Hacker News: alexk307

New comment by alexk307 in "Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit"

alexk307 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:29:24 +0000

Ring cameras don't record and index every single license plate that it sees and hand that data over directly to law enforcement. There's a huge difference between surveilling your own private property, and a massive network of ALPRs feeding data directly into government systems.

New comment by alexk307 in "ChatGPT Images 2.5"

alexk307 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:26:44 +0000

> An 1GW data center is can fit in a size of a mid size apartment.

Not even close, you're off by a few orders of magnitude. You can also easily find this info online https://www.electricchoice.com/datacenters/

New comment by alexk307 in "ChatGPT Images 2.5"

alexk307 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:42:21 +0000

I was curious and tried to come up with a crude estimate - all of the golf courses in the US use approximately the same amount of energy (mowing, fertilizer, etc) as one 1GW DC does.

New comment by alexk307 in "How Climate Resilient Are the Largest Cities?"

alexk307 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:31:22 +0000

Worth noting Texas is having one of its quietest tornado years in the ~20 years of comparable data, at the same time. Which is the problem: the reliable detection era is about 30 years, and the preliminary dataset behind these headlines starts in 2004. The IPCC has low confidence in observed trends in severe convective storms for exactly this reason. And your El Niño point argues against you, since El Niño is associated with suppressed spring tornado activity in the southern Plains, which is what we're seeing in Texas.

New comment by alexk307 in "How Climate Resilient Are the Largest Cities?"

alexk307 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:12:46 +0000

Humans have been working on this for centuries and we've never harvested more food than the present moment.

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/food-projections-2025

New comment by alexk307 in "Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf"

alexk307 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:10:34 +0000

Not to say that climate change isn't affecting this in some way, but the Pacific Ocean is known to oscillate between Sardine and Anchovy regimes [0][1].

[0] https://www.mbari.org/news/from-sardines-to-anchovies-and-ba...

[1] https://fishbio.com/collapse-pacific-sardine/

New comment by alexk307 in "The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate"

alexk307 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:38:17 +0000

> I’d like to get it to 1750

You want to bring humanity back into the little ice age?

New comment by alexk307 in "The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate"

alexk307 — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:57:01 +0000

What is Climate repair? What is your company doing to repair the climate?

New comment by alexk307 in "The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate"

alexk307 — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:51:17 +0000

> Before that [Holocene], for hundreds of thousands of years in the Pleistocene era, humans (and our hominid ancestors) spent most of their time running from drought, fires, floods, extreme cold and heat, predators, and each other. The population was likely no more than a few million people spread across the whole planet. At one point we may have almost gone extinct, with just 10,000 Homo sapiens clinging to life. But after the advent of the Holocene and its remarkably stable climate, in only 100 centuries the world population has risen to 8 billion.

This is extremely misleading. The "remarkably stable" climate didn't bring the world's population up to 8 billion, it was abundant energy from fossil fuels (7 out of 8 of all of the humans that have ever lived have done so in the industrial era). The Holocene isn't some serene stable climate period - there are still natural disasters at about the same rate they have been occurring throughout the past 11k years - but the difference is that we're much less likely to be killed by them due to abundant energy and technology. The transition from the Pleistocene into the Holocene definitely made life easier, mostly because of the natural warming.

New comment by alexk307 in "The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate"

alexk307 — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:40:21 +0000

Not to mention that if we limited access to fossil fuels today, billions of people would be dead within months. If we turned off the spigot, billions would starve and civilization would collapse quicker than you could say climate change

New comment by alexk307 in "A Sick People"

alexk307 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:24:36 +0000

OP's shining example of Mexico is essentially as obese[0], and far less educated[1] than Americans on average. It's embarrassing to be this blind to the state of things when you have the resources to check your opinions for accuracy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_r... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index

New comment by alexk307 in "800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US"

alexk307 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:28:58 +0000

Right - and that data does not suggest anything close to what OP was saying.

[1] https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjfr-2024-0216 [2] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2...

New comment by alexk307 in "800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US"

alexk307 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:35:58 +0000

> In the past thousand years, we have never seen a single season where 4% of Canada's entire forest area burned down

You cannot possibly know this, you do not have accurate records of forrest fires that occurred 800+ years before Canada was even founded. Wildfires abide by power law distributions [1][2] meaning that enormous outliers like the one in 2023 (and maybe even this year) are not unexpected with a long fat tail distribution. Wildfires in Canada have been trending down in terms of number of fires, but the fires are burning more area [3].

> When you normalize the data and isolate forests

Here's the past two decades of forrest fires globally [4], very hard to spot a significant trend. I'm not arguing that there isn't a problem here and that climate change isn't playing at least some role in it, but to attribute this entirely to climate change is misguided and not supported by literature.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law [2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0500880102 [3] https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/en/fire-history [4] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/area-burned-wildfires-by-...

New comment by alexk307 in "Elastic lays off 7% of employees"

alexk307 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:45:32 +0000

Sad but you unfortunately need to make a profit as a public company at some point. In 8 years since going public, they've had essentially one marginally profitable year surrounded by lots of losses while growing to 4000 employees. Easy to blame AI when the fault is really poor leadership.

New comment by alexk307 in "Dopamine Fracking"

alexk307 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:55:34 +0000

While I'm empathetic to the overall theme of the post, the strawberries are a terrible example and takes away from the message. Strawberries are delicate little fruits that until a handful of decades ago, were seasonal expensive treats. It's not necessarily a bad thing that we've made a synthetic analog that allows less fortunate people to experience the taste of a perfect strawberry. Real strawberries aren't disappearing because of this, if anything this would have the opposite effect because strawberry consumption in the US have ~quadrupled in the past few decades [1]. No one replaced "500 individual human experiences", strawberries are not "extinct", there's no data to suggest that people "prefer the synthetic version".

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/77884

New comment by alexk307 in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

alexk307 — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:22:09 +0000

This seems like a no-brainer. Tax 10-15k ultra wealthy people who park their cash in second homes in exchange for ~$500M/year in revenue.

New comment by alexk307 in "Parents say ChatGPT got their son killed with bad advice on party drugs"

alexk307 — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:56:49 +0000

There's a bit of a difference between "enforcing social norms" and telling a user to ingest prescription drugs to combat nausea from the other drugs that it told the user to take.

Yes, you should be able to write a book with this same information. No, you should not be able to release software that instructs its users to harm themselves. LLMs aren't people, and you shouldn't anthropomorphize human rights onto them.

New comment by alexk307 in "The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence"

alexk307 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:15:08 +0000

> extraordinary amount of labor in order to modify our environment to save civilization from sea level rise and to be able to repair damages caused by natural disasters

Do you really think that 1-2 feet of sea level rise will wipe out humanity? Can you cite any examples of natural disasters increasing in frequency or severity due to increased green house gas concentrations? Would AI help with any of that?

New comment by alexk307 in "Solar and batteries can power the world"

alexk307 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:00:07 +0000

Which is a good thing because solar + batteries is literally the easiest way to make profit currently, and will get more profitable year over year.

New comment by alexk307 in "Solar and batteries can power the world"

alexk307 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:58:59 +0000

This is just incorrect. The politics in the US say one thing but the market is going in the other direction. 2026 additions to the US grid will be almost entirely renewables - 6.3 GW of natural gas / 86 GW total means ~93% of new additions to grid capacity are renewable [1]. A quarter of the electricity in the US is now generated by renewables [2] and growing rapidly. The states with the largest amount of renewable electricity generation are wildly different politically, but all agree that renewables make the most financial sense [3].

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205 [2] https://www.semafor.com/article/03/03/2026/us-renewables-hit... [3] https://www.integrityenergy.com/blog/the-top-10-states-pavin...