Hacker News: tony69

New comment by tony69 in "I resigned from Anthropic today"

tony69 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:14:10 +0000

Example 5: how does a giant LLM that needs million-dollar server racks just to run, replicate itself over the internet?

New comment by tony69 in "An Alien Mind"

tony69 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 06:08:15 +0000

The Truth Machine is a great sci-fi novel exploring this topic (https://coins.ha.com/information/ttm.s)

New comment by tony69 in "Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone"

tony69 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 04:22:10 +0000

It’s not like they do it on purpose rubbing hands

New comment by tony69 in "And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway"

tony69 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:31:21 +0000

Some crimes are bad enough that the perpetrators don’t deserve second chances. I’m ok with punishment for its own sake in some cases even if it would be more “cost effective” or “productive” for society to rehabilitate.

New comment by tony69 in "The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services"

tony69 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:28:09 +0000

Seems to me that the TAM for a fan is basically infinite for any single company, therefore making a product that is too high quality or long lasting could still get you growing yoy sales for a long time and stay in business. But you’re probably right that vs competition lowering prices (and quality) they’d lose.

There’s probably an optimum for maximizing sales/growth that doesn’t land on highest quality products in the real world, with non rational consumers, imperfect information etc… sadly.

New comment by tony69 in "Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief"

tony69 — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:58:18 +0000

“Not in charge of” can agree

“Have no access to” I have doubts

New comment by tony69 in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

tony69 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 04:12:57 +0000

There’s TIPS ETFs

New comment by tony69 in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

tony69 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:46:40 +0000

Plenty of hedged equity funds out there. Trade some performance for peace of mind.

New comment by tony69 in "Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute"

tony69 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:43:54 +0000

Yes. That’s what passive investing is. You give money to the passive fund, the passive fund buys the market. No regard to price or any other metric.

New comment by tony69 in "Squillions: How money laundering won"

tony69 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 06:42:16 +0000

In Italy, it’s illegal to pay in cash anything over 5000 euros

New comment by tony69 in "The dead economy theory"

tony69 — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:01:33 +0000

I’m not sure what the justification is, but I assume it’s some flavor of “so index fund holders don’t miss out on returns”. It’s crooked because index inclusion drives massive flows at any price. SpaceX understands this and with so much money on the table probably exerted influence (maybe the big AI players contributed too). Passive funds don’t care about price (quite the opposite, they reward higher market caps in a feedback loop). But with an IPO, you’re supposed to let the market have some time to find the right price. Not to mention the changes related to profitability rules etc.

New comment by tony69 in "The dead economy theory"

tony69 — Sat, 30 May 2026 05:47:43 +0000

In big tech’s case it’s mostly to offset massive stock compensation of executives and insiders

New comment by tony69 in "The dead economy theory"

tony69 — Sat, 30 May 2026 05:46:02 +0000

Yes, but it was done for spacex and it’s crooked

New comment by tony69 in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

tony69 — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:41:15 +0000

By “raising death taxes”, I meant comprehensively, eliminating loopholes, as the sources I linked discuss more at length.

Re: irrevocable trust, a cursory search revealed no legitimate use case imo, all use cases I see are proxies to skirt taxes or hide income/wealth. What would you consider a legitimate use case for one?

Your point re: case law is well taken, but per [2] up until a few decades ago there was a cat-and-mouse game between laws and tricks regarding inheritance wealth transfer. This stopped and it’s easier than ever to transfer > 10M tax free at or death, which has massive implications for wealth inequality.

That said I agree it’s extremely unlikely and have no hope that any of this will change.

New comment by tony69 in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

tony69 — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:59:32 +0000

Wealth tax is highly impractical. Very high and inescapable death taxes is what we need. Like 80% after an initial exemption amount. https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/the-summer-slide-part-3-the-t... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mX5U5DNUfBc

New comment by tony69 in "How Monero’s proof of work works"

tony69 — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:22:36 +0000

Broken Money by Lyn Alden is a good book on the topic

New comment by tony69 in "Ferrari vs. Markets"

tony69 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 06:25:30 +0000

.74 is pretty weak for a correlation, and correlation is already mostly meaningless on its own

New comment by tony69 in "Computer History Museum Launches Digital Portal to Its Collection"

tony69 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 04:39:26 +0000

The picture of the 4004 and 8008 are super low res

New comment by tony69 in "When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer parts"

tony69 — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 04:56:17 +0000

Our business got charged a 200% tariff on a UPS import from Japan, completely incorrect. The dispute is taking much longer than OP’s. Either UPS doesn’t know what they’re doing, or they willfully charge higher fees, or maybe they’re just understaffed from the massive layoffs they did to try to save their stock price.

edit: as a biz you (we) should use a legit import broker instead of UPS. But individuals like OP are stuck with no option.

New comment by tony69 in "Norway reviews cybersecurity after remote-access feature found in Chinese buses"

tony69 — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 22:00:39 +0000

He is describing how bidding for publicly funded projects fails, because the bidding process designed to avoid corruption has been poorly designed (or corrupted by lobbying) such that it effectively sidelines honest and qualified bids. I would say this is a typical outcome with well meaning bureaucrats in a democracy, not capitalism