<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: dragonwriter</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dragonwriter</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:15:56 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=dragonwriter" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If the weight, training and inference code, and training data are all released under of Open Source (OSI definition) license, the it is unmistakably “open source”. As you drift from that it becomes less clearly so, and when you get to no training data, and the model weights license having extensive limitations on allowed uses, the use of even “open weights” becomes deceptive.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 23:36:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49251343</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49251343</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49251343</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Wasn't LLaMA or Llama 2 the first ever open weight LLM through a leak<p>No. GPT-2, I think, was the first, four(ish) years before Llama, and there were a bunch in between GPT-2 and the Llama leak and later open release. The Llama leak was a substantial leap forward in capacity for local LLMs, but not the first, and it wasn’t open.<p>The open licensed release was Llama 2 several months after the Llama leak.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:11:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249799</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249799</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249799</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A Georgist LVT is based on the value of the bare land, which is constrained by permitted uses. Adopting it without first removing zoning restrictions would <i>increase</i> the incentive for homeowners to defend the existing zoning rules, since the removal of the rules would increase the scope of alternative uses of the land in ways which would make it economically impossible for most existing single family homeowners to afford the taxes on the property.<p>On the other hand, once you remove the zoning restrictions, the <i>existing</i> economic incentives will produce densification without LVT, tbat's the whole thing the zoning restrictions exist to stop.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:47:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237954</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237954</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237954</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "To Recruit Teachers, School Districts Are Building Homes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How would an LVT do that when the barrier to dense housing is zoning restrictions?<p>Changing the tax structure doesn't remove that restriction.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:27:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237797</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237797</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237797</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "To Recruit Teachers, School Districts Are Building Homes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A land value tax without changes in non-tax land use regulations would not fix, and a land value tax would not be necessary after removing the non-tax land use restrictions which this responds to.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:25:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237786</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237786</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237786</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> US laboratories are currently unable to contain their agents while doing security testing<p>Alternative interpretation: US labs are using the supposed inability to control their frontier models as simultaneously marketing for the capability of their models AND as manufacture evidence to support their lobbying the government on the “safety need” to create costly compliance barriers to smaller competitors and open models.<p>Oligopoly isn't going to maintain itself.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:57:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223566</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223566</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223566</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even if by “open models” you specifically restrict that to  LLM or LLM-backbone models with different or additional modalities to text released by major American firms then there are <i>still</i> a lot of American open models being released.  Many of them are small models and/or highly-specialized fine-tunes of other open models, but there are still a whole lot.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:54:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223533</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223533</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223533</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.<p>The concern about datacenters isn’t about visual aesthetics or traffic (the relative absence of workers—which are the traffic and parking lot drivers—for the footprint is actually one of the concerns, though not na environmental one) so this seems to be less of a contradiction than it is implied to be.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:16:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49197014</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49197014</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49197014</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "Qwen Image 3.0 Pro"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Which makes it a clear price win if you already subscribe to Pro for some other reason, otherwise the price crossover where ChatGPT Pro unlimited beats the per-image pricing cited here is 80+ images/day.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:40:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49190550</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49190550</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49190550</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "AI migrated legacy COBOL programs to Java, bugs included"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You are, of course, correct about determinism. In the grandparent post I was accepting the previous poster’s somewhat sloppy use of “nondeterministic” because I was focussed on other aspects of the discussion.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:32:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172102</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172102</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172102</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "AI migrated legacy COBOL programs to Java, bugs included"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The only realistic low-error approach is incremental step-by-step migration using Cursor or similar tools.<p>Correction: AI is not deterministic, the only realistic low-error solution is not a more complex use of non-deterministic AI, but deterministic transpilation.<p>The problem is that this results in COBOL-in-Java which runs correctly but it is a nightmare to maintain.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 03 Aug 2026 06:47:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49152057</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49152057</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49152057</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "Californians' data deletion requests, DROP, become enforceable Aug. 1"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The penalty for not honoring a  DROP “request” is more severe than perjury (and, conversely, there is no penalty at all for not honoring a DMCA notice, the only effect is that you do not benefit from the DMCA safe harbor <i>if</i> you would have been liable for copyright violation without it.)<p>You are being distracted from the substance by non-substantial surface features.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 03 Aug 2026 06:34:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151970</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151970</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151970</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Also let me ask you why we need better and better and models if what we have already can produce good output with 'all the tooling to verify its hypotheses'<p>“Good” isn’t “perfect” and even if it was, the ability to produce perfect output with all the tooling to verify its hypotheses could still be improved, in time and token efficiency, by better models producing fewer spurious hypotheses, rejecting those it does generate faster, and taking fewer unnecessary steps in confirming its good hypotheses.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:56:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124704</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124704</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124704</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Love this line in the critical material quoted there:<p>“Writing correctly in STE is not an easy task as it requires a good command of the English language together with a good knowledge of the matter of the writing.”<p>This is simply what is required for good writing (in English) in any domain <i>with or without STE</i>.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jul 2026 08:26:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49120471</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49120471</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49120471</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Today, humans convert their labor to capital. Capital holders need labor (humans) to acquire more capital. When the price of inference for these robots becomes less than the price of labor then capital holders don’t need labor.<p>Ignoring quibbling about inference not being the only cost and other issues and just accepting the proposed end state: this is very good if capital is effectively democratized, and apocalyptically bad if it remains highly concentrated in a narrow class.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:22:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112189</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112189</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112189</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "Who the welfare state protects shapes a country’s financial openness"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Mean personal disposable income being comparable to median household income isn't too surprising and doesn't necessarily indicate any error. Mean is much higher than median, individual is much lower than household, disposable is much lower than total. You are comparing numbers that are different in all three axes (in ways which do not point in the same direction), so really any relationship between them would be plausible without detailed knowledge of the exact distribution of all the relevant components.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Jul 2026 22:33:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103969</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103969</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103969</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "Superlogical"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In finance and VC-funded 
-startup worshipping circles it is derogatory, because it means you aren't trying to scale like a VC-funded-startup.<p>That space is often confused with “tech”, and obviously overlaps with it, but its not the same thing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Jul 2026 22:17:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103817</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103817</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103817</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "Superlogical"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>“Didn’t forbid”, if referring to the framers of the Constitution,  is a bit of an understatement, given that they created multiple layers of protection to prevent dismantling slavery at the federal level into the future.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Jul 2026 22:09:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103739</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103739</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103739</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "Superlogical"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Franklin also supported universal male suffrage, wrote Pennsulvania’s 1776 constitution which adopted universal male suffrage, and condemned property requirements for the franchise, reportedly arguing:<p><i>“Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars, and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers — but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass.”</i></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Jul 2026 22:05:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103693</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103693</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103693</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dragonwriter in "Superlogical"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The founding fathers, the framers (a different and later group, though the two overlap and are often conflated) and original states had a variety of (and evolving in some cases between the Founding and the Constitution) opinions on the issue; some (Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, notably, the latter also the primary author of PA’s 1776 Constitution which also adopted this position at the state level) were in favor of universal male suffrage.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:59:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103634</link><dc:creator>dragonwriter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103634</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103634</guid></item></channel></rss>