overflow897 (u/overflow897)

overflow897 commented on Congestion pricing in Manhattan is a predictable success economist.com/united-stat... · Posted by u/edward

yupitsme123 · 2 months ago

I assume you're referring to just taking the metro instead. Not everyone who drives lives near a metro. Not every destination is accessible via the metro. Many people commute from more affordable areas far from the city where public transportation isn't always a viable option. Driving gets $9 more expensive but public transit doesn't suddenly get better for the people who can't pay $9.

overflow897 · 2 months ago

There are very very few places in nyc not accessible via some combo of bus, metro and ferry. It's not as reliable as say Japan but the public transit network is pretty extensive.

overflow897 commented on AI Saved My Company from a 2-Year Litigation Nightmare tylertringas.com/ai-legal... · Posted by u/anitil

CPLX · 3 months ago

This article has good advice but it’s not really AI advice that’s the important tip.

The main observation is you 100% have to manage lawyers aggressively and understand and question what they are doing at literally every step or the budget will be out of control. Sounds like AI helped this guy but it’s more about your personality/approach than anything else.

Also don’t hire $1000 an hour lawyers for litigation unless you’re a major corporation in a complex case with a ton at stake.

overflow897 · 3 months ago

I think the AI advice is pretty important. You say you should understand and question everything the lawyers do but where do you even start without an AI to read and explain thousands of pages of contracts and legal process. Nevermind all the case law and it's trained on and has access to.

I think if he tried this ten years ago he'd have a pretty hard time with it.

overflow897 commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry

kylereeve · 3 months ago

> Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs.

This stuck out to me. How long will it continue to be so cheap? I would assume some of the low cost is subsidized by VC money which will dry up eventually. Am I wrong here?

overflow897 · 3 months ago

At the rate they're going it'll just get cheaper. The cost per token continues to drop while the models get better. Hardware is also getting more specialized.

Maybe the current batch of startups will run out of money but the technology itself should only get cheaper.

overflow897 commented on The Myth of Developer Obsolescence alonso.network/the-recurr... · Posted by u/cat-whisperer

overflow897 · 3 months ago

I think articles like this have the big assumption under them that we are going to plateau with progress. If that assumption is true, then sure.

But if it's false, there's no saying you can't eventually have an ai model that can read your entire aws/infra account, look at logs, financials, look at docs and have a coherent picture of an entire business. At that point the idea that it might be able to handle architecture and long term planning seems plausible.

Usually when I read about developer replacement, it's with the underlying assumption that the agents/models will just keep getting bigger, better and cheaper, not that today's models will do it.

overflow897 commented on Thoughts on thinking dcurt.is/thinking... · Posted by u/bradgessler

overflow897 · 3 months ago

There are parts of this I agree with and parts I do not. Being able to "talk" to documentation rather than dig through it to try to understand a concept feels like a way more efficient way to get to the same end.

I think digging through forums or comments or SEO garbage to try to find answers is a nightmare compared to having a solid llm do it for you. Being able to ask to explain a concept 5 different ways or compare concepts is incredible.

Or say - knowing nothing about 3d printing and being able to just ask it about current capabilities, materials, costs etc as an entrypoint. There are whole business ideas I wouldn't even consider exploring without it because it would be so overwhelming to research from scratch.

overflow897 commented on LLMs get lost in multi-turn conversation arxiv.org/abs/2505.06120... · Posted by u/simonpure

overflow897 · 3 months ago

I believe we're already using llms to evaluate llm output for training, I wonder if there's some variation of that which could be used to identify when one llm gets "stuck".

I guess chain of thought in theory should do that but having variations on prompt and context might behave differently?

overflow897 commented on High tariffs become 'real' with our first $36K bill blog.adafruit.com/2025/05... · Posted by u/ptorrone

onesociety2022 · 4 months ago

I'm not sure if it would pan out like how your half-brother wants it to be. Let's assume the manufacturing jobs return here and you are getting paid American wages. But if you try to turn around and spend it on anything, it will just be more expensive because everything else you want to buy is also being made in US factories and those workers are also getting pay similar to yours? You might have a manufacturing job finally but now you are paying $350 for a Nike shoe that used to be $150 when it was made in China. You want to buy a new TV? It costs more now. You want to upgrade your old iPhone? It costs more now.

So will the American manufacturing wages actually translate to living wages or will you just be getting paid more on paper but you still feel poor because the things you want to buy are all more expensive now?

overflow897 · 4 months ago

Genuine question but did folks feel poor during the heyday of the middle class? It seems like there was a period post-ww2 where you could make a living wage and still buy a house and sends your kids to college.

I'm not sure what the answer here is, but it does seem like this is something that has existed. Consumerism was pretty rampant in the 50s and 60s when a lot more was still made in the US.

overflow897 commented on Is the world becoming uninsurable? charleshughsmith.substack... · Posted by u/spking

lionkor · 7 months ago

> And give many of Europe's house's a small rattle and they would fall down.

In areas where we don't have earthquakes, yeah, what's the problem?

overflow897 · 7 months ago

I think the problem is suggest that an earthquake zone's fire problems would be solved by building houses like they do in a non-earthquake zone

overflow897 commented on Is the world becoming uninsurable? charleshughsmith.substack... · Posted by u/spking

avianlyric · 7 months ago

You’re ignoring one critical difference between these two scenarios. Humans, and all human related activities, produce heat as a waste product. It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it. Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive.

So every human in your cold space is 80W fewer watts of energy you need to produce to heat the space. But in a hot space, it’s an extra 80W that needs to be removed.

Add to that all of the appliances in a home. It’s not unusual for a home to be drawing 100W of electricity just keep stuff powered on in standby, and that’s another 100W of “free” heating. All of this is before we get to big ticket items, like hobs, ovens, water heaters etc.

So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space. Simply because all the waste energy created by people living in the space reduces the total heating requirement of the space, but equally increases the cooling requirement of that same space.

All of this is ignoring the fact that it’s easy to create a tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it’s called a woolly jumper). But practically impossible to create a cool individual environment around a person. So in cold spaces you don’t have to heat everything up to same temperature for the space to be perfectly liveable, but when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.

overflow897 · 7 months ago

"cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space" Man I wish this was true but it definitely isn't in anyplace that gets significantly cold. Heat pumps are super super efficient at cooling but they get less efficient at heating the colder it gets. Humans and appliances create a pretty negligible amount of heat.