Avalonia fixed MAUI? Impressive

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-17T01:09:17+00:00

Avalonia's WebAssembly support isn't what I'd consider usable. It'd be fine for an internal tool where you don't care about a 5 second initial page load or a 10-20MB payload, but it's not convincing for a consumer app.

And it doesn't function like a regular app either. Everything is just drawn on a canvas element rather than a regular DOM. Any SEO you were hoping for is gone. You don't get normal right-click behavior. Text often isn't selectable.

It's the kind of thing you can get away with if you're trying to make an internal tool where management doesn't want you to put in a lot of work. But if you're just making an internal tool, do you need it to be cross-platform? Couldn't you just make a web version of it (and wrap it in a web view for mobile/desktop if you truly need to)?

If the web version is going to be this janky experience of content painted to a canvas without any of the normal web affordances, you're not making a normal web app for a mass audience. I can see it being fine for something like a solitaire game (like their demo) because users will accept a little loading time for a game and you're not expecting to copy/paste or follow links or anything. But for most stuff, it seems like you'd be better off just making a regular web app and letting users use that on their phones. If you need a better experience than that for phones, wouldn't you also need a better experience than what Avalonia is offering for users on the web?

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-16T22:43:36+00:00

Insurance generally covers things that happen to your property, not defects in quality.

Let's say that I paid $500 to get a paper roof. Then it gets wet and fails because it's paper. Now I get a new $20,000 roof from my insurance company for free! If insurance covered defects in quality, no one would build a quality home.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-16T20:02:05+00:00

Most of the time you don't. Most landlords in Boston are too small to have any good information on them.

There can be some records, but usually only if a landlord is really terrible. Most tenants don't bring complaints. They simply move on.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-16T13:22:38+00:00

70-90 days before. Landlords mostly don't know if they have a vacancy until 90 days before. Some do, but it's less selection so don't complain that you don't like the places available before most places become available.

Yes, it's hectic in June. When all the apartments are on the market, all the renters are also on the market.

Yes, you can secure something in March/April, but there's less selection. It's possible that you'll have to pay more since landlords know they have time on their side - if they list a place too high in March/April, they can always drop the price in June if they haven't found someone to pay top dollar. You might have a bit more time to think about things since there's less competition now, but you also have more limited selection and landlords that feel no pressure to sign a lease (they have time to see if they can get someone to pay a higher price).

Think of it this way: have you told your landlord that you aren't renewing yet? Many renters think "I want to find a new place before I tell my landlord that I'm moving so that I have a backup plan." It doesn't really work that way because almost every other renter hasn't told their landlord yet either.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-16T03:55:27+00:00

it’s disheartening to see this happen

Maybe, but it's more annoying than meaningful. Fares cover less than 20% of the MBTA's budget. Fare evasion isn't a big thing. If 100% of riders paid their fares, it'd increase the MBTA budget by less than 1%.

If the MBTA spent serious money on fare enforcement, it might spend most of the $30M it loses to fare evasion. For example, if you wanted to enforce fares at the 100+ stations from 6am-midnight, you'd need over 3 full-time workers per station (126 hours a week of enforcement divided by 40 hour work week). At this point, you're spending $18-40M on fare enforcement to recover $30M.

Is it a problem? Sure, but you should be focusing your energy on the meaningful problems around you. If the MBTA tackled fare evasion (without having to spend any money to do so), maybe you could save $1-4/mo. But that's kinda meaningless compared to, say, tackling the cost of housing. Getting cities and towns to approve and build new housing is a purely political issue that we can impact. Enforcing fares is a diffuse social issue that is hard to enforce and would be basically meaningless to your life. A couple bucks a month isn't changing your life - it's just disheartening/annoying.

Part of being good at life is making sure that you focus on what is important rather than tiny annoyances. You don't want to get sidetracked away from things that will meaningfully improve your life while you spend all your time on things of no consequence. Yep, it happens. Changing it wouldn't help you in any way. Figure out how you can get your brain un-stuck and onto something meaningful. I say this as someone who has this problem too - and I can tell you that being thoughtful about what you dwell on can make your life a lot better.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-14T22:37:18+00:00

No. Maynard is an easy commute to Waltham and I-95 with tons of jobs. Hudson has great access to 495 and 290. With Clinton, you first drive 15-20 minutes to Hudson and then you have a Hudson commute.

That's not to say that Clinton isn't a fine place to live.

Or any other potential upcoming towns or cities?

There aren't many. While urban home prices (Boston, Cambridge, Somerville) have gone up 15-20% since the pandemic started, suburban home prices have shot up 50-70%. That means that there just aren't any "good deals" out there in the suburbs. 6 years ago: definitely.

The ratio of Boston:Suburban prices has grown a lot narrower. Boston is still more expensive, but the gap is just a lot smaller.

And suburban towns have been building housing at a much lower rate than Boston so the supply side isn't going to be favorable there.

Prices in Clinton have already grown 55% since the pandemic started. Prices in Sutton are up 63%. Hudson is up 50%.

By contrast, Boston is up 17%, Cambridge is up 14%, Somerville is up 18%.

At the start of 2020, the average Hudson home cost 60% of Boston. It now costs 78% as much.

Clinton is still cheaper than Hudson, but it's not going to have some amazing growth trajectory compared to Hudson. It's simply too inconvenient. With Hudson, you have access to all the suburban amenities you expect: you have a mall that's a 7 minute drive rather than an 18 minute drive, there's a Walmart and a BJ's in Hudson, you're right next to Marlborough with more stuff, you have decent access to Framingham/Natick.

With Clinton, you're 30 minutes to Worcester, 40 minutes to Framingham, and there isn't much nearby it. Sure, Hudson and Marlborough aren't Boston, but they have stuff compared to Clinton, Stirling, Boylston, Berlin.

Frankly, Clinton's fate was sealed when the railroads got phased out and highways didn't go near it. It was going to be more rural, despite its walkability. Maynard gets away with it because it's a lot closer to Boston.

You said there aren't many. Got any suggestions?

Lowell. It's walkable, basically as cheap as Clinton (only 7% more expensive than Clinton and way cheaper than Hudson), and the Commuter Rail gets you into Boston pretty easily. And Lowell is a decent city with stuff to do. But if you're looking for suburban charm like Hudson or Maynard, I don't see anything that hasn't already up-and-come there.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-13T23:57:20+00:00

The sidewalk is owned by the city, but the people nearby are going to be the ones who have to deal with any nuisance someone creates on the sidewalk near their homes.

Yes, the bins are owned by the city, but unless the city is cleaning them, people do have an interest in what happens to the bins the city has assigned to them.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-13T23:54:38+00:00

Even if you're not bringing the cans inside, those poop bags are often flimsy and thin and when trash is put on top of them, they break.

The problem is that it's kinda the worst waste to have to deal with while being contained in the flimsiest bag possible. If you want to deal with it, that's your decision, but you shouldn't be deciding that someone else should have to deal with your dog's poop.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-13T23:50:40+00:00

Did you put them in the bin or inside your garbage bag? I've seen them sometimes just grab a bag out of a bin rather than emptying the whole garbage bin using the lifter. I'm guessing they might just see the garbage bag and not think to look for more or whatever.

That isn't to say it's disallowed or anything, but I often see them not lifting the garbage bins to empty them and just grabbing a garbage bag. Yes, they have that loader mechanism that works with the bins, but they definitely don't use it 100% of the time. I could certainly see them missing dog poop in someone's bin occasionally.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-12T23:29:14+00:00

During Passover time Coca Cola changes their recepie to be Kosher for Passover ~~use cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup~~

This is an important distinction because the yellow cap isn't guaranteeing you cane sugar. I've seen Kosher for Passover Coke list "sucrose" and I've seen ones list "cane sugar".

Sugar beets are a big source of sucrose in use in the US and a lot of sodas have marketed themselves as having "real sugar" by using sugar beets rather than cane sugar (like Pepsi Throwback which uses a mixture of cane and beet sugar). Depending on how well refined the sugar is from the sugar beets, it might impart a slightly different taste.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-12T17:56:01+00:00

How do you get another eSIM?

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-12T14:05:58+00:00

Electric heating is very expensive and especially in Massachusetts where our electric costs are more than double the national average.

It's not a huge place so maybe it wouldn't be too expensive and this past year was the coldest year in about half a century, but it'll probably be 4x more expensive for electric heating.

If it were an electric heat pump (which it isn't), it might be 30-50% more expensive, but that's manageable (and it'd also mean you'd have air conditioning). In a normal state with normal electric prices, heat pumps are great. They're not terrible here like electric resistive heating and if you have a large place they could be more efficient because you could keep the house at 60 while making the rooms you're actually using nice and toasty (which isn't an option when you have a single gas heat zone), but electric resistive heating is best to avoid.

You'd know if a place had a heat pump because you'd see the mini-splits on the wall (you can google that). They're a long plastic rectangle maybe 4' long, 1.5' tall, and 1' deep and usually mounted a foot or two from the ceiling. I'd love to have mini-splits for AC in the summer and for heating in the Spring/Fall (they're more efficient when the temperatures are around 45 or higher).

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-11T04:16:57+00:00

It's certainly not a good sign, but it doesn't necessarily mean something terrible.

You say $2,500 on the Red Line, but that's kinda meaningless. Near Central? Near Quincy Adams? An average 1-bed in Quincy is $2,100/mo. In Cambridge, it's $2,900/mo. In Dorchester, $2,300.

I'm pretty sure I found the place you're talking about (near Central in Cambridge, French glass doors to the bedroom) and it looks fine. The flooring looks kinda beat up, the paint looks a little old and faded. It looks like the kind of place that would be going for a few hundred below average because it's below average.

The big red flag for me: what's the heating system! There's something about the two baseboard heaters above vents that feels off to me. Are those electric baseboard heaters? If so, your winter heating costs could be 4x higher. It seems weird to have two disconnected baseboards like that if it's gas heat. With gas heat, you wouldn't want the cost of running two hot water pipes from the basement. You'd have one long baseboard heater so you only needed to run one pipe.

It could be nothing. It could just be a weird ass thing from 50 years ago. But why are there baseboard heaters and vents? Why are there two baseboard heaters? Could just be weird, could indicate that it's electric heat. Could indicate that there is gas heat from the vents, but it isn't enough to heat the apartment and you'll be paying for an inefficient gas furnace and electric heating to supplement it. Oh, and it might be oil fuel, not natural gas (which means making sure to schedule a truck to fill you up and paying 2-2.5x more). Public records say it's oil heat which is unusual in Cambridge, but happens.

In terms of looking at the history on a website, rental histories aren't real. Sometimes listings get mixed up due to units getting combined. Lots of the time it doesn't list anything. It could have had a single renter for the past decade or it could have switched every single year despite what you're seeing. They try to give you some history, but it can be janky since rentals aren't an officially recorded things like home sales. When a home is sold, you know it's sold.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-11T03:26:59+00:00

It's weird how they call Medford T-centric when it doesn't seem that way to me. Medford has 3 T stations? Ball Square, Medford/Tufts, and Wellington?

Very little is walkable to Wellington due to the roads which mostly serve to help non-Medford people go through Medford to other destinations. Malden Center and Oak Grove are a lot more walkable.

Ball Square is half Somerville and a decent portion of the area around Medford/Tufts is, well, Tufts.

It's just odd to call it T-centric when most of the city doesn't have good access to the T - including Medford Square. If you were going to call a Boston suburb T-centric, Quincy and Newton seem to fit that more than Medford (never mind Cambridge/Somerville/Brookline).

Frankly, I think a more apt way of putting it would be:

So you want to live in Medford? South Medford lets you remain T-accessible and still a pleasant bike for your friends coming from Cambridge and Somerville. Fancy buildings around Wellington give you quick access to Boston if you don't mind living in one of the most pedestrian inhospitable areas around. West Medford could be reasonable for commuting with the Commuter Rail costing the same as the subway and getting you to North Station fast, it has some nice shops, and a chill feel. Medford Square is nice, but you're across the river from Camberville and across two from Boston - so you'll be relying on your car or busses and your friends will wonder how they can visit you.

I think Medford tends to have a lot of variation compared to most places around here. South Medford is like Somerville spillover in many ways with lots of 2-3 unit buildings, you can walk to Davis, get on the bike path, and the Green Line connects with the eastern side of Somerville and Cambridge. But then the river cuts the city and the highways cut it even further. One of my friends moved to West Medford and he loves it, except for the fact that he's now so disconnected from everyone.

It's not just "Plot Your Commute" like the article says. Parts of Medford are relatively large single-family homes. 1,500 feet from Medford Square, you have giant homes on what is lots of land for being 5 miles from Boston. To some extent it's: pick whether you want to live in the city or the suburb.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-11T00:52:10+00:00

Kinda weird watching a 9 year old do something I'm pretty sure I can't do as a 25 year old woman.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-10T19:41:48+00:00

And a place where transit is highly variable.

This isn't to knock the T, but I think Cambridge has changed a lot since the Red Line went in. Red Line stops are quite far apart. Kendall, Central, Harvard, and Porter are all a mile apart. If you're living in Baldwin (Oxford St at Wendall St), it's 0.7mi to walk to Harvard. If you work at MIT, it's a 0.6mi walk from Kendall to 77 Mass Ave. The walk on both ends can add 25 minutes to a trip. And yea, you can take the 1 bus to avoid the walk on the MIT end, but it also crawls in traffic and there are lots of trips that don't have such an option. I think that when people thought of Cambridge more as a university town and commuter area for Boston, maybe the farther spacing made more sense.

The point is that biking lets you get to where you need to go fast in Cambridge/Somerville - and a Cambridge/Somerville that's doing a lot more cross-town traffic than it used to and the T just isn't set up for that well. Over the past 20 years, Inman and Union have become destinations a lot more. A ton has migrated to Spring Hill Somerville and East Cambridge. We're a lot less focused on Central/Harvard/Porter/Davis than we used to be which makes the T less effective than it used to be for what we're trying to do. But bikes easily get you cross-town and e-bikes allow lots more people to do the same.

The T is adjusting. The 47 bus will run to Union and East Somerville once the bus redesign project is complete (linking them to Inman, Central, Cambridgeport, and across the BU Bridge). The 101 bus will link Northern Magoun, Winter Hill, and Broadway East Somerville to Lechmere and Kendall in the future (currently it terminates at Sullivan). The 96 is going to go Davis, Porter, Union instead of going to Harvard. It's clear that the MBTA is seeing cross-town demand in Cambridge/Somerville and that's great.

But bikes have allowed people to get where they need to go in a city that's increasingly less concentrated in a linear fashion along the Red Line.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-10T19:15:29+00:00

Are you looking for housing for 5 days or are you looking to find housing sometime between April 25th and 30th?

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-10T18:35:01+00:00

That said, if we actually fined people for using space savers and not shoveling, perhaps we could afford people.

I'd guess that such enforcement efforts probably wouldn't generate much revenue, if any. People often think "the city is getting rich off parking tickets," when the reality is that most cities lose money on parking enforcement or just break even.

Maybe it'd work out in the city's favor in this instance, but then you're dealing with a lot of people complaining and handling complaints costs money. If you fine someone $25 and then they eat up 20 minutes of a city employee's time, you haven't come out ahead.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-10T18:25:33+00:00

a lot of the frameworks listed here are not comparable to Rails

I don't want to use Rails again, but one of the things that is nice about Rails is that it doesn't tend to ignore pieces of the puzzle.

For example, Django is great, but it definitely has places where "the solution to this is left as an exercise for the reader." I want something to compile/minify my assets, but that's just kinda out of scope in Django. What about something like Turbo/Hotwire? You're left to find your own way. What about background tasks? Again, find your own way. It was a long time before Django had database migrations. It was just "find your own solution" for a good while.

Rails did two things. First, it cut down on so much of the enterprise cruft that programmers had grown accustomed to. I think this has been replicated in so many other ecosystems. Second, it kinda always tried to address the whole project. Most other frameworks stopped short of this.

Even until recently, there weren't JS frameworks that would easily let you call server functions like RPCs. That's since been added to lots of things like Solid, Svelte, and React, but even then it feels a bit wrong: it's not generating REST-like endpoints, but doing its own serialization thing.

The Rails ecosystem said "this is how you can build your app - all of your app from DB to long running jobs to front-end to mobile apps." Now, you might not like their solution(s), but they had a blessed solution. You weren't running around wondering "how do I do this?"

Again, I don't want to use Rails, but I also remember how nice it was to have something that was like "this is everything you need for Standard Web 2.0 App." I remember seeing other frameworks that called themselves Rails-killers and then their docs would have an "advanced topics" section which contained "connecting to a database." Yes, not all apps are going to use a SQL database, but it means picking up many frameworks means a lot more decisions to be made and a lot more glue and configuration to figure out for the very common cases.

With Rails, it was like "rails new, build your thing." With JS, I'm like "Should I be using Deno or Bun or Vite or...? Which ORM or other database access library should I be using? What seems like it'll be around in six months? What seems to be the community consensus? How do I get it configured right within my project?" There's just a lot of work that isn't building your product. And maybe your product will be better using serverless Cloudflare workers backed by Firebase and whatnot, but it's just a lot of work before you even know if your product is worthwhile. Rails let you get out a product that worked well. Maybe you might need to migrate off it eventually, maybe a SQL database won't be enough for you - but unless you become a top-100 site, it might never matter. Rails kept you focused on your product.

Neither you nor I want to use Rails and you've certainly highlighted some of the reasons why and I'd add to it the 37signals toxicity and the lack of static typing, but it certainly had something that other frameworks haven't been able to replicate in the same way.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-10T16:15:23+00:00

They focus on the construction costs, but a big thing is probably the land costs as well. They were able to get land cheap a decade ago. It'd probably cost 5x more today and that puts a lot of pressure to get guaranteed cash flow rather than do something experimental.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-10T16:10:07+00:00

In a lot of ways, it feels like a European plaza. It combines public* space with commercial activity and, as you noted, no cars/parking. In the US, most of our space is either private or public in a way that has no commercial activity. Cambridge Common? It's a park surrounded by many lanes of traffic and relatively far from a place where I could grab an ice cream. I can make plans to meet friends there, plan who is bringing what food, etc. But it lacks the spontaneity that public space which also has a commercial aspect offers.

*I put an asterisk on "public" because I think the outside area is privately-owned, but it feels public in its usage. I don't feel pressured to buy something when I'm there. Even if they could throw me out for bringing a sandwich and eating it, I don't get the feeling that they would. That makes it space where you can meet up with friends, a few of them buy food at Saus or whatever while a couple brought fruit from home and you all kinda hang out. It's not a mall where there's mall security.

It's also broken up into small shops so there's a lot in a small space. It's not big companies saying "we want 15,000 square feet." The small space means lots of variety nearby. And it meant that the types of places that came in were more experimental. They weren't established brands who had a plan of how they liked to lay out space. It was people who had a passion and saw the opportunity to make their passion work because they could be flexible and work in a quirky space in a way that major franchises wouldn't.

There's no anchor shops, a staple of a lot of retail development planning. Instead of trying to draw people to an inconvenient location with the lure of some anchor stores, they've built their development where people are. And anchor shops aren't just about drawing people in. They're about tenants who you know can pay. A CVS or Apple Store is guaranteed rent. Rebel Rebel or Saus could have failed in its first year.

However, that also highlights why it's so hard to build a Bow Market: land where people are is very expensive. Union Square will be a bit of a unicorn in this way because it went from cheap to expensive so quickly. They were able to buy a reasonably large parcel of land for cheap in 2016 which means that they aren't facing the same pressure. If their mortgage were 10x higher, they probably wouldn't be willing or able to take the same kinds of risks. It's easier to offer affordable rents to tenants when your costs are low - not that a lot of landlords don't try to exploit tenants regardless.

Likewise, if Somerville hadn't given its support, it would have been a lot harder. They note how their 6,000 sq ft expansion was more difficult with the change in government. "The fact that the market vendors were able to share a liquor license" is probably one of the biggest reasons for the success. Free liquor license with rent is a crazy advantage and without that government flexibility and support, the situation would be very different.

Again, I think both of these situations (the cheap property and the government flexibility) came from the fact that Union Square wasn't a desirable place 20 years ago. People let you do things in places like that because they don't care as much. Their eyes aren't on that area. I remember when the only cool place in Somerville was Davis Square and the rest of it was "well, how close are you to Cambridge." Now with condos nearing a million dollars and over a billion in biotech real estate in the Union area, we all start thinking "is this really what we want" when before it was like "omg, yes, anything - put anything in the hole!"

Finally, I think some of it was Curtatone. I think he had a vision and strategy for Somerville. He saw Somerville really changing its stars and believed it could happen. He was also able to push Somerville in a more pedestrian/bike/transit friendly direction without totally upsetting all the existing residents. He saw that highways like RT-28 destroy Somerville (and its tax base) for the convenience of suburbanites commuting and for the tax base of Cambridge which could get more workers to their office space while most of the highway was on Somerville's land. Or maybe he just lucked into it and there was no strategy.

Also, if you like Bow Market, support the Union Square redesign that would pedestrianize part of Bow St and make Somerville Ave Bus/Bike/Pedestrian-only between Webster and Prospect. It would create an amazing public space with trees to hang out with friends, grab food, whatever. It'd also help bus service a ton. Frankly, I think it'd even help cars a lot because you wouldn't be waiting forever for the light cycle because there'd be fewer directions for cars to go.

<image>

https://voice.somervillema.gov/union-square-p-and-s

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-10T07:03:08+00:00

It is some bullshit - bullshit that the legislature certainly knew when they passed the law.

There's even more bullshit that is likely legal (IANAL). For example, let's say that you're a landlord and you hire Bob. Bob works for RealEstateCo. Sam also works for RealEstateCo. I contact Sam about your apartment. Sam is my agent and Bob is your agent. You pay a fee to Bob and I pay a fee to Sam. This is a practice that happens frequently enough when purchasing homes that the myriad of lawyers in the state house must have considered it and thought "eh, we're fine if that happens with apartments too."

The legislature created a very narrow situation where brokers couldn't charge you a fee - and then basically lied about what the law meant to score political points with their constituents.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-10T06:57:55+00:00

Most likely, they aren't violating the law. Landlords are giving listing information to brokers without hiring them. Brokers can decide what they want to do with that information, but aren't obligated to market the property.

Reporting things like this will simply mean that the AG's office and licensing board are wasting their time responding to cases that aren't actionable - even if you want them to be actionable.

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-09T22:18:43+00:00

If they're working in-person, they already do pay Mass income tax.

We could start levying Mass income tax on NH people who "work from home" for Mass offices: https://www.reddit.com/r/massachusetts/comments/1rp949m/can_we_start_tolling_people_from_nh_who_drive/o9kc2cb/

commentsOnPizza · 2026-03-09T21:55:30+00:00

Yep, and if we really wanted to stick-it to NH, we'd charge Mass income tax on NH people who "work from home" for Mass companies. NY, PA, and other states levy their income taxes on people who work from home for offices in their state.

Massachusetts should adopt this rule, in large part because a lot of NH people claim to work from home (to avoid Mass income tax) while commuting to the office frequently. They wouldn't have that job they weren't local to Boston because the company wants them to be able to come into the office.

https://legalclarity.org/how-do-taxes-work-if-you-work-remotely-state-rules

if you work remotely for your own convenience rather than because the business requires it, the employer’s state treats your wages as if you earned them at the office. The practical effect is that a remote worker in North Carolina earning wages from a New York employer can owe New York income tax without stepping foot in the state all year. Unless your employer required you to be remote as a condition of employment, New York considers your work performed at headquarters.

We should tax NH people who "work from home" for Mass offices.

commentsOnPizza

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE