Devon Zuegel

Clay Shirkey has a great article from 2004 about this called Situated Software. https://devonzuegel.com/situated-software

https://worrydream.com https://macwright.com/ https://www.petemillspaugh.com/ https://www.geoffreylitt.com/ https://maggieappleton.com/ https://www.robinsloan.com/ https://thesephist.com/ https://wattenberger.com/ http://conal.net/ https://www.todepond.com/ https://devonzuegel.com/ https://nadia.xyz/ https://adamwiggins.com/ http://glench.com/ https://ncase.me/ Classic from my old Haskell professor: https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-and-the…

After steeping in Fischel's tract on the proximate cause of housing inflation (linked to from Klein).. I gather that the main (meta-)issue, as you are kind of insinuating here, is that, for healthcare, there is a conflation of inflationary and deflationary processes.. (Sorry to go on what might seem to be a reductive tangent here, as I often do when pressed. I have further takes on Klein vs Shapiro for later) My roughshod framing of (one) solution is that there has to be sustained deflationary pockets in a mildly inflationary phase Probably mirrored by such proposals for housing as https://devonzuegel.com/for-the-greater-good-the-game-theory-of-zoning

Japan has avoided much of the housing issues we have in much in the western world, and in the English-speaking world in particular. Some factors in this is that construction is much more by-right, has sensible zoning, excludes a gnarly community process and is planned centrally instead locally which in combination avoids all issues with NIMBYs and results in a good housing supply. A great article on zoning to get started on this: https://devonzuegel.com/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning

"The road to hell is paved with asphalt" saw this here on HN not long ago - https://devonzuegel.com/the-road-to-hell-is-paved-with-asphalt They mention less heat as one of the multiple benefits of pavers / bricks. I used to dislike them by default - "They're bumpy". They're not bumpy. There's a shopping center in my town, and even a new Taco Bell, that use pavers for their parking lot, and I can't even notice. We could probably do pavers for new parking lots and keep asphalt / concrete for heavy-duty stuff like interstates and roads over 30 MPH and not lose much except the up-front cost of pavers. (But hey if Taco Bell thinks they're worth it...)

I think this write up about the price of housing is a worthwhile read. An underrated aspect of this is that people want to live in dense places, and are willing to pay more to do so. Not universally, but it certainly occurs. https://devonzuegel.com/post/agglomeration-effects-might-change-the-yi…

There was a fantastic post about how zoning in Japan works a couple months ago: http://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning

I don't really agree with the original post and I don't buy into the "purely digital world" argument. I'm excited about crypto for different reasons. But a few thoughts: > So then the question becomes, what is the value of <insert coin here>. Some will talk about energy, or efficiency. Some will talk about scarcity. Some will talk tech merits. But nobody to date has been able to convince me that it has any real value. There are no armies or economies validating it. Why are stocks without dividends worth anything? Companies have earnings. Many protocols have earnings as well, and they are built on top of Ethereum, which provides the security layer. What do you mean by "real value"? > Said another way, if someone gives me 10k in cash, I have faith it will still be worth 10k in a year(ignoring our awful inflation) 10k denominated in what? I think ignoring inflation is an example of why people care. You only trust your cash because you trust the US government, which may be reasonable, but people in other parts of the world don't trust their government with monetary policies, e.g. [0]. Imagine inflation gets worse, the EU needs bailout, or we have WW3, and the the US government says "Sorry, you're no longer allow to buy gold or move your assets abroad, you need to buy our bad government bonds" - stuff like this has happened before, in many countries. And you can't do anything about it other than watching your savings crumble. Crypto gives you optionality. A…

I could (and arguably should) have added "gatekeeping" as another function of the higher-education system, a role that manifests in multiple ways: admissions, graduation, faculty, curricula, publications. Whilst fixing a few typos I thought of adding that but enough time had already lapsed that it felt like a stealth change of excess magnitude. Consider it added here. What you call a racketeering scam ... is an argument with merits, but it also reflects another persistent pragmatic informational reality: assessment costs of complex informational goods, such as highly-trained higher-education graduates, are high. Universities effectively play two simultaneous roles: both shaping and measuring (and certifying) educational accomplishment. The flipside of this which you note, is a perennial HN favourite topic: how broken the tech hiring process is from both sides. For the employee and for the employer. At another level, it's the problem faced by both VC and founders in startup launches, and for users and marketers in product. Branding, reviews, resumes, certifications, and other shibboleths serve as information-simplifying mechanisms. See Akerlof's "Market for Lemons". Discussed on HN here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895171 and in context of hiring here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12671290 The resulting process remains ... highly frustrating and unsatisfying. For me as much as anyone else. But it's another of those persistent behaviours that…

I use an app called dynalist, I use it to keep track of all my sprint notes I wrote this sometime last year, but its a general gist of how I do things http://vincentmtang.com/2017/11/03/making-an-annual-work-summary-with-… This is how I generally organize myself http://vincentmtang.com/2018/08/03/how-i-organize-myself/ I quadruple gif scrubbed this here so you can see the big picture. I have some personal information that I didn't really want to share https://i.imgur.com/KXPjNLr.gif Each of those little red dots = one week's worth of notes. The notes above the first little red dot is today's notes. When I expand the list item, those are all my daily sprint logs of things I achieved and major notable things that happened during the day. There all organized with the latest date appearing up top. I organized my weekly logs (those red dots) the same way. The farther you scroll down the page, the more older weekly snapshots you see What you see on my left side are all my notes, some are courses, some are project documents. What your seeing on the right is just my journal notes only some of my notes are journal notes is just what people do with rubber duckies. I talk to myself asking myself things I need to do. Today, this is what my journal notes looked like: ------------------------------------------------------------------ 3PM @codepen - [screenshot] of work done with a frontend component I made on codepen 1PM @vendor-tag - Meeting with {{XYZ}} vendor -…

Ted Chiang explores this idea in a short story called "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" (https://devonzuegel.com/post/the-truth-of-fact-the-truth-of-feeling-by… which takes place in a world where commercial, individual, always-on recording exists. Ted Chiang also wrote the short story that the movie Arrival was based on.

You may also appreciate: https://devonzuegel.com/post/we-should-be-building-cities-for-people-n…

Devon Zuegel is a great thinker in a large breath of subjects -> On Urbanism: Her podcast Order without Design [0] where she interviews the Bertaud couple Fields note on Miami [1] (with beautiful pictures) Metamuse interview on cities [2] and a lot more on her blog On tech : She was the PM for Github sponsors (and I believe other open-source friendly projects), great interview of her by the changelog [4] The Pioneer series (of which this interview is an episod), favorites are Louis Pouzing and roundtable about Hamming [5] [0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/order-without-design-how-markets… [1] https://devonzuegel.com/post/field-notes-miami [2] https://museapp.com/podcast/33-cities/ [3] https://changelog.com/podcast/370 [4] https://www.notion.so/blog/topic/pioneers

An example is Japanese zoning [1]. Zones are layered - if you can build an apartment, you can also build a single-family home. In the US, they are all distinct - single family only or apartments only - no choice. 1 - https://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning

One of the issues is that we, in the US, don't look at other successful cities or countries and consider implementing their solutions. Then in California, we don't look at other cities or states within the US who have solved similar problems. Tokyo has rational zoning rules that has lead to affordable housing in a growing metropolis. This blog post https://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning describes the differences in Japanese zoning versus North American zoning.

> I struggle to find examples of this happening in market economies outside of a major natural disaster. i would suggest looking outside the US. The zoning/land-use regime where single-family zoning dominates is not universal -- see http://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning. In fact, Japan kind of is a shining example of upzoning bringing down (and keeping down) rents to levels unthinkable in US cities.

Totally, but in the North America it seems like we are culturally nowhere near aligned on changing this for the better. The cultural opinion seems to be slowly improving, but it still seems like most of North America has very agrarian/suburban tendencies. P.S. Japanese zoning is fascinating [1], but not without its faults. For example, the relatively laissez-faire zoning policies can be seen as to blame for the lack of bike lane infrastructure in most of Japan [2]. That said, 東京がとてもすきです :) [1] http://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning [2] https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Making_of_Urban_Japan.html?id…

Sure. But I think he's describing a massive mindset change w.r.t. zoning. Basically, something similar to the Japanese blacklisting approach (everything up to a certain use is allowed) vs. the incredibly specific North American whitelisting approach (this area can only have big box stores, vs. this one which can only have small storefronts). http://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning

Ride sharing in general is worsening traffic and causing less utilization of mass transit. https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2018/02/ride-sharing-actually-conges… We have to find a way to have better more effective cities built for people that utilize walking, biking, and transit. The less cars the better: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-11/fight-climate-chang… We have to find a way to stop the laziness/traffic/transit abandonment that spreads with ride sharing. http://devonzuegel.com/post/we-should-be-building-cities-for-people-no…