natrius

8 ms·

1.
by natrius 1y ago
You know, it doesn't really seem like a mistake for people to anthropomorphize the thinking machines.
2.
by natrius 1y ago
Unenforceable rules are bad, but if you tweak the rule to always require some sort of authorship statement (e.g. "I wrote this by hand" or "I wrote this with Claude"), then the honor system will mostly achieve the desi
3.
by natrius 1y ago
If it's any consolation, living in Blade Runner will be optional! You'll also have the option of living in full-dive VR where it's permanently 1999. No AI in sight, just print outs of MapQuest directions.
4.
by natrius 1y ago
An LLM can trivially instruct someone to take medications with adverse interactions, steer a mental health crisis toward suicide, or make a compelling case that a particular ethnic group is the cause of your society's biggest problem s
5.
by natrius 1y ago
Most poor people rent. They are already forced to move when the land they live on gets more valuable and they can't afford the new lease. Taxing land redirects part of the rent they already pay to serve their interests (assuming good g
6.
by natrius 1y ago
It's hard to export my friends list because there's no API for automated tools to use. AI can export your friends list today because it can see your friends list in the browser. I think the same thing will happen for chatbot memor
7.
by natrius 1y ago
When I want to try a new AI, it can offer to import my data by using my computer and reading the screen.
8.
by natrius 1y ago
I haven't been able to figure out how there's a moat for AI products that, if they work as advertised, can build a bridge over any most with near zero user effort.
9.
by natrius 3y ago
It's not that python doesn't have a clean way to subtract a year, it's that "subtract a year" is imprecise. There's a clean way to subtract 365 days, and there's a clean way to set the year one year earlie
10.
by natrius 3y ago
Too many of the identity and data problems are network effect problems, and ad revenue is the best business model that has been discovered for tackling those problems. The business model is incompatible with openness and user sovereignty: t
11.
by natrius 4y ago
Houston is the only major Texas city without zoning, and Houston still has plenty of parking requirements. As a result, both housing for people and housing for cars is really cheap. At this rate, Houston is going to figure out how to fix it
12.
by natrius 5y ago
The lazy solution to rivalry getting out of control is bicameralism. Make tree-based governance where most of the action is, but design another chamber that can veto it without the same rivalries involved.
13.
by natrius 9y ago
> They have this idea that there are a bunch of wealthy and greedy developers out to get them and their precious neighborhoods. This narrative is so persistent because it's 100 years old. But for most of that time, developers were c
14.
by natrius 9y ago
This happens everywhere regulation exists. That doesn't make regulation inherently bad, but before you can come to reasonable conclusions about how to change things, you have to come to terms with the spontaneous order your changes wil
15.
by natrius 9y ago
It's outlawed in so many places because of the incentives at work. At the edges of a city, greenfield exclusive neighborhoods have a better chance of holding their value than neighborhoods that let people with less money buy homes on l
16.
by natrius 9y ago
To understand what's happening, you have to observe how things have evolved. Bitcoin was advertised as digital cash. Tons of nerds envisioned a future of the whole world buying coffee with Bitcoin. As it became clear that the current n
17.
by natrius 9y ago
The economy does not care whether you put your money in a bank or under your mattress. The central bank will influence interest rates in response to your actions. What matters is the amount of money that's actually chasing goods and se
18.
by natrius 9y ago
Housing is a generational issue. There's today's middle class and tomorrow's middle class. Raising taxes on land does not hurt tomorrow's middle class, and it helps them if more homes get built where they want to live. L
19.
by natrius 9y ago
The part that people tiptoe around is the goal: a tax rate high enough that owning land leads to near-zero returns. Only the structures would be an investment. Land ownership would be biased towards the owners who can serve the most of our
20.
by natrius 9y ago
Landlords do not set market rents. Renters and their employers do. Tax changes do not raise or lower rents. They make it more or less likely that new housing will be built, which affects future rents. Land value taxes are so attractive beca
21.
by natrius 9y ago
Don't eliminate all rent, just tax away the rents derived from the land itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
22.
by natrius 9y ago
I think the obfuscation is an elaborate hazing ritual that makes it optimal to cooperate with the existing community rather than defect and launch your own competing "land" registry.
23.
by natrius 9y ago
It's a marketing fail. The commenting system needs a separate brand. If you were going to use Kinja or Chorus, you wouldn't assume you were dragging along the culture that its existing publishers have. To an extent, "just use
24.
by natrius 9y ago
It will always be valuable to know things about other people. Technologies that enhance privacy without providing perfect privacy merely increase the cost of technologies that collect data. Even with perfect privacy tech, people sell their
25.
by natrius 9y ago
It's not like a power outage. It's more like a power surge that's somehow crafted to exploit every engineering flaw in every surge protector that well-funded state actors have piled up over the years. We would not recover fro
26.
by natrius 9y ago
You're going to read a page full of comments that agree with this, which is great. But you need to change it. You need to join an organization that will show you how to fight for policies that make our cities open to all. Find your loc
27.
by natrius 10y ago
Right. Traffic is unpredictable, and the only way to adjust for it is if far fewer people bring their cars with them in the morning so they have choices on the way back. Traffic is a choice we've made as a society, and we need to creat
28.
by natrius 10y ago
The demand for road space is only inelastic for people who drive themselves. For everyone else, choosing to share a ride with more people and accept a route with more stops is a good way to consume less road space. Express lanes make that t
29.
by natrius 10y ago
User experience matters, and this works very differently from how Google Latitude worked. Digital products are not about revealing the truth stored in database records. They're elaborate fictions we tell each other about meaningless da
30.
by natrius 10y ago
Currency is a collective delusion. It's valuable if everyone believes it is, which is why precious metals trade higher than their usefulness in industry. I don't think Bitcoin's delusion will last more than another decade. We

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