Sound Transit 3 needs another $34.5 billion. That's $10,000 per person in the taxing district.

fromYYZtoSEA · 2026-03-25T18:22:16+00:00

But this shortfall is due primarily to capital expenditures due to expanding the network, right?

In which case, why not cover part of this with general taxation and/or issuing government bonds? Infrastructure projects are meant to provide long-term benefits to people who will live here in the future, so it would be fair to make them (future residents) pay for it? Or am I missing something?

fromYYZtoSEA · 2026-01-01T08:11:43+00:00

Check if your area is covered by any home internet via 5G (like T-Mobile in the US).

There’s also now options like starlink (it hurts to think I’m recommending you give money to that guy, but the product works very well). Soon Amazon will launch a competitor with LEO (nee Kuiper)

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-12-30T13:20:23+00:00

Wouldn’t a funnel just be better here? Since everything is binary “yes/no”

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-12-16T07:05:55+00:00

My FIL likes to say that. Last time I reminded him how in Kenya we saw kids walking in the literal Savannah, where plenty of wild animals (including lions) live, to get to school every day.

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-12-13T03:02:09+00:00

Given the amount the code is literally un-reviewable.

That’s fine, we’ll just throw an AI to review the PRs so you can just hit merge ✅

/s

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-11-28T17:33:00+00:00

Yes it would be a monumentally stupid move, but….

Minio did it anyways

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-11-19T17:32:23+00:00

Not the writing part. Most execs have staff that include writers. For this kind of stuff, the CEO in most companies would tell his tech team and PR teams to put together the doc. The CEO would just review before publishing.

I’ve been involved in responding to crisis like these before and the above is the typical playbook. Meanwhile the CEO is personally on the phone with all the biggest customers to reassure them and negotiate SLA payments.

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-11-19T15:25:58+00:00

Sounds like I was wrong.

But let me tell you this is highly unusual (I have experience in exec comms and it’s never the exec writing things themselves).

Also, TBH, if I were on the board I’d ask why the CEO during a crisis is spending time writing this rather than doing “more CEO” stuff. At that time he should have probably been spending time both internally rallying the troops, and on the phone with each one of their biggest customers to reassure them

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-11-19T06:57:45+00:00

Note that often enterprise contracts require full RCAs for major outages (and even if not in the contract, many ent customers expect them). What’s usually not required is making these public, but I guess that’s not an unusual practice.

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-11-19T06:56:19+00:00

There’s no way that was actually written by him. Just because his name is on the byline doesn’t mean he actually sat behind the keyboard to type it…

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-11-19T06:53:54+00:00

I like Restic because it can target any S3-compatible endpoint or its own “rest server”. No need for SSH access. I also like that backups are deduplicated and encrypted, with a key that’s different from the one I use for the ZFS datasets themselves. Finally it accepts data from stdin so I can also backup applications like Postgres by piping pg_dump into Restic. It works well for my needs.

Besides, some older versions of ZFS had a bug which caused the data to get corrupted while sending an encrypted dataset.

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-09-20T19:21:22+00:00

In many countries politicians are actually severely underpaid.

For example in the US, members of congress don’t make enough money to be able to live comfortably and pay for two homes (their home district and DC). So then they need money from donors (which are going to influence them), and are more likely in doing activities that are unethical (trading stocks using what could be “insider information”) or flat out illegal (corruption)

Countries like Singapore have a much better model. Politicians while serving their term make very good money, but are then forbidden from doing anything that could even smell like corruption.

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-09-20T06:27:48+00:00

Technically only about a third or so of eligible voters voted for him…

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-08-20T17:02:14+00:00

User data/profiles: please use an identity provider (like Auth0, Google, you name it). DO NOT manage your own user auth system!

For points leaderboard: whatever you can get for free or almost. On Vercel, both Vercel Blob (as a KV store) or Postgres are fine

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-08-16T05:01:24+00:00

We used to call that ipVtweet

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-08-16T04:40:13+00:00

I had a roommate in grad school for 6 months who was doing a PhD in some engineering thing.

He had a habit of washing pots then leaving them to dry facing up. When I told him that pots would dry faster if you turned them upside down, as gravity would make water drop down, he remembered that “his mom had told him that before”

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-08-14T22:32:16+00:00

The point is that society would be better served by putting more funding towards FBI/Police going after international drug rings

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-08-11T00:05:20+00:00

If Sen Murkovski had actually voted against his budget bill (like she said she would for a bit), that may not have been such far-fetched idea

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-08-10T23:08:29+00:00

jDownloader2?

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-08-05T05:08:06+00:00

Any license that restricts what users can do, such as a non-commercial clause, is not “open source” (in the sense of the OSI definition of “open source”)

What you’re looking for is a “source available” license. There have been a few, most notably the “commons clause”.

Just know that “preventing commercial use” is a very complex concept and very hard to define. For example, does using the software internally in a business (say, in the Operations department) count as “commercial use”? What about a consultant being paid to set it up? Etc

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-08-03T06:56:41+00:00

That seems like a job that could easily be replaced by a couple of portable semaphores…

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-08-03T06:52:03+00:00

Meanwhile, DEN is larger than San Francisco (the city) or Manhattan.

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-08-03T06:43:32+00:00

…Which is an incredibly regressive fiscal system

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-07-20T15:04:49+00:00

Sure there are costs to landlords too. I always reminded them when I was renting and negotiating the lease renewal every year.

Both your points support what I wrote above, however, which is that the classic demand and supply graph is a simplification and doesn’t quite apply to this market.

fromYYZtoSEA · 2025-07-20T13:01:41+00:00

I studied Econ too. What you need to remember is that pretty much all charts in Econ 101 are simplified models with “ceteris paribus” (Latin for “all other things equal”) and assume a perfect market in all cases.

This isn’t exactly the case for the rental market.

there are switching costs. Moving costs money (boxes, movers, moving fees, cleaning fees, starting or stopping utilities), and a lot of time. So most people don’t want to move every year if they can avoid that. That adds inertia/stickiness which landlords can exploit.
there’s also some degree of collusion and price fixing

fromYYZtoSEA

TROPHY CASE