I'm not arguing for zero zoning laws, but I'm saying that much of modernist urban planning primarily benefits the planner.

Is this person actively solving the problem, tried a bunch of approaches and ran into a road block where they're asking for help?

Or are they wishing the problem didn't exist, so they do as little as possible, hoping somebody else will solve the problem for them?

There's a big difference between:

"Hey, I saw this job at [company you work at], could you refer me please? I'm [lists skills and experience]"

and

"Hey I'm thinking of applying to [company you work at] for the product designer position and I want to make an impression, so I'm putting together a demo Figma with a couple of things I'd fix and how. I spotted those when I did the onboarding for your free trial. I'm curious if you could tell me whether [design flaw] is intentional to deter abuse or if that's something I could fix? Totally get if that's confidential"

The part where you're solving the problem instead of hoping someone else will solve it for you, that's much more important then how you word it.

1. Societies are heterogenous, and some groups are always benefitting from the status quo, which will then rebel against any potential changes.

For instance, in Germany (and multiple other European countries), forming a GmbH (LLC) requires in-person sessions with expensive notaries, who will read the entire paperwork out loud.

This made sense when it was invented in 1892 because company formation was extremely rare, always required large facilities and upfront purchases, etc.

Today, this requirement only benefits notaries, as I reckon extremely few people would voluntarily hire a notary to form their company.

But of course notaries would be against making their services legally required! And of course, if anyone suggests loosening requirements, they will spell out all of the terrible fraud that would happen if company formation didn't require a thorough legal review.

That's an example for something relatively obvious. It gets much harder with genuinely complex topics (pensions? tax reform? healthcare?).

2. Many initiatives to improve society fail because they're viewed through a prism of administration/policy, not the actual people impacted.

Take modern urbanism, which cleanly separates where people live (residential areas), where they work (commercial districts), where they shop (malls), and where they spend their free time (recreational centers, etc.)

This beautifully serves people who plan and administer because it makes their work massively easier vs. a tangle of apartment buildings with a coffee shop and clothing boutique on the ground floor and a playground for the kids in front.

It checks the boxes of daily life, but the people living through it feel alienated from their community with these single-purpose urban areas.

3. We have a bias towards actionism.

We tend to think that big, complicated problems need big, complicated solutions, and politicians (who are evaluated on perception, not results) need to be seen designing and implementing those big, complicated solutions.

Massive amounts of infant mortality were prevented by simply making doctors wash their hands, and Semmelweis (who came up with the hypothesis) was so ridiculed for that idea that he died in an insane asylum.

It's sadly often unacceptable to say "we're going to make a little tweak that'll have a ton of downstream effects and solve this massive problem in 5 years".

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48723272

Points: 13

# Comments: 10

Right now it's silly to default to frontier models, but it won't bankrupt your company. I believe in the short-medium term future, we'll need to be more deliberate about model choices.

In the long-term, of course, tech costs tend to plummet. Is there a future where in 15 years, my Apple Watch locally runs an Opus 4.8-class model? Maybe. And that would obviate this whole discussion.

1. We're still in the "$5 airport Uber" era of LLMs. They're heavily subsidized, and everyone still complains about costs.

2. There hasn't been a real incentive to work on cost optimization for data centers and the hardware they contain. When/if price hikes happen and send people scrambling to use other models or drastically reduce AI usage, this will suddenly need to happen.

3. We're massively overusing SOTA models. As long as you're on a subsidized subscription, you can use Claude Opus 4.8 high to write blog article meta descriptions. If you paid by token, you wouldn't do that.

4. Open models are a wildcard that could completely change the calculus.

We’re still in the “5$ airport Ubers thanks to VC money” era of AI

-the US is the only place where you can raise the kinds of money you need to run a lab like this.

-a government that won’t let you sell products to customers abroad will probably object even more to you moving abroad.

Even if you made the move abroad, that government might no longer let you access US data centers.

-This basically affects OpenAI and Anthropic, which make the only LLMs most people consider frontier nowadays. Since most open weights models rely on distillation of frontier models, it may genuinely entrench those companies more.

It may be playing into the hands of open source OAI/Anthropic dependencies start to look more dangerous, but it also makes building better OSS models harder.

The advantages the AI labs rely on might be less durable than a proprietary process in industrial manufacturing, but it’s still meaningful.

I think the bigger reckoning will come from a different angle: tokens will eventually need to cover cost.

That will likely mean multiplying prices compared to today. And companies already complain now!

Model orchestration and smaller models that can run locally or cheaply will become more important in my opinion.

Right now, you can still default to GPT/Claude and it’s kind of fine, but that will have to change.

The point of a ratatouille is not that it has precisely bell pepper, eggplant, tomato, and zucchini. It’s that it’s a stew of summer vegetables, and the point should be to figure out what the summer vegetables are for you.

We live in a world where we can buy summer vegetables in January (imported from across the world), so we don’t have to deal with those limitations.

I think it’s a fool’s errand to determine the precisely correct formula for the correct (tm) way of making x, y, or z.

This might be different if you work in a Michelin-starred restaurant or get a kick out of the scientific method.

But if you cook at home, the point is to make delicious things for the people you love.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674416

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

It's also telling that the most popular videos are about building the most visually striking Cyberdecks and not about building what a Cyberdeck is actually useful for—that's what gets engagement on short-form video platforms.

But I think it's a massively positive thing overall:

-Women, LGBTQ folks, and other underrepresented groups are finding their way to these nerdier hobbies.

-People are getting tired of technology taking over their lives, specifically attention economy and surveillance tech.

-People are learning about electronics and understanding that there are other ways of doing things.

I fail to see the negative in this. Even if none of these cyberdecks are used for practical purposes, someone learned something new. And, even if their cyberdeck gathers dust, being conscious of their tech usage might change how they use their MacBook or the internet more generally.

I think what you're saying is a bit like criticizing someone for not being a self-sustaining farmer because they only grew their own vegetables one summer and then quit.

They may not only eat their own vegetables, but that experience may lead to them buying from farmer's markets vs. Big Food. And that's a net positive.

So I assume this is the non-Nvidia Groq.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630874

Points: 17

# Comments: 6

Adding a new filter option for in-product analytics (assuming that data is being captured) is something AI can do reasonably well.

But things like “how should our orchestration layer be architected” isn’t a question of execution, so AI won’t be much use.

I definitely do think it’s crazy that someone whose software gets dozens of millions of downloads A DAY can end up making less than someone building a mediocre SaaS app and getting acqui-hired 2 years later.

For the record, I think the VC - Startup ecosystem is incredibly valuable. But it IS crazy how essential software can go essentially unrewarded.