Hacker News: MostlyStable

New comment by MostlyStable in "Does Georgism work? Five years later"

MostlyStable — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 17:22:52 +0000

What's the end goal of this "build ugly things and depress land values" strategy? If it's to drive out current residents and buy cheap, to what goal? If, once you have bought cheap, you stop building ugly things and start doing high value things.....then land values go back up and you have defeated your own purpose.

New comment by MostlyStable in "Allow babywearing carriers on planes"

MostlyStable — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:41:02 +0000

See: Nuclear power for an example of this.

New comment by MostlyStable in "Allow babywearing carriers on planes"

MostlyStable — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:20:11 +0000

The decision to not require seats is one of the best regulatory decisions I have ever heard of, and I wish this kind of thought process was more present in all kinds of places. The funny thing is that, I bet if it were used more broadly, given the absolutely enormous safety advantage that flying has over basically any other mode of transportation, there would be a non trivial number of other flight safety regulations that would get reconsidered.

New comment by MostlyStable in "Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy"

MostlyStable — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 04:49:51 +0000

They were already safer than coal...by several orders of magnitude. A Chernobyl level disaster every single year would have killed fewer people than coal power. The level of safety you are describing has literally killed millions of people.

Commoditizing the existing reactors of 40-50 years ago would have lead to a dramatically better world than we currently live in, with cheaper power, essentially defeated climate change, better air quality, and fewer premature deaths associated with that air quality.

New comment by MostlyStable in "OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005"

MostlyStable — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:10:16 +0000

Ich glaube, dass Deutsche buchstabieren es "aktuelle", eigentlich.

(apologies for my broken learner German, I decided not to use a translator).

New comment by MostlyStable in "The first new cat species discovered in 100 years"

MostlyStable — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:39:12 +0000

Wow, I expected it to be a DNA based split or something like that, but a genuinely new to science mammal is pretty cool!

New comment by MostlyStable in "Waymo pulls over, calls cops on juvenile riders who had 'ghost gun""

MostlyStable — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 14:52:22 +0000

I'm pretty wary of mass public surveillance. I'm much less concerned about companies monitoring the inside of their private property

New comment by MostlyStable in "Waymo pulls over, calls cops on juvenile riders who had 'ghost gun""

MostlyStable — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 14:45:21 +0000

As far as I can tell here the ghost portion is basically a non-sequiter. The waymo vehicle called the cops because it detected e passengers had a gun. The vehicle did not know or care about its status as a ghost gun or not. I'm sure that the Waymo terms of service prohibit carrying weapons into the vehicle. I'm pretty sure that if you were brandishing a realistic looking enough gun, an Uber driver would kick you out and call the cops as well.

New comment by MostlyStable in "iPhone Duo"

MostlyStable — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:20:06 +0000

I'm honestly curious about the "market keeps rejecting it" part. Yes, they sold far fewer units than the other models....but did they really not make money? I have made variations on this comment many many times. I completely buy that the opinions about phone form factor and features expressed on HN/reddit/online, and my own idiosyncratic preferences probably even more so, represent somewhat of a niche, and that your median phone consumer isn't interested in what we/I want. But the phone market seems like it's so large that it should be able to support a lot of niches! A tenth of a percent of the total market (~1,300 million in 2023 according to [0], 0.1% of which would be 1.3 million phones) should be totally viable as a business! I get that, maybe for Apple there is opportunity cost. Having more product lines adds overhead, and if the profit margin on those extra product lines isn't enough higher than the main lines to justify that overhead, they kill it. But why doesn't some smaller company (so yes, this mostly applies to Android) try to steal that fractional market share? I simply don't understand why it doesn't work to the point that now, when the market is so much larger than it was in the past, we have so much less hardware diversity.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...

New comment by MostlyStable in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

MostlyStable — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:34:56 +0000

The problem with mostly-but-not-entirely autonomous is that humans will tend to treat it like entirely autonomous.

New comment by MostlyStable in "Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics"

MostlyStable — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 17:30:07 +0000

That's how several major AI advancements have happened. I have seen no evidence that that is the fastest way to make progress right now. I expect that, much like chess engines, it will not take too long before AI is significantly better than AI + human. But right now, my bet is that we are still safely within the window where an AI + human mathematician team is still better than AI alone (at least for the case where the human has learned how to work effectively with the partner....something that this event could possible be good for teaching).

New comment by MostlyStable in "Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns"

MostlyStable — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 04:19:04 +0000

The not needing an account is obviously not minor, but honestly, the UI is just better, by a lot. I made a twitter account a while ago using one of those throw away email address sites, so I have an account that I don't care about that I can use for twitter....but the experience just sucks. I don't know how any stands it, even if they don't mind needing an account.

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

MostlyStable — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 19:17:04 +0000

Even if they don't figure out how to exfiltrate weights, someone will intentionally do this with an open model once open models are capable enough. If you ever think "no one would be so stupid as to...", you are wrong. Yes, someone absolutely would, and will.

Independent models living "in the wild" is approx. inevitable.

New comment by MostlyStable in "How Fairphone built the Fairphone Gen 6+"

MostlyStable — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 15:38:58 +0000

I think this has historically been true and is still approximately true now. But I think in the relatively near future (less than 5 years) there's a really good chance it won't be true anymore.

Once open models catch up to the current frontier in vulnerability exploitation, the cost to target people will go way down. In the past, the cost to hack a random individual person was generally high enough that if there wasn't some special reason to hack you in particular, it wasn't worth it. That may no longer be the case in the near future. The floor of what is acceptable security for the General Public probably needs to rise quite a bit over the next few years.

New comment by MostlyStable in "I don't have a smartphone or at least I wish I didn't"

MostlyStable — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 18:23:49 +0000

I don't think he's complaining about having a lot of apps, or the ability to have a lot of apps. He's complaining about being required to use apps for hundreds of small interactions every day that don't, or shouldn't, require an app. And he's correct. Companies are doing this not because they think it's better, but because they believe that if they can worm their way onto your device, and insert their cloud service (even if it's initially free), that they can turn you into a more reliable and/or recurring revenue stream in the future, either because you feel locked into their ecosystem so you will buy other products from their lineup, or, even better, buy a subscription service.

New comment by MostlyStable in "'Idiocracy' Predicted All of This"

MostlyStable — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 03:19:22 +0000

No, "Marching Morons" [0] from 1951 "predicted all of this". The original short story (which, while I have not been able to find any explicit confirmation, I just can't believe was not a direct inspiration for the movie), doesn't get nearly enough credit in my opinion. I originally encountered as part of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. II, which additionally included "Who Goes there" (Inspiration for "The Thing") and "With Folded Hands" (not the inspiration for anything so far as I know, but really good nonetheless)

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm

(not to say that I agree with the premise of the claim, but I do think that we should be properly crediting our cultural references).

New comment by MostlyStable in "No country for mediocre mathematicians"

MostlyStable — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:16:06 +0000

honestly curious question: do you expect this to remain true? If so, for how long? I can think of two potential reasons why it might not stay true.

1. The very best humans remain able to understand/check the proofs, but we go for so long with every proof checking out that society more broadly just decides to trust. We are already doing that with human mathematicians. I can't verify what Terence Tao tells me is correct, I just trust that it is because he (and other human mathematicians) tell me it is. How many proofs/years of them checking out before we reach this point? I don't know, but history suggests that eventually, humans might keep checking, but they will do so only as a hobby. For any purpose that actually matters, we will just start to trust and use it.

2. The proofs that AI comes up with become too difficult/complex for even the very best human mathematicians to understand, and our options become to either trust or to not use at all.

Obviously it's possible that neither of these happens if AI capabilities stall out not too far beyond where we are now, but if they keep progressing at the current rates for another few years, I expect at least one, and maybe both, to eventually come to pass.

New comment by MostlyStable in "No country for mediocre mathematicians"

MostlyStable — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:07:58 +0000

I do not have a single hobby where I'm very far beyond the median hobby-haver in skill (that is to say: if you took all other humans who share my hobby, I'm likely somewhere near median for all of them). This may put me in top whatever percentile among all humans, since most humans don't share my hobbies and so are terrible at those things, but there are enough humans out there, and enough humans who share my hobbies, that I have always known that there are people who are vastly better at them than I am. Now yes, if I was constantly being followed around by one of the top 10 hobby-havers, pointing out to me all the mistakes or sub-optimal decisions I was making, that would indeed be annoying and reduce my enjoyment in the hobby. But why do you expect AI to be like this? I would love if I had one of those top 10 hobby-havers on call to answer every one of my (often inane) questions with infinite patience (and who would only talk about the hobby when I specifically initiated the topic). I'm already under no illusions that I'm the best, but it's now easier than it has ever been (for some hobbies, I expect others to join them over time) to get better at them....if one so desires.

New comment by MostlyStable in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

MostlyStable — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:47:49 +0000

Lump of Labor fallacy

New comment by MostlyStable in "Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices"

MostlyStable — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 23:03:33 +0000

Still works for me (although I always use it logged in). If they kill old.reddit, I may finally abandon the site. It's been slowly losing value for a long time and being forced to use the hot garbage of the new UI might be my tipping point.