Affordable housing developer in Seattle, Tacoma and Portland. Dad, volunteer board member, aspiring pillar of the community

Seattle, WA
Joined December 2008
Very big ruling today from the appeals court on Seattle’s tenant protections. For the first time a court has basically said there is a limit to how far govt can go before it’s a “taking” courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/8… 1/
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Now the appeals court rejected that and has said that these regulations in total do constitute the kind of “taking” that the constitution prohibits. Especially the “roommate ordinance” which is pretty clearly a physical taking
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It’s now being sent back to the lower court and the trial will proceed. Hard to see how some of the more egregious laws stand up here. Ultimately, if the city wants for there to be free housing for those that can’t or won’t pay, it might have to pay for them itself.
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From Adam tooze Substack.
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AI is going to completely devastate the accounting industry especially tax. The agents are going to just be way better than humans. If you are a CPA you need to reinvent your business model now.
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I would suggest just embracing it. Offer a service where you just review tax or audits prepped by your clients agents. Ask for a specific input format and then charge 1/4 the normal amount.
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Watching Battlestar Galactica for the first time. Adama’s aversion to any networked computers on his ship is starting to look a lot more prescient
NSA and others releases guidance on applying prevention tactics to strengthen defense of U.S-based programmable logic controllers being targeted by cyber actors using AI. Learn more: media.defense.gov/2026/Aug/1… #cybersecurity #AI
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benmaritz retweeted
NSA and others releases guidance on applying prevention tactics to strengthen defense of U.S-based programmable logic controllers being targeted by cyber actors using AI. Learn more: media.defense.gov/2026/Aug/1… #cybersecurity #AI
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I don’t have good quant data on this but have been playing with different models on accounting work, and the short list of models that can do it well are opus, sol and kimi. Grok and muse are not at all in the same tier.
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Every one of our clients just takes our reporting package and drops it into chatgpt for analysis. I now have Maynard publish a big json to make this easier. People love it.
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We also set up an MCP for our clients but this is too complex. Dragging a .json works great.
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The problem for legislative Democrats is that they never approach tax reform holistically. Yes, we absolutely need a progressive income tax. But we also need to abolish the 1% cap on property tax levy increases, cut sales tax by 3-4 pts, and tax corporate profits, not revenue.
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Yep. I am just a small business owner, tho I may flatter myself in saying I’m in the 0.1% of SMB owners that see what’s possible. And it is definitely dizzying.
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel. - Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all. - Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract. - Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code. - And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while. The funnel is driven by a combination of factors: 1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel. 2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel. 3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal. So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
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I favor tax reform, but WA state law means we will need to do one of 1) cut state spending growth to below 1% 2) repeal the ban on prop tax hikes above 1% 3) expand the income tax 4) expand the hated sales or b&o revenue tax Which do you think is most likely?
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Haiku 4.5 was also a great, very cheap model. It represents all of our (non coding sub) anthropic spend. I guess that will be going down 10x now.
Haiku 5.5 is a good Haiku. With 100k token context, it's also 10x cheaper than Haiku 4.5
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