> The Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway buys up the land around new station sites before they start building them. This rail-plus-property model makes them one of the few profitable transit services in the world.
I really enjoyed this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_roPoXi8QI describing more in detail how they did this. It has as much to do with historical circumstance as it does with good decision-making. The MTR is an impressive organization. MTA in NY seems to be taking a few cues, prioritizing in-house expertise.
Great stuff. People are getting used to agents as the interface for everything, even work as simple as "change label X to label Y". More speed on that front is welcome. The Codex "blended mode" they refer to will be useful (similar to Claude Code bouncing between haiku and opus).
I imagine it's a win-win. This could significantly help their tokenomics.
The example showing a plan being generated instantaneously is interesting. Human understanding will end up as the last, true bottleneck.
Transitions take time. 0 -> 1 replacement of existing interfaces is (1) not easy and (2) not a practical approach to market adoption.
"slapping on a chatbot" is a v0 attempt at re-imagining what software looks like. It's not very inventive and sometimes it sucks, but it's easy to understand and implement and we're very early in this era.
The distribution of change also isn't uniform. Excel might not have changed dramatically, but software engineering apps are evolving rapidly. Clawdbot/moltbot hint at new forms of personal computing. Look for the future where the optimism is.
Neat. The article/title makes it seem like they've cancelled their city plans, but it seems like this is just a first step and they're still interested in the city. The California Forever blog post, https://californiaforever.com/california-forever-unveils-the..., even makes reference to it. Sane move to build out job opportunities before/alongside other plans.
Though here's a weird snippet from the California Forever blog
> Five miles northeast, Travis Airforce Base—the largest Air Mobility Command base in America—offers significant opportunities for collaboration with our military, as well as a robust talent pool of highly-qualified retirees and spouses to work in advanced manufacturing roles
Thanks for sharing, interesting article. 13 years later and his takes are still quite relevant. With the AI era, now seems as good a time as any to consider a new paradigm for the Web (and other tools), but things always move slower than we think.
> There's nothing wrong with that, except that when you have something like the Industrial Revolution squared, you wind up setting de facto standards — in this case, really bad de facto standards. Because what you definitely don't want in a Web browser is any features.
> That's why I never use PowerPoint. PowerPoint is just simulated acetate overhead slides, and to me, that is a kind of a moral crime. That's why I always do, not just dynamic stuff when I give a talk, but I do stuff that I'm interacting with on-the-fly. Because that is what the computer is for.
Also, lol
> Kay: I was never a great programmer. That's what got me into making more powerful programming languages.
TIL printer dots! Also curious if someone more familiar with this space/community could provide more backstory here. Reading some of the comments in the forum, it seems like 1) these "beta cards" surfaced a while ago and have been a contentious topic since, 2) a card authenticator business is involved. What's the scale of this scheme? What's the impact going forward/how much money is tied into this?
It looks like CGC - one of the big card graders - has touted their ability to grade some very early Pokemon The Card Game playing cards (even alpha test cards printed in very low numbers). Here is their grading scale on their site https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13347/
People have purchased these CGC cards on ebay assuming they were legit based on the above certifications. It looks like total cards is something like 6 test decks of 26 cards of the alpha prototype - so the rarest example is fairly small, but I think it goes up as they got to later pre-release versions. Furthermore, there are some cards that were signed by Akabane (a co-creator of the game) and those have the presence of the yellow dots - meaning those are most likely not legit pre-production cards. One of those signed cards was sold for $200k I believe - https://www.cgccards.uk/news/article/13661/
So total financial impact of this directly in low millions?
Thank you! Looks like CGC is in a tough spot. The grading guide struck me as quite vague.
> CGC Cards utilized all the tools at our disposal to help document and authenticate these cards, compiling vast resources for comparison with future submissions. A very thorough process is in place for the authentication and grading of these cards using ones verified by Mr. Akabane.
In an ideal world, it seems like there should be publicly shared, repeatable methods/standards for authenticating cards to avoid issues (whether complicit or an honest mistake) like this from a single central authority.
I really enjoyed this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_roPoXi8QI describing more in detail how they did this. It has as much to do with historical circumstance as it does with good decision-making. The MTR is an impressive organization. MTA in NY seems to be taking a few cues, prioritizing in-house expertise.