Which is why we also have things like a deferred property tax program! The way to "solve" the problems Prop 13 addresses would be to expand programs like that, but homeowners—disproportionately active middle- and upper-middle-class voters—want to have their cake and eat it too.

Depends on your screen size. On my laptop, I follow pretty much the same pattern you do, so I actually stopped bothering with XMonad.

But on my desktop with two 27" monitors, I find tiling incredibly useful. It's really nice to be able to quickly arrange a mix of Emacs windows, browsers and random other programs to use all that space. If I need to closely read through some documentation while also looking at code, I can quickly open a browser next to the code window. Later, when I want to focus on just code, I can send the browser to the other monitor or to a different workspace altogether. And I can juggle "side" stuff (chat windows, OBS, music, whatever) just as easily.

The key thing is that XMonad with some lightly customized layouts gives me the operations to do all of this quickly without needing to think about it. It only takes a couple of keystrokes to get to the state that I want at any time and, after a pretty short time, those keystrokes became muscle memory. Using a mouse to drag things around is more intuitive and flexible, but it requires shifting my attention far more than just using a single keyboard command. (And thanks to ADHD, that kind of distraction can be a real drag on my mental energy!)

A fee for a specific service (ie using a card vs using cash) is pretty different from unavoidable junk fees. As long as a fee like that is advertised up-front it's totally fine; but fees that everybody has to pay are a qualitatively different thing because they are just a way to get a misleadingly low sticker price for the product.

I wonder if there's any (transparently self-serving) pushback against this on Seattle Nextdoor or the like. It sounds like a straightforward set of rules that's great for everyone... but I've learned that this is never enough, and I'm sure there are some people insisting that this is some massive crime against landlords and, by extension, tenants.

Yes, there are people insisting that this will make things impossible for tenants because "no one will want to be a landlord anymore" if they can't charge junk fees.

I assume "clowned" as in "getting clowned on"

Thanks, that had me going.

One fun thing is that some words can reasonably go either way: "a hotel" vs "an hotel" or "a SQL query" vs "an SQL query".

For me, only “a hotel” and “an SQL query” sound correct here

(Edit: I just realised this might be a dialect thing. I say “ess cue ell” and not “sequel”, and “hoe tell” rather than “otel”. Australian accent)

Luckily zed and zee won't flip the article.

a ho.tel

an oh.tel or o.tel (is it still spoken somewhere like this?)

The confusion arrives for words like "herb" depending upon whether the place uses F or C for temperature ;-)

One thing I've noticed with AI posters is that they're all "flat" in terms of attention. For whatever reason, they result in a post where every part is on the same level visually, and your eye does not get drawn to anything. You can't immediately see what is and isn't important.

The bad posters are absolute disasters in this regard. (And completely irredeemable in general! They are not "OK" in any way.)

But the better-stylized examples in the article aren't much better! Most of them have the same tendency. Only the minimalist Japanese and 40s Cubist styles do much better, and even those aren't structured amazingly. If you tried to add more information, I bet even the minimalist styles would become a flat and confusing.

This is the same problem I have with stock Claude prose and code. It's verbose, sure, but worse is that there's no quick way to tell what is and isn't important. In good code, you can understand the shape of the code at a glance; AI code is pretty much the opposite of that. And so are AI posters.

I mean, that's just the most direct way to say what they're saying? Doesn't smell Claudy to me.

Like, if I had an AI detector that actually worked—and all the other ones didn't, which they don't—I'd put it exactly the same way.

If I were your editor, I'd strike the adverb. It weakens the sentence.

Being able to play without a bunch of setup in your room and without worrying about getting tangled in cables seems great. I have a Valve Index—which is a pretty remarkable device, that I definitely enjoyed—but the hassle of cable management/etc adds some real hassle. And I say this as somebody who actually set up a pulley system to make it work better in my home office :P

Row types are great. I'm doing a PureScript project right now and absolutely love having row polymorphism.

I'm also a fan of effect systems, although I haven't used them as much. Having an IO type in Haskell is great, but the ergonomics aren't (among other things, you get async-like function coloring). Effects seem like a much nicer, more composible way to get the same benefits.