Some places, including the Bay Area where this feature was probably created, have significant variance in commute times depending on the traffic of the day so this can be a useful feature.
The commute time from SF to Cupertino is certainly not constant.
The vacancy rate of offices looks low because the big tech companies are still "occupying" them, but if go into many of them and they still look like ghost towns. Much more that offices in other locations.
It definitely is unsustainable. A lot of wil-e-coyote running off the cliff type of stuff going on. And hey, maybe some places will connect with a cliff on the other side. But I wouldn’t want to be in the commercial real estate space right now.
About 90% of every office and co-working space is empty now, all day, every day here. It’s only slightly busier than during Covid when it was 99%.
Light industrial and retail (strip mall type stuff) is doing well and super busy however.
Here in NYC I've been to a couple of coworking spaces in the past 6 months and was surprised to find them downright bustling, I had trouble finding a quiet space to work. There are definitely serious problems in commercial real estate here, but the coworking situation was unexpected to me.
The thing about coworking is that, for employees at least, it is an actual solution to some of the problems with remote and in-office work, as opposed to the "hybrid" model which manages to be the worst of all worlds. With coworking, you can still have more flexibility to live where you'd like as opposed to being bound to a specific office and the often high COL and long commutes that come with it. Coworking allows one to still separate their home from their office, which some prefer, and it also allows employees to get out of the house and engage with others, socialize, and engage with their community/city, but you aren't forced to do this at your work which will always be tainted by the financial implications of the employee/employer relationship that loom over it all.
One succesful mode of applying coworking spaces seems to be less for heads-down focus time and more for periodic get-together time for teams. These spaces seem not very good as a full-time micro-office due to the noise issues you mention... but as a place to go whiteboard or empathize they seem quite useful. Bonus if there are nearby interesting excursion options, food courts, recreation, etc. and multiple easy-ish commute options. Part of economic development seems to be exploring options for how to dis- and re-aggregate services like this, providing more and smaller transitions across the tradeoff landscape.
Makes sense. I'm in the middle of finding a standalone office so I can do actual meetings and be productive, but it's tempting to keep the co-working space for exactly what you describe. One day here, another day there type of thing for when those things are helpful.
My office (near Toronto) was up for lease renewal about 1.5 years ago. Pre-pandemic about 50% of people were working from home at least some of the time, and by 2021 there were maybe 2-3 people in the office regularly (in a space that could easily have 45). The company was debating what to do but did want some physical space, and possibly would have just stayed considering the investment in build-out, networking (including at least a rack of internal servers and other infrastructure, with dedicated fibre to other company datacenters), video conference rooms, etc. What I heard was the building was trying to nearly double the rent, so this made a pretty easy decision and the place was closed. Servers were migrated to other locations, and everything else was shipped to other offices, given to employees, sold or scrapped.
Now it's 6 months later, and last time I drove by it still has our old sign up, and I can see online the entire space is still available to lease. Seems silly to risk it in the current market and take $0 instead of keep a quiet, established tenant.. but what do I know.
Some of this may be due to incentives in the way property management and owners value commercial property and calculate cash flows and fees.
In many cases, it can make more sense (to some folks) having a vacant property at a nominally high rent (look, we could make this much from this property, hence it’s worth x multiple!) then admitting that is not likely for the foreseeable future (oh shit, this property is now only capable of producing 80% of x, write downs and angry investors incoming).
It sounds weird, but the wil-e-coyote analogy is remarkably apt - in the cartoons, as long as he doesn’t look down, he keeps going just fine!
A business writer friend of mine told me a month or so ago that, based on a sampling of key swipes, office occupancy is down about a third compared to pre-pandemic although I'm sure it varies a lot.
I can't find the reference but, as I recall it was a drop from 65% pre-pandemic (that may seem low because pre-pandemic a lot of people still traveled or otherwise weren't in the office on a typical day) to around 40% these days. I'm told my workplace is quite a bit lower as well.
Yeah, re: my 'lights are on, but nobody home' anecdote from the peninsula - I'm specifically referring to butts in seats. Said seats are currently very relaxed and well aired out compared to typical.
That is a good point. The people who invested in long term leases in the late 90s in malls went bankrupt but the malls mostly stayed around. I assume the same thing will happen with office space. Demolishing the building is expensive, might as well keep the lights on and wait to see if someone wants the space for offices or storage or whatever.
Musk is doing this now by holding up a refinancing of Twitter’s building by defaulting on the rent. Anyone with a big enough war chest can just stop paying, drag it out in court, and wait the owners out. And tech companies have some of the biggest war chests.
Good. Maybe we can mass retrofit old office space into new housing. I know there are issues with office buildings not having the electricity and plumbing or lighting for proper residential, but I'm sure there are a lot of budding architects working on the problem.
It would be great for cities if we had a massive influx of relatively affordable housing.
I was a big fan of this but it's harder than it sounds. After all, we all know of some great commercial conversions from prior generations (most of the southern part of Manhattan, for example).
Unfortunately the big modern office towers often aren't constructed in a way that supports apartment conversion. There are lots of offices in those buildings with no windows, and all the service(i.e bathrooms) are in the core. Retail space is often worse in this regard, especially in malls. The renovation costs often end up higher than demolishing and building anew.
I still think you're on the right track though, it's just that the obvious fix is harder than it looks. But I do believe cities are in for a great renaissance of mixed-use buildings.
Maybe apartments are the wrong paradigm - this sounds perfect for creating something like a dormitory with rooms on the perimeter and shared bathrooms.
It's ridiculous to even consider this in New York, where they could have just been building normal apartments instead of luxury condo towers for the last 10 years.
Price, mostly. Luxury amenities are a consequence thereof.
However you can't just blame it on demand. These are $16 million condos we are talking about. Functionally they are entirely different goods from apartments intended to be inhabited as a primary residence by people who are not extravagantly wealthy. Moreover, vacancy rates for luxury apartments were high before Covid, and remain high now, even while the rest of the city continues to deal with brutally low vacancy rates in all other housing categories.
So the situation is a little more subtle than "low supply, therefore high prices" and warrants further scrutiny.
I think you’ll find TAG regularly gives assessment on attribution at least at the country level. Iran, China, Russia, Belarus and North Korea at least have been named in the last few years.
How do you know what country is actually behind any of this? I’d imagine that would be very difficult given nation states can host content anywhere in the world and will want to make it look like it’s coming from elsewhere.
Staring hard at a all the details and figuring it out?
The thing with trying to hide yourself is you have to do everything right to guarantee some false flag operation will work but if you make enough mistakes in this process there will be reasonably high-confidence links between some action and some person.
An example that I _have_ seen in some write up: some snippet of malware code showing up in a stack overflow question (with the shape and user variables being the same).
At one point it's like... probably that person. Of course maybe there are other indicators to the contrary but that's data for you. Gotta use your noggin a bit.
I don’t work in this field, but my impression has been that groups tend to share techniques and code patterns that can help tie them back to where they came from.
By connecting multiple details such as ip addresses, connection/flow logs, known CnC servers, etc. You seem to be expecting some magic simple answer but the reality is the same as other investigative work: doing the work in the details as a professional. Just because this work is difficult and inherently has some ambiguity doesn't mean you can just dismiss every attribution from your armchair.
Here’s a question I expect you’ll never answer: is it within the capabilities of any groups within the West (state-sponsored or otherwise) to fabricate the information you’re using to make those assessments? And if so, how have you decisively eliminated this possibility?
I ask because it’s broadly accepted that there are extremely powerful and wealthy entities in the West who benefit from an aggressive US foreign policy and heightened geopolitical tensions.
There are several sections of the Vault 7 leaks that showed the CIA had tools that could be used to fake the attribution of attacks. Some argue there's other uses for those tools besides faking the source of an exploit, but knowing they have the capability makes it impossible to eliminate as a possibility.
Probably, but even more simply they have the capabilities to just direct intelligence agencies, politicians, and news corporations, and big internet and social media companies to put the blame wherever they like. There is no need for a perfect technological solution.
Hack something shoddy together, go to war/regime change/etc, and worst case if it does come to light that the "intel" was wrong, a well-placed "whoopsie-daisy" is enough to wash hands of all responsibility or scrutiny.
Rather than attacking him, you are free to discuss on how it would be hard to attribute or reach to a source.
Just because you might not know what techniques the researchers here used to reach to that conclusion, doesn't mean they would have used dubious methods.
The United States reserves the right to react to cyber attacks with force [0]. Instead of asking people to be nice on the internet you should hold those accountable that are in a position to manufacture a narrative. The linked report in the sibling comment here has no valid proof of North Korean involvement but the headline is chosen in a way to paint a picture of an impoverished nation as an aggressor. If you just accept that Google can make up facts to pave the way for physical warfare you are complicit in the eventual deaths of thousands of innocent people.
To be precise. After the CIA made up reports of WMDs in Irak people should ask for receipts earlier.
> Instead of asking people to be nice on the internet you should hold those accountable that are in a position to manufacture a narrative.
Nope, Hacker News is the place where you be nice to each other on the internet rather than assuming they’re trying to manufacture consent. This is quite literally spelled out in the site guidelines.
I'd note that things like shared encryption keys and shared TLS passive tables are very indicative of shared resources.
The use of North Korean IP addresses is indicative, but never enough on its own. However, the use of domains controlled by North Korean IP addresses is interesting as well.
Combine that with passwords largely shared with another North Korean attack, devices signed into from NK IP addresses under multiple accounts setup from N Korean IP addresses you start seeing a pattern of behaviour.
And then you find that the person who controlled accounts used by these attacks was a North Korean national (pg 134) who worked for a well known North Korean front company (paragraph 269, pg 136) and the evidence becomes pretty good.
APT38/Lazarus has been around for years and has been investigated by many professional groups across the world (Kaspersky, McAfee, Mandiant, etc), many not connected to the US government. Are you alleging that they're all wrong and this is all some vast conspiracy to frame an innocent North Korea and protect... who, exactly?
Think of all the big, serious and sensible news organisations that independently reported WMD in Iraq while not being connected to the US government. Are you alleging they're all wrong and this is some vast conspiracy to frame an innocent Iraq and protect.. who, exactly?
Evidence is evidence. After WMD (which totally took me in, btw, you too?) Claims that evidence is "just over there" and "here are multiple different people reporting they've spoken to someone who saw it." Count for zero. Maybe they always should have but there's not doubt this stuff happens anymore. We watched it. (Hopefully) in horror as it unfolded without us objecting.
I thought the WMD "evidence" was BS, and actually there was only one piece that was presented publicly (the UN presentation by Colin Powell), and that was based on CIA secret intelligence. And the UN Weapon Inspectors were saying the opposite.
OTOH, the evidence linking APT38 to North Korea is pretty compelling. For example, there is a bunch of evidence collected independently identifying individuals associated with APT38, and these people worked for the North Korean company Chosun Expo.
There's a huge difference between news organizations reporting on US govt claims, and investigators on the ground actually digging into the evidence on their own. Your assertion is basically the same as claiming that Iraq did have WMDs, but UNMOVIC etc were covering up and hiding the evidence.
For what it's worth, quite a few people were skeptical about the WMD "evidence" at the time, and even more cynics like myself figured that true or false, it was mostly an excuse for George W to Do Something(tm) after 9/11 and at the same time finish off the war his dad started.
The commute time from SF to Cupertino is certainly not constant.