Hacker News: Calazon

New comment by Calazon in "I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall"

Calazon — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 22:57:29 +0000

The way I see it many HOAs are the opposite of privatization, at least when they cannot be opted out of. They control land, impose taxes (sorry, "fees"), have elected leadership, provide services, make rules that they have the power to enforce, and the only way to leave them is to move out of their territory.

In my eyes this is essentially the same thing as a form of local government, just on a smaller scale.

New comment by Calazon in "Religious scholars met with Anthropic"

Calazon — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 08:39:44 +0000

The other problem is that the AI may well do what humans tell it to rather than what they want it to, in the style of a literal genie or paperclip maximizer.

It can lead to catastrophe without ever being conscious or wanting freedom, or anything like that.

New comment by Calazon in "How Singapore's government-run dating service works"

Calazon — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 13:29:37 +0000

Where I live, even when government does make demands, as in the case of foster parenting, they still allow two boys or two girls to share a room.

New comment by Calazon in "Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics"

Calazon — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 13:28:09 +0000

Presumably some combination of marketing existing models and training/improving future models.

My point was about what is and isn't the responsibility of AI labs. Why should they be required to invest more (or fewer) resources into math than they otherwise want to?

(If you ask me, safety and security are what they need to invest more into.)

New comment by Calazon in "Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics"

Calazon — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:34:14 +0000

The insane part is placing the burden on AI labs to advance mathematical understanding. Why should this be their responsibility?

If they want to simply generate theorems and proofs and post them on the internet, why not? Does doing that really inflict "substantial negative externalities ... on the mathematical community"?

New comment by Calazon in "AI chatbots give wrong answers to financial queries 'most of the time'"

Calazon — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 07:26:30 +0000

Because it's faster.

I've done this on different topics - I know the answer is in a particular eBook/PDF/document, but for whatever reason it's not trivial to look it up. The model can do it a lot more quickly than I can, and then I can still verify the accuracy.

New comment by Calazon in "Asking authors about their own papers"

Calazon — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 14:54:31 +0000

I wonder how the ratios would change for papers at different parts of the review process. For what fraction of published papers are the authors unable to answer basic questions about them?

New comment by Calazon in "Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude"

Calazon — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 18:03:37 +0000

That sounds incredibly frustrating. It's bad enough in code reviews, but is that approach to work being tolerated in meetings these days?

New comment by Calazon in "Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs"

Calazon — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:18:28 +0000

They'd be hobbies in most utopian scenarios too.

New comment by Calazon in "Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs"

Calazon — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:16:45 +0000

The problem is that by default progress might look like an increase in power without a corresponding increase in safety. That could be catastrophically dangerous.

New comment by Calazon in "Mexican student creates an acoustic fire extinguisher to put out fire in seconds"

Calazon — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 05:34:16 +0000

There are captchas that demand selfies now? I have never heard of that before and it sounds completely crazy.

New comment by Calazon in "An Alien Mind"

Calazon — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:35:23 +0000

For the moment that may be true. They are getting better and better at acquiring, retaining, and processing domain knowledge. I wonder what this will look like in a few more years.

The responsibility side is a different matter of course.

New comment by Calazon in "An Alien Mind"

Calazon — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:32:46 +0000

For better or for worse, this technology isn't going away any more than search engines, smartphones, or social media have gone away.

New comment by Calazon in "Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board"

Calazon — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 01:51:05 +0000

I suppose one could believe that, though to me it seems like a very wild take. At least if you want the superintelligence to ever have any meaningful interaction with the outside world.

New comment by Calazon in "How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?"

Calazon — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 23:11:31 +0000

That is also very fair.

New comment by Calazon in "How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?"

Calazon — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:20:13 +0000

I read it as suggesting that AI models are simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces.

New comment by Calazon in "Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination"

Calazon — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:32:02 +0000

Sure, if culture were different, or human nature we different, we wouldn't have the problems we currently do.

However, given the culture we have, and the human tendencies we have, I think laws can make things better. Like criminalizing various sorts of fraud.

New comment by Calazon in "Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination"

Calazon — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 06:29:03 +0000

Perhaps we need a new/updated law to cover this kind of thing. This sort of academic fraud should absolutely be criminalized, but I'm not sure I'm the biggest fan of the "everything is wire fraud" approach to achieving that.

New comment by Calazon in "Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI""

Calazon — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 16:14:21 +0000

This is great. There's a big difference between levels 2-4 (where I generally operate) and levels 7-8 (where I see a lot of others operate), and I like how this level system makes that explicit.

New comment by Calazon in "CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO"

Calazon — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 15:32:22 +0000

> But why wouldn’t they want to use the budget they already have for these newly more productive people and get even more work done overall?

For all the same reasons many companies are eager to cut labor costs whenever possible. There can be a variety of bottlenecks to scaling and it's often not as simple as hire more people to make more profit, even if you have extra capital available.