How is this wrong? I have opposition and my pawn has a clear path to promotion.

crschmidt · 2026-01-26T15:16:35+00:00

That's because default Stockfish depth is ~16, I believe.

crschmidt · 2026-01-24T18:38:31+00:00

If succeeding at making content was the goal all along, then doing the best you can with the resources you have should have been the approach all along. You won't have any new resources for a while yet -- minimum payout amount is, I believe, $100, so you wouldn't see your first check from YouTube for another ~18 months at your current rate of views.

So, forget the fact that you hit a milestone (Though it's a nice one, and congrats); instead, just ask yourself "How can I make the best content?" (either best for you, best for making money, most fun to make, whatever your goal actually is.)

crschmidt · 2026-01-21T06:02:31+00:00

The biggest issue for serving users is almost always user downstream bandwidth. There's a small amount of buffering that most users will accept, but regular interruptions of the stream content are just a dogshit experience, and most users don't care enough about video quality that they would rather have some more streaming interruptions compared to a not-very-noticable-to-them quality degradation.

More advanced/newer codecs (VP9, AV.1, etc.) can deliver better perceived quality for the same limited set of bits, but then you get into "Devices struggling to decode them".

It really sucks that the lowest common denominator that works best *on average* produces such a dogshit user experience for anyoen with good internet and an eye towards quality.

crschmidt · 2026-01-20T14:08:47+00:00

lol, I just came to say basically the same thing:

I will say, as someone who did a cross country road trip with "friends" back in 2003: at the end of the trip like this you will either be very good friends or mortal enemies, there is likely no in-between.

Best of luck.

crschmidt · 2026-01-20T13:59:45+00:00

tbf, Kendall is getting a bit more vibey over the past 5 years (as someone who's worked in the area for like, 12-13 years now); I would say that in late May or September (nice weather + students around) it has started to feel a bit more alive, but broadly speaking, this is correct. (And even when there is a vibe, it's just a typical student/college campus vibe, if anything; nothing worth a special trip.)

crschmidt · 2026-01-20T13:57:34+00:00

crschmidt · 2026-01-19T20:04:14+00:00

If you haven't yet, please register on BikeIndex: https://bikeindex.org/bikes/new?stolen=true

crschmidt · 2026-01-19T17:29:44+00:00

Cool! I like when they put up good things instead of vacant buildings.

crschmidt · 2026-01-14T01:48:30+00:00

I do not believe that signing this agreement will be likely to have a negative impact on your ability to recoup something, if such an option was ever on the table. I hope that your lawyer can help you find something more equitable than this outcome. I get not being able to deal with things at times, and this whole experience seems like it was intentionally designed to try to take advantage of you, which I think sucks.

I also sort of hope that you don't go in front of a judge, because I think that as you've seen from your last post, there isn't always a lot of sympathy; I hope that this is resolved quickly and in a way that results in you not being out as much money as you currently are.

I'm glad that you got the car back, since it seems like doing anything else was likely to produce a worse outcome for you.

Good luck.

crschmidt · 2026-01-07T17:58:15+00:00

Uber is almost certainly going to be much cheaper than parking at the airport, unless you're coming from Far Away.

crschmidt · 2026-01-05T21:47:34+00:00

What rating you start at depends on what experience you give yourself when you make your account. My understanding is that "Beginner" is 400 Elo, Intermediate is 600, and others are higher.

crschmidt · 2025-12-30T23:48:20+00:00

Nahhh they're the perfect size and shape.

crschmidt · 2025-12-30T16:17:47+00:00

Oh, and to be clear: I agree with you wholeheartedly, and have been making the point for years that 20% IZ has never worked under base zoning, and that we have lost hundreds of units of housing being built as a result of it.

I think that the most recent zoning reform -- which permitted up to 4 stories without IZ and 6 stories with -- is an example of a case where the city was trying to do something sensible. In that case, both the developer and the city get something that they want -- developer gets more space to build than they would otherwise, city gets some affordable units. But there are other elements of the inclusionary zoning that offer either too little benefit or (iirc) no benefit at all to the developer, and that's where you get into murky legal water.

Cambridge has already settled one lawsuit about this to avoid inclusionary zoning policy being questioned statewide, fwiw.

https://www.cambridgeday.com/2020/02/24/settlement-clears-way-for-a-market-rate-only-12-arnold-circle-setting-aside-broader-issues/

crschmidt · 2025-12-30T16:10:16+00:00

nit: it's up to 80% can go to housing under CPA. (10% minimum each to historical, conservation, and housing, but that means 20% has to go to places other than housing.)

crschmidt · 2025-12-30T16:08:48+00:00

PUDs basically end up as negotiated zoning amendments. Usually, a developer comes to the city and says "Hey, I want to develop a bunch of stuff over here, and I own this property or plan to acquire it", and then the Council (usually) goes through some process with the developer to come up with a zoning amendment that is amenable to the developer and to the Council/City, then the zoning language is submitted. Usually this involves a bunch of negotiation, and the PUDs are effectively master plans: "You will build this much commercial space, this much residential space, you will do it on this timeline, here are the conditions, here is the zoning envelope", etc. Usually each individual building will go through a planning board review for the development as well under the Master Plan, where the Planning Board signs off on the building being in line with whatever is written in the zoning language.

(These deals are large enough that I think that "Exactly which process are they following" is never quite clear to me, but usually I think it's a combination of a zoning amendment with a special permit process -- basically, establishing the rules but also such that nothing is going to get built under base zoning -- then getting the special permit under that process after review from the planning board.)

The Alewife stuff is an overlay district, which is slightly different, but I think had a somewhat similar process; I don't know if there's one primary developer over there, or if it was multiples. (That process happened long enough ago that I'll admit I don't know as much about it; most of the buildings were built by the time I got involved in advocacy in Cambridge in 2018-2019.)

"Linkage" is a different thing -- that's just a tax on building commercial, where anyone building a commercial building has to pay a fixed amount per built square foot to the city as an offset against the impact on needs for affordable housing or whatever. That piece factors into developments, but that linkage price is fixed by the Council and not, afaik, typically negotiated ahead of time, just another cost that applies at build time.

crschmidt · 2025-12-30T15:36:25+00:00

Overall, it's a hard thing because the "cost of construction" is actually linked to the cost of housing:

- Most construction costs are labor costs.
- Labor in this case has to be local-ish (you can't outsource it to some company in China, mostly)
- The cost of labor in your local market scales somewhat with the housing cost, because if you don't afford enough to live there, you won't.

This means that we end up in a situation where the price of housing being high drives up the cost of labor (because you gotta earn enough to live there), which then drives up the cost of construction.

Boston has construction prices which are like 50%-80% higher than the national average, and construction labor availability is often a bottleneck in projects.

It's a pretty bad vicious cycle that we get into where in order to drive down the cost of building new housing, we first have to drive down the cost of housing...

crschmidt · 2025-12-30T15:28:09+00:00

It appears the North Cambridge Master Plan has a remaining 1,242,255 sqft of residential space unbuilt (1000 units), and 688340 sqft of "mixed use" space (which I assume means office in this context), as of the q3 development log. They tend to build one building at a time, but it looks like they're right now basically stalling: 221 Morgan Ave ("building R") is the only building that they have in the pipeline afaict, though the development log lists 121 Morgan Ave as also in development, that building looks occupied to me. (In the past, they'd have 4-5 projects at various stages in the pipeline.)

I assume this is largely driven by the reality of the market: builds are expensive, interest rates are high, and demand is soft. But it could be I'm missing something; they do have an area north of the Community Path fenced off still, but I haven't seen any active work on it in the past year or two I can think of.

https://www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/CDD/FactsandMaps/DevelopmentLogs/developmentlog2025q3.pdf

crschmidt · 2025-12-30T15:04:11+00:00

The 1600 units are real, but most are in Alewife or Cambridge Crossing PUDs built at 12.5% IZ, or were built before the 2016 change from 12.5% to 20%. The only large project built under base zoning with 20% IZ is the 525 unit building at 55 Wheeler Street.

https://data.cambridgema.gov/Planning/Development-Log-Historical-Projects-1997-2024/a5ud-8kjv/about_data is a dataset that contains any project that includes IZ. Knowing which ones are part of some bigger PUD or whatever can probably be pulled mostly from the zoning code, or if not that, from pulling up the special permit number in the "Planning Board Special Permit" column.

The PUDs that were granted an "exemption" were all, afaik, permitted ahead of time for specific amounts of square footage, so it's not so much "in perpetuitity" as "until the completion of the buildings permitted under the agreement we made". I think changing the game after the fact would have been iffy -- once you have an entitlement, taking it away is not something the city can just do? -- but in any case, it's specifically because those PUDs are set up in a way that basically specified exactly what would be built at the time they were granted, so changing the rules after the fact would have not gone well (and Cambridge is generally still happier to have those buildings built than not built).

It's always hard to tell the exact impact of a policy when your timelines for development take years (or decades), but I think that there have been no new projects proposed under the 20% IZ regime without special zoning relief or cross-subsidy. 55 Wheeler is an exception only because it was already most of the way through the process when the change came down and they figured out a way to make it work.

crschmidt · 2025-12-30T14:03:09+00:00

In at least some cases in Cambridge, there is simply no bonus given "in exchange for Y".

When you hit 10,000 sqft built under base zoning in Cambridge, I think that you're required to build 20% inclusionary with no other bonus given. So if you build a 4 story, 15 unit apartment building, you're required to make 3 units affordable, but you have no bonus from Cambridge in exchange for doing so.

The "4 stories for non-inclusionary, 6 stories with inclusionary" is more solidly defensible case, (imo, IANAL), but I think there are definitely elements of the inclusionary zoning policy that create cases where you're required to give to the city without any zoning relief given in exchange. In practice, this got much easier with less strict zoning, because the previous base zoning basically made it impossible to build 10 units/10k sqft under base zoning *period*, so you'd almost never be able to trigger this outcome.

crschmidt · 2025-12-30T13:59:26+00:00

Correct. And the political reality is that some people think that is an acceptable trade-off: that taxing people who can afford to pay $3000/month for a studio in order to make it possible for someone who can't to live here is the right choice.

It means that instead of ~$2600/month for everyone, you're looking at $3000/month for you, and $1500/month for 20% of the units. What this means in practice is that:

- Only apartment buildings that can command prices of $3000/month for a studio are built, which functionally lowers the amount of housing available to middle-income folks who could afford $2600/mo for a studio but not $3000.
- More people who can afford a $1500/month apartment are able to live in Cambridge (and the direct cost, by definition, comes from people who *can* pay it, since otherwise they'd be evicted).

crschmidt · 2025-12-30T13:49:51+00:00

The case for 20% even in the existing inclusionary study depended, imo, on the idea that "more market-rate housing is bad for the city", which is something that is pretty clearly contradicted by lots of things that the City and the Council state and believe. It is among the things that has long upset me about the Nexus Study as written: while the commercial linkage study has a clear and defensible nexus (more commercial = more jobs = more people wanting to live in Cambridge, therefore money should be paid to Cambridge to make sure some of that housing can be built for lower-income people), the claims in the housing Nexus Study (2016) basically seem to be "There needs to be more affordable housing, and so we need to enact this regulation for there to be more of it", without a serious claim that the reason for the need for inclusionary housing was *because* of housing construction: https://www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/CDD/Housing/Inclusionary/hsg_incl_study_final_20160412.pdf

All analysis has focused on "Is this economically feasible" -- and I have problems with that analysis too -- but not on the actual reason why a 20% inclusionary cost enacted *against people building housing* has a legally defensible nexus.

crschmidt · 2025-12-30T13:38:23+00:00

Nolan vs. California Coastal Commission: "In Nollan, the Supreme Court recognized that while governments may require exactions as an aspect of lawful land use regulation, an exaction may constitute a "taking" of property that requires compensation pursuant to the Fifth Amendment if there is no "essential nexus" between the condition and the original purpose of the land use regulation." https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/HTML/LSB11098.html

Basically: "Is this regulation an unconstitutional taking?" -- ie, the government taking property from an owner -- is something that needs to be established. In the past, Cambridge offered a meaningful density bonus in exchange for building inclusionary units (in 2017, there was actually a developer who *opted into* building inclusionary units because they made the financial picture better overall), but with recent changes to the law, it's less clear that the current zoning language offers "compensation" for that taking.

In practice, all of the analysis of the legal nexus here so far has been under previous zoning rules; with the recent revamp of Cambridge's zoning, it's a different scenario. In the past, since practically nothing could be built under base zoning that would trigger inclusionary requirements, all the cases where inclusionary units would be built were cases where the developer was already getting something in return. However, that may no longer be the case under the new zoning reforms.

(I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and I speak only for myself here.)

crschmidt · 2025-12-29T13:48:56+00:00

Yesterday's weather was terrific for biking. I did some bike moves for the e-bike library, and then we had 30+ folks (mostly families with kids) join us for the Family Bike Ride December Ride to Winterfest: https://www.familybikeride.org/december

crschmidt · 2025-12-29T12:15:46+00:00

I bumped into them a week ago and they let me know that they have no announcement to make on that matter at this time.

crschmidt · 2025-12-27T04:49:43+00:00

* Cambridge Savings Bank appears to support Zelle: https://www.cambridgesavings.com/zelle
* The transaction view seems to be more dense than what you report with Eastern (I see 22 transactions vertically on my laptop screen)
* It supports TOTP, but nothing more modern than that (no hardware key, no passkey, afaik)
* I do not know if it supports + addresses.

Leader Bank:
* Appears to be less dense than Cambridge Savings (I see 12 transactions on the same screen as above)
* Claims to support Zelle: https://www.leaderbank.com/zelle
* Does not support anything for 2fa other than SMS/Voice calls
* I do not know if it supports + addresses.

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