skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Tokyo land is still >$85 million an acre in ~finance
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Tokyo land is still >$85 million an acre
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Comment on Netanyahu backs Republican effort to end U.S. military aid to Israel in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article:From the article:
A week after that meeting in Jerusalem — and with Netanyahu’s support — Stutzman, a steadfast Israel ally, on Wednesday is introducing a resolution calling for the U.S. to develop a new memorandum of understanding between the two nations that would end the $3.8 billion in annual aid Israel receives from the United States, and instead have the nation fund its own purchases of American weapons. The resolution, and the fact that Netanyahu has written a letter supporting it, have not previously been reported.
While the specifics of any such arrangement remains under discussion by the Trump administration’s national security officials, Israel would likely benefit from U.S. support through other means, such as a provision currently being considered in the National Defense Authorization Act that would deepen cooperation between the two militaries regarding weapons production and technology systems.
The current 10-year memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Israel, which includes $38 billion in direct military aid to Israel, is due to expire in 2028.
Stutzman’s effort, while not binding, is the first of its kind in Congress, and it is notable coming from a Republican lawmaker who maintains close ties with Netanyahu and Israel. It represents a growing challenge, even in the largely pro-Israel GOP, to the longtime sentiment that the U.S. should provide direct aid to Israel — a notion facing increasing scrutiny from the American public.
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Netanyahu backs Republican effort to end U.S. military aid to Israel
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Comment on The rise of build-to-rent housing in ~finance
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
A major shift in the housing market in the last several years is the rapidly increasing popularity of “build-to-rent” homes — single-family homes that are built specifically for the purpose of being rented out. According to the National Association of Homebuilders, build-to-rent homes have risen from less than 2% of new housing starts in the 1990s to more than 7% of housing starts today. In 2025, at least 68,000 new single-family housing starts were built to rent (and due to data limitations, the true number may be much higher, 100,000 homes or more).
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The modern BTR industry, where developers build entire communities consisting of dozens or hundreds of single-family homes for rent, is a product of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Prior to the financial crisis, single-family home rental wasn’t uncommon — in 2005, there were over 8 million detached single-family homes being rented — but the business was mostly the purview of small “mom and pop” operators that owned a relatively small number of scattered rental properties. As late as 2011, no single company owned more than 1,000 rental homes in the US.
But the financial crisis shifted the housing landscape. Huge numbers of people lost their homes to foreclosure: foreclosure rates in 2009 and 2010 were four times rates from 2005, and between 2007 and 2010, there were four million foreclosures. The homeownership rate in the US fell from a high of 69% in 2005 to 63% in 2016. At the same time, to rein in the subprime lending that had precipitated the crisis, banks tightened their lending standards, and average mortgage credit scores rose by more than 50 points. In 2003 buyers with a credit score of less than 620 made up 7% of all mortgages. By 2011 that had fallen to essentially zero.
The raft of foreclosures and the tightening of lending standards had two simultaneous effects on the housing market.
First, they pushed millions of Americans into renting. Between 2010 and 2015 the number of renter households in the US rose by roughly six million, while the number of homeowner households declined by roughly 800,000.
Second, this shift created a huge pool of homes available for purchase at very low prices. Between 2006 and 2010 the value of US homes dropped by 26%, greater than the average decline during the Great Depression. In some markets the declines were even worse: home prices declined by 60% in Las Vegas, and by roughly 50% in Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa.
In response to these market conditions — millions of homes available to buy cheaply, and millions of Americans who couldn’t afford to buy them — various real estate ventures were formed to take advantage of the situation. In 2010, the Arizona-based housing investment company Treehouse Group began to buy distressed mortgages in Phoenix and turn them into rental housing. Within a year the company had purchased 11,000 homes. In 2012 Treehouse was acquired by the investment group Blackstone, which turned Treehouse into the single-family rental company Invitation Homes. Today, Invitation Homes is one of the largest home rental companies in the US, with more than 86,000 rental homes across 12 states.
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This large-scale acquisition and transformation of single-family homes into rental properties was encouraged by the federal government, as part of broader efforts to keep the housing market from collapsing completely. In 2012 the Federal Housing Finance Agency launched the REO-to-Rental Initiative pilot program, which “allowed pre-qualified investors to bid on large portfolios of foreclosed properties owned by Fannie Mae.” Roughly 1,800 homes were sold to investors under this program. And in 2017, Fannie Mae backed a billion-dollar loan to Invitation Homes for the purposes of purchasing rental properties.
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Building new rental homes had several advantages compared to acquiring existing homes. Being new construction, they typically had much lower maintenance costs than existing homes, and they could be designed by the developer with an eye towards minimizing maintenance and overheads. And because they were clustered together, they were somewhat easier to manage than purchased rental houses that might be spread across a wider area.
As the housing market recovered and the pool of single-family homes available for purchase at favorable prices dwindled, many of the large home rental companies began to experiment with their own BTR strategies. American Homes 4 Rent began work on its first ground-up rental community in 2016; today it owns more than 14,000 BTR homes, with essentially all new home acquisition coming through BTR. Invitation Homes began purchasing BTR homes in 2021 in a partnership with homebuilder Pulte, and as with American Homes 4 Rent essentially all its home acquisition now comes from BTR. Pretium Partners, which owns over 80,000 single-family homes under its “Progress Residential” umbrella, formed a $1 billion BTR venture in 2021. Some companies, such as American Homes 4 Rent, opted to do all their BTR development work in-house, while others preferred to partner with existing homebuilders, buying new houses that developers constructed in bulk.
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Today, BTR is still a small segment of the overall housing market: CBRE estimates that there are about 350,000 BTR units in the US, which is just 1.5% of the overall single-family home rental market. But it’s a rapidly growing segment of the US housing market — or was, until this recent Senate bill.
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“Build-to-Rent” has become synonymous with single-family homes built specifically to be rented out, typically in communities of a few dozen to a few hundred rental homes, but within that category companies offer a broad range of different products. BTR generally gets broken down into several major subcategories (though some use slightly different ones): single-family detached, single-family attached, and horizontal multifamily. These categories exist on something of a spectrum of “very similar to conventional single-family homes” on one end and “very similar to conventional apartment buildings” on the other.
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But while affordability issues seem to be the primary driver of BTR’s popularity, there also seems to be some fraction of residents that simply prefer renting over owning, due to a desire for less maintenance or simply because they don’t perceive owning a home as a major life goal. CBRE, NAHB, and NexMetro all mention various demographics of “renters by choice” (such as retirees), an analysis echoed by several BTR developers I talked to. As construction of BTR communities continues, this growth might create a sort of reinforcing cycle: more people move into rental housing, which makes it more accepted, which draws even more people in, and so on.
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The rise of build-to-rent housing
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Comment on When AI builds itself in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Claude writes a significant proportion of Anthropic’s code. As of May 2026, more than 80% of the code we merge into Anthropic’s codebase was authored by Claude.3 Before Claude Code launched in research preview in February 2025, this number was in the low single digits. That shift also shows up in the amount of output per engineer. Lines of code merged per engineer per day stayed constant through Anthropic’s first four years (2021-2024), then began to climb upward in 2025 when Claude began to run code rather than just suggesting it for an engineer to copy and paste. The slope steepened again in 2026 when models began to work autonomously over longer time horizons. These two inflection points are shown in the chart below. In the second quarter of 2026, the typical engineer was merging 8× as much code per day as they were in 2024.4 This is because much of the code is written by Claude, with the engineer directing and reviewing, rather than typing it themselves.
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The second criterion is writing code that another engineer can understand and build on. Here the gap between humans and AI persists, but is closing fast. There isn’t full consensus among staff at Anthropic, but many believe that the Claude-written code was still worse in quality than human-written code at Anthropic in late 2025, and is roughly at parity today. We expect it to be better within the year.
This has changed the way that Anthropic now reviews its own code. Proposed changes to our codebase are now read by an automated Claude reviewer that looks for bugs, security flaws, and other defects before it can merge. Using this tool, we ran a retrospective analysis, and found that an automated Claude review of every change to our codebase would have caught roughly a third of the bugs behind past incidents on claude.ai before they ever reached production. The engineers who wrote that code are among the best in the world at building these systems. Claude is now catching the mistakes that they missed.
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Claude is good at running experiments to hit a goal that someone else has set. Every time Anthropic releases a model, we run the same test: we give Claude some code that trains a small AI model, and ask it to make that code run as fast as possible while still passing the same correctness checks. The goal and the success metrics are fixed in advance, so Claude’s job is to find speedups by rewriting the code, running it, timing it, and repeating. It’s a miniature version of an experimental research loop. In May 2025, Claude Opus 4 averaged a ~3x speedup over the starting code. By April 2026, Claude Mythos Preview was achieving ~52x. For calibration, a skilled human researcher would need four to eight hours to reach 4x.7 In this part of the research workflow—optimizing steps within a clearly defined experiment—Claude has gone from super helpful to superhuman in under a year.
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Even if we suppose that Claude never achieves good research taste, a conservative reading of our evidence still implies compounding acceleration. If humans spend most of their time on the single-digit fraction of work that is direction-setting, while Claude handles the rest, that means each engineer or researcher is steering far more work than before. The evidence we see suggests that people at Anthropic are both moving faster and covering a broader surface. In practice, this means that AI already makes Anthropic move much faster than it did before the advent of effective AI tools.
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We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. These systems would enable frontier AI developers to verify that others globally have actually stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret. If such systems existed, we expect that we would slow down or temporarily pause, if other developers at or near the frontier also did so in a verifiable manner.
A meaningful slowdown or pause would require multiple well-resourced labs at or near the frontier, in multiple countries, agreeing to stop under the same conditions. It would also require that each can verify that the others have actually stopped. Due to the unique characteristics of AI systems, the detectability (a lower standard than verifiability) element of this arms control problem is much more challenging than with other technologies. Training runs are far easier to conceal than missile silos, their inputs are general-purpose, and the incentive to defect quietly is enormous, because whoever continues while others pause could inherit the lead. A credible pause also has to specify what triggers it, what lifts it, and who adjudicates.
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When AI builds itself
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Comment on What do you think of robots in the military? in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentBut they are extensively used in Ukraine. …But they are extensively used in Ukraine.
As of January 2023, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine estimates that around 30% of Ukrainian territory may be contaminated by landmines.[14] Other sources estimate this figure as high as 40%.[15]
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In some contaminated regions like Kherson, farmers have resorted to picking out unexploded shells by sight, and using armored and remote-operated tractors.[23] Ukrainian officials estimate that as of March 2023, up to one-third of all arable land (approximately 10 million hectares) in areas of hostility are mined.[21][24]
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Comment on What internet discussion sites remain? in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI usually share a link when there’s something about the news story that makes me feel like I learned something surprising and it changed how I think about the world, at least a little. I don’t...I usually share a link when there’s something about the news story that makes me feel like I learned something surprising and it changed how I think about the world, at least a little. I don’t think that’s quite the same thing as significance.
Many things the Trump administration does are horrible but no longer surprising. At one time they would have been very surprising.
I also don’t follow the Ukraine war in detail anymore, other than changes in technology.
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Comment on What do you think of robots in the military? in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThis seems similar to the trend with bombs and missiles. For the US at least, they are now so accurate that mistakes seem to be due to a failure in intelligence where they chose the wrong target?...This seems similar to the trend with bombs and missiles. For the US at least, they are now so accurate that mistakes seem to be due to a failure in intelligence where they chose the wrong target?
In Iran the most notorious targeting failure was bombing a school. I haven’t heard of other failures like that. Perhaps with better intelligence, such mistakes will become less common.
Also consider the times when civilians are killed at a checkpoint because soldiers cannot allow them to get too close, and they don’t stop. Perhaps an automated checkpoint would make different decisions, since self-defense isn’t as important? If a checkpoint gets blown up, they will simply replace it.
I don’t think this adds up to war being less horrific, but it means that the horror is curiously selective. Not being seen as a military target becomes all-important.
Meanwhile, the front line between Ukrainian and Russian troops has become a no-man’s land many miles wide where troops can move only by stealth. Much like minefields, automatic weapons are used to attempt to deny access.
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Comment on What internet discussion sites remain? in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThanks! I found that finishing a blog post is too much work. My substack has many drafts where I sketched an idea, but I would never feel like going back and finishing them. Sharing links and...Thanks!
I found that finishing a blog post is too much work. My substack has many drafts where I sketched an idea, but I would never feel like going back and finishing them. Sharing links and writing a comment in a few minutes seems to be about all I can manage, so microblogging would be about as much as I can do, and a Substack isn’t really the place for that. On the other hand, Bluesky’s 300 character limit is too short.
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Comment on Who’s buying SpaceX and Anthropic? in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentTheir red line is reportedly mass domestic surveillance (that would be in the US) or fully autonomous killing machines (of any kind).Their red line is reportedly mass domestic surveillance (that would be in the US) or fully autonomous killing machines (of any kind).
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Comment on What do you think of robots in the military? in ~tech
skybrian (edited )LinkVery little about war is ethical. Sometimes people refer to it as a “moral solvent” because things that are absolutely unethical in peacetime sometimes become necessary to avoid defeat. This can...Very little about war is ethical. Sometimes people refer to it as a “moral solvent” because things that are absolutely unethical in peacetime sometimes become necessary to avoid defeat. This can justify all sorts of horrible things in self-defense. Killing enemy soldiers is only the beginning.
In Ukraine, there is a drone arms race. I believe that usually they kill people by remote control, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they started killing people automatically.
And there will be more robots:
Robot wars: Ukraine now adding ‘land drones’ to its futuristic arsenal
Now, a similar process is unfolding involving robots – or “land drones,” as Ukrainians prefer to call them. Unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs, are being developed and deployed on the front lines to carry out tasks traditionally handled by foot soldiers.
From providing reconnaissance and delivering supplies to firing small arms, evacuating the wounded, and mining and demining, robots are doing it, or soon will be.
Speaking to weapons manufacturers on Ukraine’s Arms Makers’ Day in April, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine, for the first time, had captured an unspecified Russian position “using exclusively unmanned platforms,” both aerial drones and robots. “The future is here, on the battlefield,” he said, “and Ukraine is creating it.”
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Currently, about 90% of the tasks robots are undertaking in the war are in logistics, though the use of UGVs for reconnaissance missions that might stump UAVs – for example, in areas of heavy tree cover – is growing rapidly.
As a trend, this is scary as hell. What happens in Ukraine won’t stay in Ukraine. But who am I to say that the Ukrainians are wrong to defend themselves this way?
It doesn’t seem likely that there will be international agreements about a new kind of war crime concerning robots.
And certainly, there will be no complaints about robots taking soldiers’ jobs. The more soldiers they can replace, the better.
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Comment on Who’s buying SpaceX and Anthropic? in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentYes, I think it would be better to wait, but Tesla isn't a good example. It looks like the S&P 500 will wait six months.Yes, I think it would be better to wait, but Tesla isn't a good example.
It looks like the S&P 500 will wait six months.
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Comment on Who’s buying SpaceX and Anthropic? in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentI don't know what point you're trying to make. Tesla went public 16 years ago. Why wouldn't it be in the S&P 500? That's the point of the index fund, to own stock in all of the largest US public...I don't know what point you're trying to make. Tesla went public 16 years ago. Why wouldn't it be in the S&P 500? That's the point of the index fund, to own stock in all of the largest US public companies. That's what index investors want.
SpaceX should be there eventually, unless there's a spectacular crash and burn. It's a question of whether to wait a bit before deciding that the market cap is reasonably stable.
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Comment on The user is visibly frustrated in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI will say please but never thank you, because what would be the point? A waste of tokens.I will say please but never thank you, because what would be the point? A waste of tokens.
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Comment on You can now use your Gmail account in Proton Mail in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link ParentWhat does the discovery of a business look like? Probably a web search? How do you know you got the right website? It’s rather hazy, based on reputation, and perhaps vulnerable to impersonation....What does the discovery of a business look like? Probably a web search? How do you know you got the right website? It’s rather hazy, based on reputation, and perhaps vulnerable to impersonation. But once you have the right website, https is pretty secure.
How does a business identify you, assuming it needs to? A bank doesn’t care what your email address is when you sign up. They will want to see your ID, probably in person at a bank branch. It’s vulnerable to identity theft, but we don’t have anything better.
Other businesses sometimes rely on a bank relationship (for example, via a credit card).
A passkey works pretty well to re-identify you. An email or SMS might be used for login or account recovery, but it assumes you already established a relationship, and their security depends on the provider.
I don’t much like installing apps either, but they’re becoming increasingly popular, particularly for things like banking.
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Comment on You can now use your Gmail account in Proton Mail in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentYeah, good luck with that. The world seems to be moving towards passkeys and mobile notifications. Email is a fallback notification scheme.Yeah, good luck with that. The world seems to be moving towards passkeys and mobile notifications. Email is a fallback notification scheme.
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Comment on You can now use your Gmail account in Proton Mail in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentIt seems like encryption would limit how good Proton’s search can be? Is it all done client side?It seems like encryption would limit how good Proton’s search can be? Is it all done client side?
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