nathanhammond.com
Hong Kong
1,365 posts
329 followers
31 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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I think both of the top grossing local films of all time are in the last three years?
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Media consumption in Hong Kong is way way down as a revenue source.
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If I were a billionaire, you know how quickly I would spend it on trying to acquire the IP of all Hong Kong culture for the last 80+ years?
It’s absolutely on sale right now.
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I’m a Whampoa/Hung Hom 街坊. Press any key for more local facts.
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The slide at the top of the boat is closed now; basically nobody goes up to the public open space anymore.
Mostly teenagers on cute little dates.
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Other Whampoa facts:
- We built the Star Ferry boats there.
- Heavily bombed during World War II.
- During construction of Whampoa Gardens we found unexploded ordinance.
- With only mild exaggeration it was a middle-of-nowhere industrial area back then.
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You may already know this, but:
I love that it is built precisely on the site of the old Whampoa dry dock. There has basically always been a boat or “boat” in that physical location. Though after land reclamation it’s now land locked. 🤷♂️
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Anyway, feedback submitted.
***
From: <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Hung Hom Development Plan Feedback
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2025 18:12:06 +0800
This message is to acknowledge receipt of your e-mail message. Thank you. 我們已收到閣下的電子郵件， 謝謝。 Development Bureau 發展局
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Any “new” build system is not competing on the central function.
It’s competing on ergonomics and the ability to move up and down the abstraction curve.
www.nathanhammond.com/the-last-new...
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Look at that list and think about every single CI tool you’ve ever used.
Each of them found a local maxima for correctness of the central function and layered on tooling for everything else.
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Everything else is about the user experience of using that function.
How do I:
- specify all of the inputs?
- specify dependency ordering?
- avoid unnecessary work?
- create side effects?
- debug?
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And since I’m making wishes: billions more dollars for fusion, please.
I don’t care if it is successful, we still have to try.
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My ideal power mix is nuclear + solar + storage.
That storage doesn’t have to be centralized: most every vehicle in the world should be electric.
And a bunch of bauxite processing plants to make sure we have enough sinks.
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It didn’t even run into something else! It ran into a copy of itself! Of all the embarrassing ways to fail, running into the singular thing you could have avoided by talking to it over a network is exceptional.
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For those missing the context: this was posted after Trump was elected in the 2024 election. Ostensible allies instantly had reason to develop their own nuclear deterrent instead of relying on being under the United States nuclear umbrella.
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Guy named Will: not for me!?
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When you combine this with data from other leaks we can probably get it down to a very small range.
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Duck that.
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Sources for the historical photos:
industrialhistoryhk.org/kowloon-cant...
scottwilsonscotlandhistory.co.uk/Appendix%201...
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And lastly, this isn't aggressive enough at infill:
- Hung Hom Bypass still exists. Should be removed.
- Hung Hom Station and the carpark still exist and aren't being replaced with something 60 stories tall.
- Hong Kong Coliseum isn't being demolished and rebuilt in the basement of something else.
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My primary complaints about the plan:
- No material improvements for pedestrians.
- Not enough detail on bus interchange plans.
- Not enough residential, and what they're building isn't tall enough.
- The marina diminishes the access to the harbourfront.
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Also, there's immense ROI available in building directly on top of Hung Hom Station but that unfortunately appears to be out of scope for the plan at this time.
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Bus station changes appear semi-detailed in the written plan, but I'm not convinced that they've fully identified exactly how much return on investment they would get from having the singular, most-frequented bus station beneath a shopping mall adjacent to the Cross-Harbour Tunnel.
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A pretty fantastic bus station can dramatically improve all of Hong Kong's Cross-Harbour bus traffic, and we should absolutely spend the money to invest in that.
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We should invest in making Hung Hom a fantastic routing point as the hub for bus routes.
Buses from all over Kowloon go to Hung Hom, drop their passengers, and turn around having loaded up on people who just arrived from the routes on the Island.
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Hung Hom Station is, amusingly, one of the best places to grab a bus in the city. The number of buses heading to the island that can get you closer to your destination than the MTR makes taking the MTR to the island superfluous.
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The second thing I looked for is "combining bus stations." The surface lot is for "local" routes, or if you go to the Cross-Harbour Terminal you can hop on any of ~20 buses southbound to get to different places on the island, or get on northbound to go to places in Kowloon.
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This proposal also doesn't increase connectivity into the Hung Hom Bay/Whampoa area (marked in yellow and with the labeling filpped because the author is not a local).
The only focus of this entire proposal is increasing connectivity to Tsim Sha Tsui.
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This proposal does very little for pedestrians, the only significant new addition would automatically be added by any developer building a high-dollar building at the waterfront.
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And the last pedestrian accommodation pitched is a waterfront boardwalk which would look out onto the harbor, except that the view is obscured by the proposed marina. It runs parallel to the existing walkway attached to the Hung Hom Bypass, so it doesn't introduce any new connectivity.
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I have to point out that the two distinct renderings of the bridge over Hung Hom Bypass are presented on the same slide.
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"Proposed Pedestrian Link to Waterfront"
This is new, and I'm 100% on board with doing this. However, it has to cross a highway and they clearly have no idea what they want that to look like.
(Would love to remove Hung Hom Bypass entirely, but I'm trying to scope comments to in-plan items.)
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Solving this problem for them: a bridge could to go out of the presently-McDonald's area upstairs inside the station, travel parallel to the road until it can cross it after clearing the coliseum.
I consider this footbridge a waste; we'd do better to connect to the existing underground walkway.