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I like writing retrospectives for things I'm involved in, especially if I'm likely to be involved in them in the future: it's a good place to set thoughts down so I can find them again, link materials I'm likely to want, and collect feedback from others (but also: fill out the feedback survey!). As a bonus, they can be useful to other people who are doing similar things.

I've written ones band tours, failed attempts to limit covid spread, and dance weekends; Saturday night I ran the music for the 2025 Boston Secular Solstice, so here's another one!

As part of the general discourse around cost of living, Julia and I were talking about families sharing housing. This turned into us each writing a post (mine, hers), but is it actually legal for a family to live with housemates? In the places I've checked it seems like yes.

While zoning is complicated and I'm not a lawyer, it looks to me like people commonly describe the situation as both more restrictive and more clear cut than it really is. For example, Tufts University claims:

The cities of Medford, Somerville and Boston (in addition to other cities in the area) have local occupancy ordinances on apartments/houses with non-related persons. Each city has its own ordinance: in Medford, the limit is 3; in Somerville, it is 4; in Boston, it is 4, etc.

As far as I can tell, all three of these are wrong:

The world is divided into plain text and rich text, but I want comfortable text:

• Yes: Lists, links, blockquotes, code blocks, inline code, bold, italics, underlining, headings, simple tables.
• No: Colors, fonts, text sizing, text alignment, images, line spacing.

Let's say I want to send someone a snippet from a blog post. If I paste this into my email client the font family, font size, blockquote styling, and link styling come along:

There's been a lot of discussion over the last month on whether it's still possible to raise kids without being rich. Housing is a big piece of this, and if you need to buy a house where each kid has their own room, yes, that's expensive, but it's also not the only option. We didn't wait to buy a house (or have multiple bedrooms) before having kids, and I think that was the right choice for us.

Every time someone releases code publicly under some kind of "look but don't touch" terms a similar argument plays out:

A: This is cool, X is now open source!

B: It's cool that we can read it, but we can't redistribute etc so it's not "open source".

A: Come on, if it's not "closed source" it's "open source".

B: That's not how the term "open source" has historically been used. This is why we have terms like "source available".

A: It's bizarre that "open" would be the opposite of "closed" everywhere except this one term.

I'm generally with B: it's very useful that we have "open source" to mean a specific technical thing, and using it to mean something related gives a lot of confusion about what is and is not allowed. While A is right that this is a bit confusing, it's also not unique to open vs closed source. Some other examples:

My house has radiators for heat. There are three heating loops ("zones") but the house has more than three rooms and it's not very well balanced. Fixing this properly involves hiring a plumber, but it turns out we can make it much better with just a small fan!

Radiators heat passively: they warm the nearby air, which rises and allows cooler air to flow in. This new air then warms, and the cycle repeats. This works pretty well: no electricity, no noise, just smooth heating.