Hacker News: m101

New comment by m101 in "New Withings Users Must Pay $99/Year for Apple Health Syncing"

m101 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 08:28:50 +0000

Also trustpilot:

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.withings.com

I had a similar experience with tado that tried to paywall a basic temperature control of a smart thermostat. Their ratings got trashed and they pulled back.

New comment by m101 in "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?"

m101 — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 22:31:06 +0000

It’s a feeling that I got from reading his stuff over the years. Asking the AI just now comes up with a number of examples where he himself admitted to it. I also found him increasingly disingenuous.

New comment by m101 in "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?"

m101 — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 11:54:04 +0000

I feel like Scott Alexander sacrificed the truth on the alter of status a long time ago

New comment by m101 in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

m101 — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 21:46:26 +0000

My interpretation of this is something like: if LLMs are to be mega useful token counts need to increase by many orders of magnitude -> broad adoption (and spending) would require token costs to drop by many orders of magnitude -> before the common folk get mega useful tools existing GPUs will be worthless

New comment by m101 in "OpenAI annualised revenues $20B less than previously signalled"

m101 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:34:21 +0000

“However, the new investor presentation shows close to $30bn annualised revenues in July.”

2.5bn in revenue for all of July. That is a disaster.

Squeaky bum time

New comment by m101 in "Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics"

m101 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:05:33 +0000

Eventually, because this guy felt unsafe multiple members of the rest of the camp put their hands up as feeling unsafe. I call it liberal mind virus because of the “safety” focus. A normal person would see small challenges and discomforts as part and parcel of daily life, and they certainly wouldn’t have safety concerns as grown up (mostly) men from a small girl. Everything was also taken out of context too - they all knew her and had camped together for 10+ years. It was basically a group-think public lynching based on some false sense of morality.

New comment by m101 in "Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics"

m101 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:57:11 +0000

See my other comment

New comment by m101 in "OpenAI: Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscription"

m101 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 08:14:31 +0000

Yes very possibly. If you assume your competition will always exist then I think it makes sense to increase prices as they do even if you have the best business model.

New comment by m101 in "OpenAI: Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscription"

m101 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 08:05:05 +0000

OpenAI were initially competing with Anthropic in $ value of tokens, and then number of tokens, and then the 5h limit removal meant you could buy multiple plans for huge continuous usage. This gravy train was never sustainable from a margin perspective and must have cost them billions.

It’s now going to be interesting how anthropic react - 5h limit and retain 15-20x $ value, or go the same was as OpenAI.

New comment by m101 in "Show HN: PaperMono, e-ink fridge magnet shopping list with mobile web page"

m101 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:34:39 +0000

I think on the app you should have an auto sort for your local supermarket. I have a list of aisles that I go through on my route around and I ask an ai to sort my shopping list by that route through the supermarket.

New comment by m101 in "Does Georgism work? Five years later"

m101 — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:39:00 +0000

Well yes, in reality you want a system where you don’t wait until the lease expires because that would leave many short lease properties without investment. It is trivial to value (competitive real estate market, rational negotiation, market interest rates) a lease extension from 30 to 99 years (enabling development) and the state shouldn’t really care about it unless it wanted to take ownership early as part of a wider land development plan.

The state is technically repossessing it when you own a lease, but it’s not something you had rights to anyway, or had paid for. The terms of what you own are up to the lease end date, under the terms of the lease.

New comment by m101 in "Does Georgism work? Five years later"

m101 — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:29:41 +0000

A minority of land is freehold.

New comment by m101 in "Does Georgism work? Five years later"

m101 — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 07:40:26 +0000

LVT and things like market value based taxes are all far more complicated than is what already works, and what Singapore does (and a couple other countries like China): all land owned by the state, sold to private individuals with [99] year leases.

So the revenue comes through in resales once leases end.

Super simple: no valuation (only market sales); no annual expenses to consider (all upfront); development issues are simply a matter for leases to expire; speculation is capped given the capped lease length (although it can still get to stupid valuations).

Implementation is also extremely simple if you’re already onboard with taxation as expropriation: the state just legislates that all property is now a 99 year lease and they own it at that point (alternatively they compensate you 2-5% of market value, and retain existing annual taxes, or cut existing annual taxes to compensate, or they just do it without compensation!)

New comment by m101 in "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"

m101 — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 07:16:12 +0000

The main one I was thinking about was in finance when doing lending to corporates. You build a financial model of the company, and then you “stress test” it to see where the company struggles to pay you back by changing a few variables up or down. If it was distributions you’d simply assign distributions to those variables and look at the distribution of outcomes for your loan.

New comment by m101 in "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"

m101 — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 11:54:53 +0000

As a number of the comments have suggested there are a number of Monte Carlo methods (including this addin) but I was hoping that someone would make one which calculated based on random variables and output a resultant random variable, over brute force monte carlo. Monte Carlo is also somewhat slow, but doing the maths analytically should be fast.

New comment by m101 in "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"

m101 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 23:04:52 +0000

What would be a revolution in excel is if we could have probability distributions in cells. Right now all spreadsheets are fairly deterministic and we think that tells us something about the real world. Having an ability to make cells distributions (and then all resultant cells would be distributions too) would represent the uncertainty in the world better (and expose lots of interesting things like distributions of tails)

New comment by m101 in "The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy"

m101 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:51:38 +0000

And heavily punish the users (which is the only way to actually win a war on drugs)

New comment by m101 in "The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy"

m101 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:49:56 +0000

A war on drugs can only be won through heavy penalties on the users and the political classes refuse to come down hard on the users (themselves, their children) but rather come down hard on the dealers (poor people) or traffickers (foreigners). For this reason we never really had a war on drugs, just lip service towards one, hence a failure of government.

New comment by m101 in "The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy"

m101 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:34:21 +0000

There is not that much difference between the state and a mafia. The fact that the mafia has successfully managed to keep out fentanyl shows just how much democratically elected states are failing their citizens. This outcome is not surprising.

New comment by m101 in "GPT-6 Sol and Luna"

m101 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:42:26 +0000

perhaps they use this as the carrot to get you locked into their monthly plan over anthropic's.