> What do you care about the value of the house you're living in?
When you are eventually too old to live there, sell it and move into an assisted housing facility, the money you get for that house very much matters for how you will live the remaining years of your life.
> What did you do to deserve the massive raise in value of land since you bought that house besides buying early?
What did the sw eng do to deserve the 500k a year comp while the lady cleaning the toilets in the same building hardly makes 10% of that? Market? You don't say...
If the house is paid off, you have that equity. Maybe it's $500k instead of $1million, whatever, it's still worth money.
To your second question... the difference is a wage is based on adding economic activity while the land value increase is almost exclusively rent-seeking. Apples and orangutans.
> If the house is paid off, you have that equity. Maybe it's $500k instead of $1million, whatever, it's still worth money.
"Whatever"? With 20 years left to live, $500k difference is huge. Try to get informed about prices for such places. And how come you are the one to decide whether they are worth it or deserve it? This is a ridiculous discussion.
> To your second question... the difference is a wage is based on adding economic activity while the land value increase is almost exclusively rent-seeking.
The economic value of their lot obviously increased manyfold since they purchased it. Anybody could have bought it. If society (through laws) should have a say in the price of selling a plot of land then I'd like to see your reaction to society having a say about sw eng compensation. Oh right that's totally different! Because one of them impacts you directly while the other one doesn't and is easy to armchair philosophize about.
You don't have to move to such a place, but there are a lot of real estate that's not very hot, on account of not being near anything economically relevant, but are still pretty nice places.
If you don't have to work a day for the rest of your life, why should you care if a famous tech company has its offices 15 minutes away?
It wasn't a jackpot. Many, many people have houses. Trying to make people who did that into a group you're allowed to dismiss is evil. Just as it is with basically any group.
"I'm a highly paid sw eng in the bay area and want to buy a house, but it's very pricy. Let me present a scapegoat so we can all agree to force them to sell below market value. But don't touch my total comp because that's totally the market value of what I contribute to society!"
A consistent view please. Either society decides through laws who gets to have how much, or not, but stop selectively applying that to things you want versus things you already have. Such brain acrobatics is just dishonest.
If you bought a house for 50 grand in 1984 and now it's worth $3 million because you got lucky and happened to buy in the right spot, that's a jackpot in my book. You didn't do anything to create the value of that land: that's what Georgism recognizes.
If you bought it in California, say, in 1984 it was more like $100k, and would now be worth more like $900k[0]. Your outlier valuation is a terrible basis upon which to institute yet another tax.
The outlier valuation is exactly the point! That's why it's a lottery ticket. Some people get $900k, others get $3m, not because of anything they did, not because of improvements made to the property, but just because they picked the lucky patch of dirt.
As discussed in the article, LVT can be implemented in a revenue-neutral way where most homeowners would pay lower property taxes so your handwringing about "yet another tax" is unconvincing.
> Perhaps the LLMs are a reminder that we should make an extra effort to cultivate relationships with each other and form communities online – communities that belong to us, not some billionaire.
Time to look up who owns Stack Overflow, Reddit and Hacker News if you had some romantic ideas about them not being owned by billionaires.
1. When you write a comment in a discussion of an article, be upfront with being the author. It took me a while to understand that from your comment. "Author here" is a thing.
2. Your article itself doesn't have clear authorship stated. At the very bottom there is a copyright notice, but that's pretty generic and not a single person either. Just place your name at the top together with a date. Not everybody knows you or follows your blog.
3. When I read this ...
> When I was a little kid, a family friend sold us our first “computer” — scare quotes because I’m pretty sure it was a VTech Laser 200 clone, a chiclet keyboard Z80 that ran off cassette tapes and plugged into our TV.
.. I prepared to stop reading since .. how is that not a computer? After another paragraph or two which just felt like rambling, I gave up.
No, I almost didn't get that, and that's the point. It's bad style to leave folks here in the dark about discussing your own work. Presumambly you would react similarly if somebody else did it like that.
And it's odd that you are getting so defensive about this feedback.
It pisses me off (not just for my own site) when people talk as if stories that show up on HN are somehow community property of HN. It's a page I put on my own website. I will make it look any way I fucking choose. People here do this all the time and I can only imagine how alienating it must be to website authors who aren't familiar with our giant clique.
Sure, do that. I don't mind. But when coming here discussing your own article, please be open about that it's your article and not an independent opinion you are giving. Everybody else manages to do that, I'm sure you could too.
But that's the 3rd time we are circling around this and you are still actively fighting anybody pointing it out, so I'll just conclude that you are this kind of person.
I will not be, because, again, I didn't submit this article here --- what I did instead was write this and then dread what would happen when it hit the front page.
That's not true for all (or even most) of what I write, but it's true this time, and I'm not letting it slide.
The feedback here is pretty clearly that it's not clear that it's your site. Are people supposed to just assume that 'sockpuppet.org' and 'tptacek' are related somehow? Do we have to click on the profile of every commenter we read to establish outside context? And whether or not you submitted it has nothing to do with whether or not you commented on it at length without establishing that relationship.
You're getting perfectly reasonable feedback here, and your response is weird.
with 3. being the most prominent one.. I made it a little further than that "hot take" but a few more paragraphs in the thoughts expressed seemed neither novel nor to go anywhere. SaaSpocalypse but on localhost... shrugs
I think the argument is that there won't be a reason to read the code. If you want a change, just let the agent change it.
Similar to the output of a compiler. Nobody (with very few exceptions) reviews its machine code output. No reason to do that. If you want to change it, just recompile.
(I don't share this view, but I think a substantial and growing fraction of folks does.)
Yes, I think you're right. It could be I haven't experienced the cutting edge of AI, but it a) doesn't seem there yet, and b) goes off on tangents assuming outcomes of decisions and needing to rewrite things a lot. So I quite like reading the output.
I agree with most of what you are saying, but I believe that this view on people's ethics is a little naive. Remember that we are talking about AI contexts here. Everything it infects has a questionale track record w.r.t. ethics on many levels.
Besides, ethics come from upbringing and social influences, not from attending a mandatory ethics class.
I do the same, but without AI in the loop. Just me and my thoughts while cleaning or doing laundry or going for a run. The best designs and architectural choices and algorithms I've come up with in my carreer were developed and/or refined that way.
It's very enlightening, though it requires being comfortable with being alone with ones thoughts. It seems to me many people are not and need constant distractions and/or dopamine kicks.
Thinking alone about fundamentally deep problems can be poweful, but most software problems are not that deep, they follow a pattern, and it's only a question of discovering them. Doing that alone is inherently slower and less efficient than discussing it with a colleague.
AI just serves as a substitute - an artificial conversational partner.
I feel like you consider yourself more virtuous for not using AI for discussion. Would you consider people who don't talk to colleagues at all, but do all the work themselves more virtuous in an analogous manner?
There is a difference between LLM-generated code that somebody merged essentially unseen and LLM-generated code which a human then looked at carefully and massaged until they were happy with it.
The first version can hide a lot of crap. All you see is the end-to-end functionality and there can be corner cases or scenarios which you have not tried and in which it is terrible or plain incorrect.
The second version hides just as many issues as human written code.
Unfortunately, the debate that our field has about LLM-generated code mixes both quite freely even though they are quite distinct.
There was a time when a generation of hackers got (rightfully) worked up about the Microsoft tax for every PC sold. It's not hard to see that somebody gets mad if they believe that an Anthropic/OpenAI tax is about to become the standard when doing any serious Physics/Math/... research or writing code.
The term "hackers" didn't just apply to those of us who wiped the thing off first chance they got. Folks working in IT of large corps which had fleets of a 5-digit numbers of PCs to administer and for each of them, Microsoft took their cut.
Just because a description doesn't apply to you personally doesn't mean it's misrepresenting things.
Maybe someday when you produce something useful that is of somewhat widespread use, you will understand.
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