Hacker News: eli_gottlieb

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "US oil inventories fall to 'precariously low' level as Iran war disrupts supply"

eli_gottlieb — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:25:19 +0000

> The real winners will be everyone who destroyed their own oil demand. I went out and bought an EV in May to replace an ICE vehicle, and the other car in the household hasn't burned through a full tank in the months since. They may have killed the EV subsidies in the US but they just went out and created a huge regressive tax on everyone not driving an EV.

LOL, I sold my car and bought an e-bike.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Mark Cuban: fight inequality by giving all workers company stock"

eli_gottlieb — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:23:26 +0000

"More jobs" and "more productivity" are more-or-less opposite goals under capitalism.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Mark Cuban: fight inequality by giving all workers company stock"

eli_gottlieb — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:22:32 +0000

> Will it ever get done? I wouldn’t hold my breath. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Well except that Mark Cuban is out here proposing the first steps towards the end of capitalism, namely collective worker ownership of the means of production, so I think that rather than quote Mark Fisher all over again, we have to understand why today's capitalist class are suddenly proving rhetorically amenable to certain steps towards socialism.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "In San Francisco, Some Home Sellers Now Ask for OpenAI or Anthropic Stock"

eli_gottlieb — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:44:09 +0000

Tax the land. Legalize housing.

Or just nuke San Francisco from orbit.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "We're extending access to Fable 5 on all paid plans through July 12"

eli_gottlieb — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:16:23 +0000

> In the mean time, I will gladly switch to Codex.

IME Codex had a bit of a big head/ego about writing what it thinks I ought to want rather than what I actually ask for, and I've had to spend some time cleaning up its slop.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Costco is the anti-Amazon"

eli_gottlieb — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 22:33:52 +0000

"[W]hat earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?"

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective"

eli_gottlieb — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 22:27:29 +0000

Culture my foot! It's a difference of law. American employment is "at-will", meaning they can legally fire you for "any reason or no reason", with the only asterisk being that "any reason" cannot violate civil-rights law (eg: they can't fire you for your race, sex, or age). European and Japanese law penalize laying off an onboarded, long-term, full-time employee who's already passed probation and acquired years of seniority.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Nano Banana 2 Lite"

eli_gottlieb — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:56:34 +0000

> Our regulatory agencies have either been completely gutted by DOGE, or just no longer have an appetite to do any kind of proactive enforcement

Well yeah. That's what they ran on, and people voted for it.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Claude Science"

eli_gottlieb — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:50:43 +0000

If I didn't want companies focused on making money to exclusively target the life sciences, I would simply fund literally anything or everything else commensurately with how much money is thrown at the life sciences for the sheer garbage they actually practice and produce. Don't like it?

NSF annual budget (pre-Trump): ~$6-8 billion

NIH annual budget (pre-Trump) ~$50 billion

There it is.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Claude Science"

eli_gottlieb — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:49:27 +0000

Most of what's impressed me in working with LLMs is just how much "intelligence" you can get out of the agent iteratively refining something it looks back at with each turn, without its ever actually exhibiting human-level intelligence. I've always been an embodied-cognition guy, and it really seems to me like "agent harnesses" are basically task-specific pseudo-embodiments for LLMs.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Claude Science"

eli_gottlieb — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:44:42 +0000

Matplotlib? Ha! There are loads of academic fields where you still write data analyses by hand, one at a time, in Matlab, without proper version-control or libraries.

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

eli_gottlieb — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:38:35 +0000

Ok so get rid of the investors then.

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

eli_gottlieb — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:38:00 +0000

No, he's arguing that if it's not legal, it's not enforceable by men with nightsticks.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Rent collections are down in New York"

eli_gottlieb — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 05:24:25 +0000

> Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.

1) Because screw you, that's horrible and you shouldn't do it.

2) Because all these digital key systems are horrendously insecure and much more open to thieves and crackers than than a plain old door key anyway.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Rent collections are down in New York"

eli_gottlieb — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 05:10:32 +0000

Society isn't supposed to run on philanthropy.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Rent collections are down in New York"

eli_gottlieb — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 05:09:55 +0000

Don't worry: they'll tell you.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Rent collections are down in New York"

eli_gottlieb — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 05:08:29 +0000

I'd like to try and give you some sympathy, but my last landlord was a well-regarded property management firm who left me with no heat from the end of October to the weekend of Martin Luther King Day in New England, effectively only fixing it once I withheld rent, got on the local news, and was threatening a lawsuit. So, uh... yeah plenty of landlords have done a lot to earn that reputation for the class as a whole.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Rent collections are down in New York"

eli_gottlieb — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 05:03:33 +0000

I mean, to be fair, having your population semi-permanently depleted by two major wars and a fundamental loss of national economic centrality and prestige will help you keep a fixed stock of social housing lasting longer.

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Turns Out, There Is a Cabal of Elite Crazies Trying to Control the World"

eli_gottlieb — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:07:14 +0000

Why use a German word for "scapegoat"?

New comment by eli_gottlieb in "Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI"

eli_gottlieb — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:18:48 +0000

Also, evaluating complicated functions with numerical stability and automatic differentiation is hard.