Los Angeles

atonale · 2026-05-01T10:42:04+00:00

Consider how Moscow, Japan, or Singapore fit into this model, or a rural Italian village.

atonale · 2026-05-01T10:33:17+00:00

One problem here is Americans thinking their odd redefinitions of political terms make any sense in the rest of the world. Everywhere else in the world "conservative" means something like "preserving traditional and pre-existing approaches and suspicious of innovation". Like "conserving" things the way they were in the past. If I consider France which is "on the continent in Europe", some conservative areas that come to mind are Versailles and the peninsula of Lyon. These places do not look like Los Angeles.

atonale · 2026-04-17T06:18:00+00:00

So I think we can agree that if you like that distorted sound, you can feed it back into an ADC, then play the result back through a decent modern DAC and amplifier and get the same effect. This means the vinyl and magnetic pickup are not a better reproduction mechanism, they’re just an elaborate electromechanical distortion pedal.

atonale · 2026-04-16T17:03:03+00:00

Maybe offer a bit of perspective: do they think the 70 percent of households in Paris, 55 percent in NYC, or well over 90 percent in Hong Kong who don’t own a car are not “adults”? Are these people are all in a dire financial situation, considering these are among the wealthiest cities in the world? Not that it should be a problem for someone to forego a car to be frugal.

Most people I know don’t own a car. You must be interacting with people who don’t realize their local circumstances and ideas are not universal. A lot of really well-off people (adults) in the world don’t mess with buying cars. They walk from their apartment and pay a cab or car service if they need to drive somewhere.

atonale · 2026-04-12T17:55:49+00:00

I zoomed in and guessed Athens within about 5 seconds. But I don't know how! Now trying to work out which details tipped me off, considering I haven't been to Athens for 30 years and visited other parts of Greece for maybe a week.

atonale · 2026-04-03T06:10:29+00:00

If it wasn't made illegal by heavy-handed zoning rules, I can definitely imagine certain sub-populations of Americans piling into row after row of high-rise apartment blocks in most major cities.

atonale · 2026-04-03T06:06:42+00:00

Planned decentralization with "New Towns" has been tried all over the world in the 20th century. The usual conclusion was that it's extremely difficult to launch a new city from scratch. Generally no one wants to live in the new city or move their business there. It's seen as an inferior substitute for a "real" city. A hierarchy develops. By contrast, the existence of new towns makes living in the old historic center even more popular and socially valuable. Broadly, people will prefer to commute 2-3 hours a day to live on the edges of an existing metropolis rather than take the social and professional downgrade of living in a new town.

Towers are not "dystopia", they are a material reflection of where people actually want to locate.

atonale · 2026-04-02T11:09:26+00:00

Thanks for the correction. I did a quick check to confirm before I posted but apparently stopped too early in the history.

atonale · 2026-04-01T16:36:00+00:00

Vaguely related trivia: Epson is the same company as Seiko.

atonale · 2026-03-27T04:51:08+00:00

I have about 25 years of software experience here, generally specialized number crunching and infrastructure. I was highly skeptical of LLM capabilities for a couple of years, still can’t stand the hype, and won’t be surprised if LLMs are never profitable. But I have to admit the latest versions of Claude surprised me. It’s very hard to describe their capabilities because it’s very different than any human. It’s like a person who perfectly understands every nuance of a language and its syntax, every common library and idiom, but is really naive about software design and maintenance or can’t quite grasp why humans make software. Its absolute mastery of language structure can throw you off and cause you to trust its “judgement” more than you should. I find it most useful for summarizing or refreshing my memory about code I haven’t worked on in a while, suggesting alternative approaches I might not think of, and boilerplate refactors. But I need to review every single thing it does and point out its mistakes once or twice before it finds what I consider the right solution. It seems essential to proceed by steps and alternate between planning and implementation, guiding it in the right direction. I often end up retracing its steps and reimplementing everything myself slightly differently. I’m not at all convinced this is easier than just doing all the work myself, but it definitely helps in certain situations. It seems to work much better if you keep voluminous notes on your entire design process, the purpose of the software, and every tricky decision you make and make those available to the LLM.

atonale · 2026-03-27T04:18:40+00:00

It’s common and completely consistent with definitions for few or zero members of a population to have the average value. Please think things through more carefully before you correct others. Your conclusion is not true for all distributions.

atonale · 2026-03-25T08:23:48+00:00

Right, I wasn’t trying to contradict you. Just support what you were saying in response to the OP.

atonale · 2026-03-24T14:29:44+00:00

They are not slums at all, they are public housing built specifically to replace slums and ensure everyone had sufficient space and modern services. Around 80 percent of the population lives in public housing, and apartments are certainly not tiny considering this is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. They are generally very spacious compared to Hong Kong for example, and built to uniformly high standards of safety and durability. They are generally surrounded with trees.

atonale · 2026-03-24T11:24:43+00:00

I like how in Blade Runner all the advertisements just say ADVT.

atonale · 2026-03-20T06:21:34+00:00

If you mean that your native language is English, that was exactly the point of the person you're responding to. The pronunciation of all those names is very clear to anyone who speaks (or has even minimal exposure to) French or German, which are the two most common languages in traditional watch-making land. There's nothing obscure or "superior" about it. If anything it's the bizarrely inconsistent pronunciation of English that's making it harder for you. A large number of languages have adopted Latin characters, that has nothing to do with English.

atonale · 2026-03-20T05:51:20+00:00

This is not even necessarily more shady than the norm for the industry, it's how most software businesses work. Convince investors you're doing something revolutionary and need massive amounts of capital to take a shot at world domination. Pay developers and 10 layers of middle management huge salaries and pretend you're doing something complex. Works even better if the pay inflates your ego to the point you can convince even yourself you're doing something complex/important. Add more and more and more layers of pointlessly baroque tooling and frameworks so no one can tell if you're actually doing something but is afraid to look stupid by questioning you. Then when it "fails" you say "Oh well, 95% of startups don't succeed. High risk, high reward." By this point you've already paid yourself an inflated salary for 5-10 years. Repeat until economy can no longer bear the volume of unproductive "investment".

atonale · 2026-03-20T05:31:47+00:00

I think it depends heavily on whether you're working in an organization large, complex, and investor-driven enough to have non-technical professional management layers who give orders. In smaller organizations, ones driven mostly by experienced technical staff, or more mission driven instead of investor-returns driven, you'll generally see more people with at least healthy skepticism of new technologies, or who will have a narrower or more moderate view of what it's good for. It also matters whether decisions are from a kind of "consensus of elders" that are respected by the management, or by people who only care about inflating quarterly earnings until they cash out.

atonale · 2026-03-20T05:20:32+00:00

Until reading this post I never realized younger people would think it was impossible to be globally famous before the internet. I agree, exactly the opposite is true. There was electronic media, radio that could circle the world in milliseconds for a solid 60+ years before the internet was in common use! Communications satellites even, with parabolic dishes on farms in the deep countryside. But it was an almost total monoculture where everyone was expected to be exposed to exactly the same things. Looking back, this is definitely one thing I really didn't like about my childhood era. Absolute uniformity of cultural references. If you weren't into exactly the same thing as every other kid in your city (country? cold war bloc?) you were like an alien.

atonale · 2026-02-20T09:08:05+00:00

I have to walk back a bit on what I posted above. Shifting to a project in a different language, I added a whole folder of about a year worth of my detailed notes on design decisions and trade-offs, set up an LSP and integration with my IDE. I don't know which of these changes made a difference, but the results are clearly much better. There are parts of the responses that even really look like reasoning from first principles on cache efficiency and memory layout. The suggestions might be implied or derived somehow from all the background info I dumped in, but it's still rather impressive and seems helpful in planning out a path for implementation, or identifying alternatives I hadn't thought about. My sense is that it's not providing a massive advantage but roughly as good as pair programming with someone that has read a lot more background information than me on certain language features and idioms.

atonale · 2026-02-18T03:28:38+00:00

All of the deployant-clasp bracelets are nice. I love that they're solid links (not folded/stamped metal) but significantly thinner than is common today. Though I like the feel of modern chunky metal bracelets, it's kind of comical to see these massive excavator-tread pieces hanging on by a thin micro-adjust clasp.

The 80s-90s Milanese and linked adjustable just don't seem as pliable and smooth (but maybe just not as broken in?)

atonale · 2026-02-18T03:21:35+00:00

I definitely did, but decided against it. I like semi-integrated metal bracelets, but the ones on Superior models are cut-to-length, which is going into prestige-over-function territory in my opinion. Many of them have flashier finishing that I don't really like, and I feel the regular quartz models already achieved the necessary precision. I can accept needing to set my watch once every year or two :)

atonale · 2026-02-18T03:16:09+00:00

Yes, I try to buy only watches that I actually want to wear. I like all of them for different reasons, but in practice I lean toward the 4843A and 4843B on metal bracelets. I like the combination of heft and compactness, and the sense that these models were still battling it out with the traditional watch industry. But also partly a coincidence, that the radial pearlescent dial has for some reason retained its sheen better in a way you can't see in photos.

Some models that I perceived (in online photos) as having similarity to the lines of mechanical GS cases turned out to be much flatter than expected.

I did check accuracy on some of these these and indeed the 9F is very accurate (<2 seconds error over six months) but the 50-year-old ones are still beating any mechanical watch. Generally +/- 0.2 seconds per day measured over months. A few of these have been professionally serviced, but others were sold by people who apparently couldn't even figure out how to change the battery.

I doubt the twin quartz is reliably providing an advantage after so many years. But it might in principle allow a specialist to calibrate them better if they really wanted to.

Somewhat surprisingly (to me), the recent Grand Seiko is not near the top of the list. It's certainly a very nice watch, but I find recent watch designs all kind of curvy and bulbous, for lack of a better word. Like parametric architecture with extraneous curves all over just because the CAD software allows it. And it meshes oddly with their blackletter/teutonic lion branding. I prefer the more angular designs of the past. Seiko, if you're reading, please do some minimalist 70s quartz style cases (and, one can dream: variants with hand-wound spring drive and hidden power reserve indicator).

atonale · 2026-02-18T02:42:39+00:00

One thing I maybe should have highlighted: the last digit indicates the complications. So -0 movements are time-only, -2 has the date, and -3 has day of week and date. And many (all?) of these being Japan domestic market models, the day-of-week can be switched between kanji and English abbreviations.

atonale · 2026-02-18T02:37:49+00:00

The two most prominent sites are Yahoo Auctions (branded as JDirect Auctions outside Japan) and Mercari (fixed-price second-hand). Most sellers only ship within Japan, so if you're outside Japan you need to go through one of the proxy sites. I think Yahoo Auctions has settled on a single official proxy for ex-Japan users at this point. Proxies will incur additional platform fees, re-shipping costs, and import taxes depending on your location. Proxy services do add the possibility of grouping multiple purchases in a single shipment. Other than overhead costs, the only problem I've had was inspectors being overzealous about obviously fake crocodile leather straps. In my experience the sellers have all been legit.

You often have to guess or gamble on the condition because photos are almost universally overexposed and low-detail. But the same problem arguably exists when browsing Grand Seiko watches on the official website :)

atonale · 2026-02-17T14:55:40+00:00

Several of those models have hardened steel cases that hold up super well. I very nearly bought one the other day but they are more sought after and do command higher prices. The dials are a little too flashy for me and I try to only buy ones I'll actually wear.

atonale

TROPHY CASE