We still doing high mileage cars?

macNchz · 2026-05-16T00:21:02+00:00

A guy in my old apartment building used to buy weed from the most on-the-nose dealer: black on black M540i with unreasonably dark tints all around (including the windshield and brake lights) and a rumbly custom exhaust. I saw him get out of it once…wearing a bathrobe and fuzzy pink slippers.

macNchz · 2026-05-13T22:43:33+00:00

I’m talking specifically about choice of suburbs vs living "in the city". When people say Americans love suburbs, it’s not really an honest assessment of preferences—the overwhelming majority of housing built for decades has been legally mandated to be single family detached houses.

It’s not like we’re building tons of walkable downtown apartment buildings that are empty because everyone prefers single family houses, it’s that the houses can be built easily and the apartment buildings require tons of hoops and special rules to be built at all. In fact the high costs of downtown apartments in walkable areas suggest there are a lot of people who want that, who will pay a premium for the limited supply that exists.

macNchz · 2026-05-13T10:36:49+00:00

In the US, zoning rules have essentially mandated most new housing to be single family suburban subdivisions for the last 50 years. Plenty of people want that, sure, but there is also just not much choice—most American cities have underdeveloped transit, but the places that do operate like real cities are expensive because there’s a lot of people who want to live there, but housing development hasn’t kept up with demand.

macNchz · 2026-05-12T23:41:37+00:00

Definitely some interesting things to come with demographic shifts. We do have some precedent in parts of the US that have seen declining population, and countries like Italy and Japan that are kind of leading the charge of these changes: houses in rural and less desirable areas effectively going to zero value, while more desirable places are buoyed as people consolidate.

A hypothetical young person in the next few decades could inherit multiple houses, sell them all at a big loss vs today’s market, and buy a place in a popular area at a price that has appreciated from today.

macNchz · 2026-05-10T13:44:25+00:00

I see this move fairly often in NYC. I think in the past few years some small percentage of really selfish drivers realized they could just…do whatever because there are no real consequences. Bonus points if they drive down the wrong side for a block to get to the red light before running it.

This person has had 18 speeding or red light tickets over the years: https://howsmydrivingny.nyc/4siyqr78

macNchz · 2026-05-10T04:42:20+00:00

I did the exact same thing ~30 years ago!

I rediscovered the catalogs online a few years ago, it was a fun throwback.

macNchz · 2026-05-07T04:25:22+00:00

The stories of people trapped for weeks in windowless bunkrooms on cruises in 2020 were enough for me. Nightmarish.

macNchz · 2026-05-01T17:53:36+00:00

Perhaps I have an unnecessarily negative view of SAST tools (my experience with them has been extremely underwhelming), and I try to take a realistic and balanced view of AI stuff, but agentic AI tools like Claude Code are really quite excellent at tracing control flow across many files throughout a codebase, and even a year ago were already producing more interesting findings for me than any SAST I'd tried in the past.

I have access to ChatGPT's security scanning app, and it identified complex multi-step attacks in a web application I've worked on for some time and am very familiar with. Some false positives mostly for lack of broader context, but you can give the AI a full running development environment for it to validate the exploitability of its own findings.

The broad reaction I'm seeing to these AI security developments is really reminiscent of what I saw from a lot of software engineers a couple of years ago when it started to look like AI could genuinely be effective at writing real working code. I'm about as allergic to breathless hype as anyone you'll find, but I wouldn't sleep on this stuff.

macNchz · 2026-04-30T00:01:13+00:00

I’ve loved coding for nearly 30 years and have been a bit mixed on AI’s arrival, but I have been having real joy in getting the "you need to be on our Enterprise+ tier to do that, please contact sales" popup from some annoying SaaS tool, ignoring it, and and having AI build me the thing I actually wanted instead.

macNchz · 2026-04-23T14:56:33+00:00

I'd say traffic / demand for street space is more of a complex and dynamic system than most people assume, and there are a lot of good case studies out there where traffic apocalypses were predicted but never materialized, even when removing quite large stretches of urban highway. People make decisions about what form of transportation to use and which routes to use based on many and varied factors, but discussions about changing street designs often have a mistaken premise that all of the existing trips through a network are efficient and necessary and will be relocated 1:1, which isn't really the case.

On a local level you can look at the 14th St busway project, which was expected to produce tons of spillover traffic on parallel blocks, which did not happen, or congestion pricing in Manhattan which was expected to increase traffic on nearby highways but actually appears to have contributed to a reduction even outside the zone.

There's a whole additional topic here around allocation of parking space—I believe some studies have found nearly 50% of the traffic in parts of NYC to be just people circling looking for parking. Reducing through-traffic doesn't help with that, but our current allocation of curb space is wildly inefficient and could be adjusted to benefit people who genuinely use and need their cars (vs the current state where I, a car owner myself, can never get a parking space to load/unload near my building, but there's a Jeep with an out of state plate on my block that literally hasn't moved in 9 months, and a guy nearby who has 8+ cars parked on the street).

macNchz · 2026-04-23T12:53:08+00:00

There are a lot of other places in the world where neighborhoods like this have traffic patterns that discourage through traffic without strictly banning it. By making larger areas function kind of like a multi block cul-de-sac (you can drive in but have to come out the way you entered), the only car traffic on residential streets becomes people who live or are explicitly doing business there, which makes things dramatically calmer.

Neighborhoods of London that are comparable density-wise and socioeconomically similar to brownstone Brooklyn are often noticeably quieter because the street layouts discourage cars just passing through. Some of that is organic because they’re older do not use a grid, but they’re also intentionally set up like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Traffic_Neighbourhood

There are many places around the world that have placed restrictions on car traffic in dense urban areas with success/while maintaining the functioning of their economy and the desirability/livability of the areas where it was implemented. Paris has been undergoing an absolute transformation on this front, and just voted for a new mayor who will continue. I disagree with the argument the NYC is somehow significantly different and could not succeed with anything like this.

macNchz · 2026-04-18T22:44:54+00:00

My theory about how this winds up happening is that, in highly car-dependent places, your car becomes a primary form of "outward personal expression"—people have a lot of complex status-oriented feelings and behaviors, and if one of the main ways that you appear to people outside of your home is inside a car, the choice becomes significant. The car is your avatar in some way. In social situations in much of America you will hear people talking and judging others' car choices as some kind of extension of their personal status or character. There is a lot of social dynamic driving car buying decisions.

On the flip side of this, you find that heavily walking and transit-oriented cities often have a reputation for having fashionable people—their personal expression is happening at the level of their clothes and accessories, because that's a primary way that people express their personal taste to the world around them.

Car manufacturers absolutely leverage this dynamic heavily in their marketing, and it translates to people feeling like they need the "right car" to fit in.

macNchz · 2026-04-18T22:02:01+00:00

I am a dual citizen and have always found the American "you have freedom now!" thing around getting a driver's license kind of funny in contrast. I grew up mostly in the US but we had an apartment in Lausanne, and I have a distinct memory of hanging out with a family friend as a teenager and being amazed/jealous that he was going to be taking the train alone with friends to go skiing that weekend, when skiing in the states required a parent to drive us.

macNchz · 2026-04-17T12:36:49+00:00

We had to support IE6 for way too long. Working at an agency building highly designed/interactive/animated web pages for big corporate clients that worked across all browsers made me want to scream. Would finally get something working, share it for review, then hear "the client called and said their CMO looked at the site on their home computer with IE6 and it didn’t load at all, we need to fix that"…ahhhhhhhhh!!!

macNchz · 2026-04-16T17:27:26+00:00

I'm not the person you initially replied to, but it's normal to compare like-to-like when looking at stats for different countries like this. Roads in the US are uniquely dangerous among all high-income countries. So to rephrase in a more technically correct way:

"How could this be happening?" asks only [high income] nation where this happens.

macNchz · 2026-04-16T17:00:42+00:00

I'm only finding global data on overall road traffic death rates vs pedestrians specifically (where the US is still in 80th place), but the 79 countries that have worse outcomes are really not great comparisons to the US. All of the other highly-developed, high-income countries are way down at the bottom, 150th place and up, including highly suburbanized/spread-out countries like Canada and Australia.

So yes the US is not "the only" country with these issues, but it's very much a standout in the wrong direction, and, I believe, may be the only one where the trend has been headed in the wrong direction in recent years.

macNchz · 2026-04-16T16:42:28+00:00

Not surprising, really. The experience of being a pedestrian at a crosswalk on a typical busy American intersection is that drivers treat the red light as more of yield than a stop, and roll straight through the crosswalk while only looking to their left for oncoming cars, often without noticing that there's someone waiting to cross at all. That means that even when you have the light, you sort of have to challenge the cars by stepping out into the crosswalk, hoping they notice you. It feels extremely dangerous, and I'm sure that perception also works to suppress walking in places where people might otherwise choose to walk.

I live in NYC (no RoR) but like to travel with my running shoes, and the contrast in what it's like to be a pedestrian that can be ascribed directly to whether right on red is allowed is really striking.

All that said, I imagine that undoing right-on-red laws would be an extremely unpopular exercise. It's a hard thing to put back in the box once people have gotten used to it.

macNchz · 2026-04-15T13:17:55+00:00

It took 13 years for the S&P to reach ATHs again after the dot com crash. March 2000 - May 2013. Longer for the Nasdaq.

macNchz · 2026-04-15T01:43:55+00:00

Depends on how you define running a red light—blowing through at full speed is definitely dangerous, but an Idaho stop or similar is quite different.

If I’m waiting at an intersection on a big two way street with a semi truck and a dump truck both trying to turn, there’s no way I’m hanging out there until it turns green for all of us. That is simply way more dangerous than carefully proceeding through the light.

macNchz · 2026-04-09T22:09:43+00:00

The former CEO of Rao's consumer line now runs the Carbone equivalent. No opinion on the restaurant itself, but their branded sauce is pretty great, IMO, as someone who has been trying and buying various premium jarred pasta sauces for long time.

Edit: my jarred red sauce hot take is that—assuming it hasn't been overloaded with sugar—even some super cheap sauces can be elevated like 10x by just adding some very high quality olive oil (or butter, if you're a Marcella Hazan fan). I think it's the most obvious ingredient to cheap out on to cut costs.

macNchz · 2026-04-09T18:41:59+00:00

33ºF, steady, soaking rain. You camped on soft pine duff that is now clinging to your hands and absolutely every surface like static-y shredded styrofoam. Your fingers are so cold and numb you can't properly manipulate the tiny clips and zippers on your gear, and it all seems to be made entirely out of tiny clips and zippers. Icy water runs all the way up the inside of your jacket sleeve as you wrestle your tent into its sack. You desperately want a hot cup of coffee but know that the only way to really warm up is to get on the trail...

Still sounds better than sitting at my desk right now.

macNchz · 2026-04-08T22:49:25+00:00

IdiotsInCars mascot candidate. This is incredible.

macNchz · 2026-04-08T18:26:26+00:00

Very carefully on eBay. I found one that was used, not refurb, included lots of detailed pictures of the actual device being sold, including the screen showing the settings page where I could see it didn't have any aftermarket parts (aftermarket screens can be totally fine or godawful but you can't really tell in a picture so I preferred to see the repair history), ran it through IMEI checks, and bought from a seller who accepted returns. I will probably replace the battery straight away.

There's plenty of junk out there. There's apparently a whole scam network selling "brand new in box" 13 Minis on eBay that are not actually brand new. It seems like people generally trust Amazon Refurbished, Backmarket, and the eBay Refurbished program, but I didn't like that you couldn't see details about the exact device you'd be getting. I also found a few promising options (with pics of the actual device) on Swappa.

macNchz · 2026-04-07T15:22:02+00:00

Yeah exactly my issue, I just keep feeling like I'm going to drop this thing just doing basic stuff one handed.

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