natrius

You know, it doesn't really seem like a mistake for people to anthropomorphize the thinking machines.

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 desired goal of calibrating code review effort.

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.

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 so they should be eliminated. Words can't kill people, but words can definitely lead to deaths.

That's not even considering tool use!

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 government).

Land value taxes are politically impossible in America, so there's no need to make the people who like LVT look bad. We already look bad!

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 memory. I don't need to run my own AI to do this. Every AI company will build their own importer.

When I want to try a new AI, it can offer to import my data by using my computer and reading the screen.

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.

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 earlier. But if you're doing the second thing, is python supposed to silently change to March 1 when you change the year from a leap day? There's no way around handling edge cases.

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: the dollars go to the platforms with the most users, and the other platforms die.

We can't get the Mozilla we want until they discover a network effect business model that's actually compatible with empowered users. Until each user gets to steer every advertising dollar on the internet where they want them to be spent, there's plenty of room for innovation.

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 its planning mistakes of the past much faster than more regulated cities are going to decide to build enough housing for the people who want to live there. I'd never bet against Houston, or Texas in general.

How about we ease up on both zoning restrictions and parking requirements?

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.

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 called greedy because they made money by introducing cheaper housing into the neighborhood, thereby "ruining" it.

Here's a Supreme Court Justice shitting on apartments in 1926:

With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that, in such sections, very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district.

That's from Euclid v. Ambler, the case that established the constitutionality of zoning. Our cities are expensive on purpose.

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 will result in. You can't abolish self-interest.

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 less land. Once an economically stratified city is in place, no one can opt out without losing money. Everyone has to opt out together, and the politics of that are the worst.

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 network could never fulfill that vision, the whole community evolved its belief system to support the value of the currency, and they did so without any leader to coordinate their actions. They were just led by incentivized memes—the more convincing the justification for high valuations, the better the ideas spread. Now, people don't pitch Bitcoin's value as a digital cash. They tell people it's digital gold and the transaction fees don't matter.

The beliefs of the community will continue to evolve as needed to support the value of their claims on our society's productive capacity.

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 services.

If the central bank wants banks to have more reserves for loans, it buys assets from banks in exchange for newly created reserves. Money markets are a command economy.

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. Land is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. Higher taxes mean the price of the land itself must be lower for people to buy it—the taxes don't cause wealthier people to suddenly show up.

Today's middle class has lots of political power. Tomorrow's middle class doesn't. We're allowing generations to extract wealth from those who come after them without considering the consequences.

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 needs with the land, which would end our urban crisis.

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 because they avoid changing the incentives to build.

Don't eliminate all rent, just tax away the rents derived from the land itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

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.

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 the subreddit's moderation" is a product fail, too. It needs to feel like a standalone product, not embedding another site that you might not completely understand.

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 privacy for small discounts all the time already. Is the resulting information asymmetry better or worse than sacrificing privacy altogether? I'm not sure.

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 from that in days.

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 local pro-housing organization and join it. Let people live where they want.

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 create more ways for people to opt out of it. Capping tolls just forces everyone to deal with traffic.

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 trade-off possible.

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 database records.

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'll probably find a way to design a delusion that distributes value "fairly" rather than to a class of nerd overlords. But until then, it's a fun story to watch.