Hacker News: stocksinsmocks

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

stocksinsmocks — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:07:30 +0000

That’s the opposite of my experience. Weird. But I’m also not the kind of person who gets hung up on whether someone used a loop or recursion or if their methods are five times as long as what I would’ve done myself unless there is a performance impact that matters to me as a user. But I’m also the kind of person who doesn’t get paid by the hour to write programs. I use programs in the service of other paid work.

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes"

stocksinsmocks — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 19:54:10 +0000

The tariffs are a bit of a new phenomenon so I think that may be motivated reasoning. Construction productivity has also been stagnant for about 60 years. I think the most important factor is that housing prices, in the United States at least, are governed by how much a bank will lend. Very small but affordable houses will never be built because a bank will not finance a $10,000 loan over 30 years. In the same vein, it’s technically feasible for automobiles to be built for just a few thousand dollars, but, again, they will not finance $2500 over five years. So cars and houses are just built to the price point which will satisfy the lenders. You may not hate financialization nearly as much as it deserves.

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Why didn't AI “join the workforce” in 2025?"

stocksinsmocks — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 20:40:08 +0000

OK, let me fall less short. It has replaced the freelancer for me. I communicate product requirements. It builds the product immediately at trivial cost. It’s better than a human. There are jobs I would have considered hiring out that I don’t because the machine is better. Nothing you said about labor effects in the large even logically follow. Have you even used one of these systems?

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Why didn't AI “join the workforce” in 2025?"

stocksinsmocks — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:54:13 +0000

I really don’t agree with the author here. Perplexity has, for me, largely replaced Cal Newport’s job (read other journalists work and synthesize celebrity and pundit takes on topic X). I think the take that Claude isn’t literally a human so agents failed is silly and a sign of motivated reasoning. Business processes are going to lag the cutting edge by years in any conditions and by generations if there is no market pressure. But Codex isn’t capable of doing a substantial portion of what I would have had to pay a freelancer/consultant to do? Any LLM can’t replace a writer for a content mill? Nonsense. Newport needs to open his eyes and think harder about how a journalist can deliver value in the emerging market.

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring"

stocksinsmocks — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 17:09:19 +0000

There is no simple explanation, but an important issue is that there is no price discovery mechanism or system pressure for efficiency. You also may not know that the US healthcare system is also an elaborate jobs program. Walk into any hospital and you will see 5-10 mostly young women doing basically nothing. I don’t know why the powers that be decided that the US should divest itself from any useful work, but here we are. Now we’re a couple generations into this social experiment by “smart” billionaires and their courtiers, and the military industrial complex is begging the Taiwanese to hold our soft hands and teach a blossoming generation hipsters and resentful immigrants how to build the computers we invented. We had a good run, but we’re Rome circa. 400-500 AD. Don’t let the marketing in Venezuela fool you. I’m just hoping the robots give us a few more decades of working plumbing.

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring"

stocksinsmocks — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:30:09 +0000

We almost do. Employers must provide insurance. If you’re unemployed you can probably get Medicaid. We have private entities handle the details instead of something that looks like the Post Office. There is nothing anyone in Congress can do which results in all 8 billion people on Earth having instant access to all conceivable treatment in any location the the US. Like socialized medicine, there is no meaningful price discovery mechanism in the US. Unlike socialized medicine, it’s a lot harder for political parties to conduct pogroms by rationing resources and euthanizing demographics that don’t vote the way they like.

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"

stocksinsmocks — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 13:55:39 +0000

Humans do not know what’s right. What’s worse is the phenomenon of people who don’t actually know but want to seem like they know so they ask the person with the question for follow up information that is meaningless and irrelevant to the question.

Hey, can you show me the log files?

Sure here you go. Please help!

Hmm, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in these. Good luck!

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

stocksinsmocks — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 15:25:56 +0000

Can he round up the goons in the CIA and FBI while he’s at it? Is being a tributary vassal state of China materially worse than being a tributary vassal state of foreign power? I’d like sovereignty, but that’s not really an option.

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

stocksinsmocks — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 15:02:59 +0000

I think his removal has a lot more to do with his willingness to cooperate with the “bad guys“ in the Middle East. I think this also has a lot to do with why we suddenly care about Somali fraud rings that have been operating since the 1990s. The stage is getting set for another regime change in the Middle East. It’s pretty amazing what you can buy with a $250 million campaign donation.

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

stocksinsmocks — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:44:43 +0000

I think there were that many immigrants. I don’t believe they are so many living there now. Iran demonstrated pretty conclusively that mass repatriation is completely possible if you have a government that actually wishes to do so.

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

stocksinsmocks — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:42:44 +0000

I think heads of state bearing personal responsibility for misconduct is an excellent precedent that I would love to see applied much, much more widely. Preferably to the superpowers, especially if said leader were to say, for a totally-hypothetical example, recklessly create a massive security risk near our borders for the sole purpose of benefiting a foreign interest group… but I’ll take what I can get. I think the Sword of Damocles is missing all too often from high society. If life and death decisions, don’t come with life and death risks, then I think they become taken too lightly. I think we are too quick to insulate high society from the consequences of their actions.

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "HPV vaccination reduces oncogenic HPV16/18 prevalence from 16% to <1% in Denmark"

stocksinsmocks — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 21:23:44 +0000

You see, my lad…

In this house we believe Love is love Black Lives Matter Science is real Feminism is for everyone No human is illegal Kindness is everything

Signaling your alignment to the public-facing opinions of your social betters is the modern ersatz religion for atheists. The television is the temple, the pundits the priests. Apostates and heretics are not welcome here. Now, my child, you would not want your words to inadvertently cause the faithful to stray. Would you? Just think of what the late night comedians would say if they could hear you cast doubt on their sponsor Pfizer? Perhaps you would rather join our hate session on the pagans in flyover country?

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Straussian Memes"

stocksinsmocks — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 02:38:30 +0000

I wish atheist would just stop writing about Christian practices. Particularly screenwriters. It’s better that your audience assumes you are ignorant than to open your mouth and prove them right.

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Straussian Memes"

stocksinsmocks — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 02:24:36 +0000

Unrelated to the topic, I’m a bit at a loss as to what to make of this website. There was a link to a really cool analysis of artificial intelligence research. And I guess they are a nonprofit and are raising $2M for “infrastructure“ but I think they mean infrastructure in the sense of software they like, and not the kind of infrastructure normal people think of like plumbing, electricity, and roads. I spent a few minutes browsing, and I can’t even tell what charitable purpose or educational purpose they could be serving. There’s just no clear statement of purpose anywhere other than I suppose being really rational.

Who are these dudes?

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%"

stocksinsmocks — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 20:04:14 +0000

I don’t think self-dealing is new. Although it was eye-opening, when I learned that BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity all own 5-10% of every company and competition between the companies they hold is not meaningful. Everyone just has to have nice steady predictable returns and nobody is allowed to innovate too far ahead of anyone else for fear of devaluing the real bosses’ other assets.

I don’t even know what to call the kind of system we have.

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Toll roads are spreading in America"

stocksinsmocks — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 19:46:02 +0000

It was George Bush/DNT. Usually coming from out of state to Plano or downtown Dallas

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Say No to Palantir in the NHS"

stocksinsmocks — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 17:55:03 +0000

Employee headcount is not a good proxy for actually accomplishing the tasks government is expected to do. Your DOT has a huge number of employees, but I can say from first hand knowledge that none of the staff engineers actually design anything. They manage and administer projects, and they attend a lot of meetings and spend a lot of hours in the office, but they probably don’t actually do the things you care about as a taxpayer: deliver infrastructure improvements. Contractors manage the programs, plan the jobs, design the jobs, build the job, and inspect the job. State employees might do maintenance, and they will do it with 3-5X the headcount of the contractors.

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Say No to Palantir in the NHS"

stocksinsmocks — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 17:48:14 +0000

I’m not very confident in the strategy of immiserating most people to drive positive change. This has been a Communist talking point for a century and a half that has yet to produce positive results, despite many attempts.

I am pleased to read someone is taking some initiative.

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Project Vend: Phase Two"

stocksinsmocks — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 14:30:52 +0000

A lot of work in project controls and management are simple enough that any system that can handle data that isn’t reliably structured could do it. Read project team updates each week. Are we on time and on budget? If yes, commend the team and write a glowing report of the AI’s wise and dynamic leadership to operations, if not, encourage the team and recommend operations outsource the employees.

New comment by stocksinsmocks in "Say No to Palantir in the NHS"

stocksinsmocks — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 14:14:18 +0000

Facebook was Life Log, Oracle was Project Oracle. None of the household names in tech are playing straight.