@BillKingHouston @theSurlyBiker @torygattis @jarjoh This is great (despite the disappointing lack of maps), thanks
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Andrew Grizzle
6.3K posts
Andrew Grizzle
@drewgriz
I wouldn't say I've been missing it, Bob @drewgriz.bsky.social
Houston, TX Katılım Ocak 2009
993 Takip Edilen257 Takipçiler
@drewgriz @theSurlyBiker @torygattis @jarjoh It was never made publicly available by Metro. I obtained it through an open records request and posted it here -
drive.google.com/file/d/1iuvXPm…
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Houston remains vindicated in their decision to build light rail only in the core instead trying to serve the burbs in order to get them on board. Dallas built a long system with poorly located stations and now those burbs are opting out.
Texas Tribune@TexasTribune
Dallas’ Highland Park votes to leave Texas’ second-largest public transit system. Voters in Highland Park chose to leave Dallas Area Rapid Transit amid complaints that the transit service isn’t worth the cost. bit.ly/4urckLj
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@BillKingHouston @theSurlyBiker @torygattis @jarjoh I would actually be really curious to read this MetroNext ridership study, is it publicly linkable?
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We spent $3bb on the existing system. Where do you think the money would come from? Metro studied 150 alignments as part of MetroNext. NONE generated enough ridership to justify the cost or to qualify for federal funding. Also, DART did exactly what you are proposing - over 100 miles of rail, connector to DFW. It carries 25% fewer riders than Metro does and its finances are a disaster. Of course if you spent as much time actually studying these issues as you do searching the internet for memes you might actuallly know that.
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I think it’s funny people forget Texas has big cities with rich areas where they can charge more for gas
Spencer Hakimian@SpencerHakimian
🚨BREAKING: Gas hits $5.00/Gallon in Texas.
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@bobbyfijan This is one thing I love about living in a house that will 100% be a teardown if/when we sell it: the resale value of any work we do is zero, so we are the only people whose opinion matters.
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And that, ladies and gentlemen … is why all cabinets are white, all the floors are gray and all the appliances are “stainless”
Rohin Dhar@rohindhar
If you design/remodel a home too idiosyncratically to your own tastes It will be extremely challenging to sell later on, even in the blazing hot San Francisco real estate market of 2026
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@gratifihouston I mean you're kind of proving the point that it only matters because of the other 500 worse things he's done. I don't want people pulling gotchas when the Hollins admin is dropping bangers on TikTok every week about fixing Metro and building new bike lanes.
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@drewgriz The guy who has a bully pulpit at city council every week, the guy who can have media interview him at any point, the guy who has wasted millions of dollars while lecturing us the city is broke. It matters.
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I gotta say, I'm a certified Whitmire hater, but I just can't summon any outrage over the podcast thing. 60k is nothing in a city budget. Arguably a good city hall should spend way more than that on new media (see NYC). The problem is the podcast sucks, like the rest of the admin
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Oat milk specifically could also probably benefit from more economies of scale. By similar accounting it should also be way cheaper than almond milk. Drink more oat milk, people! It's delicious! And I say this as someone who also drinks plenty of dairy milk.
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The synthesis here is that there *is* a rightwing plot to make plant milk more expensive, but that plot is federal dairy (& feed crop) subsidies. By any accounting for actual inputs cow milk should be like 5x the cost of oatmilk. Not much any coffee shop can do about it, though.
Jason, Coffee Shop Oligarch@jasonc_nc
Hi. Restaurant and coffee shop owner here. Almond milk runs 2.2x the cost of whole milk. Oat milk is 2.4x, macadamia is 4x and soy is ~2x. We charge more because it costs us more, not because all of us are engaged in a rightwing plot against people who prefer alternatives.
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Andrew Grizzle retweetledi
This is just like being alive in the 1600s when they got good at making complicated clocks and deduced that every complicated thing in the universe probably functioned exactly like a clock
Dwarkesh Patel@dwarkesh_sp
There's a quadrillion-dollar question at the heart of AI: Why are humans so much more sample efficient compared to LLM? There are three possible answers: 1. Architecture and hyperparameters (aka transformer vs whatever ‘algo’ cortical columns are implementing) 2. Learning rule (backprop vs whatever brain is doing) 3. Reward function @AdamMarblestone believes the answer is the reward function. ML likes to use pretty simple loss functions, like cross-entropy. These are easy to work with. But they might be too simple for sample-efficient learning. Adam thinks that, in humans, the large number of highly specialised cells in the ‘lizard brain’ might actually be encoding information for sophisticated loss functions, used for ‘training’ in the more sophisticated areas like the cortex and amygdala. Like: the human genome is barely 3 gigabytes (compare that to the TBs of parameters that encode frontier LLM weights). So how can it include all the information necessary to build highly intelligent learners? Well, if the key to sample-efficient learning resides in the loss function, even very complicated loss functions can still be expressed in a couple hundred lines of Python code.
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@evan7257 I could be convinced to move the yellow line over to the west south of Buffalo Bayou
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@emilytakesnotes I don't know that I would have much to contribute but would love to lurk in such a channel
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Who else watches city council every week and should we make ourselves a lil discord channel or something?? I want to talk ish but also it would be genuinely useful I think???
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@allynwest Utility ROWs are such low-hanging fruit. This would be absolutely packed on day 1.
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B E Y O N D
T H E
B A Y O U S
S P A C E • B O Y@rumilb
The network needs more connections, especially North-South
HT
Andrew Grizzle retweetledi
A story about following your dreams even if they’re stupid, and believing in yourself, even if you’re stupid (which would explain the quality of the dreams): theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/…
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On top of everything else the funding threat from Austin was the most predictable next move on the board. If Whitmire planned on folding immediately, he shouldn't have voted for the ordinance. He's not playing both sides, he's pissing everyone off.
Alejandra Salinas@salinasforhtx
Governor Abbott’s threat to strip $110 million in public safety funding from Houston is an attempt to bully our city for doing what is right, what is legal, and what upholds the Constitution. The premise that Houston must either repeal this ordinance or lose funding is a false choice designed to force compliance through fear. Those are not the only options. Houston has a clear legal path forward. I sent a letter to urge the Mayor and the City Attorney to immediately file a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) to prevent the State from withdrawing funds and seek a declaratory judgment affirming that this ordinance is lawful. If we act now and file, the court will issue an opinion as early as today, providing City Council with critical guidance before any rushed decision is made regarding repeal. There is no funding that will be put at risk by seeking this emergency relief ahead of the State’s April 20th deadline. Houstonians deserve a city that will stand up for them, defend its laws, and protect its residents. I respectfully urge the Mayor to take immediate legal action.
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@sam_d_1995 Reminds me of the old adage about the fishing lure business. Making one that catches fish is easy, but to make money you have to make one that catches the fisherman. Similarly, showing this stuff is great for cities is easy, but we gotta make it great for city councilors.
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upzoning is basically a municipal infinite money printer:
-more housing to bring down overall costs
-more affordable housing, cross subsidized by the market rate housing
-more property tax revenues
-more MTA ridership and farebox revenue
-more population and income tax revenue
NYC Planning@NYCPlanning
A two-story building will become 28 in Jamaica! Thanks to the Jamaica Neighborhood Plan, 285 homes — including permanently affordable housing — will rise just blocks away from the E, F, J and Z trains + LIRR. Read more in @CrainsNewYork: crainsnewyork.com/real-estate/re…
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@DanielKayHertz Just one guy's opinion which is probably wildly unpopular, but I think chock-a-block Paris-style blocks but with double the sf/unit would be a massive improvement in most American cities. If we actually did that then found ourselves needing more density/sqmi then it's tower time.
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it also doesn't work without teeny tiny (by American standards) little units
Brandon Donnelly@donnelly_b
Many like to talk fondly about Paris-scale density without fully understanding what they’re advocating for. It’s very dense. It doesn’t have parking. It’s more than an architectural style and a building height.
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@bobbyfijan Some anecdata that maybe helps point to success: in my relatively high-income bubble in inner loop Houston, it feels like everyone I know (including me) is having babies.
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My theory (and solution) on the fertility "crisis" has been consistent for years:
Young people move to the The City for school, opportunity, adventure etc. But they are reaching the (not unreasonable) conclusion that having kids means moving away. So they delay.
This is *partly* due to the cost of family housing, childcare + education ... but the primary driver has become social or cultural: they just DO NOT SEE families around them. This becomes a self reinforcing downward loop. Fewer kids means reduced services for families: schools close, fewer high chairs and kid's menus in restaurants etc. This is exacerbated by the higher costs the cities impose on childcare and the ~monopoly they have on schools and enforcement of disorder.
It's an incredibly difficult cycle to reverse and the only practical solution is an incremental one: make it easier for very young families to decide to stay. Appeal to the people who ALREADY love the City to make it their home when they have their first child.
This starts by building housing designed FOR families, but also in improving safety, public education, local elementary schools etc. And slowly by adding more babies and toddlers, we make it more socially customary for places to be child friendly. Families who have lived in neighborhoods for years decide to send their kids to the local schools with their friends.
And then hopefully as more of these pioneer families grow and flourish, the younger people around them see this and think: "Well if they are making it work ... then I guess I could too."
Bobby Fijan@bobbyfijan
Why aren't young people having kids? Because not only are housing+education costs too high, but they believe they have to uproot their entire life if/when they have children We need to make it easier to have little kids in the city (because that's where young people live)
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@KelseyTuoc Do we have data on the comparability of the miles? i.e. do Waymos have a significantly different surface-to-freeway mile ratio than human drivers? Not sure how significant it would be but immediately sticks out as something you'd want to control for.
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Because Waymo is rapidly scaling up its operations, we're rapidly accumulating more evidence on the question of whether it's safer than human drivers. The case for Waymo being safer than human drivers in in some sense almost twice as strong as it was in October.
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