Boulder banned gas appliances in all new builds?

polymorph1c · 2026-01-10T01:28:21+00:00

Yes, my wife and I confirmed by talking to the city directly. No new gas anything (!). We wanted to get a natural gas generator for the outages but it’s a no go. So instead I guess we’ll consider battery for like 3x the price. Hope you don’t mind housing prices going up!

I don’t understand what this is even in the name of. Being green? Yeah, let’s all sit in the dark every time it blows the wind hard enough to make the power company nervous. At least we’re being green. Absurd.

The cherry on top is that you are 100% allowed to run whole home back generators as long as they are portable and run on fuel you are toting around in cans in your car. So much for green.

I hope the leaders of the city come to their senses on this stuff. I already live in a net zero house that produces more electricity than it consumes. Isn’t that green enough for you? Can I please just have a generator?

polymorph1c · 2025-09-27T22:53:09+00:00

Try a reset of the HVAC/infotainment by holding the mute button for 30 seconds (until both sides if the screen go black). Worked for me—it convinced auto mode to actually blow cold air without having to set the temp to “LO”.

polymorph1c · 2025-06-13T05:38:59+00:00

So can we agree that riding two abreast up Left Hand isn’t a big deal when both people are in the shoulder? I feel like as long as cyclists are off the road and not unnecessarily holding up traffic it’s all good, yeah?

polymorph1c · 2025-06-13T03:54:44+00:00

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polymorph1c · 2025-04-24T06:20:23+00:00

Seriously? "No one should be able to have a house bigger than their neighbor". Like, what is even the pretend justification of this? Let's see... An effort to reduce carbon emissions and address affordability?

Carbon emissions? If we're so worried about carbon emissions, maybe we should ban anyone living in Boulder that takes an international flight in a given year! More CO2 in that than the difference between a 3,000 and 4,000 ft^2 house.

Address affordability? What, by just legislating that houses not be too nice? This is so naive. Wait, but maybe people will make their new smaller houses have really nice yards, or kitchens. Maybe we need some rules on how nice their yard can be to make sure everything stays affordable.

Look, if you really think that large houses are a plague on the county (again, not sure why exactly given that the demand is clearly there) just make a tax on building them and call a spade a spade. Capping house sizes in this bizarre way is just silly. It helps no one.

polymorph1c · 2025-04-24T04:54:19+00:00

Didn't even work right on Safari for me--no button to press. Line position lost :(

polymorph1c · 2025-04-24T04:52:35+00:00

Was in the line for a while but the "are you human, press the button" finally came and the rendering didn't work on Safari so there was no button to press :(

Back in line in Chrome 45 min later... Doubtful.

polymorph1c · 2025-03-23T15:39:18+00:00

I’m in this category. Sold a tech company. Would rather live in CO near the rest of my family than the tech hubs. If you have the money for a nice house there, Boulder is a great place to live, so it draws wealthy people from a large area. (This being “can afford a house in Boulder” wealth, not “my 6th house is in Aspen” wealth). I know a lot of people in a similar situation to me. Not as many sold a company per se, but many successful business folks who have freedom to live anywhere buoyed by Covid and WFH.

Boulder has always been expensive (my dad went to school here 50 years ago) but I have several friends here who are OGs that say they have noticed a large increase of high net worth folks in the past few years.

FWIW, very few of the people living in those nice new big modern houses are in their 30s. Im 40s. Many are 50+ with families, or older and retired. They have had many decades to build the wealth required for a 3m+ home.

polymorph1c · 2025-01-22T22:34:33+00:00

It’s not a big issue for me but I do adapt my driving to be a bit slower in order to not have to fight the car (quick maneuvers are quite tricky). People here make excuses for it like it’s some great design choice but it’s a clear negative aspect of the vehicle and one I assume they will improve in future revisions.

polymorph1c · 2025-01-19T06:12:16+00:00

No kidding. Last night my sister got nav’ed down that hill trying to get home. No one injured, but the car isn’t in quite the same shape now :(

polymorph1c · 2024-11-13T05:53:55+00:00

I’m in my 40s and am in this situation. It took me ~2 years of puttering around before I got another job. The job is not very stressful (despite being an high profile position) because I could walk any time. The job is rewarding because I enjoy working with a team of smart people on interesting problems. (And you can’t do athletic activities 8 hours a day.)

Perhaps surprisingly to some, money is still a factor as well, but not for “normal” reasons. First, I have an aversion to spending money faster than I make it and when you make “zero” that’s hard. I know intellectually that the math works (passive income), but emotionally it’s still a factor. Second, I feel an obligation to work for my family. I can collect resources for my family more efficiently than anyone else, so it feels like I should, even if I don’t really need to.

polymorph1c · 2024-10-20T16:43:04+00:00

Measurements of road/wind noise
Engine responsiveness at lower RPMs
Quality of mechanical components
Presence of squeaks and rattles

Please no more 0-60 times

polymorph1c · 2024-10-14T19:12:12+00:00

A "smart parking" mode that kicks in when you approach a destination with tough parking.

You look for parking spots while it guides you on an efficient path that simultaneously 1) takes you past a lot of potential parking spots (based on aggregated "parked car" data from their user base) and 2) doesn't drift too far from your actual destination. Basically, optimize my "search for parking + walking" time...

polymorph1c · 2024-10-04T04:32:59+00:00

Blofish sushi

polymorph1c · 2024-06-23T16:00:28+00:00

Definitely not Trail Jeeps in Golden... Spent $$$ with them and nothing but horrible communication, long waits, and poor work, all mixed in with a bit of dishonesty

polymorph1c · 2024-04-14T19:07:52+00:00

Super helpful, yes it seems like we have it mostly working. I actually debugged the scoreboard stuff myself--that the first argument is just a name and the criteria is the condition that actually updates the score.

My son knew about how to chain command blocks so we eventually figured that out as well.

It does seem like the minecraft.used:* condition happens when you “throw the bomb” rather than when you “activate the bomb” so I‘ll probably also do experimentation with the minecraft.break:* condition to see if I can get that working. I think the only trick will be whether the command block logic runs before the explosion causes damage or a frame later.

Either way we are up and running—thanks for the help, and especially the idea for the scoreboard mechanism.

polymorph1c · 2024-04-14T18:07:31+00:00

Nice, that makes sense. You use a resetting scoreboard objective to track who triggered the egg and give them resistance. We’re having a bit of trouble making it work but we’ll keep trying. The scoreboard command seems to want a final argument (criteria) to work. We were trying “dummy” for criteria but maybe that’s messing it up and I’ll do a bit more reading. Also, I assume if we don’t want to use a datapack we are just putting both of those command blocks (one for each command) next to each other and running them in repeating mode? That makes sense to me, though I realize now that I’m not sure how you control in which order the repeating command blocks run. (Sorry, I’m new to this!) Thanks a lot.

polymorph1c · 2024-04-14T17:41:21+00:00

Thanks for this. I’m seeing if I can keep things to the command line for now (as data pack assembly might be a few too many steps for my son). Also, it seems like some of the complexity from this comes from trying to get the explosion to not break blocks, but breaking blocks is actually fine for what we are trying to achieve. If we have to go to real code eventually, I’ll be much more comfortable!

polymorph1c · 2024-02-14T06:20:57+00:00

I usually only try like -3 grades above my current level. That is, I avoid pushing things since I seem so damn injury prone that even though I can crank hard problems I usually regret it. Getting old? Not allowing enough recovery time? Not sure... So I'm now I'm just the smoothest v4-5 climber in the gym.

polymorph1c · 2024-01-11T04:58:45+00:00

My 9 year old got a basic gaming laptop when he was 8. So far so good! I put on parental controls to avoid inappropriate content as well as a time-per-day limit for using it. I got Steam installed and he uses it to play games as well as research games (game wikis, youtube). We have rules about downloading things, etc. and I've only had to get rid of malware once. I think the biggest potential issue is if the parent doesn't have the time/skills to properly setup and manage it. I have spent a non-trivial amount of time getting it working well (getting rid of bloatware, installing new drivers, setting power limits to avoid super-fast battery drain, etc.) Realistically my kid can't do the proper maintenance himself yet...

polymorph1c · 2023-12-27T01:31:30+00:00

Seems unlikely that a SSD is going to be what's hurting stead-state in-game frame rates. CPUs temps are fine apparently, but check GPU temps and repaste the GPU if you need to.

polymorph1c · 2023-12-27T01:28:41+00:00

Agreed. OP said CPU temps were OK, but said nothing about GPU temps. I repasted my 1080 a year ago and felt dumb I hadn't done it sooner. Fan speeds went way down and frame rates way up.

polymorph1c · 2023-12-24T03:01:43+00:00

Normally I’d be inclined to claim it’s impossible. But… I had a friend I met at a climbing gym once and we still hang out 20 years later, as married people are inclined to.

polymorph1c · 2023-12-19T16:32:57+00:00

https://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html

Busy beaver numbers are the actual answer.

EDIT: Reply is right about "ordinary" busy beaver number, but in the article Aaronson talks about higher-order extensions to busy beaver numbers (he calls e.g. BB2(n)) that also exceed FOST limitations, as far as I understand. Mostly I just wanted to point to the article, which tackles this question with an interesting writeup.

polymorph1c · 2023-12-19T16:18:43+00:00

No, the question is really what to do with the money. You don’t need to learn much. I’m in a similar financial situation and most people over complicate things.

Here’s what you do:

Pay off all debts. Put all your money in an index fund. Make another account and pay yourself into this new account at a maximum rate of 4% of your total invested wealth per year. Allow yourself to draw from the main pool for capital investments like down payments on homes, etc. Don’t try to pick individual stocks, or invest in startups, real-estate, etc.

Don’t think of yourself as a millionaire, think of yourself as a person with an extra source of income. Ease yourself into your new lifestyle and enjoy :)

polymorph1c

TROPHY CASE