Hacker News: schmidtleonard

New comment by schmidtleonard in "Bring Your Agent to Teams"

schmidtleonard — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 01:47:38 +0000

Can all the king's agents and all the king's men stop Teams from frequent silent failures to deliver a short message in Year of the Lord 2026?

New comment by schmidtleonard in "10 Enduring Lessons from Adam Smith"

schmidtleonard — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:46:41 +0000

Yeah, but the "rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are" parts of the economy do tend to exponentially run away until a big enough shitshow incinerates enough capital to reset the clock.

New comment by schmidtleonard in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

schmidtleonard — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:37:31 +0000

Pool's closed.

New comment by schmidtleonard in "U.S. stocks are set to deliver their worst quarter in nearly four years"

schmidtleonard — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:30:41 +0000

As opposed to posting on HN complaining about reddit, which is where the real money's at? Nah, this shit was dank enough to make it into popular culture. We have:

1. The shamelessness absurdity of using "market is up" to deflect from a pedo scandal

2. The fact that the market said "nope" and tanked immediately after Bondi tried to lean on it

New comment by schmidtleonard in "U.S. stocks are set to deliver their worst quarter in nearly four years"

schmidtleonard — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:16:47 +0000

I've heard a few traders refer to it as "The Bondi Top" -- she really top-ticked it to perfection. We all wish she hadn't.

New comment by schmidtleonard in "How the AI Bubble Bursts"

schmidtleonard — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:27:21 +0000

This is a story of other careers having salaries pushed down relative to inflating essentials and the resulting economic surplus being squeezed into asset portfolios. It's a story of rich people getting paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are and soaking up more than 100% of economic growth for the last 50 years. Not a story of software engineers working for a living and getting what would have been a blue-collar salary for it.

New comment by schmidtleonard in "Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI"

schmidtleonard — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:09:12 +0000

> arguments against mercantilism

It has been funny to watch the rise of "China is beating us" rhetoric against the steady backdrop of "mercantilism is obsolete/bad" dogma, because the elephant in the room is that China has been running a textbook mercantilist playbook.

New comment by schmidtleonard in "How the AI Bubble Bursts"

schmidtleonard — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:38:36 +0000

Overinflated relative to the wet dreams of the ownership class.

New comment by schmidtleonard in "How the AI Bubble Bursts"

schmidtleonard — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:37:01 +0000

The open source tooling got quantization support 3 years ago! It was a lesser type of quantization, but more than enough to prove that the savings just go to bigger models.

New comment by schmidtleonard in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

schmidtleonard — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:39:43 +0000

Hey, that's not fair! It's also used for degenerate gambling.

New comment by schmidtleonard in "Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case"

schmidtleonard — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 13:24:18 +0000

> more nuance

Not enough to diffuse liability. 15 years ago when recommender algorithms were the new hotness, I saw every single group of students introduced to the idea immediately grasp the implication that the endgame would involve pandering to base instincts. If someone didn't understand this, it's because

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair

New comment by schmidtleonard in "The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification into Linux"

schmidtleonard — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:11:37 +0000

Also, if I was a corporate simp conspiring to destroy Linux, this is exactly the type of stupid hill I would try to bait the open source community into dying on. If they add a stupid compliance feature that everyone bypasses in practice, there isn't much I can do, but if they insist on openly flaunting the law I can go to war.

New comment by schmidtleonard in "Trevor Milton is raising funds for a new jet he claims will transform flying"

schmidtleonard — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:52:31 +0000

> I think people are mature enough to be able to read past a headline

What trainwreck of misconceptions could possibly compel an otherwise reasonable person to believe something so ridiculous?

New comment by schmidtleonard in "Trevor Milton is raising funds for a new jet he claims will transform flying"

schmidtleonard — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:49:49 +0000

Messaging is attention-weighted. It always has been, but the exploitation of this fact has been on the rise and in 2026 everyone should know it and internalize the consequences: if you signal boost statement A and bury nuance B, you are promoting statement A, flat out, completely independent of what B brings to the table.

New comment by schmidtleonard in "Trevor Milton is raising funds for a new jet he claims will transform flying"

schmidtleonard — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:43:44 +0000

"Convicted fraudster pardons convicted fraudster therefore you can trust convicted fraudster."

Wild!

New comment by schmidtleonard in "I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job"

schmidtleonard — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:07:59 +0000

It's interesting that both the USA and China found that the prosperity maximum happened when capitalism was kept in line with a firm hand, even though China approached from the left and the USA approached from the right and later departed back to the right.

New comment by schmidtleonard in "Dario Amodei – "We are near the end of the exponential" [video]"

schmidtleonard — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:23:32 +0000

Exactly, it's the Lex Fridman gambit: a reputation for asking safe questions to powerful people tends to snowball because "safe, popular interview platform" is something they are all looking to self-promote on.

If you want to see the mask slip, watch Lex's interview with Zelensky.

New comment by schmidtleonard in "Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver"

schmidtleonard — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:30:40 +0000

Is there anything in Georgia not named Peachtree?

New comment by schmidtleonard in "U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025"

schmidtleonard — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:07:14 +0000

Brains turn off if you say Voldemort's name out loud. These ideas need to be rediscovered and rebranded.

New comment by schmidtleonard in "Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?"

schmidtleonard — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:01:45 +0000

TechnologyConnections debunked the Phoebus Cartel a while ago.

tl;dw incandescent bulbs can be made more efficient and brighter by running them hotter, but this reduces the lifetime. The obvious Nash Equilibrium involves increasingly hot/bright/efficient bulbs and as much lying about lifetime as a typical consumer would accept, which is a lot. The idea behind the Phoebus Cartel was to force honesty on the dimension where it was most likely to disappear. You are free to disapprove of this and reject bulb lifetime policing, but if so you support the "everybody lies" alternative. Pick your poison.