If the goal is to provide a distinction between model and agent, i think the "agent system" is doing too much heavy lifting in the example here.
A useful extension to this mental framework that i use when trying to make this distinction is the application (cursor) -> which sometimes includes an orchestrator and all of the QOL stuff like resuming, checkpointing, etc. single or multiple agents (cursor agents)-> and runs a single or many agent instances (single agent in cursor)-> service api-> model.
This is to address a confusion i often see with agent being conflated with the application that we use agents in, rather than the distinction in the article which tries to unpick agent-model confusion.
For those of us on the other side of the ditch: all museums in London are free. and I would echo the sentiment that it makes exploration of them less of a completionist activity to "get your monies worth" and more of an enjoyable forey into a rich space.
Its literally a paradigm shift.
Also almost all commercial art galleries are like this, obvs for other reasons. The gallery district (google art galleries then wander those streets, chelsea is the most established) in NYC is an amazing place to spend a day wandering around seeing amazing art. my uncle who teaches art introduced me to it and i try to spread the word.
I agree some why could be interesting. I would add to your list, because IMO this is more of a thought experiment-as-repo than a utility focused tool, what can i see by using this that i cant with a more fully fledged starting point?
I have to say I enjoy the brevity and clarity of this idea, given the ease of producing something large and unfocused in the last couple of years.
I hope it stays very simple, and would be interested if the author or anyone else can speak to what kind of complexity arises from using it, rather than bloating out the seed itself with initial complexity.
Ive been thinking about starting stimple with a pi framework for example and letting the tools emerge, but this is so much more lean to start, i wonder if it will be more or less interesting and or useful to start here.
Its also a common misconception that all glutamates are MSG (thats one salt of glutamate) and that all umami compounds are simple glutamate salts.
So while MSG is an excellent "neutral" umami ingredient, fermented products like this have a whole host of complex flavors that are often very desirable beyond just their glutamate salt.
Looking at the statistics that are used to measure growth and performance at a population level are such a great window into how they themselves are opinionated stances.
The two measures are both great measures of house ownership that measure different things. The article frames the second one as better, and if you are looking to see the ownership proportion of people (for example as they note to look at the numbers of young people who live with parents) thats great. If however you care about the housing development decisions that will incentivise owner occupancy you might care more about the standard owner occupancy per household.
I often see this with respect to GDP/GDP per capita vs mean income and other economic measures, but its great to see a non economic measure like this compared in this way.
> If however you care about the housing development decisions that will incentivise owner occupancy
Genuine question: who, precisely, cares about "incentivising owner occupancy" as a policy goal? What interest does that serve and why should the government prioritize maximizing that metric?
Basically right now we measure "what fraction of homes are occupied by an owner" and not "what fraction of people live in their own home?". It seems bleedingly obvious that the latter is the number we should be maximizing, if either. And in particular it seems to me that a lot of argument about the former is actually using it as a proxy for the latter anyway.
No one cares about the poor homes who don't have local owners!
If you live in a place which is used only for vacation homes, or worse, only as investment objects, you know the value of owner occupancy.
Non-occupants contribute very little to the actual value of a place - they don't work here, they don't buy here. But they capture much of the value of other people trying to make the place a pleasant place to live, though rising real estate values.
This depends heavily on the industry of the area. Go to a college town and you will find owner occupancy is not that big of a deal. Go to a luxury resort town and they literally make their money from non-residents transiently moving through.
I don't think you can get any of these situations non-organically. But schools and worker dormitories have a lot in common. More than most seem to admit to.
It's very easy to see that owner-occupancy is an incoherent metric.
Stipulate that owning a home is good.
As the number of homes goes up, owner-occupancy necessarily goes down (you can only occupy one home at a time). Homeownership might rise or fall while this is going on. But that doesn't matter; the number of homes going up is good, so the fact that the metric falls when it rises tells you that either (1) the metric is "evil", rising when bad things happen and falling when good things happen; or (2) the metric is incoherent and doesn't carry information about whether things are going well.
Here's a hypothetical: if everyone owns a home, no one rents homes anymore, right? I mean why would you?
So why would anyone buy a second home in that scenario? Maybe as a studio or whatever, perhaps. But as homes become less useful as a rental investment, the number of non owner-occupied homes seems like it will decrease too?
The theory behind it is that 1) economic growth generally accrues to land values so distributing land ownership is one way to distribute wealth and 2) people generally treat the things they own better than the things they rent or consume.
Incentivizing ownership is more closely aligned with objective (1) while owner-occupancy is more closely aligned with objective (2).
These don't work in the presence of capital's outsized returns though, which allows people who (for whatever reason) have access to more capital to recursively seize more of the growth in land values from objective (1) and therefore price out objective (2).
> distributing land ownership is one way to distribute wealth
Right, so you want to know how many people own homes, not how many homes are "occupied" by an owner[1], which is at best a proxy, right? Sounds like you're agreeing with me but just getting the sides of the argument mixed up?
[1] As the article points out, a single person can in fact "occupy" more than one home!
It's also a pretty dubious metric for wealth equality anyhow. If 100% of people owned their own home, then some fraction owning additional ones that no one lived in wouldn't really matter; the value of them would surely not be as high in a world where there was no renting or homelessness, and even if it was, I'd still take that over the alternative where every home is occupied by an owner but there's still not enough to go around for everyone.
> Genuine question: who, precisely, cares about "incentivising owner occupancy" as a policy goal? What interest does that serve and why should the government prioritize maximizing that metric?
Culturally, in many countries it helps with household formation (coupling, starting families), which, in an age of low birth rates, can be useful.
A key difference is illustrated in TFA.
To maximize fraction of people owning a home, you dislike people renting or living with a homeowner. A spouse that marries a homeowner, for example. It would be "better" if they broke up and owned their own separate homes. Or perhaps they could buy two homes, one for each. Or they could by two homes and rent a third to actually live in - same metric value.
To maximize fraction of homes with their owner living inside, you focus on the ownership _and_ the lifestyle choice. A family living together is the best use of land in this case. A family renting a side room to a college kid is still the best use of land. If every home were lived in by its owner, you could still have 90% of your population renting and not building generational wealth.
> A key difference is illustrated in TFA. To maximize fraction of people owning a home, you dislike people renting or living with a homeowner. A spouse that marries a homeowner, for example. It would be "better" if they broke up and owned their own separate homes. Or perhaps they could buy two homes, one for each. Or they could by two homes and rent a third to actually live in - same metric value.
Or they could... both own the home? Independent of the rest of your argument, this is a pretty weird hypothetical case to illustrate your point. Joint property ownership is way more common than any of the "alternatives" you're suggesting, so it's hard to take what you're saying seriously when you've dismissed the obvious way that this would work for the overwhelming majority of married homeowners.
Yes, we're not talking about reality, we're talking about the measures of it. A metric would fall down on corner cases, so identifying the corner cases is how you determine if a metric is a good one.
"% people owning homes" is maximized by joint ownership, as well, but the corner cases are interesting: It is lower with big families living together or when anyone rents.
On the other hand, the "% homes lived in by owner" metric falls down in a much more realistic way: When there are fewer homes and they are lived in by owners, you can still have 90% of your people renting apartments while this metric hits 100%
More importantly, nobody cares about the people where renting is their ideal condition (at least for now - in different situations different ways of living are ideal). There should be nothing wrong with renting. Owning your own should be a worse choice if you will live there for less than 5-10 years. Owning a home should be only slightly better if you will live there for more than 10 years - not enough better to make up the hassles of owning.
If you rent make sure you vote. Make sure you have an informed vote, all too often cities will put rules on rental units that make renting worse for you. (bad tenants and bad landlords exist - good tenants and good landlords need protection from the former). Likewise while rent obeys supply and demand, when property taxes go up that factors into supply and will make rent go up indirectly - is it worth it? (I cannot answer the later question - the more important consideration is make sure the taxes are similar for rental and owned units otherwise you are a renter are harmed)
I didn't vote when I rented in San Francisco for a few years because I had no intention to stay, and thought it immoral to disenfranchise the locals. Actually in my opinion you shouldn't be able to vote until you've lived somewhere for at least 5-10 years. Certainly even if you can, you shouldn't if you know you're only there temporarily.
I don't see why you think owning should only be slightly better after 10 years; if you don't want to deal with maintenance directly, you could always hire a management company as if you were the landlord and renter, but there's a benefit to you and everyone around you when you are invested in your home and community.
Risk is why owning needs 10 years. If the economy collapses you value goes down, by 10 years it will likely either have recovered, or at least not be done much. If the economy goes down and you lose your job in the process you have to sell to that down market and lose money.
Management companies have a terrible reputation. While you can use them, it is likely they will be much more costly than doing things yourself. Real estate investors tend to hire their own people for management even though this seems like the perfect thing for them to outsource because they have been burned so often. If they work for you great, but beware.
Even if you find a good management company, if the roof it 23 years old (expected lifespan 25 years) you should expect the big bill to replace the roof - over 10 years this works out since there will likely be one such big bill but not many. However if you live there less than 10 years these big bills will hit you.
The point is if you're renting, you're already paying for those things while also introducing a middleman and losing autonomy. There's no reason why renting "should" be a better choice even on a relatively short timeframe. e.g. if more were automated to reduce transaction costs, and if the housing market were more stable, then it seems like it'd obviously be better for society for people to own even if only for a few years. On longer timeframes, we should certainly want people to own; we want people to view their surroundings as something they should take care of.
You might want to maximize owner occupancy because you care about the poor homes who don't have local owners - as an owner living in the home might be better incentivized to take care of it and provide decent living conditions, for example.
Allowing people access fairly illiquid and predictable housing allows and incentivizes them to prioritize things on longer timelines which is good for society.
You are the second reply that seems to have misunderstood what the article is about. The point is that the current metric is not a measure of how many people own homes, even though everyone thinks it is.
I think that single family homes as a speculative asset needs to be done away with. If all this energy and investment went to purchasing, say, agricultural land, then more "little" people could own that and protect against institutional investors. Small landlords were only good because they kept institutional investors away, but now that they can't purchase more homes, the small real estate investor's money would be better used to hedge against market capture in the next thing up the hierarchy of needs, i.e. food. If we keep walking this back, then eventually we can prevent assholes from speculating on basic needs.
That sounds like a tough realization to come to, and has been an opposite of my experiences in startups (as a non founder). Ive sought them out because the leadership cares so freaking much about what they are doing, and really genuinely wants to succeed. That can be intense, but at least you know they care. If you are early enough to have both equity and a solid chance at impacting the possibility of success you can have both mercenary and personal incentives aligned in a way that is impossible in a bigger company IMO.
I hope you give startups another go if that sounds good to you, and as you say, it sounds like you will be able to see the things you dont want at least. Good luck.
I can appreciate this sentiment. I am someone who favors a resign vote over a let it play in 8v8, and when i was thinking about why i think its that in a lobby based system like bar, where there are few games I value staying in a lobby rather than skipping around. Thus when a game feels lost to me, id rather play a new game (even to another loss) with a good lobby then play a slow inevitable losing struggle, or worse yet watch someone else play a losing struggle (even if they enjoy playing that loss out).
Something im trying to lean into in my games is to ask the players who are voting no what their win condition or what they think they can make a go of is.
I think what ive said above could make me sound like one of the folks who "want the tightest possible loop to winning and restarting", so to add some nuance there, I think playing a game where the conclusion is foregone lacks agency, and in a game where one team eventually loses of course there is a blurry area where the team agrees that they are in fact never going to win, and then another question on whether they lie to play regardless. Because of the variation there, i like the vote, and i am in favor of coms around why someone wants to resign or stay.
I actually think it is up to players in an open loby system to communicate their intentions and reasons, and while it is true that it means people who spam coms trying to push folks around are possible, i would echo ptaqs sentiment to use that report function! and on a softer level, i really like the mute. if someone is too much, mute them and continue to enjoy your game.
While i appreciate that this is a valid link. I would argue that its political stance is clear: its framing of this as "Biden’s border crisis", and its sourcing is poor: referencing fox news but no other news sources, and no links to primary documents or data, especially around the causality.
This at least has AFAICT the 100% figure, but the causal link seems unsubstantiated. The exact, unreferenced quote from the document is "Immigration accounts for up to 100 percent of housing demand growth in some regions, and for two-thirds of rental demand growth nationwide. In California and New York, immigrants have accounted for 100 percent of all rental growth and over one-half of all growth in owner-occupied housing in recent years." p45 with no further citation to back that up. I know its not an academic paper, but some citation would be good to back this up.
Id be interested in more information on causal data, or at least a more nuanced stance on such a strong statement. Or a less politically charged comment.
Full disclosure, i (obviously from my comment) dont lean right, but one thing i appreciate about HN is a more nuanced comment, and i think this is a chance for that.
You're right. The leap from that to “illegal aliens caused 100% of rental price growth in CA/NY” is politically charged, underspecified, and overclaimed. I jumped the gun on that.
In a small team, or an aware team, where AI is being used all the time and we are figuring out the best way to do it, i often just preface my messages with
- "from my ai to yours" where ive pointed my ai at some relevant context, and asked it to transform it for other ai context that a coworker needs
- "my thoughts prettied by AI" where i just polished up my own words, often for outside coms, but indicating that i wrote the bones of it.
- "i wrote this myself" in my case i tend to be very casual with my written coms, and ive been leaning into this in the past year rather than looking to correct it, as it gives the personal feel. but for cases where ive written more thoughtfully, i just flat out say that.
Now im not doing this rigerously, or obsessively, but i am finding it helps with exactly the kind of friction and erosion of trust that comes from reading things by ai as if i should treat it the same as a person and writing things as a person just to have it consumed and spat out again by an ai.
Helps my team is small. interested in how this could be translated to more widespread "company culture"
I could see that being useful. Maybe have a different color or font for each one so that its easy to see them at a glance and you don't have to keep prefacing everything.
A useful extension to this mental framework that i use when trying to make this distinction is the application (cursor) -> which sometimes includes an orchestrator and all of the QOL stuff like resuming, checkpointing, etc. single or multiple agents (cursor agents)-> and runs a single or many agent instances (single agent in cursor)-> service api-> model.
This is to address a confusion i often see with agent being conflated with the application that we use agents in, rather than the distinction in the article which tries to unpick agent-model confusion.
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