niam (u/niam) - Readit News

niam commented on The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong derekthompson.org/p/the-a... · Posted by u/rbanffy

TFYS · a month ago

> Here's how a rational market works.

Might regulations be the result of these "rational markets"? After all, if I invest a lot of money to build apartments, I might want to protect that investment by lobbying for regulations to make it harder for competitors, increasing the value of my investment. Or if I buy an apartment, I might want to prevent others from ruining my view, prevent noise, etc. All completely rational.

niam · a month ago

Whether it is or isn't seems immaterial if you're of the opinion that government should step in to solve issues where the market has proved ineffective.

If it's the case that market participants have an imperative to convince the government to screw everyone else over: a solution preventing the government from being convinced by small petty nonsense seems remarkably simple, relative to the other kinds of policy challenges that exist.

niam commented on The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong derekthompson.org/p/the-a... · Posted by u/rbanffy

grafmax · a month ago

Abundance YIMBYism has many shortcomings. It doesn't address the risk of gentrification and displacement, the slow and unproven trickle-down effect of market-rate housing, or the critical need for direct public housing to serve low-income communities. Journalistic ideologues deserve little praise for dismantling the weakest counterarguments of their opponents while ignoring core criticisms.

niam · a month ago

> It doesn't address the risk of gentrification and displacement

This is a puzzling critique because it seems very much in the wheelhouse of "abundance YIMBYism" to advocate for cheaper housing--an argued byproduct of which is that fewer people are displaced. It probably changes the problem statement of gentrification since, if housing is abundant and displacement is low, there's not much to distinguish "gentrification" from just "investing in the neighborhood".

>the critical need for direct public housing to serve low-income communities

This isn't a problem caused by YIMBYism, nor one whose solutions are obstructed by it. We could by that reason malign it for not solving heart palpitations or cancer too.

niam commented on Orion Browser kagi.com/orion/... · Posted by u/gtirloni

roughly · a month ago

I really like Kagi, but I'm starting to get that same sense of anticipatory melancholy I used to get when I found a really good drug dealer back in the day - this product or service is fantastic, and I'm very happy to be able to give it money, but I recognize this is a short term affair and some day I'll be back to having to search for it again.

I would continue to pay Kagi $10 a month forever for exactly the product I signed up for - I have zero additional product wants or needs, zero additional ambitions for the service, zero things I'd like my money to be going to other than sustaining a high-quality service that solves a need for me. I don't need or want the AI features, I sure don't need a browser, and I'd really like all of this manic product energy to be going towards the core product so I can continue to enjoy it for the foreseeable future.

niam · a month ago

Kagi and Orion both entered public beta at the same time[1]. Even if they didn't: it kind of seems unfair to indict this as an additional ambition. It's not as though browsers and search engines have an exotic relationship, and there's pertinent strategic threats that operating a browser protects against.

[1]: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-orion-public-beta

niam commented on LLM Embeddings Explained: A Visual and Intuitive Guide huggingface.co/spaces/hes... · Posted by u/eric-burel

agentcoops · a month ago

Apologies if this comes across as too abstract, but I think your comment raises really important questions.

(1) While studying the properties of the mathematical objects produced is important, I don't think we should understand the situation you describe as a problem to be solved. In old supervised machine learning methods, human beings were tasked with defining the rather crude 'features' of relevance in a data/object domain, so each dimension had some intuitive significance (often binary 'is tall', 'is blue' etc). The question now is really about learning the objective geometry of meaning, so the dimensions of the resultant vector don't exactly have to be 'meaningful' in the same way -- and, counter-intuitive as it may seem, this is progress. Now the question is of the necessary dimensionality of the mathematical space in which semantic relations can be preserved -- and meaning /is/ in some fundamental sense the resultant geometry.

(2) This is where the 'Platonic hypothesis' research [1] is so fascinating: empirically we have found that the learned structures from text and image converge. This isn't saying we don't need images and sensor robots, but it appears we get the best results when training across modalities (language and image, for example). This is really fascinating for how we understand language. While any particular text might get things wrong, the language that human beings have developed over however many thousands of years really does seem to do a good job of breaking out the relevant possible 'features' of experience. The convergence of models trained from language and image suggests a certain convergence between what is learnable from sensory experience of the world and the relations that human beings have slowly come to know through the relations between words.

[1] https://phillipi.github.io/prh/ and https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.07987

niam · a month ago

Re: #2

I've never really challenged that text is a suitable stand-in for important bits of reality. I worry instead about meta-limitations of text: can we reliably scale our training corpus without accreting incestuous slop from other models?

Sensory bots would seem to provide a convenient way out of this problem but I'm not read-enough to know.

niam commented on Some arguments against a land value tax (2024) lesswrong.com/posts/CCuJo... · Posted by u/danny00

Aurornis · 2 months ago

> Primary residences pay a lower % of the value than 2nd and 3rd homes.

I think it's funny how every LVT discussion eventually comes back to some inclusion of other factors to adjust the taxes or provide exemptions, which starts to defeat the claimed purpose of a Land Value Tax.

LVT is a concept that sounds amazing and novel in a vacuum, but starts to look less ideal in the real world. The people who think about it enough start to include factors like structure value and different exceptions for how the land is being used, which starts to look a lot like existing tax code in most places.

niam · 2 months ago

> which starts to defeat the claimed purpose of a Land Value Tax.

What do you think others claim the purpose of an LVT is?

> every LVT discussion eventually comes back to some inclusion of other factors to adjust the taxes or provide exemptions

This argument seems only to follow from a belief that carving exceptions out of policy here is either: inherently bad, lends to a slippery slope towards badness, or is fundamentally incompatible with the professed aims of an LVT (hence my asking).

I don't believe any of those are true, so this sounds to me an unfair indictment against the otherwise legitimate strategy of "keep what's good; change what's bad", which is practical and works for other policy all the time. While I'd scorn the complexity of our current tax code, I wouldn't do so on principle of exemptions being bad, but rather that we've made poor tradeoffs or struck a bad balance.

niam commented on US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/gausswho

Buttons840 · 2 months ago

While the courts, supposedly, focus on what the law actually says, remember that Wickard v Filburn (1942) established that growing a plant on your own property for your own personal use is "interstate commerce".

I don't know a lot about law, but I at least know that ruling on what the "actual law is" is selective, and usually selective in a way that is beneficial for the rich and powerful.

niam · 2 months ago

> ruling on what the "actual law is" is selective

US judges are not fact-checked and may rely on whatever selection of information presented in amicus briefs (as-filtered by 20-something year old law clerks trying their best) seems applicable.[1]

This seems relevant here because the mentioned figure seems to be "compliance costs" (cost to implement), not the cost on the bottom line of each org. It's very possible that that cost still exceeds $100,000,000, but it does leave more discretion in the hands of the judges than the GP would seem to imply, and more room for judges to listen to inflated estimates of cost.

Acknowledging that there's still something to be said about erring side of caution, but also that there's something to be said about what a ridiculous limit $100Mil is in 2025.

[1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/supreme-court-errors-are-...

niam commented on Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web websmith.studio/blog/astr... · Posted by u/pumbaa

ttoinou · 2 months ago

I spent a small amount of time looking into Astro and I didn’t get the difference with the Fresh framework created by the Deno team.. ? Fresh does this Island architecture already, and benchmarks on Astro website dont include Deno+Fresh to compare. So I’m still wondering what’s the benefit of using Deno+Astro vs. Deno+Fresh

niam · 2 months ago

Astro and Fresh were both inspired by the islands idea which was iirc coined by an Etsy frontend architect and further elaborated on by the creator of Preact.

My understanding is that Astro is able to more-or-less take a component from any combo of popular frameworks and render it, whereas Fresh is currently limited to just Preact via Deno. I think the limitation is to optimize for not needing a build step, and not having to tweak the frameworks themselves like Astro does (did?).

I'm not affiliated; I've just looked at both tools before.

niam commented on A receipt printer cured my procrastination laurieherault.com/article... · Posted by u/laurieherault

vonneumannstan · 3 months ago

>When I "fast" from those "treats", work takes on new enjoy-ability. Dopamine diet is probably the wrong technical term, but it nails the practical effects well.

Man no offense but this sounds devastatingly sad. "We must starve ourselves of fun so that the barest excitement at work feels good."

niam · 3 months ago

I suppose in some sense, but how is this sadder than the reality that we're not all doped up on space cocaine?

A desirable (practical) reality would seem to stem not just from first order effects now, but also in summation of all the credits and debits that it leaves us over time.

niam commented on Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174) · Posted by u/dang

varsketiz · 3 months ago

Somehow I'm not a fan of HN using this community for lobbyism purposes.

niam · 3 months ago

May I ask why?

It's expressly the intention of democracies to hear from constituents (and conversely: groups of constituents). That we happen to call that feedback loop "lobbying", and that the term carries some societal baggage from corporations using/abusing it is unfortunate, but shouldn't be an indictment of what is otherwise a democratic function.

Some group FOO with a shared ill should be able to convene about it and petition congress about it.

niam commented on EU OS for the Public Sector eu-os.eu/... · Posted by u/doener

gizmo · 3 months ago

This is all sizzle no steak. Marketing without substance, frankly.

A proof-of-concept doesn't provide any value. For Linux to gain further adoption a gargantuan effort is needed to get things from 90% done (or 90% working) to fully working. Any Linux distribution is already suitable for government use. Manjaro, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian. They're all fine distros. The only remaining problem is quality. Things don't work or suddenly stop working for no apparent reason. For government use that's a deal-breaker. It's also a deal-breaker for gamers. Which is why SteamOS has been relentlessly fixing reliability issues. So if I had to bet on a linux distro going mainstream, it would be that one.

niam · 3 months ago

This seems unreasonably dismissive. Spitballing as to why:

* "Fedora-based" was skipped over. Or it wasn't, but you intuited something else from that term, maybe without the backdrop of Fedora's bootable containers or uBlue. Or with awareness of those tech, but without valuing their contributions to system stability (or the contributions of the broader "immutable"/"declarative" projects) as much as they perhaps warrant.

* You believe a govt end user's notion of "software quality" to matter more than (basically) any other stakeholder's notion. Or you don't recognize as intensely as I that simply having a URL to point at (or more importantly for older bureaucrats: a PDF / PDF printability) is a multiplying force on the ability to get in front of someone who makes policy decisions.