Favorites November 2nd 2022

Walnut Creek, October 2022

Anna Tong @annatonger

Since @SonjaTrauss founded YIMBY in 2014 in San Francisco, the movement has grown dramatically nationwide. There are now 140 groups in 29 states. CA has 3x'd housing approvals. Politicians are realizing they can't win without YIMBY support. sfstandard.com/housing-develo…

One of the wild things is that despite Statewide YIMBY success, San Francisco, where the movement started, has not yet increased the rate of housing approvals.

Karen X. Cheng @karenxcheng

Testing out Stable Diffusion inpainting on a video - by @justLV See below for his process #inpainting #stablediffusion #artificialintelligence

The thread of details about how it was done is pretty cool. Still very labor intensive, despite all the AI stuff involved.

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Canada’s immigration system enjoys “broad public support” because it favors skilled workers in industries with critical labor shortages. And they just announced a major increase in future immigration targets:

Again, Maximum Canada is seeming more likely than One Billion Americans. I think combining the two for One Billion Canadians is a bit ambitious though.

Ars Technica @arstechnica

Meta recently announced an AI-powered audio compression method called "EnCodec" that can reportedly compress audio 10 times smaller than the MP3 format at 64kbps with no loss in quality.

trib.alMeta’s AI-powered audio codec promises 10x compression over MP3Technique could allow high-quality calls and music on low-quality connections.

This is pretty cool, but it is insanely processor intensive to encode/decode, it barely runs in real time on a modern processor. Skimming the paper, I couldn't find the memory requirements, but I suspect that's also pretty significant.

Jack Nicas @jacknicas

Brazil's election aftermath took a worrisome new twist today. Bolsonaro's supporters took to the streets in more than 75 cities, demanding the military take control of the government and prevent the transfer of power. Our story, without a paywall:

nyti.msRefusing to Accept Defeat, Bolsonaro Backers Call on Military to InterveneTens of thousands of people demonstrated in cities across Brazil, many of them demanding that the military stop the transfer of power to President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

And of course, Bolsonaro himself has driven the distrust in voting proceedures that are causing people to refuse to accept the results. I recall being taught in my Computer Security course: the goal of an election is to convince the loser that they've lost and that they don't have support to try to overturn the results extra-judicially.

Randall Munroe @xkcd

Wirecutter Recommendations xkcd.com/2693

Threads

• Really beautiful example case study of a single staircase apartment development in Seattle. The single-staircase allowance is special and Seattle-specific unfortunately.