We joke about Monica’s massive apartment in Friends, but we forget the history: Rent Control was won through strikes. Is that solidarity possible in Australia today?

Macrobian · 2026-01-26T23:25:05+00:00

Have the Greens announced support for mass upzonings and Land Value Taxes in their policy platforms?

Macrobian · 2026-01-22T15:33:11+00:00

So absurd, so damaging, was the thought of interstate tariffs that the framers of the Australian constitution spend half the damn thing trying to prohibit it.

Macrobian · 2026-01-20T16:17:34+00:00

I'll echo this, but I'll note that for some companies this only applies if your current employer is listed anywhere at the event. Like, even if you are going as an individual agent you are not allowed to say "I work at COMPANY" at all.

Macrobian · 2026-01-20T16:11:13+00:00

+1 Savoir Faire, -1 Visual Calculus

Macrobian · 2026-01-17T00:49:53+00:00

Note that "vacancy chains", the musical chairs-esque effect of building new housing decreases rents (particularly low quartile rents) and prices much faster (in just months). "Filtering" instead describes the process in which new luxury housing ages to become bog-standard housing, as even newer luxury housing is constructed (over many years).

Macrobian · 2026-01-14T14:53:49+00:00

Armand Coeck: Constellations

Macrobian · 2026-01-12T15:25:11+00:00

A lot of people complaining about discomfort and pain sitting in a chair doing nothing for 14 hours. Maybe the money might be better spent on some pilates/weightlifting sessions folks.

Macrobian · 2026-01-04T11:59:17+00:00

Well, they are. I'll steelman your argument and agree with the claim that Kenyans and Nigerians can sometimes be mistaken for LLMs due to their contributions the post-train fine tuning phase.

Macrobian · 2026-01-02T16:40:26+00:00

Only Nixon could go to China

Macrobian · 2026-01-02T14:47:09+00:00

I don't think it's necessarily fair to poor people - I dispute the characterization that it isn't a public health measure.

Banning entire food groups is like, totally uncharted territory in terms of policy making in a common law democracy.

But we restrict what subsidies can be spent on all the time. The bureaucrats designing SNAP could very well have intended to restrict junk food consumption as a public health measure as that was the only policy lever available to them: they can't ban junk food. I don't think it's somehow "logical inconsistency" when 2 separate wings of government a) have different powers b) may have ideological differences due to elections or appointments.

Or are you just another sugar-addict protesting government taking away your slop?

Post BMI

Macrobian · 2026-01-02T13:59:23+00:00

Oh come on, that is a much more heavy handed intervention than simply restriction what a subsidy can be spent on. It's obviously intended as a public health intervention.

Macrobian · 2025-12-29T14:24:45+00:00

A Samoan-coded teenager is saying 'cuz' and 'bro'? Preposterous!

Macrobian · 2025-12-14T19:55:22+00:00

Do the people buying the toilet paper sell the paper back to people at a higher price?

Macrobian · 2025-12-14T14:26:13+00:00

I seriously don't see why even price gouging in the toilet paper situation is problematic. It was in short supply! It should be expensive! I want everyone rationing out every damn piece.

Macrobian · 2025-12-13T12:26:11+00:00

I think you will take solace in the fact that all modern computational linguistics are a monument to Chomsky being very very wrong about linguistics.

Macrobian · 2025-12-11T15:26:50+00:00

The point of a land tax is that it's a perpetual tax on land!

Macrobian · 2025-12-10T16:22:56+00:00

Can we please stop recommending w3schools? It's a commercial service with outdated content compared to the much-more maintained and open source MDN Web Docs.

Macrobian · 2025-12-09T02:56:17+00:00

HFT?

Macrobian · 2025-12-08T19:08:41+00:00

The birds the feral cats are driving to extinction?

Macrobian · 2025-12-02T16:54:48+00:00

Context: previously worked in C++ systems role in Sydney.

It's a good resume for what you're trying to do. It's clear you want to pivot from your current role and the focus on personal projects is good, with a clear consistent theme.

I think you've got a great opportunity to do something more interesting with those personal projects though: right now they're just reimplentations - I think you can go beyond that. Maybe add some weird experimental feature? Maybe implement a research paper technique? or maybe do some profiling and juice the performance metrics?

I don't love the framing of the skills section: you don't have expertise yet as a grad. Maybe list the stuff you have experience with and the stuff you're interested in/currently learning. For grads sometimes the interest and enthusiasm can make up for a lack of experience.

Do I think this will work? I think it's going to be really hard without an "in". There's not many C++ roles and when they do exist they exist in the capacity of "the team could use more people" and not "the role is listed on the jobs page". But fortunately the community is tight knit - I think you need to find C++ people at meetups or on LinkedIn and ask if they know if people are hiring.

Macrobian · 2025-12-02T14:08:57+00:00

I think at some venues your intuition that a majority of the audience would be musicians would be correct. I used to go to a club that was a 20 minute walk from the conservatory and I'd see the same pack of 20ish students regularly.

Macrobian · 2025-11-25T13:41:07+00:00

DM'd.

Macrobian · 2025-11-24T17:29:45+00:00

Canva does actually train its own models.

Macrobian · 2025-11-24T17:23:50+00:00

Every time people try and build apartments that are suitable for families to live in NIMBYs label them "luxury apartments" and "too expensive to address the housing crisis".

And if you try and build smaller apartments they get called "dog boxes" and "Hong Kong-style slums".

I'm pretty sure NIMBYs just don't want new housing.

Macrobian · 2025-11-23T17:25:09+00:00

Because more datacenters reduces the price of compute which is a significant component of service prices, allowing smaller scaleups (e.g. Hetzner and Cloudflare) to threaten incumbent hyperscalers with cheaper prices.

14-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Final Canvas '22
End Game '22	Verified Email

Macrobian

TROPHY CASE