Hacker News: pixodaros

New comment by pixodaros in "The “small web” is bigger than you might think"

pixodaros — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 03:32:13 +0000

Google gets money for showing ads and sponsored content on the search page. If you click on a site with Google ads or Google scripts, it gets more money and monetarizable PII. So its in their interest to prioritize sites with Google ads or Google services, but only Google staffers know exactly how the search algorithm works.

A few years ago they upranked all results on a few trusted domains, so many of those domains filled up with advertising and cheap copywritten content. They framed this as 'fighting misinformation.'

New comment by pixodaros in "The “small web” is bigger than you might think"

pixodaros — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:41:46 +0000

One of the many things I disagree with Scott Alexander on is that to me, frequent blog updates signal poor quality not excellent writing. Its hard to come up with an independent, evidence-based opinion on something worth sharing every week, but easy to post about what you read lots of angry or scary posts about. People who post a lot also tend to have trouble finding useful things to do in their offline life. It is very unusual that he managed to be both a psychiatrist and a prolific blogger and he quit the psychiatry job before he had children or other care responsibilities.

New comment by pixodaros in "Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral"

pixodaros — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 23:22:32 +0000

In any serious engineering operation, a failure like this is time to shut down everything and redesign until the same failure cannot happen. We all read Feynman's essay on Challenger right? But these companies want credit when their products work as advertised, but push the blame on users when they emit plausible lies or demonic advice. Taken too far that leads the police walking into HQ, arresting the board of directors, and selling the company for scrap. Just as often that leads to strict regulation so you can't be a cowboy coder or turn any loft into a sweatshop any more.

New comment by pixodaros in "Tenure Is a Total Scam (2023)"

pixodaros — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 02:37:09 +0000

No chance of tenure and you don't get grad students and adjuncts busting their butts as underpaid workers for a decade, so universities have to pay them better with the money they saved by laying off a few underperformers (in the USA, think roughly doubling pay for those workers and adding health insurance). I thought GMU economists liked gambling-based mechanisms?

New comment by pixodaros in "Tenure Is a Total Scam (2023)"

pixodaros — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 01:11:43 +0000

Also, that 2/2 teaching load is for a research university. The average community college professor or land-grant university professor is not teaching that little. And in lab science the professor will have a serious management and fundraising job aside from teaching (and if he or she stops getting grants the university and the department chair will not be happy).

This site does not whine when someone like Maciej Ceglowski creates a "lifestyle business" that only takes 10 hours or so a week, but it whines when people unionize or climb the academic ladder to get good working condition.

New comment by pixodaros in "Tenure Is a Total Scam (2023)"

pixodaros — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 01:02:10 +0000

I am a former academic. The tenured faculty who have 20 years of union-negotiated annual raises, and in some trendy fields or fields with business applications, earn good money for salaried workers. A newly minted Associate Professor of Linguistics does not!

None of them earns as much as a billionaire's child earns just by having parents who gave them a trust fund.

New comment by pixodaros in "European Alternatives"

pixodaros — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 02:50:57 +0000

No, that article has one paragraph which frets that if Medicare drives down drug prices in the USA, pharma companies might cut R&D spending, and might get less new drugs (note the conditional and hypothetical). A colleague in biomedical research says that its just a common misconception that R&D costs drive drug prices eg. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2022-071710

New comment by pixodaros in "European Alternatives"

pixodaros — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 23:07:11 +0000

AFAIK, Medicare in the USA is forbidden by law from using its big market to drive a hard bargain like most national health services can (Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003). So its like employers paying workers less in jurisdictions where they can't unionize and strike.

New comment by pixodaros in "I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years"

pixodaros — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 01:44:47 +0000

My site has both subscription and one-time donations. The subscriptions bring in 90% of the revenue even though more people have Paypal accounts than accounts with specific crowdfunding services.

New comment by pixodaros in "I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years"

pixodaros — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 05:13:57 +0000

A lot of people expect social media to serve them things to read, rather than following specific sites, and bloggers have a much keener sense of what will be rewarded by subscribers. In the old days, you could make a bit of money just from views, and there were many more places to make money from writing and speaking offline. There were also more long-form musings about academic life which today would be snarky posts on Bluesky. As posting on microblog sites became sometimes professionally useful, academics put their energy into that and let their longform blogs fade (or just got older and busier and were not replaced by younger academic bloggers).

New comment by pixodaros in "He Jiankui PhD Thesis: Spontaneous Emergence of Hierarchy in Biological Systems (2010)"

pixodaros — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 06:39:25 +0000

Its worse than that. Someone wants to set him up with a lab in Austin TX. Its the CCP which thinks "maybe we should not let the mad scientist out where someone will let him continue his experiments." (A later story says that he will direct assistants in Texas over the Internet). https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3271952/chin...

New comment by pixodaros in "A new threat: Being replaced by someone who knows AI"

pixodaros — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 05:20:35 +0000

If something is really clearly better, people come around. Some people never will but their children and apprentices adopt the new ways. A whole community of practice experimenting is very powerful. Everyone does not move at once, but people on this site know how often the cool new thing turns out to be a time bomb.

New comment by pixodaros in "A new threat: Being replaced by someone who knows AI"

pixodaros — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 01:42:19 +0000

You didn't have to punish athletes to make them wear Nike and Adidas shoes, because they were obviously better than plain sneakers. You didn't have to punish graphic artists to make them use tablets because they are so convenient for digital art. But a lot of bosses are convinced that if their staff don't find these tools useful for their tasks, its the line workers who are wrong.

New comment by pixodaros in "The publishing industry has a gambling problem"

pixodaros — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 23:10:45 +0000

I know several full-time self-published authors and they are not spending anything like $10-30k a year on ads

New comment by pixodaros in "Substack just killed the creator economy"

pixodaros — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 15:15:32 +0000

You could do all of those on Typepad in 2008 except sending some posts only to paying subscribers https://everything.typepad.com/blog/2009/11/feedburner-typep... You had to wait until 2017 for that https://everything.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/making-money-wit...

New comment by pixodaros in "Substack just killed the creator economy"

pixodaros — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 03:42:02 +0000

Writers move to sites like Substack (or 15 years ago blogspot) funded by other people's money like a software developer gets into an AI startup (or 5 years ago crypto). You can make bank in the short term even if you should know it will not last. Substack subsidizes individual creators and markets their blog as cooler than old blogs, Google subsidized web ads and upranked blogs in search results. Yes, it is no fun if you like stability, and its not a game I play.

New comment by pixodaros in "Guess I'm a rationalist now"

pixodaros — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 02:03:20 +0000

The party line has shifted comrade. This year with posts on Richard Lynn etc. Scott Alexander is now saying in public the same thing he said in a private email: that he thinks race pseudoscientists and neoreactionaries are brilliant and precious and as many people as possible need to read the best 1% of their ideas. He is no longer pretending that he thinks they have nothing to offer and just has them in his blogroll because ?

The private email from 2014 explained how he hoped people would respond to the anti-neoreactionary FAQ, and his posts this year are 100% consistent with that.

New comment by pixodaros in "Guess I'm a rationalist now"

pixodaros — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 15:11:19 +0000

Even GiveWell partnered with the long-termist/hypothetical risk type of EA by funding something called Open Philanthropy. And there are EA organizations which talk about "animal welfare" and mean "what if we replaced the biosphere with something where nothing with a spinal cord ever gets eaten?" So you can't trust "if it calls itself EA, it must be highly efficient at turning donations into measurable good." EA orgs have literally hired personal assistants and bought stately homes for the use of the people running the orgs!

New comment by pixodaros in "Guess I'm a rationalist now"

pixodaros — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 20:35:22 +0000

GiveWell is an example of the short-termist end of EA. At the long-termist end people pay their friends to fantasize about Skynet at 'independent research institutes' like MIRI and Apollo Research. At the "trendy way to get rich people to donate" end you get buying a retreat center in Berkley, a stately home in England, and a castle in Czechia so Effective Altruists can relax and network.

Its important to know which type of EA organization you are supporting before you donate, because the movement includes all three.

New comment by pixodaros in "Guess I'm a rationalist now"

pixodaros — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 21:10:29 +0000

In that essay Scott Alexander more or less says "so Richard Lynn made up numbers about how stupid black and brown people are, but we all know he was right if those mean scientists just let us collect the data to prove it." The level of thinking most of us moved past in high school, and he is a MD who sees himself as a Public Intellectual! More evidence that thinking too much about IQ makes people stupid.