There's no official definition of what the "the suburbs" means, but when people say that they usually mean "areas that follow a post-war suburban style of development". Think culdesacs and no sidewalks. The area you linked looks to me more like an older "streetcar suburb", which I think most people would just call "the city".
Nobody I know would call that street the city. In my mind, "the city" is, minimally, houses that are a few feet apart, small yard in back/front, pretty much nothing on the side. Frequently, it's 2-3 story buildings, with whole floors rented out as an apartment. That's my "least dense" vision of a city. Anything less than that (ie, full yards) falls into my vision of suburb.
Those houses are more densely packed than in what I'd call a suburb. And much more importantly, nothing in that area is more than a few blocks from some sort of commerce. Suburbia (at least in the US) isn't so much about the houses themselves, but what's around them. I'm in one of those "streetcar suburbs" and the nearest store is a mile away and the bus comes every 20 minutes. I could get by without a car but it would be very annoying. You might find a fairly similar set of houses in the nearby city, but they'll be near a lot of stuff and living without a car would be far more practical.
Yeah, I wouldn't call that a suburb either for practical purposes. It would be one by the definition of "small city near big city," but in terms of how it functions it looks like city to me.
This is the Chicago block I grew up on. It's less dense than Oak Park. It's easy find blocks like it elsewhere in Chicago. Jeff Park in Chicago and Oak Park are basically clones of each other.
This is really what most of Chicago looks like (modulo economic conditions in the different neighborhoods --- they're not all this upscale). It's a city of neighborhoods. Most of the streetscapes that jump to mind about Chicago, if you don't live here, are places people basically don't live.
Wow, you weren't kidding about the relative density between those areas. I'd consider Oak Park dense compared to most suburbs, just not as dense as some neighborhoods in Chicago. I'm most familiar with the north side neighborhoods and had those kind of lots in mind, with their near non-existent front yards, with front steps right off the sidewalk, and virtually no front driveways.
Apartment building on Pine Grove in Lakeview for me and then a beautiful old two flat in Ravenswood. My rent in Pine Grove in 1999 was $400 I think for a two room apartment.
Small world, my wife and I literally just moved to Beverly not far from there. This area is a bit of liminal space between city and suburbs (or at least my definition of them) and it can vary quite a bit block to block. I'm walking distance to a grocery store, the Metra, coffee shops, restaurants, parks, etc., which is unfortunately more than many areas of Chicago can say.
I moved from a denser part of Bridgeport, so it definitely has been an adjustment (particularly in variety). But even some areas of Bridgeport, which is much closer to downtown, had pockets that are equivalently walkable to where I'm at now, or maybe even less so. Anyone surprised to see SFHs and front yards in Chicago probably hasn't ventured far out of downtown/a handful of North Side neighborhoods.
Some US cities incorporated their lower-density "streetcar suburbs" over the years and other US cities didn't. This is why "Kansas City" proper has literal farmland [0] within its city limits, while "St. Louis" proper [1] on the other side of the state doesn't even include most of the skyscraper development that's occurred there within the last 40 years.
This is entirely arbitrary and knowing whether a particular place is technically part of "the city" doesn't really tell you anything about it. As you might expect, this causes a ton of unnecessary confusion.
They're pretty clearly not using "the city" to refer to city but instead to a certain density threshold, so pointing out that city limits are arbitrary doesn't really help anything.
What you're describing is called "agreement." I'm very plainly arguing that if the distinction between "city" and "suburb" is to mean anything at all, then it can't just be about what's within municipal boundaries and what isn't.
So you were agreeing with OP's comment, not disagreeing?
> Nobody I know would call that street the city. In my mind, "the city" is, minimally, houses that are a few feet apart, small yard in back/front, pretty much nothing on the side. Frequently, it's 2-3 story buildings, with whole floors rented out as an apartment. That's my "least dense" vision of a city. Anything less than that (ie, full yards) falls into my vision of suburb.
That's why people have been using paragraphs to clarify what they mean. Paragraphs that you seem to have ignored in favor of critiquing the utility that specific words have when taken out of the context the author intentionally put them in.
No clue about Seattle, but they definitely do in Northern VA where I live. Every new development that requires a change of permitted use goes through a lengthy review process with plenty of opportunity for locals to object.
Edit - sibling comment indicates Seattle has something similar.
> but when people say that they usually mean "areas that follow a post-war suburban style of development". Think culdesacs and no sidewalks.
Define people?
When most people I know say suburb they mean this: You're far enough the urban core that you probably have to drive to get to shops and jobs, but close enough to the urban core that you don't pass through farmland to get there. Some suburbs are like what you describe, but most are exactly like what OP links to.
I'm not at all sure what the utility is of a using a definition of suburb that excludes most of the not-high-density but not-rural US and only counts the absolute worst-designed spaces. It just means we're all talking past each other, with some of us saying "not all suburbs are terrible" and others insisting that suburbs are by definition terrible and anything that isn't terrible isn't a suburb. It's a bit of a True Scotsman fallacy and doesn't make for very useful dialog.
I believe the colloquial definition has changed substantially over the last ~100 years in the US. As a concrete example, Travis Heights (part of Austin) was initially advertised as "Austin's first suburb", but is very much inside the city core today. In the UK, this is true of places like New Malden or even Wimbledon, which were as-built not part of London and were referred to as "suburbs", but are categorized that way by approximately no-one today.
You're right that people in practice use the word "suburb" to talk about all these different things, but that just reinforces that the word isn't very useful. Oak Park and Naperville are both "suburbs," but this reveals nothing to us. In fact, it mostly obfuscates.
A suburb is outside of the city in low density housing, typically not within walking distance of anything. That reveals plenty for a lot of purposes, and if you want to critique something more specific than that you should use a word that people will recognize as being more specific than that.
Clearly the author of TFA believed that this was the definition of suburb, because they were clearly thinking of a space where people could in fact just hang out in front of their houses and meet neighbors. So for the purpose of this conversation, this definition of suburb is the only one that makes sense.
There is nobody in Chicago who would describe Oak Park and Evanston as anything other than "suburbs". You'd get laughed at if you called them "the city".
Right. I'm not at all sure why some people on here think "suburb" is only meant to refer to a very specific type of housing development, rather than a description of a location's spatial and cultural relationship to "the city".
I mean, you’re making the same sort of NTS argument here, aren’t you?
> Some suburbs are like what you describe, but most are exactly like what OP links to.
Without defining what constitutes a suburb, how can you argue that most are good? Your argument hinges on your own definition of suburb IMHO.
I’m not sure what the right answer is, but in my experience most people mean post-war development patterns when they talk about suburbs, but in any case it probably doesn’t hurt to be more precise about what we are praising or criticizing.
No, I'm not, because I'm not saying that what you are identifying as a suburb isn't a suburb, I'm saying it's not representative of all suburbs. I provide a perfectly valid definition:
> You're far enough the urban core that you probably have to drive to get to shops and jobs, but close enough to the urban core that you don't pass through farmland to get there.
Since my definition is broader it's less susceptible to NTS fallacies. What you identify as a suburb is a suburb but it is not all suburbs.
> but in my experience most people mean post-war development patterns when they talk about suburbs
Even this is too broad to sweepingly say all suburbs are bad. I've lived in 5 different suburban neighborhoods as an adult, 4 of which were developed post-war, and all had sidewalks and plenty of walking around and neighborly interaction.
That is a definition you're making up to suit an argument you're making. It's not the actual definition of the term. Anybody can just look it up and see that! The Oxford Languages dataset that Google uses for the definition literally uses Chicago's suburbs as an example.
And, seriously, who cares? Why would you want your argument to die on this hill? What could it possibly matter?
I'm not sure why you're critiquing my definition, given that I'm trying to emphasize that your specific Chicago suburb very much does meet the typical way that people think of suburbs. So yes, I agree with Google: Chicago's suburbs are suburbs. Oak Park is not within walking distance of anything that most people I know would identify as "the city", which puts it squarely in the suburbs in my book.
Did you read me as disagreeing with you, or did I misunderstand and you were trying to say that Oak Park isn't a suburb? Or is Oak Park actually within walking distance of "the city" as Chicagoans would identify it?
Oh I may just be reading the thread backwards! Sorry. Yes, Oak Park is definitely a suburb. Oak Park is also extremely within walking distance of the city; it's across Austin Blvd from it.
Yes, both the parent and I agree that Oak Park is a suburb (and a lovely one by the way; I hit up Amerikas every time I visit)—I was pointing out that he was making an argument of the same style that he was criticizing (using his own definition of a suburb to advocate for his own definition of a suburb).
In any case, I think there are multiple valid definitions for suburb—one which talks about smaller towns on the periphery of large cities and another which emphasizes postwar design principles/philosophies. I don’t see the point in arguing for a single true definition; language doesn’t work that way.
Agree. Lots of US cities have neighborhoods like this outside of the downtown business districts. Even in NYC, famous for concrete-jungle apartment dwelling, you find this in Staten Island and in parts of Queens.
we each can only rely on our own experiences, but mine don't agree with you. suburbs in the US northeast have sidewalks. most of LA looks like a suburb to a nor'easter. No sidewalk? rural.
I've used rlua (mlua is a fork of it) and mlua extensively. The part you've shown is absolutely the easy part. Doing anything interesting with the runtime after that is much less obvious. Even something as simple as 'load a lua file that returns a table of functions and use those functions from rust' is surprisingly hard to figure out. (I know, I just did that a few weeks ago.)
I haven't used Rhai, but Lua has a lot of impedance mismatch with Rust that could be avoided with a fresh language. (Or maybe even just a fresh implementation of Lua, like piccolo is trying: https://github.com/kyren/piccolo)
Just to be upfront, I'm not looking for just anything. I left my job about a month ago and usually like to take ~3 months off between each. I'm just starting to look now. But, I'd be willing to hop into something that sounds fun sooner than that.
I seem to have fallen into doing mostly Rust, usually somewhat in the vein of lower-level network programming. I've been doing Rust development since Rust v0.6 (2013) & I've got 12 years of experience as a software dev overall. That work has straddled the line between embedded and cloud side with most being embedded linux application development.
The work I've done that I'm most proud of was designing and leading development for Samsung SmartThings' Edge Device Driver Platform which is a system written in Rust, embedded within an existing C application, which runs sandboxed user-written 'Edge Device Drivers' on user-owned IoT hubs.
I've also got experience doing project & product planning, though I'm really looking to do primarily software dev.
Big plusses for me are: Working with Open Source, Working on Tools for Other Developers, Doing Work "For Good"
Other assorted things I want an excuse to learn/get involved with more deeply: Cryptography, C++, WASM, Large Scale Server Side Programming, P2P, Decentralization, rustc (& ecosystem) Dev, Linux Kernel, Mapping, Autonomous Drones, Spaaaaaaaccce, Guix, Scheme/Lisp, Erlang/Elixr
Hey, might I suggest adding a public domain example book? I tried adding a couple of different epubs that I happen to have on my phone, but it just says "Please select an EPUB file." when I do. (Using mobile Firefox.)
As far as I've seen, LLMs used to write code are only good for getting juniors to a PR features faster. But, it slows down everything else in the process. Reviews take ages because there's random nonsense landmines scattered around, the previous PR feedback is less likely to be applied to later code because they're not writing it, bug fixes take much longer because no one understands the code well, and there's just so much more code to deal with at every step since it doesn't matter to them if they are copy-pasting 10 lines or 1000.
I've tried using them myself, but they end up sapping more of my time than they save because of all the dead ends they send me down with plausible sounding bullshit. Things that use real terms, but incorrectly. I basically treat LLM output like that one guy who doesn't know anything except the existence of a bunch of technical terms and who throws those terms around everywhere trying to sound smart. It might be nice to know that a term exists if you're unfamiliar with the topic, but only to go look up what it actually means elsewhere.
I love your idealism, but allow me to be your data point. The place where I work just fired our CTO because he was doing exactly that, to "speed up" the software team, after I complained to other execs that this was massively slowing us down because of all the time we spent trying to figure out what the nonsense code he was shotgunning into main was supposed to do. (Not the only reason, I'm told.)
As far as I could tell reading that DEA memo, they were being really sneaky with what they said. None of the pill manufacturers had hit their allotment, but they didn't say anything about the raw ingredient manufacturers which are under a different quota. And most of the shortages I've seen in the FDA shortages database were listed as 'shortage of active ingredient'. (Or 'demand increase', which isn't specific enough to know that it's not literally the same thing.)
> Or you can be sitting bored for 8 hours at your desk stretching out 1 hour of responsibilities to last all day and feel super burned out.
Can confirm, this is exactly how I burnt-out at my first professional job. I've burnt-out of 3 jobs, and I honestly think make-work / work-stretching burnout was the worst, or at least the most soul crushing. (Though, to be fair, it was also the first for me, so I was least equipped to know what it was / deal with it.)
Turns out it's actually already a word: having the proper form or shape —used of minerals whose crystalline growth has not been interfered with
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idiomorphic
That seems to fit amazingly well here too.
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