Kyle Piira

Category: Microblog

  • Cities Need Heat Sewers

    I think cities should create something like a sewer system for heat.

    Air conditioners just move heat from inside buildings to the street, while adding even more heat from the electricity they consume. In dense cities, thousands of AC units collectively intensify the urban heat island effect, making the outdoor environment significantly hotter than surrounding rural areas. This, in turn, forces those same systems to work harder, creating a feedback loop of rising temperatures and energy demand.

    This reminds me of how human waste was once managed individually and often simply dumped into the street. Eventually, cities built shared sewer systems, and we are all better off for it. A “heat sewer” could work similarly: buildings would send waste heat into a district network that transports it away, stores it underground, or routes it to places that need hot water or heating.

    Instead of every building dumping heat into the street, heat could become a resource managed by a municipal utility.

  • NIMBY

  • Priced into the market

    A panicked T‑rex and a laid‑back triceratops staring down an incoming meteor—an absurd riff on the classic “it’s already priced in” line you hear from market-watchers.

  • The relationship between college enrollment and tuition

    I spent my evening determining a reasonable expected growth rate for future college tuition. The graph below displays the correlation between college attendance rates and tuition. While I’m not concluding causation from the data, it seems plausible that increased enrollment rates have led to higher tuition costs. With enrollment now peaking at around 100% and appearing to decline, I anticipate a lower future growth rate. The historical growth rate was approximately 6%, but I’m considering a rate closer to 2% going forward.

    In the data attendance rate is defined as the number of people enrolled in college divided by the number of people aged 18-22 in the United States.

  • Low Risk Stocks Should Have Higher Risk-adjusted Returns than the Market

    • Leveraged constrained investors with high risk tolerance will invest more heavily in stocks that are riskier than the market
    • Investors with a lower risk tolerance than the market can deleverage very cheaply by holding some combination of cash and TSM
    • There is no reason for an investor seeking less risk than the market to invest in low beta stocks because they could instead just deleverage a portfolio with beta = 1.
    • The only reason for someone to hold low beta stocks is if they offer better risk adjusted returns than the market
    • If high beta stocks get bid up by leveraged constrained investors, then their risk adjusted returns will be worse than the market, consequentially low beta stocks must then have higher risk adjusted returns than the market
    • If low beta stocks do have higher risk adjusted returns, there are limits to arbitrage because leverage is not free
    • Low beta stocks should still underperform high beta stocks in absolute terms

  • How to make Office Online use OpenDocument format

    Did you know that Microsoft Office online can use either Microsoft Office format (docx, pptx, xlsx) or OpenDocument format (odt, odp, ods)? I didn’t until a commenter pointed it out.

    You can change the default file formats for Office documents from your OneDrive Settings. There is an option called Office file formats.

    Yovko Lambrev

    If you visit the OneDrive settings on their website there is an option to change between the two formats.

    OneDrive online settings to change office document format to OpenDocument

    Then if you create a new “Word document” by right-clicking in OneDrive

    OneDrive online right click dialog showing new word document

    It’s actually a OpenDocument ODT file!

    OneDrive online with two files open (one of them an ODT)

    Then you can click on it to open it in Word online.

    Microsoft Word online opening an ODT file

    Pretty neat!

  • Switching to WordPress.com

    For the past few years I’ve been hosting my blog on Linode, but I’ve decided to switch over to WordPress.com on their “Personal” plan since it was a bit cheaper.

    So far everything seems to be working well, and I was able to migrate over all of the posts, pages, and comments from my previous WordPress installation. However, WordPress.com doesn’t support the www subdomain which is annoying, so I either have to make it the naked domain (kylepiira.com) or use another subdomain like blog.kylepiira.com. Right now, I’ve opted for the naked domain, although I think it looks much uglier than the version with www.

    WordPress.com does not support the www subdomain

    Typical web developers, breaking something that’s worked for the last 30 years in favor of the new hotness.

    I also had to disable the AMP feature which is enabled by default by going through Settings → General → Performance.

  • Santa Rock

    I made some waffles and a small Santa hat for my pet rock.

  • Microsoft Office Online switches to OpenDocument as default format

    So earlier today I was trying out Microsoft’s online office suite and noticed something interesting. Whenever you create a new Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file from the OneDrive interface, it automatically creates it using the OpenDocument file format (odt, ods, odp) as opposed to the Microsoft Office format (docx, xlsx, ppt). Interestingly if you create it from Office.com it uses the Microsoft format instead.

  • Switching to exFAT

    I’ve decided that I’m going to be reformatting my 25 TB of external storage capacity (for storing datasets, backups, etc.) to exFAT. Most of it is currently ext4 or NTFS.

    exFAT is great because similar to its predecessor FAT it has read-write compatibility with Linux, Windows, and macOS. But while FAT can only have files as big as 4 GB and partitions of 16 TB, exFAT can do 16 EB for files and 64 ZB for partitions. Lots more room to grow.

    It’ll be a slow process since I can only format one drive at a time and need to copy the data to another drive and back again. So far I’ve converted 4 TB of data.