I've been writing https://urbanismnow.com weekly for a year. The idea is to bring you the best ideas from around the world to inspire action where you (c)are.
It's been going well for a side project and now I'm thinking of expanding to have a directory of urbanists on a map so you can easily find people involved in the local discourse and how to get involved.
I don't have an iPhone to try this, but I've been a long time time user of Tasks.org on Android and particularly because it supports CalDAV and works so well offline.
However, while we are on the topic of planning apps, you should know the Todoist added the best use of AI I've ever seen. It's called Ramble mode and you can just talk and instantly it'll start showing a list of tasks that update as you go. It is extraordinary. I'm considering switching away from tasks.org for this one feature.
That’s cool! Slight fear of replicating the Dropbox comment here, but all you really need to do is run whisper (or some other speech2text), then once the user stops talking jam the transcript through a LLM to force it into JSON or some other sensible structure.
"once the user stops talking" is a key insight here for me. When using this I wasn't intentionally pausing to let it figure out an answer. It seemed to just pop up while I was talking. But upon experimenting some more it does seem to wait until here's a bit of a pause most of the time.
However it's still wild to me how fast and responsive it is. I can talk for 10 seconds and then in ~500ms I see the updates. Perhaps it doesn't even transcribe and rather feeds the audio to a multimodal llm along with whatever tasks it already knows about? Or maybe it's transcribing live as you talk and when you stop it sends it to the llm.
Anyone have a sense of what model they might be using?
I cannot remember off the top of my head the exact number and am clearly too lazy to google it but there is a specific length of time in which, if no new noises pass through, the human brain processes it as a pause/silence.
I want to say 300ms which would coincide with your 500ms example
This is definitely dependent on individuals. It’s a reason during some conversations people can never seem to get a word in edgewise, even if the person speaking may think they’re providing opportunities do so. A mismatch in “pause length” can make for frustrating communications.
I am also too lazy to google or AI it but it’s something I remember from when I taught ESL long ago.
That makes sense! To be honest I’m referring to my audio engineering degree and the pause was specific to noticing silence in audio so I’d 100% agree that in conversation it can vary between people as I know some many people who will not let you get a word in
All of the ones I come across only extracted the points for action items. I didn’t notice any of them submitting to task managers.
You asked “how they are able to do this” and I said it has been a standard feature for a while now in meeting rooms. The additional features in todoist fills in the right data in the right columns, which is notable, but things like have been done with 30boxes where natural language is used to create events.
I use symbolic links, and Claude Code often gets confused, requiring several iterations to understand that the CLAUDE.md file is actually a symbolic link to AGENTS.md, and that these are not two different, duplicate files
The recommended approach has the advantage of separating information specific to Claude Code, but I think that in the long run, Anthropic will have to adopt the AGENTS.md format
Also, when using separate files, memories will be written to CLAUDE.md, and periodic triaging will be required: deciding what to leave there and what to move to AGENTS.md
I'm still not 100% sure I understand what a symlink in a git repository actually does, especially across different operating systems. Maybe it's fine?
Anthropic say "put @AGENTS.md in your CLAUDE.md" file and my own experiments confirmed that this dumps the content into the system prompt in the same way as if you had copied it to CLAUDE.md manually, so I'm happy with that solution - at least until Anthropic give in and support AGENTS.md directly.
It just creates the same symlink on any other checkout. (On Linux/macOS at least, Windows I believe requires local settings changes.)
Only sane (guaranteed portable) option is for it to be a relative symlink to another file within the same repo, of course. i.e. CLAUDE.md would be -> 'AGENTS.md', not '/home/simonw/projects/pelicans-on-bicycles/AGENTS.md' or whatever.
On windows, it depends on the local git configuration. It’s not something I’ve been happy with, especially since symlinks also behave differently again when you’re running a docker container to get your windows usable for development.
With so much surveillance I think there's a real need for E2E on anything. I just bought the basic Tutanota package - but maybe that's just my OCD acting out.
Have only lightly dabbled in latex but Typst was super easy to pickup. I recently even published a whole book[0] in Typst. The process was straightforward for the most part. It took a little time to work out how to get page numbers alternating between the left and right side and a few other small formatting details but by and large it was very easy to create a beautiful PDF that's ready for printing.
Also, pandoc has fairly good support for Typst so I use that to create a docx (which Draft2Digital converts to epub). I even opened a few issues (https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues?q=sort%3Aupdated-desc%2...) for pandoc support and they were almost all resolved pretty quickly.
Does it seem like the calendar protocol will be able to replace the VTODO bit of ical so that Todo applications can be built on top of it? I've played around with ics files a bit for the tasks app in nextcloud and it wasn't a pleasant experience so I kinda dropped the project.
It’s also an example of the "spatial fix," where global capital parks itself in real estate as a safe asset rather than in the local economy. Basically turning urban housing into a storage vehicle for surplus wealth instead of a place for people to live.
We already have this in the Netherlands. In order to deter squatters you can hire a student to live in your property.
You can kick them out on short notice.
And you should not. Hyping real estate prices or just putting massive real estate to disuse and often pricing the locals out is a big problem but so is losing a property to squatting. Such things don’t always involve millionaires and billionaires.
Devils advocate: is it really such a problem? Perhaps it should be banned simply on moralistic grounds.
But I fail to see how a hundred or so buildings sold to millionaires and billionaires numbering in the thousands has any affect at all in a city with 20 million people.
Again, surely it’s not the best nor most democratic thing that these buildings exist at all.
But I don’t see how it can impact the bread and butter real estate and rental market. Surely this is caused by the city’s numerous bad housing policies like rent control, zoning, public transportation, education.
I disagree. We should encourage this. It's the best form of export: you sell a good, but the good stays in place. It also collects taxes, taxes that are used for the benefit of the local population, without those who pays those taxes consuming a lot of local government services. On the rare occasions that these billionaires visit their luxury residence, they inject plenty of cash in the local economy. Why would you want to eliminate this?
Paying an entity for building a useless empty building, so that they can build another useless empty building... All as a kind of wealth insurance scheme for a rich person who has reason to think their assets might not be safe in their home country (because they were obtained in corrupt or illegal ways?).
> Why would you want to eliminate this?
Because I believe we can do better than living off the scraps of the obscenely wealthy.
Regardless, given the scarcity of housing space in NYC, I’d expect that if more of it is used as a store of wealth, housing prices will generally increase.
Are you suggesting that, in practice, the currently levied taxes prevent this?
There is no scarcity of housing space in NYC. NYC is a very large city. About 80% of it is low rises. If you want to increase the housing supply, you an do just that: you approve more building permits. 10 or 20 or even 50 sky scrappers will not change the availability of land in NYC.
Yes, and the current zoning / city council / NIMBYism death triangle means most development is poorly located.
In expensive parts of Northwest Brooklyn & Queens, the waterfront which is a 15 minute walk to the subway was zoned to put up a ton of 40+ story residential towers. It's far enough away that many of them run private shuttle busses to the subway.
Meanwhile the subway station (Bedford Ave particularly) that you walk to from said waterfront is surrounded by 3-4 story buildings.. as is most of the walk there.
The difference is there were already people in those 3-4 story buildings to show up to city council meetings & whine about any zoning changes, unlike the previously industrial water front.
I can't find the thread but there was recently a discussion here about being asked to do things at work that are unethical and I thought this was fairly related.
Sure, but the article is saying the school's accreditation "validates its quality of education". I'm saying that's not really true. There are many schools that are accredited and are crap or scams. Accreditation on its own doesn't tell you much.
No, it doesn't. That info from the website is a gross mischaracterization and seemingly an attempt at self-promotion. It's like saying that your building has walls and a ceiling and is therefore in the same league as Notre Dame de Paris and the Taj Mahal.
As an example, some of Corinthian's colleges (Heald College) were accredited by WASC. . . until they declared bankruptcy in the face of multiple fraud investigations and a $30 million fine.
The accreditation is an extremely low bar. In my view it is so low it is harmful because it totally fails to distinguish legitimate schools from shady ones. Accredited colleges run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous.
That's not to say the school that this article is from is bad. I don't really know anything about this school. But the fact that they tout mere accreditation as putting them on par with Stanford and that they can't correctly name the University of California, Berkeley does not inspire confidence. The fact that it is nonprofit is a plus, though, as the worst of the crap-but-accredited schools are for-profit ones.
It's been going well for a side project and now I'm thinking of expanding to have a directory of urbanists on a map so you can easily find people involved in the local discourse and how to get involved.
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