It’s entirely possible that people who are praising this CEO might have to come up with incredibly convoluted mental gymnastics to defend their position soon: “Anthropic chief back in talks with Pentagon about AI deal”.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/97bda2ef-fc06-40b3-a867-f61a711b1...

I genuinely get bothered when someone talks to me. I am typically rushing through my day to do stuff, whether it is hiking, grocery shopping, working out, or going to the restroom at work, and getting interrupted feels to me like getting an unwanted push notification on your phone.

When someone occasionally engages, I extremely quickly dismiss them in the most polite, but firm, way possible. I also intentionally keep a demeanor that generally signals I’m not open to random conversations (I avoid eye contact etc.), but that often doesn’t work. At the gym it is particularly problematic, I’m focusing on gathering strength for my next set and sometimes people bother you even if I am wearing headphones.

I truly do not have a problem with who I am, I’m comfortable in my shoes.

As such, never in a million years I would approach a stranger to strike up a conversation, it would seem an incredibly rude thing to do towards them, on top of clearly not having any desire to engage from my side.

I’ll talk for hours straight to my wife, close family and the very few friends I have though!

> I extremely quickly dismiss them in the most polite, but firm, way possible.

And I think that's the answer; people who don't want to talk will simply tell you! And everyone carries on.

But they said it's rude just to speak to them ... which is a factually erroneous characterization.

Fascinating how much this varies by culture too. People generally have attitudes similar to you in Nordic countries, or even Seattle, but then you go to South American countries, or India, and it feels like everyone talks to everyone all the time.

I have found people in Seattle are very friendly and ready to talk. Maybe not on a morning commute, but in general.

Danes are, according to the internet, in the "don't talk to me ever" group, but I don't think that true. Mostly I believe that's because the areas of the internet where people talk about the glory of self-checkout and the benefits of wearing big ass head phones are a little self-selective in their view of the world.

Obviously you should not bother people, but even in random encounters many people absolutely loves to talk. In many you can see their eyes light up if you talk to them of ask them a question. The internet has us so conditioned to believing that people just want to be left alone that we miss out on a ton of wonderful human interaction.

We honestly can't keep both talking about a loneliness epidemic and at the same time push the narrative "don't talk to me ever". We should absolutely respect e.g. people on the autism spectre or anxiety and their issues with talking to strangers, but I feel like we're allowing them to dictate a mode of interaction, or avoidance thereof, which isn't healthy for the rest of us.

> it would seem an incredibly rude thing to do

It's one thing to not want it and to be comfortable not wanting it, but viewing it as rude goes way beyond that and is not rational.

The golden rule disagrees.

I am bothered by random people wanting to talk to me -> Randomly talking to other people would bother them -> Bothering people is rude -> Randomly talking to people is rude.

Hence why the platinum rule is better. Once you know that other people (apparently!) aren't bothered by randomly striking up a conversation, you can adjust your actions accordingly.

> The golden rule disagrees.

No, that rule does not say "it is rude for others to do unto you differently from how you would do unto them"--it's about how you should behave toward others, not a justification for your negative judgment of how others behave toward you.

I agree that the platinum rule is better, but that difference is not the problem here.

I don't judge them negatively. They're working based on the available information. That line of reasoning is the exact same that I would use if it weren't for the fact that I have better information available and thus can apply the platinum rule. I don't enjoy random conversations, and would consider it rude to engage in them if it weren't for the fact people seem to enjoy them. Since they do, I try to engage in them when people try to strike one up.

If I didn't have that information (and people used the golden rule consistently and weren't just knobheads), then I would be consistently annoyed at people not following the golden rule. As long as my theory of mind doesn't include 'other people generally enjoy random conversations', my perception would be that the golden rule is consistently broken by people striking up random conversations.

Sigh. Why do I even bother to point out errors in logic here.

There is some need for moral dynamic range. Anthropic is quite bad and there's lots of room at the bottom for OpenAI to be remarkably worse.

Starts with "astro" and ends with "turfing".

Think about how valuable HN is for a company whose primary market is professional devs.

Just wanted to thank you for the Sutro Tower work (https://vincentwoo.com/3d/sutro_tower/), it was truly beautiful and I’ve been looking at it so many times, very nostalgic for me. This one is great too!

I always see a large amount of pessimism about this company on HN, and I accept it might be for rational reasons. What do people think is going to be the most likely outcome for the company, since everything seems to be going so bad for them product/moat/financial-wise? Do people think it will literally go bust and close business due to bankruptcy within a couple years? If not, what else?

It could be acquired by microsoft with large layoffs, and kinda run in me maintenance mode — if inference gets cheaper.

If inference stays too expensive, then I don't know what happens, maybe a few people will pay for it.

A TurboTax-quality tax filing service for American expats with American investments who live abroad (particularly interested in a few European countries) and have to file in their country of residence and declare the income from such investments. I would pay $1-2k a year for a service like that, as I prefer to do things myself than relying on a CPA who will inevitably mess things up.

I wish America wouldn't tax their citizens abroad. They are one of only two countries in the world that do this. Eritrea is the other one.

Citizenship-based taxation makes absolutely no sense, other than to harass Americans living elsewhere. Every other country in the world does residency-based taxation.

I thought the benefit of using a CPA is then it's on them to rectify any errors?

But who exactly is going to catch those errors, especially when the outcome of such mistake would be an adjustment in your favor? Not the tax authorities, not the CPA. You’re left to advocate for yourself.

This is a story that really happened, I’m not making things up. A few years ago, myself and other colleagues exercised some ISO in a startup we were working for. The exercise left us exposed to a steep AMT tax, it was a 6 figure tax bill (this was expected and we knew that going in, it was offset by some liquidity opportunity on the side).

Now, if you know what you are doing, it’s possible to get back all that extra AMT tax you paid as credit in future years, you just really need to be aware of the mechanics that enable that via form 8801, it requires variable carryovers for N years until the credit is extinguished. But it’s no big deal, even the TurboTax wizard is fully capable of the functionality! A colleague of mine, with his fancy CPA, completely missed this.

It wasn’t until several years later, when I casually mentioned that I was happy to have finally used up all the AMT tax credit, recouping my full 6 figure bill, that he literally said “what are you talking about?!”, and just there we learned that his CPA completely missed the situation (my coworker being clueless also certainly didn’t help). He called me later that evening to get the name of the form 8801, and confirmed it wasn’t there in his previous tax returns. I don’t know how the situation ended, but it’s possible I saved my colleague 6 figures that day, if he acted fast and painfully amended N years of prior tax returns, and hopefully fired the CPA.

There are more modest variations of this, for example your averagely talented CPA is most likely not going to go beyond the 1099 and, say, go look up what percentage of your money market fund interest was state tax exempt and ensure you get a credit.

For these reasons, I just don’t use CPAs and consider the time I spent to learn my taxes well spent and I’m fairly confident I’m doing a better job than any CPA for my specific personal circumstances, aided by tax filing software and some reconciliatory spreadsheets. I just wish I had a software for the expat situation, since the EU/US taxation is such a nightmare and it’s what I’ll find myself in when I early retire soon.

Does that mean that you hope the next generation of iOS will do away with liquid glass so that you can update, or that you’ll never update again (also implying you’ll never buy an Apple device again)?

I always understood the sentiment of waiting until the first dot release for bug fixes, but refusing to update while still being in the ecosystem seems clearly a losing battle not even worth fighting for.

It’s going to take me a lot more to switch to Android, but yeah iOS 26 is not good. Some new UX paradigms are actually useful, like the ability to swipe over controls instead of having to press buttons, or the control bars shrinking during scrolling, but all could have been achieved without the major styling change.

I’m old enough to remember the Windows 98 -> XP -> Vista regressions and inconsistencies in UX, and I expect Apple to be headed that way.

What do you think this will mean for OpenAI, Anthropic and their current valuations?

There’s quite a few people on HN who hold Anthropic on a high pedestal compared to the other AI labs, I’d be curious to hear their opinion after this.