Hacker News: aerhardt

New comment by aerhardt in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

aerhardt — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:10:40 +0000

It’s perfectly reasonable to believe that a law of marginal decreasing returns will kick in at some point (if it hasn’t already), and that what one point looked like an exponential may start looking like an s-curve.

I do not see how being experienced in engineering, or having higher studies in computer science and economics should make that view less common.

New comment by aerhardt in "Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows"

aerhardt — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 11:54:58 +0000

It tests general reading comprehension. Is it possible that a generation with abysmal reading comprehension and attention copiously reads for pleasure? Yes, but I’m very doubtful.

New comment by aerhardt in "Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows"

aerhardt — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:07:52 +0000

They should ask the Ministry of Culture here in Spain, who claims that reading is on the up and up among 14-24 year olds [1].

Nothing points to that in our abysmal PISA reading results, general educational attainment and outcomes, or anecdotal observation, but hey! At least it might be worth asking them about the surveying methodology.

[1] https://www.cultura.gob.es/ca/actualidad/2026/01/260122-baro...

New comment by aerhardt in "Policy on the AI Exponential"

aerhardt — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:53:57 +0000

Why are they not preaching for protected weights, but public, ie, under state control? What do you feel his posture will be if that is starting to be discussed?

Also, on an unrelated note, why would you have an account for 5 years and only now post your second comment? AI has been an existential threat for years, why only now?

This is a pattern I am seeing all over the place on HN in the last year in AI threads, and I have to admit that I am starting to become paranoid and my feels need some assuaging.

New comment by aerhardt in "Claude Fable 5"

aerhardt — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:31:01 +0000

So this is the one, huh?

New comment by aerhardt in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

aerhardt — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:59:10 +0000

I don't think at $1,500 you're not forced to code on your own at all, in the sense of typing code. You're simply forced to not yolo-max twelve parallel agents at all times.

New comment by aerhardt in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

aerhardt — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:23:04 +0000

Classical supply and demand models do not show that increasing the price of x causes quantities to first go up then down after a certain inflection point…

You could probably make the relationship through utility rather or a proxy model (you can model anything with enough imagination in economics) but to call it “the result of” as if it is immediately related is not accurate. It is apparent at first sight when you compare the curves…

New comment by aerhardt in "Robinhood now lets your AI agents trade stocks"

aerhardt — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:13:36 +0000

They’re possibly great at generating alpha in highly complex systems that compose LLMs with tabular machine learning and other analytical techniques at a large scale. So yea, certainly not for these users.

New comment by aerhardt in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

aerhardt — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:42:31 +0000

You could maybe somehow relate it to supply and demand dynamics, but the idea that that higher taxes can start reducing receipts after a certain point is widely credited to Laffer (although apparently there are signals of others saying similar things throughout the history of economics). The Laffer model displays an inverted U curve.

New comment by aerhardt in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

aerhardt — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:35:24 +0000

France's government expenditure is 57% of its GDP according to th OECD. It's probably an all-time record in the annals of global economic history in peacetime. It's more than the late Soviet Union spent around 1985-1990 according to the IMF / World Bank.

The 2025 deficit ran at around ~150 billion euros. The Zucman wealth tax would raise 25 billion in the most optimistic projected scenario (so, one sixth of the deficit at most). This is the very best case as projected by its proponents - there's a decent chance receipts would be significantly lower than that.

You're absolutely right that right wing parties did not, and almost certainly will not, solve any of these issues. Neither will a wealth tax. In my opinion, this is only solved in a bang.

New comment by aerhardt in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

aerhardt — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:48:16 +0000

That's how I feel about most of your writing. I click through most times when I see you either on the front page or in the comments, and I generally walk away feeling like I have food for thought, without necessarily buying everything wholesale. It's part of why I keep coming back.

My root comment simply represented my two cents about the current post. I don't think anything about the post is outrageously incorrect or anything, just somewhat confusing. You're a very prolific contributor in this community and I don't think me or anyone else that welcomes your takes expects everything you write to rock our collective socks every single time, anyway.

New comment by aerhardt in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

aerhardt — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:14:58 +0000

I like his other posts. He's bullish on AI, which is fine. I'd like to read a mix of bearish and bullish level-headed takes from people who are subject matter experts. His technical credentials are well past discussion - I love Django, and he comes across as a pretty upbeat but level-headed guy. Certainly beats radical takes in either direction from people who have no clue what they're talking about. It's just this article that I find rather confusing.

New comment by aerhardt in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

aerhardt — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:27:37 +0000

I find this analysis confusing. PMF for coding was likely reached some time last year. Profitability, which is different, we don’t know. The article kind of confuses both without making a strong economic case or using numbers in a compelling way. I don’t understand what the Uber case has to do with this either. The Uber COO clearly said that at least in terms of ROI he’s not seeing the results either.

My take is the product has been very useful for coding (PMF) for months. But it’s certainly not useful at any cost…

New comment by aerhardt in "Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods"

aerhardt — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:23:25 +0000

What they told me and I can read online is that they don’t because they can’t operate on the Austin highways. Have you read anything that’s more detailed?

New comment by aerhardt in "Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods"

aerhardt — Thu, 21 May 2026 18:29:10 +0000

I’ve just been to Austin where self-driving cars are everywhere but found to my disappointment that they can’t do trips to the airport.

To your point, knowledge work, as a whole is a much larger and complex domain than self-driving.

New comment by aerhardt in "Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO"

aerhardt — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:59:02 +0000

You’re trying to tell me, in an infinitely smug, condescending, and unnecessarily long-winded manner that you know as a clinical fact that Sam Altman is a psycopath?

New comment by aerhardt in "Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO"

aerhardt — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:19:20 +0000

For all his weirdness and moral failings, I don’t see Altman saying things like whites being under apartheid in the US. And worse. Multiple times a day. Every day.

New comment by aerhardt in "Mythical Man Month"

aerhardt — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:58:06 +0000

Dario Amodei said in the most recent interview with Dwarkesh that Anthropic currently gets achieves an increase of around 20-30% coding productivity, which tracks with my experience. What do you do to reap orders of magnitude more?

Also, how much more money do you make? Or are you working less?

New comment by aerhardt in "The bottleneck was never the code"

aerhardt — Wed, 06 May 2026 19:26:13 +0000

I've been selling and managing my own projects for over six years, so I don't count myself in the antisocial camp. But LLMs haven't changed the fact that I like to have at least five hours of deep work every day.

New comment by aerhardt in "Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw""

aerhardt — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:28:33 +0000

I hope you appreciate the irony of saying that in a thread where we are discussing that OpenAI's main competitor is engaging in blatantly anti-consumer behavior.