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.