Hacker News: ljw1001

New comment by ljw1001 in "Business co-founders in tech startups are less valuable than they think"

ljw1001 — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 23:21:41 +0000

Everyone is less valuable than they think, especially in a tech startup

New comment by ljw1001 in "Language models can explain neurons in language models"

ljw1001 — Wed, 10 May 2023 23:34:50 +0000

We don’t really know how harmful this stuff will be, but we’ll keep on making it more powerful (and keep on bragging about it) until we find out.

New comment by ljw1001 in "Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead"

ljw1001 — Mon, 01 May 2023 23:41:27 +0000

If you don’t consider the difference in kind between a human vulnerability and an automated vulnerability that derives from the essentially unlimited capacity of the latter to scale, your comment makes a lot of sense. If you do consider that, the argument becomes irrelevant and deeply misleading

New comment by ljw1001 in "Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison"

ljw1001 — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 18:26:31 +0000

Exactly. Only an amateur criminal steals from the rich.

New comment by ljw1001 in "Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison"

ljw1001 — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 18:24:26 +0000

It’s a “full” capability they’re incapable of delivering. It’s really hard to see how your distinction has any meaning.

New comment by ljw1001 in "AI is most important tech advance in decades"

ljw1001 — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 00:28:34 +0000

You lost me at calling AI an “advance”. I think that’s a speculative statement that has yet to earn the positive bias it entails.

New comment by ljw1001 in "Long Covid has had a brutal effect on the workforce, study finds"

ljw1001 — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 00:20:29 +0000

How many? So many. And that’s not just my opinion; it’s my strongly held opinion

New comment by ljw1001 in "The Varieties of Bad Stoicism"

ljw1001 — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 18:02:27 +0000

Everything that matters, including how much money you have, but more importantly when you and the people you love become sick or die accidentally is governed by chance.

If you think money gets you a pass, maybe recheck your understanding of the issues and the stoic solution. The shallow packaged version produced by Ryan Holiday isn’t a good source

New comment by ljw1001 in "The current layoffs were orchestrated by hedge funds"

ljw1001 — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 15:33:06 +0000

Given that the mean salary at google is probably driven by people making 7 or 8 figures, I’m going to suggest that laying off 10,000 people will not change that one bit

New comment by ljw1001 in "The current layoffs were orchestrated by hedge funds"

ljw1001 — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 15:30:30 +0000

What is the average salary at TCI?

New comment by ljw1001 in "Moderna CEO: 400% price hike on Covid vaccine “consistent with the value”"

ljw1001 — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 03:07:06 +0000

Yeah. Or Ma Bell

New comment by ljw1001 in "Blue spaces: why time spent near water is the secret of happiness (2019)"

ljw1001 — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 20:10:09 +0000

I think the fair comparison is: if you’re living someplace with any given level of economic opportunity (and the other things you mention) would you be happier if it was on the water than if it was not.

It seems for you the answer is no, but that’s not necessarily the typical response.

New comment by ljw1001 in "Palantir’s SPAC bets backfire"

ljw1001 — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 22:35:01 +0000

I suspect it’s because they have a near monopoly in high-quality, next-gen sequencing. They’re trying to grow the market for their machines rather than take business from a competitor.

New comment by ljw1001 in "Meta plans to devote ~20% of overall costs to Reality Labs in 2023, up from 18%"

ljw1001 — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 17:40:40 +0000

What’s your evidence for massive interest in business markets? I use a quest for gaming, but find the idea of interacting with colleagues for corporate stuff to be just hideous.

New comment by ljw1001 in "Meta plans to devote ~20% of overall costs to Reality Labs in 2023, up from 18%"

ljw1001 — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 17:35:52 +0000

Thrill of the Fight is one of the best, as long as you’re careful to avoid repetitive stress injuries.

New comment by ljw1001 in "Meta plans to devote ~20% of overall costs to Reality Labs in 2023, up from 18%"

ljw1001 — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 19:29:04 +0000

>To show me things that I want

That’s an extraordinarily generous interpretation of Facebook’s motivation.

New comment by ljw1001 in "Songtell"

ljw1001 — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 20:32:30 +0000

The real difference is in scale. Automations can be coordinated to produce self-affirming bullshit at a scale that drives real discussion out of view. You already see this on twitter with troll farms and primitive bots. Now it will be a tidal wave

New comment by ljw1001 in "As unions decline, inequality rises"

ljw1001 — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 20:26:11 +0000

Only management should be able to impose their will on employees and should be able to do so without competition. On the job, and during their “free-time”.

More seriously, imagine where not everyone is required to be in the union and think about how easy it then becomes for management to manipulate the environment to the detriment of union employees until the union is wiped out.

New comment by ljw1001 in "As unions decline, inequality rises"

ljw1001 — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 15:43:26 +0000

I think your characterization of unions is a propaganda driven falsehood, and your argument ignores the fact that Most people see less and less of the fruits of their labor.

New comment by ljw1001 in "As Carvana crashes, used car dealers, not buyers, stand to win big"

ljw1001 — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 17:29:14 +0000

A less benevolent take is that VC money is primarily used to buy market share by selling below cost until other competitors exit and the company is left with a monopoly.