Private equity has absolutely been buying up (and building) U.S. residential stock, and this is addressing a real problem. The fact that Trump's doing it doesn't change my opinion at all, but it's absolutely the right thing to do and hopefully will be bipartisan.
It's not the opposite of a problem, it's orthogonal.
In this particular instance, what's happening is that it's crowding out and destroying diversity in the home builder market.
The model is built to rent out, and it's taking capacity out of the build-to-sell market. It's putting regional and smaller homebuilders that have traditionally provided most of the housing out of business because of their greater access to national capital.
We are seeing this everywhere in the economy. If you have access to Wall Street capital, you can put basically everybody outside of business and then set the price. That's exactly what's happening.
It's not confusing at all. There's definitely issues with private equity ownership of single-family homes. Although it is fair to say that the BlackRock meme might not be accurate, they aren't necessarily the key player.
I don't know why they decided to put the "warning!" text box on the actual thing - it would look much cleaner if it just said "ON AIR" . Inane copyright/trademark reasons?
It is a practice that leads, as a consequence, to insight. Insight is not information that might be read from a book, it is experience that uses observation to arrive at understanding and transformation. You can't just "decide to have" the experience without doing the work of transforming yourself through observation. People who have gone far in the practice do tend to say that there was never any goal to begin with, that they ended up where they started, but that's more of a metaphor than anything else. Someone who travels around the world and ends up where they started is in a very different place than someone who never left home.
It's a practice. There are benefits. It's not a cure-all. The goal is to be more in control and aware of your own thoughts and feelings. You achieve that by learning to turn off the "monkey mind" - the continuous stream of distracting thoughts and feelings which can lead us down paths which are not of our deliberate choosing and not necessarily beneficial to our wellbeing.
It is often said that if you go into meditation with a goal to improve yourself that you will probably be disappointed. I guess I would say that meditation is as much about unlocking your intuition as it is about anything else, so consciously trying to improve yourself through meditation does seem to miss the point of the practice.
> now it is unfortunately also crawling behind perl into extinction. This is very unfortunate - I still use ruby almost daily as the ultimate glue language. But this can not be denied now that ruby is following the extinction path perl already had going some years before.
I'm pretty sure that can be denied.
Rails and Ruby (both separately and as a unit) is still absolutely huge. It's launching massive new releases regularly and still underpins a healthy chunk of the top websites on the planet (Shopify, GitHub, Airbnb, Twitch, Hulu, Kickstarter, Zendesk, Basecamp, Crunchbase, Dribbble etc etc) and is still taught to new developers as well.
I know that HN is famously a discussion forum where users comment based on the titles of submitted articles, rather than their content.
With that said, the divergence in comments on this very insightful and well written article will soon provide an unusually clear means of determining who is commenting on the title and who is commenting on the article.
The omission of quotations in the title triggered my Lisp-damaged brain to man the walls, only to immediately be met with Ruby and Scheme examples. False alarm.
That's fair. It's also the case that to some extent HN's article titles serve the same purpose as that one line description in a speed dating event. They're ice breakers, everybody has the same prompt and then writes about that, and even if they did read the article which I agree often they don't, they come at it from a different angle.
I feel similarly to the article author, it is trivially true that we could express anything in all the general purpose languages, that's what general purpose even means, but I find for Computer Languages the Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis checks out pretty well. The language changes how you think about the problem.
As a long-time HN contributor, I believe in visualizing myself like water flowing downhill. As such, I certainly would never try to overturn the prevailing culture of commenting on article titles and in fact engaging in it myself from time to time.
The shocking changes to the culture over the last 20 years start to make a lot more sense when you realize someone decided to flood the society with mass quantities of prescription Amphetamines.
The writing doesn't feel particularly out of character for Yegge, who has always been at least a bit like this. (Though I don't know if that's just him, or drugs as well.)
Buffet is not a good guy. Our society’s greatest problem right now is concentrated corporate power being used to destroy the ability of working people to prosper.
Buffet had an active and direct role in making this happen. He supported and advocated for monopoly, and profited from it.
He lived a lavish life that included opulent mansions and private jets, and used his resources to deftly drive a media narrative of himself as a regular guy, with apparent success as your post demonstrates.
Not doubting you, but any specific examples of him supporting monopoly?
Or are you saying the general environment of high finance supports this?
No doubt he had more money than he needed but if this is referring to his preference for coka-cola and apple stock / any stocks with the ability to set their own prices because of market dominance, I feel like that’s not a totally fair criticism.
And this bit is tripe: “Buffett is the avatar of monopoly. This is a guy whose investments philosophy is literally that of a monopolist. I mean, he invented this sort of term, the economic ‘moat,’ that if you build a moat around your business, then it's going to be successful. I mean, this is the language of building monopoly power.”
Seeking moats isn’t monopolistic. It’s inherent to competition.
He lives in the same home in Omaha that he had in the 60's. BH does not own any corporate jets but they do own NetJets that sells/leases fractional shares of their jet fleet of which Buffet uses for his travel.
Funny how the goal posts shift. From modest house in Omaha to multi-million dollar property in Laguna Beach. If more properties are revealed are those "pretty meager" too? It's amazing the degree to which normal people will simp for billionaires.
Since I hadn't established any goal posts, I couldn't have shifted them.
But I get your point. I'm happy to make billionaires illegal by taxing them back to being millionaires, but to try and hoist Warren Buffet up as the problem ignores the much, much worst offenders out there.
Can’t even remember if Zuck testified before the Congress or Senate, but his super weird fucking haircut on that day is indelibly etched into my brain. So a stylist is probably a solid strategic choice for him.
Legend has it that Meta was having difficulty making their metaverse Mii characters look human, so Zuck solved that problem by making himself look like a Mii.
That was his biggest win in quite some time if true. Really hit the mark. My guess is he refused to acknowledge his receding hairline so he just kept having hard "bangs" cut further and further back.
What would warrant an exception? I generally don’t like billionaires either, but I wouldn’t put Buffet at the top of my shit list just for curating a public persona.
There are couple of artists for example that had managed to become near- or full billionaires. Of course I do not know the details but in my view this warrants an exception
I absolutely love this concept! It's like the thing that I've been looking for my whole life. Well, at least since I've been using Claude Code, which is this year.
I'm sold.
With that said, I can't think of a way that this would work. How does this work? I took a very quick glance, and it's not obvious at first glance.
The whole problem is, the AI is short on context, it has limited memory. Of course, you can store lots of memory elsewhere, but how do you solve the problem of having the AI not know what's in the memory as it goes from step to step? How does it sort of find the relevant memory at the time that that relevance is most active?
Could you just walk through the sort of conceptual mechanism of action of this thing?
Appreciate it - yeah, you're right, models don't work well when you just give it a giant dump of memory.
We store memories in a small DB - think key/value pair with embeddings
Every time you ask Claude something, the skill:
1. Embeds the current request.
2. Runs a semantic + timestamp-weighted search over your past sessions.
Returns only the top N items that look relevant to this request.
3. Those get injected into the prompt as context (like extra system/user messages), so Claude sees just enough to stay oriented without blowing context limits.
Think of it like: Attention over your historical work, more so than brute force recall. Context on demand basically giving you an infinite context window. Bookmark + semantic grep + temporal rank. It doesn’t “know everything all the time.” It just knows how to ask its own past: “What from memory might matter for this?”
When you try it, I’d love to hear where the mechanism breaks for you.
yeah so you can run it in automatic mode, or read only mode. In automatic mode it hooks onto the conversation and tool calls so you get the entire conversation stored. If you dont want to get super deep, then read only is safe and only stores what you ask. You could ask it things like "why is my reasoning dumb" by recalling passed conversations, or even give it the claude tool call sequence and ask "how can claude be smarter about next time".
I think of it like a file tree with proper namespacing and keep abstract concepts in separate directories. so like my food preferences will be in like /preferences/sandos. or you can even do things like /system-design preferences and then load them into a relevant conversation for next time.
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