City Journal is a right wing rag whose opinions represent propaganda. There is one correct point that the 2019 law eliminating rent increases tied to capital improvements is broken. But its other points are simply not correct. Vouchers are not a like for like replacement for stabilization. Like work and other gates applied to SNAP and similar programs, they are fundamentally broken and inhumane.
The article makes a whole bunch of points - the main one being that rent control is not a good way to address expensive housing. Are they wrong about other things besides your somewhat beside the point example? Are they wrong that "The city now has nearly 50,000 empty units"?
The fact is a fact, their diagnosis and narrative is fantasy. A fair number of the stabilized empty apartments are due to the specific points in the 2019 law that too greatly impacted the economics of stabilized apartments. Prior to the 2019 law, it was economic to operate stabilized units, but too easy to unstabilize them, hence the motivation for the law. Replacing those dynamics with section 8 is idiocy.
Your question about testability is justified. However, the considerations are not an empirical hypothesis in the scientific sense, but rather a philosophical argument. He is not claiming that the simulation hypothesis can be experimentally confirmed or refuted. His point is rather that even if one accepts the simulation hypothesis — even recursively — it does not result in a privileged beginning, a final observer, or ontological salvation. Change, emergence, and decay persist at every level. The question is therefore less whether we live in a simulation than what this assumption actually explains or changes.
It does, you make certain claims in your text, and the parent questions how to test you alternate theory against the perceived reality to see which of those two are true.
I understand why you consider his question relevant. At the same time, it is worth making a clear distinction: OP does not formulate an alternative empirical explanation of physical reality, but rather a philosophical reflection on the consequences of the simulation assumption itself. In this context, the question of experimental testability is generally meaningful, but it misses the point here because it presupposes a scientific hypothesis that OP does not even propose. His objection would be justified if OP were to claim truth in the scientific sense — but he does not.
Uh, irrelevant to highlight sqlite and "local first" if it assumes talking to gemini. The data does not stay on the machine. Support llama.cpp, etc.
I do like the idea of a home made book workflow but no one needs a new bookstore. There are plenty of these.
I think a related area is incorporating tts for interviews esp of older family members. Support photos and audio and have some ai magic around those. Produce a family member history. That is a pdf or richer media artifact, and does not go into any bookstore. Absolutely needs local ai in that case too.
I would pay $50 for an oss fully local authoring tool (and I do pay for others like zettlr).
To a first approximation, yes. You are young and don't have perspective on this, but this is what old people do. Recognize the value of stories and try to preserve them.
To my eyes skills disappear, MCP and agent definitions do not.
You can have the most capable human available to you, a supreme executive assistant. You still have to convey your intent and needs to them, your preferences, etc, with as high a degree of specificity as necessary.
And you need to provide them with access and mechanisms to do things on your behalf.
Agentic definitions are the former, and they will evolve and grow. I like the metaphor of deal terms in financial contracts- benchmarkers document billions of these now. The "deal terms" governing the work any given entity does for you will be rich and bespoke and specific, like any valuable relationship. Even if the agent is learning about you, your governance is still needed.
MCP is the latter. It is the protocol by which a thing does things for you. It will get extensions. Skill-like directives and instructions will get delivered over it.
Skills themselves are near term scaffold that will soon disappear.
It isn't between llm and skill, it's between agent and skill. Orgs that invest in skills will duplicate what they could do once in an agent. Orgs that "buy" skills from a provider will need to endlessly tweak them. Multiskill workflows will have semantic layer mismatches.
Skill is a great sleight of hand for Anthropic to get people to think Claude Code is a platform. There is no there there. Orgs will figure this out.
Saying it was both diminishes the sociopathy and malevolence. It was a warlike invasion, an act of great violence, and the perpetrators should be treated as criminals.
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