Posted on July 11th, 2018
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...
Posted on June 3rd, 2018
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...
Posted on May 31st, 2018
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:...
Posted on May 30th, 2018
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...
Posted on May 22nd, 2018
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 ...
Posted on May 21st, 2018
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 ...
Posted on May 21st, 2018
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...
Posted on May 16th, 2018
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...
Posted on May 7th, 2018
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...
Posted on April 20th, 2018
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...
Posted on April 19th, 2018
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...
Posted on April 17th, 2018
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...
Posted on April 1st, 2018
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 ...
Posted on March 22nd, 2018
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 ...
Posted on March 17th, 2018
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 ...
Posted on March 17th, 2018
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, ...
Posted on March 12th, 2018
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...
Posted on March 7th, 2018
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/...
Posted on February 19th, 2018
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...
Posted on February 13th, 2018
Dan Wang emailed me with some interesting additional hypotheses regarding the question of flaking that I raised last week:
I liked your piece on flaking. When I moved to New York, I found that flaking declined dramatically. So I think that any piece that talks about flaking in SF has to explain why it happens less in NY. Here's what I'd offer:
SF is made up more of tech people, who like to spend long periods of time on their own, and aren't o...
Posted on February 9th, 2018
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 ...
Posted on February 6th, 2018
I often use a thesaurus while coding, and I mentioned this fact to a non-programmer friend today. He was shocked, and he said that he thought that programming was mathematical, not lexical. But it’s not so easy to separate out—naming is one of the most important parts of programming (and math!), because it’s how you reduce complexity down to something that you can understand, explain, and maneuver.
The conversation reminded me of a post I rea...
Posted on February 5th, 2018
My favorite aphorism might be "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime". It's a useful idea to incorporate into your life philosophy, both for yourself and others. It's nice to offer help to someone with a problem that you can solve, but far better to teach them how to do it.* On the flip side, when there's something you don't know how to do, I encourage you to find someone who will bot...
Posted on February 2nd, 2018
This essay from Aeon makes the observation that folktales weren't always about fighting for a noble value. Rather they were just about getting what you want, without framing actions in a strong moral light:
Stories from an oral tradition never have anything like a modern good guy or bad guy in them, despite their reputation for being moralising. In stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Sleeping Beauty, just who is the good guy? Jack is th...
Posted on February 2nd, 2018
In an email exchange with Brian Lui, he asked me an interesting question about the rate of flaking in San Francisco:
I had a brief question too. I've read that the rate of "flaking" in San Francisco is really high, because everyone is so busy and there is so much to do. But then I thought, wouldn't that lead to an extra strong norm against flaking, because your time is too precious to get flaked on by someone? Apparently this doesn't happen an...