Erica Van Houten
@epvh.bsky.social
Trans girl in Texas. Software nerd by day, local and state advocate by night.
Reading Queen of Shadows thinking why am I supposed to care about this witch storyline? Then back story reveal and hooooly fuck. Those are some feels.
November 26, 2025 at 9:15 PM
Reading Queen of Shadows thinking why am I supposed to care about this witch storyline? Then back story reveal and hooooly fuck. Those are some feels.
This is the conclusion I end up getting to when trying to suggest changing anything.
I agree if things stay the way they are they will stay the way they are.
November 26, 2025 at 6:52 PM
This is the conclusion I end up getting to when trying to suggest changing anything.
No one gets to tell me about character limits. I do what I want.
There are (at least) two things that drive the cost of housing. The land it’s on and the building that’s on the land. More density spreads the cost of the land over more units. Similar sized units compete with each other. New builds nominally make older builds less attractive.
November 26, 2025 at 12:49 PM
No one gets to tell me about character limits. I do what I want.
Cars are 26 times more deadly than trains and 75 times more deadly than busses. How about we discourage car ownership so that transportation will be both more affordable and safer.
Car ownership (dependency) itself is expensive. But what if we, I don't know, focused on expanding transportation options beyond cars? What if we changed regulations so that automakers were no longer incentivized to build giant SUVs and trucks? No, we'll just cut back on safety features? Okay.
November 25, 2025 at 8:19 PM
Cars are 26 times more deadly than trains and 75 times more deadly than busses. How about we discourage car ownership so that transportation will be both more affordable and safer.
The setup for this Chubbyemu is so awful. Terrifying.
A man asked AI for health advice and it cooked every brain cell
YouTube video by Chubbyemu
youtu.be
November 25, 2025 at 6:13 PM
The setup for this Chubbyemu is so awful. Terrifying.
Oh this thing that has been treasured for generations? Let’s make it into a creepy simulacrum to save a buck.
Disney has revealed a next-generation robotic figure of Frozen's Olaf that will literally walk, talk, and interact with guests around the World of Frozen lands at Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland in early 2026. https://bit.ly/4okgGQW
November 25, 2025 at 1:52 PM
Oh this thing that has been treasured for generations? Let’s make it into a creepy simulacrum to save a buck.
Google was already dead when they started optimizing for ad revenue over the accuracy of the search results. Everything else is just coating it in another layer of feces.
Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea
November 25, 2025 at 4:35 AM
Google was already dead when they started optimizing for ad revenue over the accuracy of the search results. Everything else is just coating it in another layer of feces.
Drivers are too stupid to slow down and not run into things so we have to do it the more expensive and dangerous way.
November 24, 2025 at 10:54 PM
Drivers are too stupid to slow down and not run into things so we have to do it the more expensive and dangerous way.
It’s not fraud in the technical sense, just the practical sense is a distinction that you’re allowed to make I guess.
Nvidia’s ‘I’m Not Enron’ memo has people asking a lot of questions already answered by that memo
Nvidia’s ‘I’m Not Enron’ memo has people asking a lot of questions already answered by that memo
The Streisand Effect strikes again
buff.ly
November 24, 2025 at 9:42 PM
It’s not fraud in the technical sense, just the practical sense is a distinction that you’re allowed to make I guess.
Reposted by Erica Van Houten
Just read the Euclid v Ambler and it’s just NIMBY bullshit. Think of the children, we design around cars so everything follows, poor people (read black people) might come here sometimes or horror of horrors actually live here.
November 24, 2025 at 8:12 PM
Just read the Euclid v Ambler and it’s just NIMBY bullshit. Think of the children, we design around cars so everything follows, poor people (read black people) might come here sometimes or horror of horrors actually live here.
Only poor people want multifamily housing so put it on the worst land. Then burden it with parking minimums to kill its economic viability. Then ban commercial activity on the same lot to justify the parking minimums and putting them on arterial’s.
Euclid v. Ambler was a mistake.
Euclid v. Ambler was a mistake.
after @ronpdavis.bsky.social attended the cascadian innovation corridor conference's presentation on upzoning 'grand boulevards' in region - he asked me to write about this concept.
corridor zoning is antithetical to livability, public health, & walkability.
ronpdavis.substack.com/p/mike-elias...
corridor zoning is antithetical to livability, public health, & walkability.
ronpdavis.substack.com/p/mike-elias...
Mike Eliason on "Corridor" Zoning
A Guest Post
ronpdavis.substack.com
November 24, 2025 at 7:28 PM
Only poor people want multifamily housing so put it on the worst land. Then burden it with parking minimums to kill its economic viability. Then ban commercial activity on the same lot to justify the parking minimums and putting them on arterial’s.
Euclid v. Ambler was a mistake.
Euclid v. Ambler was a mistake.
I’m going to be sick…
Mike Green is writing some amazing stuff at the moment. It's not in the delta, it's in the level and the cost structure. Read this and you will understand Angrynomics on a new level: www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-...
Part 1: My Life Is a Lie
How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America
www.yesigiveafig.com
November 24, 2025 at 5:26 PM
I’m going to be sick…
Reposted by Erica Van Houten
Pirating books makes you an asshole, full stop.
There's no debate to be had here. You either pay for books and support the author, borrow them from a library, or don't read. Those are your options.
There's no debate to be had here. You either pay for books and support the author, borrow them from a library, or don't read. Those are your options.
I see we've cycled back to the "pirating books is good, actually" discourse. This shit is fucking exhausting.
#WritingCommunity
#IndiePub
#WritingCommunity
#IndiePub
November 24, 2025 at 11:16 AM
Pirating books makes you an asshole, full stop.
There's no debate to be had here. You either pay for books and support the author, borrow them from a library, or don't read. Those are your options.
There's no debate to be had here. You either pay for books and support the author, borrow them from a library, or don't read. Those are your options.
Being an expert that has spent all of 4 hours in Jersey. Fuck Jersey.
So getting a lot of questions about this, basically, Bergen County is one of the last counties in the United States that has a Sunday closing law which bans the sale of electronics, clothes, etc., but it does not apply to groceries, so Costco is open, but any non-groceries look like this:
November 24, 2025 at 1:07 AM
Being an expert that has spent all of 4 hours in Jersey. Fuck Jersey.
We’ve automated lying. Absolute bullshit can be spewed faster than it can be read, never mind fact checked.
"I was embarrassed. I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch’s ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it"
Stunning investigation of how slop merchants are getting work into established media outlets
thelocal.to/investigatin...
Stunning investigation of how slop merchants are getting work into established media outlets
thelocal.to/investigatin...
November 23, 2025 at 9:52 PM
We’ve automated lying. Absolute bullshit can be spewed faster than it can be read, never mind fact checked.
Consenting adults can don what they want I guess, but at 40ish dating someone that hasn’t even established a career yet would be weird. I can imagine how foreign an early 20 something will be when I’m 20 years older.
Can you imagine thinking you were qualified to run for US Congress just two years after graduating from college? Karoline Leavitt did. She announced her candidacy in 2021. Then she started dating her future husband in 2022. She was 24/25 and he was 57/58. She also lied during her campaign.
1/
1/
November 21, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Consenting adults can don what they want I guess, but at 40ish dating someone that hasn’t even established a career yet would be weird. I can imagine how foreign an early 20 something will be when I’m 20 years older.
I hate this timeline.
November 21, 2025 at 4:14 PM
I hate this timeline.
I feel like I’m out of the loop on something. What has Trump riled up today?
November 20, 2025 at 3:24 PM
I feel like I’m out of the loop on something. What has Trump riled up today?
MS Teams be like “you have a notification!” But refuses to let you go look at the thing it wants you to look at until you scavenger hunt it down. Is it a chat? Is it a channel? Is it a hidden channel? These are things it thinks are too dangerous for you to know. I’m sure copilot could help.
November 20, 2025 at 3:21 PM
MS Teams be like “you have a notification!” But refuses to let you go look at the thing it wants you to look at until you scavenger hunt it down. Is it a chat? Is it a channel? Is it a hidden channel? These are things it thinks are too dangerous for you to know. I’m sure copilot could help.
I would play “Drive” on loop for an entire shift just out of spite.
I appreciate both the specificity and broadness of this sign
November 19, 2025 at 11:14 PM
I would play “Drive” on loop for an entire shift just out of spite.
Reposted by Erica Van Houten
I've had a few 'what do you do' convs recently, and everyone on hearing I'm an author comes out with "so how do you come up with ideas?", just like every book or movie about a writer has them staring numbly into space because they don't have an idea for the next book. And look, that is Not It.
November 19, 2025 at 7:43 AM
I've had a few 'what do you do' convs recently, and everyone on hearing I'm an author comes out with "so how do you come up with ideas?", just like every book or movie about a writer has them staring numbly into space because they don't have an idea for the next book. And look, that is Not It.
Great thread. Renewable is the cheapest source of power now. We want more of that. We need a base load while we build out grid scale storage, which can be some mix of nuclear/fossil/hydro. Nuclear would be fine if we had it on hand. NG is cleaner and price competitive with coal.
Uhm...TM1 went offline because it wasn't profitable
"The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant has been awarded a $1 billion federal loan guarantee that will enable it to shift onto taxpayers some of the risk of its plan to restart the Pennsylvania facility and sell the electricity to Microsoft for its data centers."
November 19, 2025 at 2:28 PM
Great thread. Renewable is the cheapest source of power now. We want more of that. We need a base load while we build out grid scale storage, which can be some mix of nuclear/fossil/hydro. Nuclear would be fine if we had it on hand. NG is cleaner and price competitive with coal.
I mean… that’s kinda impressively bad. Kudos to them I guess.
November 19, 2025 at 4:25 AM
I mean… that’s kinda impressively bad. Kudos to them I guess.