EDIT: this comparison is much less clean than I thought it was: the Union Sq building has 19 garage spaces reserved for affordable units. Combining these with the permits, it's 29% of parking-eligible units having a car instead of 8%. In 2017 I wrote: > One of the major reasons...
People are often pretty short-sighted, spending money today that they'll want tomorrow. Debt makes it possible to prioritize your current self even more highly: you can spend money you haven't even earned yet. This is a trap many people fall into, and one different communities have built social defenses against....
A common source of friction within couples or between housemates is differing quality standards. Perhaps I hate the feeling of grit under my feet but my housemate who is responsible for sweeping doesn't mind it so much. If you do chores when you notice they need doing and stop when...
We present and formally deprecate WoFBench, a novel test that compares the knowledge of Wings of Fire superfans to frontier AI models. The benchmark showed initial promise as a challenging evaluation, but unfortunately proved to be saturated on creation as AI models produced output that was, to the extent of...
Six years ago, as covid-19 was rapidly spreading through the US, my sister was working as a medical resident. One day she was handed an N95 and told to "guard it with her life", because there weren't any more coming. N95s are made from meltblown polypropylene, produced from plastic pellets...
I think more people should be storing a substantial amount of food. It's not likely you'll need it, but as with reusable masks the cost is low enough I think it's usually worth it. It's hard for me to really imagine living through a famine. The world as I have...
I learned a few weeks ago that I'm a Canadian citizen. This was pretty surprising to me, since I was born in the US to American parents, both of which had American parents. You don't normally suddenly become a citizen of another country! But with Bill C-3, anyone with any...