Hacker News: qwytw

New comment by qwytw in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

qwytw — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:42:10 +0000

Well yes, Russian gas was obviously cheaper than nuclear if you ignore the environmental and political externalities. It helped growth in the short and medium term and that's the only thing politicians cared about.

New comment by qwytw in "Anthropic S-1"

qwytw — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:39:31 +0000

Well not exactly. It's quite different this time since most other tech companies used to IPO way earlier. So their valuations weren't based on everyone assuming that they will continue growing exponentially, corner the entire market and effectively become monopolies. You used to have much more uncertainty and therefore potential upside for investors. I mean Anthropic can do great by the standards of pretty much every other public company and still catastrophically underperform the current expectations.

New comment by qwytw in "AI promised less work. I've never worked more"

qwytw — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:27:00 +0000

> It was knowledge work that brought us fertilizers, tractors, trucks and large ships, which

Yes but the number of people who actually worked on the R&D and the amount of time they spent on it is absolutely insignificant on the grand scale of things.

New comment by qwytw in "AI promised less work. I've never worked more"

qwytw — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:23:09 +0000

> Deskilling the job makes the employees time less valuable, because they can be substituted for another more easily.

That's not that self evident yet. If AI is a multiplier it might be the other way around i.e. can a $300k engineer + unlimited tokens generate more a $200k in extra value compared to a $100k engineer? That should be much easier to achieve with AI than without it? The more you spend on tokens the more it makes sense to hire the most highly skilled people you can find since their salaries are no longer that significant.

I don't think the dynamics are similar to what they are e.g. during the industrial revolution since AI is more than capable of clicking the submit button on its own.

The issue is that wages are based on supply and demand and rarely directly related to how much value you generate.

New comment by qwytw in "Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce"

qwytw — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 09:42:03 +0000

> Things during dotcom crash looked at least this bleak

And we're still technically in the boom part of the cycle. I wonder how bad it will be after the actual crash.

New comment by qwytw in "Anthropic S-1"

qwytw — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 20:50:04 +0000

It just doesn't really make much sense. It's way harder to stop a company in a country which hasn't signed it (not that the congress ever would sign a random document Trump and Xi come up with regardless...) from developing a model than from building nukes. Also if American and Chinese labs stop development it would make it cheaper and easier for others to catch up.

New comment by qwytw in "Anthropic S-1"

qwytw — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 20:44:01 +0000

But the question is not so much if they can IPO at those prices but rather if the valuations are sustainable over a couple of years. If they are priced to perfection there isn't much left for public investors besides huge risk that something might not work out 100% as expected.

New comment by qwytw in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

qwytw — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:47:33 +0000

Storage still has some way to go until comparing the raw price per MWh ceases to be a partially apples to oranges comparison. You can't really have a stable grid in most of Europe with only solar + wing + storage. Unless you are willing to close down most of the factories during winter amongst other things.

New comment by qwytw in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

qwytw — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:41:38 +0000

To be fair switching to nuclear was an option in the 70s-90s. Obviously it would have a been a bit more expensive but it would have slowed down climate change by 10-20 years.

New comment by qwytw in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

qwytw — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:38:21 +0000

It certainly was in the 80s and early 2000s if negative externalities like CO2 emissions were factored in (of course nobody cared about that back then)

New comment by qwytw in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

qwytw — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:37:13 +0000

> The temporary transition to coal was studied long time ago and identified

When and by whom? The "phase-out" in 2002 was enacted by a government led by a person who later turned out to be a paid Russian agent. How did that work out? Germany did almost nothing for 10-15 while it increased it's dependency on fossil fuel imports from Russia...

New comment by qwytw in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

qwytw — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:29:33 +0000

Well point is that Germany's CO2 emissions could be the same as in France had they not stopped building nuclear plants in the 80s and 90s. Obviously the psychosis amongst environmentalists who were hellbent on maximizing CO2 emissions (in addition to Germans electing a Russian agent to lead their country in 1998) was just one of the factors.

New comment by qwytw in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

qwytw — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:23:20 +0000

By 2011 hardly mattered anyway. Nuclear was doomed when Western countries stopped developing and building new plants in the 80s and 90s.

New comment by qwytw in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

qwytw — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:15:56 +0000

Some of the planet is already much nicer than it was 100 years ago. At least in the European countries that industrialized the first or had high population density even before that.

New comment by qwytw in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

qwytw — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:14:00 +0000

> pre-industry levels within the next 500 years

For instance there are more forests in much of Europe than we did before the industrial revolution, let alone the 1800s. e.g. more of France is covered in trees now than it was as far back as 1300. Of course that's a very narrow and specific "KPI", mostly just shows that humans already had a massive impact on the environment and ecosystems long before the industrial revolution.

New comment by qwytw in "Dam removals are bringing fish back across the northeastern United States"

qwytw — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 11:14:30 +0000

Most of those small and medium hydropower plants generate near insignificant amounts of electricity, even if you damn all the non major rivers you can (and destroy all the surrounding ecosystems) it would be hardly noticeable.

New comment by qwytw in "Dam removals are bringing fish back across the northeastern United States"

qwytw — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 11:12:40 +0000

a ~5HW hydropower is insignificant and can be replaced by a handful of wind turbines and solar panels. Not sure if it's worth sacrificing local biodiversity for that.

New comment by qwytw in "Mistral Large 4"

qwytw — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:40:28 +0000

Both opinions are worth very little if they are anecdotal and both sides don't share the same frame of reference?

New comment by qwytw in "Mistral Large 4"

qwytw — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:38:34 +0000

> Yet Europeans are healthier, happier, and have a better quality of life than Americans.

Well it depends. If you are white or Asian and live in a more developed state and earn above median income is that really true?

New comment by qwytw in "Why were Victorian elites so effective?"

qwytw — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 10:52:16 +0000

> and when Rome fell they just continued, as it was the established sign of higher class.

Well not in the west where the elite was replaced by uneducated barbarians for several centuries and it took quite a while for the church to teach them how to read and write again.