China’s capital. I’d read so much about its astounding growth and change in the past few decade—finally a chance to see it firsthand! I was also excited for the food, to get a sense of daily life, and of course to build my mental map of the city. My key takeaway is that Beijing is an epicenter of cultural and technological change, but the experience ...

I love the feeling of building up a mental map of a once-unfamiliar place. Last week I traveled to several cities that I’d never visited before (Beijing, Saigon, Singapore, Jakarta, and Bangalore), so March has been full of this sensation. I joked with friends that I was "training my neural net". I’d read a lot about two of the cities (Beijing, Singapore), knew a bit about one (Saigon), and knew close to nothing about the others (Jakarta, ...

I originally gave this talk at Typescript Conference 2018. You can find the slides here. TypeScript is a godsend for Webpack and Ethereum developers. In the nascent world of smart contracts, developer-friendly tooling is almost non-existent, the only error message is VM Exception: revert, and bugs can cost millions of dollars. Meanwhile, most Webpack config files are incomprehensible, fragile, and cobbled together from a mess of Stack Overflo...

Epistemic status: Highly uncertain, asserted with ~40% confidence. Low enough that I didn’t publish this piece when I originally wrote it in May of 2016. But a recent first trip to Singapore reaffirmed the intuitions in here. Even if the argument is wrong, I think it’s wrong in interesting ways, and I want to start a conversation about it. Plus, since originally drafting this essay I now have the concept of "epistemic status" in my toolset (h/...

A few weeks ago, JUMP Bikes launched a pilot of 250 bikes in SF. Their fleet is dockless and electric, and I’ve been skeptical of the hype around both features, so I was excited to give it a spin. My experience with GoBike, which by comparison both has stations and is human-powered (for now), has been fantastic. I’ve used it nearly every day (sometimes multiple times a day!) since signing up last spring. I evangelize it to anyone who will lis...

I’m proud to be a beginner! But when it comes to the concrete steps of learning something new, I often feel undue shame about my approach. At first, I thought it was a fear of not knowing things or, more likely, a fear of other people seeing of me as a beginner. This doesn’t add up though. I don’t hesitate to ask questions when I’m stuck, and I pride myself on my love of picking up new skills and learning new things. In fact, going from zero ...