Hacker News: plaidfuji

New comment by plaidfuji in "France pulls last gold held in US for $15B gain"

plaidfuji — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:10:40 +0000

No, you’d remark that your house has appreciated in value over the past 20 years. But you wouldn’t have realized any of that gain until you sold the house - the point being that the realization is the actual taxable event, which is why it matters from the pedantic technical accounting POV. The fact that you turned around and bought another house just means you’re doing something new with your realized gains. Now you have a new cost basis. Maybe that’s what you’re saying with “unrealized gain” though.

New comment by plaidfuji in "SpaceX files to go public"

plaidfuji — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 02:28:50 +0000

> SpaceX's valuation only makes sense if

It’s funny, I hear the exact same phrasing used when justifying Tesla’s valuation. “It only makes sense if…” … if you ignore what the actual, physical business does today, and picture it doing something entirely different, beyond its current capabilities (robotaxis, androids, etc)

The difference with this pie-in-the-sky ambition (Mars Colony) is that I don’t even understand how it would be profitable if achieved. What do you get from a Mars colony? What on earth (no pun intended) could you extract from it that would command that amount of value? This isn’t like colonization of the americas, where there was a trove of readily available natural resources to extract and sell back to the mainland markets - nothing is going to get shipped back from Mars any time soon. A Mars colony could only be supported through significant public investment - so is the valuation justified via the expectation that SpaceX will be the primary vehicle for public investment in Mars exploration, or through the centuries-long payback period of founding a self-sustaining civilization? Or both?

New comment by plaidfuji in "AI (2014)"

plaidfuji — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 12:27:51 +0000

Came here to quote the same sentence, but say the exact opposite - it seems to me that today’s LLMs are progressing far faster on the “thinking” front than the “doing”.

I suppose it depends on your definition of “doing” - if it’s “writing code”, then sure. But there’s a whole world of actual, physical “doing” that AI is nowhere close to matching humans at, and it’s much easier for me to envision a world where AI replaces the management / “thinking” layer of society than the physical labor. Which is scary, because it’s the opposite of his (and I would assume most people’s) ideal.

New comment by plaidfuji in "Executing programs inside transformers with exponentially faster inference"

plaidfuji — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:30:42 +0000

Besides being a very interesting conceptual exercise, the animated figures in this article are absolutely stunning - best I’ve ever seen.

New comment by plaidfuji in "New imagery suggests U.S. responsible for Iran school strike"

plaidfuji — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 13:28:29 +0000

I agree, but it is still very unfortunate. It’s a lot less compelling to argue “but we killed fewer civilians, and it was only on accident”

New comment by plaidfuji in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

plaidfuji — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 13:22:46 +0000

China is the world’s largest fossil fuel importer, so this is a case where their economic incentives align with global environmental trends. I suspect they would be trying to do this regardless of whether global warming were a problem. And now that they’re heavily invested in green tech manufacturing, it’s kind of a self-fulfilling feedback loop - they have an interest in promoting electrification worldwide.

New comment by plaidfuji in "New imagery suggests U.S. responsible for Iran school strike"

plaidfuji — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:32:45 +0000

If this turns out to be true, which seems increasingly likely day by day, this will be the humanitarian price against which the rest of the campaign will be measured. The US will have ceded much of the moral high ground they claimed in avenging the slaughter of innocent protesters.

New comment by plaidfuji in "New imagery suggests U.S. responsible for Iran school strike"

plaidfuji — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:30:26 +0000

This story is now being carried by WSJ.. the likelihood that it’s real only seems to grow each day. If true, this will be the humanitarian price the war is measured against, assuming the casualties don’t grow further.

New comment by plaidfuji in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

plaidfuji — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 02:24:04 +0000

> Analysis of the area shows the school is in a middle of a military area full of IRGC bases.

Isn’t the far more likely explanation here that they (Israel / US) tried to strike an IRGC base and missed?

New comment by plaidfuji in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

plaidfuji — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:07:40 +0000

The key difference is that Anthropic aired their disagreement with the DoD publicly, and the DoD is not going to work with a company that tries to exert any amount of control over their relationship via the public sphere. Same goes for Trump.

I think Anthropic knew full well that by publishing their disagreement, it would sink the deal and relationship, and I think they also calculated (correctly) that that act of defiance would get them good publicity and potentially peel away some of OpenAIs user base. I think this profit incentive happened to align with their morals, and now here we are.

New comment by plaidfuji in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

plaidfuji — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:58:04 +0000

> Minimally lethal

“Israel strikes two schools in Iran, killing more than 80 people”

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/2/28/israel-strikes-...

Welp, better luck next time

New comment by plaidfuji in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

plaidfuji — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:55:00 +0000

If this spreads into a broader conflict, it remains to be seen whether Europe sticks tightly with that block. They certainly won’t align with Russia, but they may be tied so closely to China economically that they can’t afford to be dragged into a direct conflict with them. I could see a situation where they try to remain non—aligned.

New comment by plaidfuji in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

plaidfuji — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:31:32 +0000

Yeah… turns out you have to keep a certain balance of domestic industries to keep 350 million people employed in a capacity where they don’t want to burn down the whole system. But that would be socialism.

Now you’ve got the people whose jobs suck and want their old jobs to come back vs the people whose jobs suck and just want to dispense with the illusion that everyone needs to be employed. Either way, the money-generating corporate automaton needs to cough up some of its profits to fund people’s existence. If everyone could just agree on how, maybe they’d get somewhere.

Meanwhile, I will continue to cling to my slice of the corporate automoton pie.

New comment by plaidfuji in "A16z partner says that the theory that we’ll vibe code everything is wrong"

plaidfuji — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 20:39:17 +0000

My first thought as well - they suddenly realized they have an interest in AI not cannibalizing their existing SaaS portfolio

New comment by plaidfuji in "Gemini 3.1 Pro"

plaidfuji — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:33:21 +0000

Sounds like the update is mostly system prompt + changes to orchestration / tool use around the core model, if the knowledge cutoff is unchanged

New comment by plaidfuji in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

plaidfuji — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:15:38 +0000

I suspect this may be the case. There’s inherent inefficiency in having a human forced to translate everything into context for the LLM. You don’t get the full benefit until you allow it to be fully plugged in.

New comment by plaidfuji in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

plaidfuji — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:13:17 +0000

This is the biggest bottleneck. To realize the “replacement of white collar workers” fever dream, (which is, I still believe, technically feasible), you need the agent that replaces them to have all of the context they had. All of the emails, all of the Slacks, all of the meeting minutes, access to private corporate systems and files, etc. I can’t think of a single company that would want to turn all of that over to OpenAI.

New comment by plaidfuji in "OpenAI should build Slack"

plaidfuji — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 13:15:13 +0000

Interesting idea. I do feel one of the major barriers to mass replacement of white collar workers is lack of direct integration between email/slack and LLMs. A human still needs to distill organizational needs from multiple stakeholders to write a prompt.

At the same time, I would be very surprised if companies are lining up to hand over all of their internal comms to OpenAI. Would need really strong privacy guarantees, and I’m not sure OpenAI has the goodwill to be convincing on that front.

Also, doesn’t MS still nominally have some stake in OpenAI? Would be surprised if they were chill with another competitor to Teams getting built.

New comment by plaidfuji in "AI-First Company Memos"

plaidfuji — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:19:36 +0000

Fiverr CEO goes on a pretty dark rant about how people who don’t upskill and convert to AI workflows will have to change professions, etc.

Then concludes his email with:

> I have asked Shelly to free up time on my calendar next week so people can have conversations with me about our future.

I assume Shelly is an AI, and not human headcount the CEO is wasting on menial admin tasks??

New comment by plaidfuji in "Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon"

plaidfuji — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:31:39 +0000

China innovates orders of magnitude faster than they did even ten years ago. Yes, a lot of it is still copycat, but there is value in being able to copy quickly and well.

The question is whether China offers long-term stability for external investment. Should US retirement portfolios load up on Chinese equities?