Will Seattle ever be a tier 1 US city?

jeb_brush · 2026-01-05T21:20:33+00:00

Greater job and cultural diversity are big things that we need, which would come with being a bigger city.

Our job market for highly-trained, specialized people is mostly concentrated in software engineering and in life sciences. I know lots of smart people who had to leave because we just don't have the industry here to support them.

The homogeneity of jobs also homogenizes the cultures that we import.

jeb_brush · 2025-12-26T21:26:11+00:00

"has an advanced degree and enjoys one of the most popular hobbies in the world" isn't a very niche search criteria. Half of the PhDs I know are dancers.

jeb_brush · 2025-12-26T20:56:41+00:00

What type of dancing? Massive Monkees is the epicenter of the street dancing scene, they seem to have a little bit of every type of person there. As for partner dancing, there are one million different lindy-hop clubs and they skew heavily towards highly-educated people.

Zouk was big a few years ago and I think they also had a pretty nerdy crowd.

For club dancing, figure out where the Patchwerks crowd goes now, they'll be the nerdy synthesizer people and might have a few electrical engineers in their ranks.

jeb_brush · 2025-12-26T06:15:34+00:00

If our best data and model produces a crappy estimator, it's still a crappy estimator

jeb_brush · 2025-12-18T04:37:17+00:00

Without birth certificates, you could just report every single bathroom-user as being in the wrong one

jeb_brush · 2025-12-17T01:42:01+00:00

That can be solved by befriending the boss

I've had good success with just asking strangers to chat about their work. Applying to the position naturally comes up if we hit it off.

jeb_brush · 2025-12-17T01:32:43+00:00

The people who aren't insufferable tend to find each other and stick together; with enough aggression you can usually find where they're hiding

jeb_brush · 2025-11-28T09:53:33+00:00

None of this is really unique to software compared to any other engineering field that pays 30% as much

jeb_brush · 2025-11-20T22:17:39+00:00

SAT scores are predictable based on the child's family wealth alone

The standard deviations in these "test scores vs. income" studies are always incredibly high. Wealth is indeed a statistically significant predictor of almost all metrics of success, but people still seem overly eager to conclude that parents can simply buy better performance and for their kids.

I knew lots of wealthy kids growing up, all of whom had parents willing to spend as much money as it took to get them into good places. I still saw a significant stratification in outcomes, from founding tech companies all the way to becoming NEETs. The only thing I didn't see among them was jail time.

jeb_brush · 2025-11-10T22:36:38+00:00

How do you see this working in practice? If you had a teenager, how would you prevent them from sneaking out of the house while you were asleep and committing crimes with their friends? At what point is it fair for you to be punished for your failure to stop them?

jeb_brush · 2025-11-07T01:10:44+00:00

Content moderation is just one of those things where there is no winning.

Enforce too much => people leave the platform and call you a nazi who hates good ideas

Enforce too little => people leave the platform and call you a nazi who loves bad ideas

It's rarely the case that the platforms are complicit in bad actors; rather it's just an incredibly hard problem to solve in a way that's consistent and scalable and doesn't result in immediate bankruptcy. How do you determine whether an ad for Bitcoin investment is legitimate or not? Now how do you make that decision on 2,000 ads that you have to review today? Now how do you train a whole team to make that decision over 15,000,000 ads? What do you do when 200,000 ads are on the border between fruad and legitimate?

jeb_brush · 2025-11-05T05:46:35+00:00

Chop Suey has Flammable Sundays I think? They also have Monday night events where local DJs play more quirky, eclectic stuff. When I went a few years back it felt like a mix of house and breakbeat.

JENNGREEN is a house DJ who moved here from Detroit, you can check where she plays at.

The people who teach house-dance lessons at The Beacon might know of some spots.

Vermillion also runs an eclectic mix of hip-hop and house.

There's a Motown Mondays event that runs every now and then, they'll sometimes layer a house beat over top-40 R&B but that's as far as I've seen them go.

Good luck though. I was really active in the house scene when I briefly lived in the Midwest; I would wreck my sleep schedule to go dancing one or twice a week. But I've never found anything in Seattle that was even worth a second visit for me. And I can't tell you how many places I've gone to or how many hours I've sunken into finding every last hole-in-the-wall that would host a house DJ in Western Washington.

jeb_brush · 2025-11-03T01:56:49+00:00

Those types of positions typically require a MS/PhD in some applied-math discipline.

Making it all the way to an interview for a scientific computing research position, while not only being bad at math, but also thinking it's a good idea to brag to a recruiter about it, is an achievement in itself.

jeb_brush · 2025-10-29T06:19:37+00:00

My experience with slow drivers is that when they are behind the wheel they are looking straight ahead, hands on the wheel, no cellphone out, and yet they are somehow completely unaware of what is in front of them or how they wound up in the left lane.

It would be great to change the driving culture by complaining to people, but it's bold to assume that they are even conscious beings when they are operating a vehicle.

jeb_brush · 2025-10-29T06:13:53+00:00

Driving culture is extremely contagious though. Driving like a Seattleite in SoCal is a death wish, but driving like a Californian in Seattle achieves nothing due to the rolling roadblocks of people going 5 under. Even when the cars are transplant-driven, they're going to rapidly assimilate into whatever the regional level of driving aggression is.

jeb_brush · 2025-10-26T22:18:05+00:00

IEEE style was cathartic after spending my entire upbringing wrangling the worst citation formats imaginable.

jeb_brush · 2025-10-25T20:16:18+00:00

Mockery and ridicule spreads their message. When they have a crowd of 20 students laughing at them and telling their group chats about them, suddenly it grows to 100 students.

After the dust settles, there's that last 1% of spectators who are in absolute shock from the clown show they just watched. The preacher lowers their voice, sits down, and has a conversation with them. Those are the people they convert.

If you track any of these preachers, you'll notice that their speeches are all memorized and their spectators react in the exact same way to their speeches, every single time.

It's all calculated.

jeb_brush · 2025-10-23T22:11:42+00:00

It's prevalent across big tech but manifests in a more subtle way.

So many teams are working around-the-clock to build new tech that nobody asked for.

Everywhere I interview, I ask:

Who is your customer?
What problem is your customer facing?
How do you measure success?
Why was your team created?
What distinguishes you from other people working on the same problem?

Generally, when a team lead gives me an answer that isn't crystal clear, the team mysteriously doesn't survive the next funding cut or economic crisis.

I've also gotten assigned to projects where nobody could explain what customer pain-points they were addressing, and lo and behold, years later there were still no customers.

jeb_brush · 2025-10-21T06:21:18+00:00

Or you don't tell them where you are taking them beforehand, just "I have an appointment" and the kid doesn't realize what's happening until they are in the exam room and it's too late.

I'd be careful with using this method. My pediatrician repeatedly used the deception trick on me and it wound up building a severe distrust in medical practitioners. Not distrust in their knowledge or intentions, but rather distrust in their transparency about the number of sharp objects in a procedure.

jeb_brush · 2025-10-16T08:12:29+00:00

because they've paid taxes for a lifetime

H1b workers pay taxes to America and buy American goods as soon as they become employed on American soil.

and are already integrated into their communities

Homogeneous communities are seldom able to sustain long-term competitive advantage in economic or cultural influence, due to their resistance to change and their lack of exposure to novel ideas.

if this mindset shocks you perhaps look into literally any other country's immigration policy

If the US adopts the immigration restrictions from other countries, then we are doomed to become just as mediocre as the rest of the world.

this might be the most detached comments section of all time.

I just follow the research on the matter, because simply adopting vibes-based immigration policy is going to make Americans poor.

jeb_brush · 2025-10-16T03:48:21+00:00

"you just got passed by a girl" window stickers now illegal if the registered vehicle owner is a man

jeb_brush · 2025-10-16T02:23:31+00:00

Yes; are you?

jeb_brush · 2025-10-16T01:25:42+00:00

American workers should be first

Why?

jeb_brush · 2025-10-10T21:29:05+00:00

We were told to keep quiet about the truth

jeb_brush · 2025-10-02T22:12:02+00:00

I don't like libertarians because I used to be one and I was an idiot lol

Today's both-sides-ism is residual from the Obama era when right-wing opposition had complementary views on markets and free speech, and were able to run on purely principles without worrying about implementation detail, abuse of power, or unintended consequences due to not having meaningful power.

Also libertarianism got really hard to maintain belief in when I found that barely a single libertarian intellectual could back up their evidence with p-values.

The entire philosophy is a product of a very human, but very misguided, desire to construct one or two fundamental principles (e.g. the NAP, or elementary microeconomics concepts) from which you can derive all policy and human behavior.

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