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Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

lax-skyline.parcelscope.net

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Re: Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

#11

Post by oijkuij »

losteric wrote: post #5

[flagged]

If you want to encourage folks to continue their efforts and really "build something", I think you'd want to ask your questions in a way that shows genuine interest and support, rather than ridiculing and questioning the level of effort involved.

I agree, I'd love to learn where the dada was sourced! I'm also curious why it appears to come in waves, as opposed to each building going up independently (as I would have expected it to in reality). Cool idea! I can see my house from here haha.

Re: Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

#13

Post by ck2 »

wild to see that, reminds me vaguely of the amazing ariel photos by kite of San Francisco after the earthquakes in 1906

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Francisco_in_ruin_edi...

early 1900s to early 2000s was a wild and crazy ride for humanity

when I was a teenager I used to run early morning before sunrise and I would never see a car, like maybe once per hour

but these days it's like rush hour at 5am which is frustrating and annoying

and then I realized in perspective that within my own lifetime from teen to 60 the world population has more than DOUBLED, so what I am experiencing makes some sense in that regard (plus technology advancement)

Re: Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

#14

Post by dvt »

losteric wrote: post #5

[flagged]

> What cool problems did you (not the robot) solve?

Building products has nothing to do with technical problems, just the end result. This is in contrast with things like writing a library or coming up with a new algorithm, or doing research, or even writing a technical blog post, etc.

> or is it just pretty?

People have been sharing "just pretty" things on HN for decades. It might be interesting, thought-provoking, discussion-worthy, or whatever. Even if this wasn't vibe-coded, it wouldn't be some monumental technical achievement. Your point is absolutely moot.

Re: Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

#16

Post by computomatic »

tcdent wrote: post #6

I did a project recently where I extracted every Los Angeles building permit record for a property and was able to look at the evolution of its infrastructure and tenancy over time by embedding the permit documents into an image-based embedding model. Could be an interesting way to incorporate more granularity of the history of properties over time, although it dramatically increases the scope of data processed.

Interesting idea. Is there a practical way to obtain those permit records at scale?

Re: Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

#17

Post by drivers99 »

rustywasm wrote: post #2

I joined the county's 2020 lidar building footprints (LARIAC) to the assessor roll, so every one of the 1,129,558 buildings inside the City of LA has a footprint, a height, and a year built for 98% of them. (All public info, but kind of a pain to grab.) The page extrudes them in 3D and plays the city filling in from 1880 to now. Colors are by decade, or switch to height and fly to downtown. Hover any building for its…

Didn't realize you could zoom in until I saw this. It looks really cool when you zoom in and it replaces the boxes with actual building shapes.

Re: Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

#18

Post by asdff »

ericzawo wrote: post #12

Having moved to LA this february, the sprawl is really something I had no true appreciation for until I moved here for real, and tried to run errands across town. It's a gigantic, beautiful, complicated place.

The density at least means you don't have to really run across town for much and can stay within a certain radius for most all your needs and wants. I mean look at the density of costcos alone. Many other metros might have 1 or 2 for the entire area. Then again a lot of other metros you basically can drive end to end in 25 miles.

Re: Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

#20

Post by tcdent »

computomatic wrote: post #16
tcdent wrote: post #6

I did a project recently where I extracted every Los Angeles building permit record for a property and was able to look at the evolution of its infrastructure and tenancy over time by embedding the permit documents into an image-based embedding model. Could be an interesting way to incorporate more granularity of the history of properties over time, although it dramatically increases the scope of data processed.

Interesting idea. Is there a practical way to obtain those permit records at scale?

I had an LLM reverse engineer the API protocol of LADBS and extract the content I wanted. Wether that scales from one property to many (rate limits for one) I don't know, but I didn't encounter anything in the thousands I extracted.
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