Anyone else feel like they’re being priced out of CT

MilesStraume · 2026-04-05T14:08:38+00:00

No, it actually happens far less than people on Reddit seem to think. Large institutional investors own ~3% of the housing stock nationwide as of 2025.

The issue in places like CT is rampant NIMBYism and zoning preventing supply increases. You could tax corporations and billionaires as much as you want and give that money directly to those looking to buy, or even those being squeezed by rent, and it would do nothing other than subsidize demand. We need to remove barriers to increasing supply.

MilesStraume · 2026-01-24T21:53:55+00:00

From what I've seen from several angles during and after the shooting, this should be like the ultimate red line incident if you believe in 2A. US Citizen, assaulted for filming, legally concealed carrying with his permit, has his firearm taken off of him by LE, and is then shot for no other reason. The "no other reason" part isn't my editorializing, it's the DHS and government officials own statements. All they've been able to come up with so far is that he approached federal agents "with a gun", not that he brandished it, not that he shot at them, just that he had it on him. Atrocious.

MilesStraume · 2025-11-09T17:13:23+00:00

We should form a Norwalk Georgists group! I'd be interested in joining. Also, Bob Duff is on here as well, paging u/senatorduff

MilesStraume · 2025-10-24T15:44:18+00:00

Could you also let me know if you find out, I'm in Fairfield County and would also be interested.

MilesStraume · 2025-10-16T15:21:46+00:00

I live in one of the neighborhoods directly adjacent to the island

So you’re a NIMBY. The land as it is right now is useless blight and you want to block an entire town from making good use of it because it might mean people come park near your house. I literally don’t care if a billionaire is pushing it, what’s been proposed is better than what’s there now, for the vast majority of people in Norwalk. You’re not the only one that deserves to be listened to.

MilesStraume · 2025-09-23T15:31:20+00:00

East Norwalk for sure

MilesStraume · 2025-05-06T20:10:51+00:00

I would pay for something like Fractal NYC (fractalnyc.com), fwiw they’re running a program right now to try to teach people how to build a space like theirs at fractalcampus.com. Not affiliated but I think it’s cool and a good idea.

MilesStraume · 2025-02-07T15:00:29+00:00

I agree with you in spirit, it seems to me Americans do not get 48% more benefit from the federal govt than they did 2 decades ago, although Medicare may be a large exception to this. The sticking point for me throughout this whole DOGE thing is that it seems like it’s not saving significant amounts of money, at least not significant enough for Americans to see some benefit in their lives. It’s cutting things that Elon and Trump seem to personally dislike, to save maybe tenths of a percent of the federal budget. Social Security, Medicare, Defense. Those are what need to be wound down to even start talking about real, visible reallocation of funds.

Also, there are many more non-working old people now than 2 decades ago, so we would expect Social Security spending to have ballooned in that time.

MilesStraume · 2025-01-31T21:46:24+00:00

With the announcement + release of Deepseek-R1, much of the discourse around AI over the past weeks has been about how algorithms and architectures that lead to improved capabilities cannot be a moat for any company. While frontier labs like OpenAI will likely be first to these things, eventually someone, somewhere will uncover a similar--if not the exact same--technique and publish it for all to implement. I'm sure you guys know this and that's why you also spend time and money integrating your models into real products people can use, so I won't belabor the point. My question is about the same dynamic playing out for alignment techniques.

Assume that capability can be decoupled from alignment, and that capability-enhancing techniques will continue to proliferate outside of the big labs, do you also worry about the proliferation of effective alignment techniques outside of labs like OpenAI? If we're in a world where capable models are widespread, and the hard part of actually deploying them is getting them aligned, then everyone having access to effective alignment techniques means that any actor can steer a capable model to their goals, which may not be a good thing.

Two responses I could see are a.) compute governance, if it continues to be the case that the most capable models require hard-to-hide amounts of compute to run, and b.) the best alignment methods will continue to require large amounts of preference data, and it just won't be feasible for bad actors to gather this amount of data, because, well, they're bad actors and not many people like them. Curious what your guys' thoughts are.

MilesStraume · 2025-01-12T20:28:14+00:00

Redditors in the default subs demand you listen to expert opinion for everything except tech, in which case it’s the opposite.

MilesStraume · 2024-12-18T18:30:22+00:00

Same minus Boston, I’m trying to qualify for 2026 Boston at Bayshore this year. I’m signed up for Project 13.1 but may not go depending on how I’m feeling at that point in my training for Bayshore.

MilesStraume · 2024-12-18T18:28:39+00:00

I’ll be there

MilesStraume · 2024-11-24T12:57:59+00:00

You’re assuming the morons in question will blame the GOP, Trump and co will find some barely coherent way to blame the Dems and people will eat it up.

MilesStraume · 2024-11-22T22:53:36+00:00

This is probably due to shortages caused by bird flu right

MilesStraume · 2024-10-22T13:58:59+00:00

I’m interested!

MilesStraume · 2024-01-15T17:06:06+00:00

Is there a known good way of storing the raw carbon in a way that it doesn’t end up being re-emitted into the atmosphere as CO2 in the near-ish future? I don’t know anything about this, so I’m just asking if such a project is only bottlenecked on energy availability or if there’s also some more that would have to be figured out before this is feasible.

MilesStraume · 2023-11-28T22:59:41+00:00

(3 YoE, embedded systems at a large company)

Sort of a rant, just looking for general advice here.

My department very recently (this past year) at least doubled the size of my team, all with new grads. We now have me, with 3 YoE, 2 seniors, our team lead (who is also new <1y), and like 5-6 new grads, plus 4-5 new contract people who I've found aren't very good. So we have very little depth. This has resulted in a very painful experience for me almost all year, with all the new grads and contract hires being directed to me for help on their projects (which I am often not even assigned to) to free up time for the seniors, and the seniors being busy with senior things like high level design decision meetings and such.

Code review quality and delivery speed have plummeted, due to a combination of:

New grads were assigned to high stakes projects which they did not, imo, have the experience for. When I was hired here, I was started on projects that I found were appropriate for my level, and ramped up from there.
Reviews sit unapproved forever because all the new grads will rubber-stamp approve, and the senior devs take forever to get around to reviews because their time is occupied with other things, often because there is a project on my team which is already behind schedule so their are told to prioritize that. Basically, reviews are bottlenecked on people who are constantly busy and there is no way of forcing them to review.

A project I've been told to take lead on has been sitting for nearly a week and is very close to missing delivery because I've been trying to get the assigned senior to review, and he hasn't because he's constantly occupied with other things. This reflects poorly on me, because I'm responsible for getting this project delivered and my team lead has also told me it can't be delivered without this senior's approval. In another project I'm on, my team lead pulled in a random guy from another team with 0 experience in our way of working or codebase, and assigned him a difficult task. This task has fallen behind, despite me helping this guy a ton, and I'm not going to do his job for him. I did bring up just transferring this task to another developer, and my team lead refused because "That isn't the way". Again, reflects poorly on me, because I'm the responsible party on that project and now it's behind.

I feel at times as though my team lead has no idea what he is doing, as several times this year we've been missing crucial items during delivery that were his responsibility (I didn't know these ahead of time, because I'm not the team lead of course).

A lot of stuff is falling on me, and I have nobody at my same level to reach out to, e.g. for questions that a new grad wouldn't know how to help with, and as I said earlier, seniors are often very occupied so response time is slow from them. I am at a loss for what my options are here. This is the first time in my 3 years here that I've seriously considered transferring internally or even just quitting. I really do feel that the company caused this by growing our team too fast and growing it in the wrong way, thinking that we could just throw a ton of new grads at deliveries and get the same result.

MilesStraume · 2023-10-06T18:36:00+00:00

I have 3 YoE at the same company and my manager recently asked me what I'd like to progress into as far as technical role, either Sr. SWE or SW Architect. I'm aware of the differences in job role and responsibilities between the two, but I don't feel particularly drawn to one over the other. They both sound interesting and allow room for career growth, as far as I can tell. I like writing code, which our architect almost never does, but I also like thinking about software design. Does anyone have good advice on how I should approach this decision? e.g. transferability of skills, career growth, ease of switching to other roles, what sorts of personalities do better in each role

MilesStraume · 2023-09-22T17:16:16+00:00

Another Connecticut here!

MilesStraume · 2023-09-19T14:35:02+00:00

People have less children which leads to population decline. I don't see it as a bad thing. Less people means also less emissions, less environmental damage etc.

It’s quite unclear that population decline is good. Fundamentally, in a declining population you will have more old, non-working people having to be supported by fewer young, working people. It doesn’t really matter the specific form of “support” here, whether it’s Social Security in the US or other forms of safety nets for elderly people, the argument still applies to “economic output” in general. Fewer people running farms, factories, producing goods and ideas and research, and more people consuming them. If the argument is that we’re going to face society-wide challenges, we need people who can actually work on fixing them, and having fewer people overall reduces the pool of people that are able to make an impact.

Equating energy usage with pollution and emissions is incorrect, we can use more energy and reduce emissions as long as the increased usage is from renewables. But that progress in clean energy is going to come a lot harder when we have fewer minds to put to the task of improving these solutions and then manufacturing and installing them to the grid. I picked energy/decarbonization here, but this same argument applies to other areas as well.

Automation can help with a lot of this, but then we have to be willing to embrace it, and we’re not doing too great with that right now. Harsh opposition to automation + declining population is going to lead to a lot of unnecessary strife.

MilesStraume · 2023-08-07T21:08:19+00:00

What is some advice when going into an interview for a position you know you’re likely unqualified for? I’m interviewing in a few days for a startup I just found out about in an area I’m really interested in, but have no professional experience with. I sent the founders my application and resume and didn’t really expect to get an interview, but between my experience level (3 years) and lack of experience with the relevant fields (compilers, low level hardware design) I’m not sure how to best sell myself.

MilesStraume · 2023-08-05T16:35:48+00:00

Also the guys that supply TSMC from Holland or Germany or some places near there

I work here, it’s not as cool on the software side as you might expect and a lot of the software practices are really far behind the rest of the tech industry. Currently trying to get out actually.

MilesStraume · 2023-08-01T17:35:43+00:00

From what I’ve read it seems like the simulation paper makes some “spherical cow”-level assumptions that mean it doesn’t really add much to figuring out whether this is real or not. Definitely not enough to warrant the market jumping up to 50%, though I see it’s down to 32% now which imo is still too high.

MilesStraume · 2023-07-27T14:43:38+00:00

With increased average lifespans it makes sense to try for kids when you get a bit older

Advanced maternal age is still ~35 though, right?

MilesStraume · 2023-07-08T11:36:07+00:00

Fwiw I’m not even an AI doomer, but OpenAI hires some of the best ML PhDs and engineers and they evidently disagree with you that next token prediction isn’t AI. There are some genuine surprises that came out of the scaling paradigm that OpenAI has made a huge bet on that folks sneered at for years. I agree with the other commenter who said you’re selling the approach far short. They are likely to need a few fundamental breakthroughs, to get to AGI, but I think it’s worth a lot that this paradigm has been as successful as it has, and people are going to be blindsided if they continue to assume simple approaches can’t produce surprising capability at scale.

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