kbos87

I'm not running a hotel - it's a large house in a rural area, and it's not uncommon for it to take a day or two before a house gets cleaned after you depart, which means that trash and dirty dishes left behind become a problem.

Again these are clear expectations set up front before someone books, and I've never had a guest complain about them. If you are really that averse to taking out the trash and sticking your dishes in the dishwasher, my property probably isn't for you and you probably aren't the guest for me.

If I don't have the ability to make simple and reasonable requests like this, I'm going to have to work around it. In this case that means telling my cleaners I need them there immediately after someone checks out, which almost certainly means my cleaning fee is going up to $350.

On leaving negative reviews of guests, it's widely known among hosts that leaving a guest who you've had a poor experience with a review at all is a guaranteed path to getting a negative review yourself. The guest sees I've left them a review, they are relatively sure of what it will say, so they leave me a negative review preemptively. It's best to not review them and hope they choose to not leave me a review.

And no, I don't have the ability to see a guests' reviews before they book. To have any hope of visibility on the platform I need to have instant book turned on, and they've removed the ability to require any sort of floor in terms of a guests' rating.

The platforms have intentionally engineered both hosts and guests into all sorts of prisoner's dilemma situations to drive booking volume at any cost.

"Airbnb" is a label that represents a massive range of situations. Different guests, different properties, different expectations.

I'm a host, I've had hundreds of stays over several years, and I have stellar reviews. It's a large house so there's a $250 cleaning fee. I ask guests to start the dishwasher and take their trash to the dumpster at the end of the street.

I'd say I have two types of guests. The first type is the 99% - they are friendly, grateful, and make the whole thing worthwhile. People who ask for recommendations on the area, leave a nice note in our guest book, and are grateful and respectful of our home. They never complain about taking care of a few things before they leave, and often ask what else they can do. It's honestly a source of positivity for everyone involved to have them stay in our home.

I can count on a single hand the number of times I've had the second type of guest. Exploitative people who have it out for us the second they check in and won't be satisfied until they've extracted money and apologies. As a host, I have literally zero recourse against these people. The system is set up to let them behave this way, and they make me more cautious and my home more expensive for everyone else.

Getting to my point - everyone comes to conversations about Airbnb with an enraged, polarized point of view. It's still a thriving platform with absolutely everything in a single place. The homes range from bare bones crash pads and neglected side projects to true luxury experiences. The guests range from people you are happy to have met to true predators.

Unfortunately, Airbnb and Vrbo have created an absolute race to the bottom. As a host I have next to zero ability to screen who stays with us, and I'm basically at the mercy of bad actors. They extract huge fees and are unhelpful to me and barely helpful to my guests. They introduce ham-fisted rules like this every few months and are revenue optimizing themselves off a cliff.

This is a market that could benefit from more choice.

I wish I had mentioned that I recognize there are some very valid reasons why a professional with a deeper knowledge than I have might steer their patient away from some of these offerings (completely separate from the reason I mentioned.) Thank you for making that point!

> You may need to push for comprehensive genetic testing. Some doctors were weird about this and didn’t order it promptly, even after telling me they would.

Honest question - when physicians steer their patients, do they have any specific instructions or obligations with regard to who and what they are optimizing for?

For example, if you visit any online space where (self-reported) physicians are sharing their opinions on any of the newer self-paid testing services (e.g., Function Health blood testing, Prenuvo MRI scans) you'll clearly see some of their internal calculus around why these services are good or bad. The thing that I've been surprised by in the past is that the "impact to the system" often comes up as a reason not to use these services. Yes you the paying consumer might learn something about yourself, but it's a bad idea on the premise that you might be crowding out someone who needs the care more than you do.

I can respect that point of view, but if that is part of what informs a physician's recommendation, it should be clear and explicit. Is this something that any code of ethics covers? Optimizing for the patient in front of you first and foremost?

Fair, I won't comment on whether or not a camera adds any value to this use case specifically. I can imagine a lot of other ways that a camera could be useful. Today I only plug in a google home camera when I'm gone for extended periods of time (e.g., on vacation) because my partner and I don't want a camera pointing into our living space at all times.

This seems to be the first instance I can think of where a vendor is trying to take a middle road of extracting more value from a camera while also having a more conservative view on privacy. We'll need to see exactly what that means in practice, but I'm glad someone is finally broaching the question.

It takes real effort and tuning to get it right today, but it's getting easier!

I live in a 1700sqft space - not small, but not large. I have ~15 separate banks of overhead lights that were built into my builder grade condo when I bought it, and probably 20 light fixtures (lamps, accent lights, etc) I've added myself. If you are even remotely interested in design, decor or lighting it's easy to end up with a similar number of lights in an average sized space. When I walk through the door, the scene sets itself perfectly based on the time of day. If I didn't have that automation, I'd probably end up turning on the nearest 1-2 lights out of convenience. It's a huge quality of life improvement. Today it takes some up front effort to get it set up, but it's getting easier and easier and more people will realize the benefit.

I don’t disagree, but effective enforcement of the law as it is written has to play a role. There is a kernel of truth behind the broken windows theory of policing. When it’s widely known that the law can’t be reliably enforced, crime escalates, and quality of life deteriorates.

I hate that this has to be an all or nothing conversation. There is a path where technology can deliver benefits without significant harm to individual privacy.

San Francisco has turned the tide on smash and grab crime through license plate readers and drone response. New Hampshire requires law enforcement agencies to delete unflagged license plate data within three minutes of collection. These two conditions can exist at the same time, in the same place, if we don’t allow the narrative to be pulled toward either extreme. Unfortunately that’s very tough to accomplish in today’s political climate in the US.

Similar take here - I only find value in skills as a way to repeatably carry out tasks that are specific to my workflow; any skills I've seen shared broadly don't seem to add much value beyond what the model itself can already handle.

At work I'll occasionally repurpose a skill that someone else has shared as a starting point, but those skills are already somewhat customized to the environment I operate in.

I have all of my skills maintain a single table in a markdown file with a description of each skill, when it last ran, exceptions it encountered, and when it was last edited.

This piece is so incredibly lazy. It's essentially an inventory of grievances the author has heard, each one poorly articulated and poorly supported. It aims to get points for completeness so it's lengthy, though every argument (even the valid ones!) are an inch deep. It ironically would have benefitted from a simple critique by the Claude of two years ago.

Corey laid out this line of thinking on a July 1 episode of the Galaxy Brain podcast. It was a good listen and I generally think he has some interesting points, but I also can't help but think that he does himself a disservice by having such a consistently negative bias toward AI and tech in general.

Most of the time he comes off as an objective thinker, but those are really discounted by moments where his own dogma leads him down a path of making weakly supported points that seem like they come more from a place of anger.

I currently have a Tesla (no CarPlay) and a Volvo EV with a reasonably good CarPlay implementation. I was in the same position as the writer until I experienced great in-vehicle software that I think only Tesla & Rivian can currently offer.

I don't miss CarPlay one bit, and I think a lot of people are brainwashed into thinking it's the only viable option because they've never been exposed to an auto manufacturer who actually knows how to build software ;) The level of software-hardware integration you experience in a Rivian or Tesla is something that CarPlay just can't compete with.

Personally I also don't want Tesla or Rivian to add CarPlay, because the reality is that it's not only additive. If Tesla & Rivian don't continue to nudge their buyers toward their native in-vehicle software CarPlay will continue to dominate simply because people will default to using what they are comfortable with. That will inevitably drive decisions by Tesla & Rivian about where and how they should invest in the in-vehicle experience.

If you want CarPlay, there are plenty of legacy auto manufacturers out there who can give it to you.