Hacker News: natrius

New comment by natrius in "Sprinkling self-doubt on ChatGPT"

natrius — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 22:29:45 +0000

You know, it doesn't really seem like a mistake for people to anthropomorphize the thinking machines.

New comment by natrius in "AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions"

natrius — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 19:48:44 +0000

Unenforceable rules are bad, but if you tweak the rule to always require some sort of authorship statement (e.g. "I wrote this by hand" or "I wrote this with Claude"), then the honor system will mostly achieve the desired goal of calibrating code review effort.

New comment by natrius in "LLM Inevitabilism"

natrius — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 05:28:13 +0000

If it's any consolation, living in Blade Runner will be optional! You'll also have the option of living in full-dive VR where it's permanently 1999. No AI in sight, just print outs of MapQuest directions.

New comment by natrius in "OpenAI delays launch of open-weight model"

natrius — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 02:30:59 +0000

An LLM can trivially instruct someone to take medications with adverse interactions, steer a mental health crisis toward suicide, or make a compelling case that a particular ethnic group is the cause of your society's biggest problem so they should be eliminated. Words can't kill people, but words can definitely lead to deaths.

That's not even considering tool use!

New comment by natrius in "Modeling land value taxes"

natrius — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 05:42:35 +0000

Most poor people rent. They are already forced to move when the land they live on gets more valuable and they can't afford the new lease. Taxing land redirects part of the rent they already pay to serve their interests (assuming good government).

Land value taxes are politically impossible in America, so there's no need to make the people who like LVT look bad. We already look bad!

New comment by natrius in "The New Moat: Memory"

natrius — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 17:57:54 +0000

It's hard to export my friends list because there's no API for automated tools to use. AI can export your friends list today because it can see your friends list in the browser. I think the same thing will happen for chatbot memory. I don't need to run my own AI to do this. Every AI company will build their own importer.

New comment by natrius in "The New Moat: Memory"

natrius — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 16:35:05 +0000

When I want to try a new AI, it can offer to import my data by using my computer and reading the screen.

New comment by natrius in "The New Moat: Memory"

natrius — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 15:42:39 +0000

I haven't been able to figure out how there's a moat for AI products that, if they work as advertised, can build a bridge over any most with near zero user effort.

New comment by natrius in "Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?"

natrius — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 20:58:18 +0000

It's not that python doesn't have a clean way to subtract a year, it's that "subtract a year" is imprecise. There's a clean way to subtract 365 days, and there's a clean way to set the year one year earlier. But if you're doing the second thing, is python supposed to silently change to March 1 when you change the year from a leap day? There's no way around handling edge cases.

New comment by natrius in "Mozilla.social mastodon waitlist"

natrius — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 01:52:02 +0000

Too many of the identity and data problems are network effect problems, and ad revenue is the best business model that has been discovered for tackling those problems. The business model is incompatible with openness and user sovereignty: the dollars go to the platforms with the most users, and the other platforms die.

We can't get the Mozilla we want until they discover a network effect business model that's actually compatible with empowered users. Until each user gets to steer every advertising dollar on the internet where they want them to be spent, there's plenty of room for innovation.

New comment by natrius in "Emergent Tokyo: Designing the spontaneous city"

natrius — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 05:22:07 +0000

Houston is the only major Texas city without zoning, and Houston still has plenty of parking requirements. As a result, both housing for people and housing for cars is really cheap. At this rate, Houston is going to figure out how to fix its planning mistakes of the past much faster than more regulated cities are going to decide to build enough housing for the people who want to live there. I'd never bet against Houston, or Texas in general.

How about we ease up on both zoning restrictions and parking requirements?

New comment by natrius in "Is content moderation a dead end?"

natrius — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 19:00:49 +0000

The lazy solution to rivalry getting out of control is bicameralism. Make tree-based governance where most of the action is, but design another chamber that can veto it without the same rivalries involved.

New comment by natrius in "Study: Renters in high-rent cities are as NIMBY as homeowners"

natrius — Tue, 13 Mar 2018 02:16:44 +0000

> They have this idea that there are a bunch of wealthy and greedy developers out to get them and their precious neighborhoods.

This narrative is so persistent because it's 100 years old. But for most of that time, developers were called greedy because they made money by introducing cheaper housing into the neighborhood, thereby "ruining" it.

Here's a Supreme Court Justice shitting on apartments in 1926:

> With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that, in such sections, very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district.

That's from Euclid v. Ambler, the case that established the constitutionality of zoning. Our cities are expensive on purpose.

New comment by natrius in "Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies"

natrius — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 21:14:31 +0000

This happens everywhere regulation exists. That doesn't make regulation inherently bad, but before you can come to reasonable conclusions about how to change things, you have to come to terms with the spontaneous order your changes will result in. You can't abolish self-interest.

New comment by natrius in "Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them"

natrius — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:45:10 +0000

It's outlawed in so many places because of the incentives at work. At the edges of a city, greenfield exclusive neighborhoods have a better chance of holding their value than neighborhoods that let people with less money buy homes on less land. Once an economically stratified city is in place, no one can opt out without losing money. Everyone has to opt out together, and the politics of that are the worst.

New comment by natrius in "Bitcoin (BTC) is up by +22% in a single day, valued at over $14,600"

natrius — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 01:42:01 +0000

To understand what's happening, you have to observe how things have evolved. Bitcoin was advertised as digital cash. Tons of nerds envisioned a future of the whole world buying coffee with Bitcoin. As it became clear that the current network could never fulfill that vision, the whole community evolved its belief system to support the value of the currency, and they did so without any leader to coordinate their actions. They were just led by incentivized memes—the more convincing the justification for high valuations, the better the ideas spread. Now, people don't pitch Bitcoin's value as a digital cash. They tell people it's digital gold and the transaction fees don't matter.

The beliefs of the community will continue to evolve as needed to support the value of their claims on our society's productive capacity.

New comment by natrius in "American Equity"

natrius — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 23:16:14 +0000

The economy does not care whether you put your money in a bank or under your mattress. The central bank will influence interest rates in response to your actions. What matters is the amount of money that's actually chasing goods and services.

If the central bank wants banks to have more reserves for loans, it buys assets from banks in exchange for newly created reserves. Money markets are a command economy.

New comment by natrius in "Faster Growth Begins with a Land Tax in U.S. Cities"

natrius — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 20:04:26 +0000

Housing is a generational issue. There's today's middle class and tomorrow's middle class. Raising taxes on land does not hurt tomorrow's middle class, and it helps them if more homes get built where they want to live. Land is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. Higher taxes mean the price of the land itself must be lower for people to buy it—the taxes don't cause wealthier people to suddenly show up.

Today's middle class has lots of political power. Tomorrow's middle class doesn't. We're allowing generations to extract wealth from those who come after them without considering the consequences.

New comment by natrius in "Faster Growth Begins with a Land Tax in U.S. Cities"

natrius — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 19:53:20 +0000

The part that people tiptoe around is the goal: a tax rate high enough that owning land leads to near-zero returns. Only the structures would be an investment. Land ownership would be biased towards the owners who can serve the most of our needs with the land, which would end our urban crisis.

New comment by natrius in "Rising Rents Are Pushing More Tenants Past the Breaking Point"

natrius — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 18:01:45 +0000

Landlords do not set market rents. Renters and their employers do. Tax changes do not raise or lower rents. They make it more or less likely that new housing will be built, which affects future rents.

Land value taxes are so attractive because they avoid changing the incentives to build.