Hacker News: afinlayson

New comment by afinlayson in "Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence"

afinlayson — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:07:01 +0000

Didn't we learn our lesson in SimCity? Crime went up when you added a casino.. but governments gained a little tax revenue... We seem to get the crime (see insider trading) but no tax revenue... Maybe I'm just showing my age...

New comment by afinlayson in "Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing"

afinlayson — Mon, 25 May 2026 19:25:48 +0000

Replace Tokens with Gas, or water or healthcare or anything - and it's foolish. You shouldn't let the seller dictate what amount you need of something.

Smart engineers are figuring out how to best use their tokens - as tokenmaxing is just as silly as gasmaxing your car.

New comment by afinlayson in "OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid"

afinlayson — Sun, 17 May 2026 02:41:58 +0000

What do you get out of it that a csv or access to another service that allows you to do readonly access does this give you that you’d trust. What happens when they hallucinate a payment with an extra digit in it. This will be seen as another example of tech companies acting out of touch.

New comment by afinlayson in "The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine"

afinlayson — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:43:43 +0000

At some point there needs to be a check if it's a real human... But it's a cat and mouse game - any way we create to keep bots off gets a work around by clever engineers.

New comment by afinlayson in "Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job"

afinlayson — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 14:36:16 +0000

My understanding is stats canada gets offered a lot of money for this data after being anonymized. A lot of employers might not ask questions if someone had really good data they could use to help market their product. Especially politically aligned think tanks

New comment by afinlayson in "xAI joins SpaceX"

afinlayson — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:37:41 +0000

I’d love to see the new cap table of this company. My guess is this will be terrible for spacex employees and gains xai a lifeline. My guess is this helps Elon get to trillion dollar status before any changes the tax structure…

My reasoning is xai has no moat … except in lawsuits, and spacex has one of the biggest moats in history. And they aren’t valued into this equation.

New comment by afinlayson in "Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned"

afinlayson — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 03:13:01 +0000

If you are old enough - feels a little like the bitkeeper/git situation

New comment by afinlayson in "Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege"

afinlayson — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 17:26:09 +0000

At the moment the biggest hope I have is there’s client side tech that protects us from these dark patterns. But I suspect they’ll have their own dark patterns to make them profitable.

New comment by afinlayson in "Was Catch Me If You Can Based on a Complete Lie?"

afinlayson — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 17:47:36 +0000

Next you'll say Star wars didn't take place a long long time ago /s It was a fun story / movie even if it's mostly fiction. I'm more concerned about the number of scams / cons that exploded in the last 12 years or so. This seems small potatoes in comparison.

New comment by afinlayson in "OpenAI Is Just Another Boring, Desperate AI Startup"

afinlayson — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 17:47:49 +0000

I wouldn't write them off yet - but if their funding dries up and there's no more money to support their spending habits this will seem like a great prediction. Giving away stuff that's usually expensive for free is a great way to get numbers - It worked for facebook, uber and many others but it doesn't mean you'll become a profitable company.

Anyone with enough money can buy users - example they could start an airline tomorrow where flights are free and get a lot of riders - but if they don't figure out how to monetize, it'll be a very short experiment.

New comment by afinlayson in "U.S. Government Expected to Get Multibillion-Dollar Fee in TikTok Deal"

afinlayson — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 05:40:52 +0000

What do they bring to the table? Sounds like a no bid contract like thing to me. Doesn't sound like the meritocracy to me

New comment by afinlayson in "The Gen Xers Who Waited Their Turn to Be CEO Are Getting Passed Over"

afinlayson — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 18:16:24 +0000

It's not just in business it's politics, on air personalities, movies / tv shows are focusing reboots and sequels.

New comment by afinlayson in "Losing Money Is the Point"

afinlayson — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 18:04:12 +0000

I don't think enough people think about how the current tax / economic system is made up, and we can change it if we collectively work together.

New comment by afinlayson in "CEOs Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: AI Will Wipe Out Jobs"

afinlayson — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 20:04:11 +0000

At some point the people who were laid off start competing against the company they used to work for at a fraction of the price. A company that only has a few real people and the rest AI that has cushy executive margins can be out priced by those who have access to the same AI features and just want a reasonable wage.

We could also see CEO wages fall as their job can be done by anyone because of AI.

New comment by afinlayson in "I deleted my second brain"

afinlayson — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 06:09:31 +0000

Has OP never had too many tabs, too many unread emails before? Declare bankrupcy, archive instead of delete. Obsidian allows you to have multiple vaults - and you can link to other vaults, Maybe a Vault per year will work better for you if you ever decide to not use Second brain again.

New comment by afinlayson in "Everything Is Down"

afinlayson — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 19:06:40 +0000

and aws

New comment by afinlayson in "Canada votes for Mark Carney as prime minister"

afinlayson — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 06:12:32 +0000

At least post the CBC link: Results: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/federal/2025/resul...

YouTube Live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SATBOqyYODU

New comment by afinlayson in "Ask HN: Can vibe coding competitions be challenging and fair?"

afinlayson — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 04:20:15 +0000

The Randomness of LLMs make it so 10 people could write the exact same prompts and have wildly different answers.. It's closer to Texas Hold'em than a coding challenge.

New comment by afinlayson in "OpenAI is building a social network?"

afinlayson — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 22:00:47 +0000

What if it was an un-social media. Like undo what happened over the last 5(or more) years in social media… may be interesting or just concentrate power in another company.

New comment by afinlayson in "Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future"

afinlayson — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 01:44:59 +0000

You know someone could make white mirror (or a title of a techno utopia) but those people are too busy making memes using AI.