We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

I disagree. This is the good part of capitalism. In an ideal world, a custom-designed housing unit should be achievable by anyone in the upper middle class. The combined property tax rate in Austin is around 1.8%-2.5% (according to https://lrgrealty.com/lrg-blog/property-taxes-in-austin-tx/), which is decently high and supports the community. ChatGPT says that they paid $52,142 in property taxes for 2025 on an assessed value of $3M.

In my opinion, the only immoral part of this is the “million dollars in profit” on the house in Palo Alto that he left which the author himself called out as ridiculous. This unearned increment is thanks to Palo Alto’s exclusionary zoning and Proposition 13’s low property taxes (around 1.25% at acquisition, but much lower for long-term investors). ChatGPT says that the author paid $11k/year and the new owner now pays $28k/year for the Palo Alto house now assessed at $2.3M.

And having to restore everything (this is a house with personal items, not a loaner, anonymous flat) if someone trashes it?

Naah, even a small risk is unacceptable in such case.

> The cabinetry is just a bunch of wood, cut into fairly large pieces. Maybe a few screws and hinges. Whereas the computers in total contain more than a trillion transistors, each of which had to be carefully etched in the right spot connected correctly to all the others. A trillion! That's 1,000,000,000,000!

Really cool house, but describing the cabinets as "bunch of wood, cut into fairly large pieces. Maybe a few screws and hinges" shows little understanding of what goes into building something like that.

It's hard to tell from the pics if the cabinets are made of sheet goods with veneer or solid boards glued into panels. But at the very least, the trees need to be grown, they need to be managed, they need to be felled, sent to processing for sheet goods, dried and milled for solid wood. Even then you've got to get everything cut to size and square, then build the cabinets with all the specific sizes, then finish them, transport to site and install everything and the trim.

It's two ends of the manufacturing scale. For transistors, you've got mass production at an impossibly difficult level of accuracy for a human and for cabinets you've got single production (at the install level) at very difficult level for a human.

But again, very, very cool house. I especially like the cat doors but not nearly half as much as I imagine the cat does.

Window blinds for the worst hours (can be angled so the sun doesn't enter but the view outside is retained), and solar reflective foil for the normal days. I'm still looking for the good, transparent matte coat for my exterior walls, but I've already cut some of the cooling power use via passive means.

Did you look through the accomplishments? I don't mean to be crass but I like a bit of weight for "accomplished".

I mean, the American Express office looks like a track stop or mall you will find along the highway.