Mark O'Sullivan
17.1K posts
@MarkOSullivan94
Building a Airbnb alternative called Caza de Casa
the digital nomad thing peaked around 2022 and now there's a quiet correction. people buying property. getting dogs. learning the language of wherever they landed. the forever-travelers are settling and nobody's writing about it because "I stopped moving" isn't a sexy headline. but it's the truer story. the sequel to "quit your job and travel" is "find your place and build."
Flutter is the second most popular mobile app building SDK
Depending how you measure the crime area in Barcelona's center is even bigger though, but it's more pickpocketing in the Gothic Quarter than violent crime, but still... What you see is European cities are starting to mirror cities in the United States now: ask any American and of course you avoid the downtown, it's always crime, drugs and poverty Historically this was NOT the case in Europe! Downtown areas in European capitals were historical and beautiful, now they're overrun by crime and starting to be no-go zones
Shakira's story tells you everything you need to know about the Spanish 🇪🇸 tax system I had never looked into her case; always thought she had used some sort of shady business structure to avoid paying taxes But reality is way worse than that Turns out, she wasn't really living in Spain the year Hacienda claims she didn't pay her taxes She spent 163 days there. Less than the threshold of 183 days that automatically turns you into a tax resident So, what was Hacienda's claim? She was dating a Spaniard and had a house in Spain... So even if she was not really living there... She had to pay Now the National Audience has decreed that's not how it works, and Hacienda has to pay her back, with interests But this tells you a couple things: - If you're from a Western country and plan on leaving, you need to be VERY careful with how you structure things. Tax authorities will try anything to get your money - Shakira only got her money back because she has the time and resources to fight a legal battle for 10 years. You won't be so lucky - If you're a foreigner, stay away from the Spanish tax system. Yes, our cities and nature are unmatched. But just go there as a tourist
Almost all of the cities of the West sprawl, with high rise cores giving way to mid-rise blocks, to rowhouses, to detached homes, to exurbs and only then to countryside. One country stands out as an exception: Spain. Even today, Spanish cities expand in mid-rise blocks including shops and businesses, served by extensive metros, and structured in traditional courtyard blocks. The style of the facades has changed, but in other respects they are still close to the urbanism of Barcelona’s nineteenth-century Eixample neighbourhood. This is extremely distinctive. Americans often imagine that all European cities are like this, but actually most Europeans switched over to car-dependent suburbia in the twentieth century, much like the American norm. worksinprogress.co/issue/why-spai… Why did Spain diverge? - Spain remained very poor until late in the twentieth century, limiting suburbanisation. By the time Spain was rich enough for suburbs, new urbanist ideals were already beginning to appear. - Traditional Spanish flat-building practices were not decimated by rent controls as they were in France and Germany, avoiding a forcible switch to owner-occupied single-family houses. - The Spanish state still plans street networks like European and American municipalities in the nineteenth century, and Spanish landowners normally pool their land in land readjustment schemes to create a unified landowner. Spain never really had a conscious plan to diverge from international urban norms – the divergence happened partly by accident. But it shows that multiple ways of building cities remain possible in affluent societies. Today, hundreds of Asian cities are near the densities and GDPs of Spain in the 1960s, when the Spanish Divergence began. If they want, they can choose the Spanish path, and grow like modern Madrid (left) rather than modern Alburquerque (right).
Eye-opening to see some non-coding LLM applications regress over the last year in functionality. I used to trust Perplexity as an AI search engine as it summarizes underlying sources, and did it well. It now hallucinates stuff despite crawling pages with correct information. Eg I asked it where Jamie Vardy (Leicester City hero / footballer) is playing. Perplexity says as of May 2026 there’s no information… despite crawling sources that confirm he’s been playing in Italy
Huge collapse in drinking among high schoolers 👀
