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

Joined December 2008
566 Photos and videos
Amazing how the horseshoe theory never fails huh.
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
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The anti-data center, anti-safety camera people are basically just young liberals turning into their NIMBY parents. Different era, different issues, same fear of change even when positive for them in the long run
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We just ripped out a $60/u/m SaaS phone system for 200 users and replaced it with our own platform based on Twilio. Cost will be probably 1/20th, and it’s exactly what we want with call routing that matches our complex business and incorporates AI effortlessly. 1/3
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Twilio makes this very easy. API support for configuration and production is excellent and Claude Code knows exactly how to drive it. Took two days of dev work to get the pilot working. 2/3
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SaaS may be cooked but service providers like Twilio that provide easy to use primitives are likely to thrive. Future of software is small shops like us rolling their own applications and relying heavily on providers with great DX for the hard stuff
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This is what’s driving the “ban RUBS” movement in Seattle. There is this idea that landlords are gouging tenants but really it’s the county doing it to everyone. And remember this doesn’t even include the $60/ sewer capacity charge that new units need to pay for 15 years!
Everybody knows Seattle is expensive but it’s pretty crazy how much water/sewer/trash really is: $200/mo for normal family of 4 usage. If urbanists want to prove cities are more cost-effective than suburbs, residents have to actually see lower costs in reality.
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I think they have just mismanaged a few large infrastructure projects and are passing on the consequences
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benmaritz retweeted
Everybody knows Seattle is expensive but it’s pretty crazy how much water/sewer/trash really is: $200/mo for normal family of 4 usage. If urbanists want to prove cities are more cost-effective than suburbs, residents have to actually see lower costs in reality.
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The Oregon legislature passed a law requiring data centers pay for their impacts on the grid, and the PUC and utilities implemented it. Data centers pay 29% more for power, and residential ratepayers now pay 1.3% less (because data centers weren't causing major rate increases).
The changes reflect a Public Utility Commission order last month on the utility's rate framework under Oregon's Power Act, adopted last year to shield other customers from the cost of powering data centers. bizjournals.com/portland/new…
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This story about a new mega complex in Bellevue breaking ground has links below it to stories about the last two Bellevue mega complexes going bankrupt. I don’t get it either.
Onni Group’s Biggest WA Project Brings 1,300 Homes, Pools & Daycare to Bellevue downtownbellevue.com/2026/04…
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benmaritz retweeted
HOP is one vote away! Huge thanks to @SeattleCouncil's Land Use Chair Eddie Lin, CM @Alexis4Seattle, CM Dionne Foster, and @CMDanStrauss for moving it through committee. Join us Tues 6/2, 2pm at City Hall to help get it across the finish line: forseattle.substack.com/p/jo…

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How long before the US goes after China for illegal dumping of tokens? DeepSeek v4 is about 1/10 the price of Claude/gpt and not far off on quality (and maybe 1/20 of the price effectively since it’s so good at caching and basically free in that mode)
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This is wishful thinking written by someone who hasn’t tried the efficient open source Chinese models
🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. My Take The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested. This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown. Hedgie🤗
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benmaritz retweeted
Sound Transit seems like the latest local government agency that can’t seem to deliver the results it promised. Facing a $35B budget shortfall, ST leaders are throwing up their hands and, behind a obscuring wall of empty, soothing word salad, planning to kill the Ballard line (which projections show would generate the greatest ridership. But what if there was a way to totally rethink the line, using shorter, automated trains and much smaller stations, reducing costs by $10B or more? On the latest @RealSeattleNice (link to follow), former SDOT Director Scott Kubly says that this alternative vision is doable, and points to cities like Copenhagen as examples. But he says he’s gotten the cold shoulder from Sound Transit leaders as he’s tried to come to them with a creative alternative to throwing in the towel. So is Kubly a disaffected crank who’s spinning simplistic fairy tales and unattainable pipe dreams? Or is Sound Transit an insular, hidebound agency that would rather underdeliver and break promises to its voters as opposed to fundamentally rethinking its assumptions in a way that would disrupt a comfortable status quo? Listen to what Scott has to say and decide or yourself.
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Scale is really important in any business, including housing. Imaging if each town got to set design standards for cars.
California's ADU reforms are successful in large part because they replaced 482 different sets of local rules with one consistent statewide standard. We should do the same thing with building safety regulations, which should be rigorous, evidence-backed and statewide.
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Hey Seattle- about those historic districts…
The Senate just passed my bill to ensure people can replace drafty windows with energy-efficient windows, without cities or HOAs obstructing them from doing so. Energy bills are through the roof & people should have the tools to lower their bills. Right now, some cities & HOAs are banning people from weatherizing their windows for aesthetic reasons, or forcing them to pay dramatically more money to fabricate replica windows. SB 908 puts a stop to this practice & gives people a tool to lower their cost of living. Thank you, colleagues!
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We only miss about 25% of inbound calls, which is great for property management But most of those are renters looking for immediate move-ins. Before, they basically disappeared into voicemail limbo. Now an AI voice agent answers, triages, gathers context, and routes them.
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The interesting thing is that the underlying AI tech has probably been good enough for a while. Eleven labs had the tech for this for years. What finally arrived is the developer experience. Meaning there are services that Claude code can configure entirely on its own.
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