Hacker News: jdm2212

New comment by jdm2212 in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

jdm2212 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 07:57:48 +0000

When your job pays you a dollar, you get an actual dollar. Your job never claws that money back. Unrealized capital gains are not money, and they routinely get clawed back. Unrealized capital gains just means someone in New York traded GOOG/GOOGL at a higher price than they did yesterday.

And, sure, super-rich people can in theory use the appreciated stock as collateral for loans and not pay taxes, but in practice Larry and most other centi-billionaires actually sell loads of stock and pay a lot in capital gains taxes because having your status as super rich dude who owns a huge yacht be totally dependent on Google's stock price is a dumb risk to take on, and it's worth paying some taxes to eliminate that risk.

New comment by jdm2212 in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

jdm2212 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:58:37 +0000

You sort of can make more land -- by building tall buildings. Unfortunately the Bay Area has mostly outlawed that, too. And we can't blame that just on homeowners. SF "tenant advocates" are just as violently allergic to developers building new structures as homeowners are. But the worst offenders are definitely Peninsula and South Bay homeowners.

New comment by jdm2212 in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

jdm2212 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:42:32 +0000

Then you'd have two (or three, or four) companies that Larry owns 5% each of that are collectively worth $4T.

New comment by jdm2212 in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

jdm2212 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:40:16 +0000

You can't solve a shortage with demand subsidies. You need to expand supply. SF has too little housing relative to its population, and has perennially tried throwing money at the nonprofit industrial complex which has (obviously) perennially failed to solve the problem because it doesn't generate new housing units, it just bids up and reshuffles the existing ones (and steals a lot of money in the process).

New comment by jdm2212 in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

jdm2212 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:37:58 +0000

Larry has sold tons of Alphabet stock and paid lots of capital gains taxes. This is easily available public information. The whole buy-borrow-die thing is sort of a stupid myth. Actual centibillionaires diversify because the risk of having a huge concentrated position is much greater than the liability of having to pay some capital gains taxes.

New comment by jdm2212 in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

jdm2212 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:35:01 +0000

Google doesn't have much power. It can't arrest you or pass laws or vote. It just happens to produce a lot of profits for its shareholders (who are, overwhelmingly, average people with 401Ks) and a lot of profits means a big market cap.

If we need revenue to fund useful government programs, great, let's tax Larry. But I don't understand what problem is solved by expropriation qua expropriation.

New comment by jdm2212 in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

jdm2212 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:24:53 +0000

Sure, yeah, but which of the two numbers I was multiplying together is, in your mind, too big, and should be made smaller, and by what mechanism?

New comment by jdm2212 in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

jdm2212 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:09:21 +0000

Larry Page owns about 5% of Alphabet, which is worth $4T, so he has $200B give or take. Which part of that do you think reflects a "broken tax system"? Companies should get kneecapped if their market cap gets too high? Founders shouldn't be allowed to keep even a single digit percent of the company?

New comment by jdm2212 in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

jdm2212 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 03:17:02 +0000

Their business model is based on making money from LLMs. That is some mix of (a) selling API access to businesses and (b) making money from ads / referral fees / whatever from consumer usage.

The businesses API usage will disappear overnight if OpenAI doesn't honor its contracts with businesses.

New comment by jdm2212 in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

jdm2212 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 23:10:32 +0000

The actual money will be made because the driverless car manufacturer is self-insuring and cutting out the insurance company. Competition among manufacturers will then pass most of those savings on to you.

Similarly, many car makers offer heated seats without a subscription fee, because of the magic of competition.

New comment by jdm2212 in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

jdm2212 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 23:02:18 +0000

I've worked for three different companies that all use some mix of enterprise agreements, self-hosting, and AWS Bedrock to ensure that proprietary data doesn't get trained on. It's not a difficult or complicated problem.

New comment by jdm2212 in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

jdm2212 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:56:19 +0000

You are, again, flatly wrong about this. ZDR involves infrastructure separation that prevents any data flowing back.

New comment by jdm2212 in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

jdm2212 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 20:54:03 +0000

Insurance will just be bundled with the self-driving car software. Insurance and car are separate today because driver and car are separate today. Once they're the same, there's lots of money to be saved by bundling the sale.

New comment by jdm2212 in "How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads"

jdm2212 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 20:17:36 +0000

This depends on local defamation laws. It's an issue with all online reviews in countries like Germany where the onus is on Google to establish a review isn't defamatory.

New comment by jdm2212 in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

jdm2212 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:31:31 +0000

This is flatly false. ZDR means the customer request is processed and nothing about its content remains on the model provider's servers.

New comment by jdm2212 in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

jdm2212 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:29:29 +0000

Nothing is certain in life, but huge corporations very rarely engage in flagrant, intentional breach of contract at all, and particularly not with counterparties who have good alternatives available. If OpenAI turned out to be training on ZDR queries, they would as a practical matter have to retrain their models from the ground up on uncontaminated data (which would cost 9 or 10 figures), possibly pay considerable damages to counterparties, and offer a detailed accounting of what went wrong and probably fire a bunch of senior leaders.

New comment by jdm2212 in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

jdm2212 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 18:37:41 +0000

By Buckmaster's own account, OpenAI (a) wanted him and Alpoge to publish their Euler result first and (b) wanted Buckmaster to author the Navier-Stokes paper, and (c) when he refused both of those, tried to get Alpoge to talk him into it.

Why would OpenAI go burn another $20 million trying to prove they didn't accidentally train on synthetic data derived from Buckmaster's codex sessions? They're desperately trying to give him credit anyway!

New comment by jdm2212 in "Apple Watch Series 12"

jdm2212 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 18:13:48 +0000

It produces "high level summaries" so it's perhaps legally akin to note-taking rather than audio recording?

New comment by jdm2212 in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

jdm2212 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 04:14:09 +0000

The available information is essentially that story.

OpenAI's account: they heard a rumor that a Millennium Prize problem had been solved, so they tried to do it themselves and succeeded. Then they contacted the other researchers and were surprised to discover those guys hadn't actually cracked it, but offered the one of them who's not an Anthropic employee a co-authorship anyway. The conversations got testy.

Buckmaster's account: totally unsubstantiated accusations of plagiarizing from chat logs and plainly false accusations of OpenAI trying to get Alpoge removed as coauthor of a thing he was not an author of in the first place, and threats to ruin people's careers.

I think the synthesis is basically that Buckmaster and Alpoge had not quite solved the Navier-Stokes problem yet but thought they were really close, and had told friends as much, which is how the rumors got out. Now they're mad they got scooped. They aren't getting the money and recognition they thought they had locked down, and are engaging in a smear campaign.

New comment by jdm2212 in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

jdm2212 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 03:02:14 +0000

The boardroom will absolutely veto a decision like "let's give all of our proprietary data way to a company that will use it to train a competing product". That's why zero data retention exists, and why it's corporate suicide to not do it correctly.