There's an article about luxury apartments sitting empty. Condos of the living dead or something similar that gets passed around in the construction field around these parts.
Those that have other assets which are outperforming real estate can sometimes be the only ones who can actually afford some of the properties, which can change hands until they come to rest under such a situation.
At which point they can afford to hold on to them through lean times in anticipation of future appreciation, and in that case it doesn't make much difference if there is anyone living there or not.
Apple pays 100% of the tax on the service road to the stores and pays for the parking lot, though. They deserve some fee and that's what the courts said, right?
You call it a tax, most others would call it the cost of doing business.
But yes, that's built into the product's price. Devs are paying for a license to work with IOS and need to own hardware only Apple sells to work on IOS. So I think those costs are covered.
We'll see what the "reasonable" price is. If nothing else, we know 27% was too much even for appeals.
Not if the only way to get to the store was through that road. In that case, there are public access laws and it is literally illegal for people who "own" a road to charge people money, if there is an easement.
Thats probably a simplification, but they are called "easement by necessity." rights. So even in your example of the roadway, thats also wrong. They get zero dollars.
My point is in the real world sharing an area with it would mean the other store also contributes tax wise. It's not equivalent to bring up real life if the real life paying part isn't also adhered to; the lack of symmetry is notable. I don't think they deserve to set their price, though (30% is way too high).
> would mean the other store also contributes tax wise.
No, land parcel A does not pay land parcel B any amount of dollars at all.
The fact that the government gets tax revenue says nothing about the fact that land parcel B receives nothing, even if they are require to open their street to the public for easement.
What kind of system to you have for parsing symbology?
Do you check anything like cross discipline coordination (e.g. online searching specification data for parts on drawings like mechanical units and detecting mismatch with electrical spec), or it wholly within 1 trades code at a time?
edit: there's info that answers this on the website. It seems limited to the common ones (e.g. elec vs arch), which makes sense.
Symbol variation is a huge challenge across firms.
Our approach mixes OCR, vector geometry, and learned embeddings so the model can recognize a symbol plus its surrounding annotations (e.g., “6-15R,” “DIM,” “GFCI”).
When symbols differ by drafter, the system leans heavily on the textual/graph context so it still resolves meaning accurately. We’re actively expanding our electrical symbol library and would love sample sets from your workflow.
We parse symbols using a mix of vector geometry, OCR, and learned detection for common architectural/MEP symbols. Cross-discipline checks are a big focus as we already flag mismatches between architectural, structural, and MEP sheets, and we’re expanding into deeper electrical/mechanical spec alignment next. Would love to hear which symbols matter most in your workflow so we can improve coverage.
I do electrical so parsing lighting is often a big issue. (Subcontractor)
One big issue Ive had is drafters use the same symbol for different things per person. One person's GFCi is another's switched receptacle. People use the specialty putlet symbol sometimes very precisely and others not. Often accompanied by an annotation (e.g. 6-15R).
Dimmers being ambiguous is huge; avoiding dimming type mismatches is basically 80% the lutron value add.
This is exactly the hard part symbols aren’t enough when each drafter overloads them, so we lean on the annotation + schedule context (fixture tags, notes like “DIM,” control zones, panel/ckt callouts, and control intents) to disambiguate.
We're in a similar space doing machine assisted lighting take offs for contractors in AU/NZ, with bespoke models trained for identifying & measuring luminaires on construction plans.
Compliance is a space we've branched into recently. Would be super interested in seeing how you guys are currently approaching symbol detection.
Happy to swap notes. If you send a representative lighting plan set, we can run it and share how the detector clusters, resolves, and cross-references symbols across sheets. Always excited to compare approaches with teams solving adjacent problems.
What do you mean when you say "vector geometry"? Are you using the geometry extracted from PDFs directly? I'm curious how that interacts with the OCR and detection model portion of what you're doing
Great question. By “vector geometry” we mean we’re using the underlying CAD-style vector data embedded in many PDFs (lines, arcs, polylines, hatches, etc.), not just raster images. We reconstruct objects and regions from that geometry, then fuse it with OCR (for annotations, tags, labels) and a detection model that operates on rendered tiles. The detector + OCR tells us what something is; the vector layer tells us exactly where and how it’s shaped so we can run dimension/clearance and cross-sheet checks reliably.
Woah! What determines if something is an object at that vector level? I've done some light PDF investigations before and the whole PDF spec is super intimidating. Seems insane that you can understand which things are objects in the actual drawing at the PDF vector level
Yep, exactly, when layer data survives the PDF export, it’s a huge help. We use it as a weak signal for clustering and object grouping, but never rely on it fully since it’s often inconsistent or stripped. When it’s there, accuracy and speed both improve noticeably.
Maybe this is saying the quiet part out loud: how do you deal with bogus specs that designers end up not caring about since they're copy pasted? Is it just mission accomplished when you point out a potential difficulty?
We see that a lot — specs that are clearly boilerplate or outdated relative to the drawings. Our goal isn’t to force a change, but to surface where the specs and drawings diverge so the designer can quickly decide what’s intentional vs what’s baggage. “Flag + context for fast human judgment” is the philosophy.
Is the pay as you go model % based or project sized? I've had issues with conflicts of interest of being lean vs not. It's hard to sell on % based revenue.
Also who is this targetted at? Subcontractors, GC, design?
We price per-project based on size/complexity not % of construction cost, so there’s no conflict of interest around bigger budgets. Today our main users are architects/engineers and GC pre-con teams, but subs who catch coordination issues early also get a ton of value.
Most teams run us late DD through CD anywhere the set is stable enough that coordination issues matter. Subs especially like running it pre-bid at ~80–100% CDs so they don’t inherit coordination risk. Earlier checks also help designers tighten the set before hand-offs, so value shows up at multiple stages. Eventually the goal is to be continuous QA tool including during construction by pulling in field data too and comparing to drawings and specs. Like drawings showed X size and field photos show Y size.
Would love to run it and give feedback if it's cheap to do so; my company just finished a bunch of projects and would love to cross reference if it catches the issues that we found by hand (assuming it's inexpensive enough). I do high rise electrical work for a subcontractor.
We’d love that — perfect use case. Send a recent set and we’ll run a discounted comparison so you can see what we catch vs. what surfaced during construction. If helpful, we can hop on a quick call to walk through results and collect feedback. Email me [email protected]
BIM just shuffles the problem around. There are firms that do "one source of truth" BIM models but the real issue is conflicts and workflow buy in.
How do you get architect to agree with engineer with lighting designer with lighting contractor when they all have different non overlapping deadlines, work periods, knowledge and scope?
edit: if you don't work in the industry, BIM helps for "these two things are in the same spot", but not much for code unless it's about clearance or some spatial based calculation
Huh the gameplay was ass?
The units weren't interesting, the strategies derivative, the flow bad, the balance off, not even half finished campaign and 0 goodwill from kickstarters after rugpulling content that was promised and charging them for it
Notably prescient
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