drooby

A tax takes a percentage of value that someone else created. A royalty collects payment for access to something you already own. When Alaska collects from oil companies, it's not taxing their profits. It's charging them for extracting a resource that belongs to the people of Alaska. The oil was never theirs.

It being a royalty and not a tax is the reason Alaska's dividend is politically untouchable while tax-funded programs get gutted every budget cycle. Ownership is a fundamentally stronger claim than redistribution.

The same way Alaska taxes oil extraction. Alaska doesn't track which molecule of oil came from which acre. They don't audit every drop. They tax the extraction operation and collect royalties on the resource being pulled out of the ground. We know who is training large models. We know roughly what data they're using. We know their revenue. A compute tax on large training runs, a revenue royalty on foundation model companies, or a licensing fee above a certain data threshold... none of these require tracking individual data points. They require taxing the extraction operation, which is visible, measurable, and already being monitored to some degree for safety purposes. We already have a very analogous model in the form of oil and Alaska.

Edit: to clarify, this wouldn't be a tax. A tax is the government taking a cut of someone else's money. A royalty is the owner charging for access to their resource. Alaska doesn't tax Exxon for drilling. It charges Exxon for extracting something that belongs to the people. Same principle here.

if you assert ownership over physical infrastructure, the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space.

But the model is built on us. You can move the server anywhere you want. You can’t escape the fact that everything inside it came from human minds. That’s an ownership claim no one can relocate away from.

The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered, every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of people built the knowledge base that makes these models work. Without that collective human output, AI is nothing.

Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."

We are in exactly that window right now with AI. The resource is being extracted at an incredible pace and almost all the value is flowing to a handful of companies. The longer people wait to assert sovereign ownership over the collective intelligence that makes AI possible, the harder it becomes.

If you think this is crazy, ask yourself what’s actually crazier: demanding a share of the value built on your collective labor, or watching trillions of dollars get extracted from it and saying nothing.

the idea of Alaskans getting a check just for existing sounded crazy too, right up until it didn’t.

I'm currently in the hiring process.. and my head is spinning.. 1. Interviewing is becoming more difficult. Many skills we valued two years ago are genuinely becoming less valuable. 2. The skills we tested 2 years ago were in-part a proxy for evaluating critical think and systems thinking skills. So we need to re-evaluate our technical interview process. 3. It's genuinely less friction for me to prompt Claude than some of my SEII colleagues. And wtf - Claude is getting so good that it's starting to feel like it's outpacing the intellectual competency of some people. Sure - it does weird things like add Sleep instead of proper concurrency. SEIIs did that too, and we couldn't as easily reprogram them with Skill.md 4. Core competencies remain necessary. Systems thinking. SOLID principles. Communication skills. These skills are more important than ever. 5. Companies that offshored engineers and traded core competency for perceived-throughput are doing the same calculus with Claude. 6. Core business models are threatened. There is fear that revenue streams will dry up. How does one hedge against that risk? Humans are expensive. 7. Navigating this situation is hard and uncertain

I just vibe coded a my own NaturalReader replacement. The subscription was $110/year... and I just canceled it.

Chatterbox TTS (from Resemble AI) does the voice generation, WhisperX gives word-level timestamps so you can click any word to jump, and FastAPI ties it all together with SSE streaming so audio starts playing before the whole thing is done generating.

There's a ~5s buffer up front while the first chunk generates, but after that each chunk streams in faster than realtime. So playback rarely stalls.

It took about 4 hours today... wild.

Same. Claude nailed both questions, with the slightest hint of "... u serious?"

I pay for the $100 Opus 4.6 plan... maybe that makes a difference?

Exactly this.

I’m starting to believe that people who think AI-generated code is garbage actually don’t know how to code.

I hit about 10 years of coding experience right before AI hit the scene, which I guess makes me lucky. I know, with high confidence, what I want my code to look like, and I make the AI do it. And it does it damn well and damn fast.

I think I sit at a unique point for leveraging AI best. Too junior and you create “working monsters.” Meanwhile, Engineering Managers and Directors treat it like humans, but it’s not AGI yet.

While I whole heartedly agree with your conclusion..

It's worth noting that much of the frustration stems from expectations.

I don't expect an AI to learn and "update their weights"..

I do however expect colleagues to learn at a specific rate. A rate that I a believe should meet or exceed my company's standards for, uh, human intelligence.

Special treatment for big players.

I have seen full blown porn on instagram too. Ads. Porn ads. They look exactly like porn ads on porn websites.

It's been about a decade years since many thought full-self-driving cars were "just a couple years away".

Reality is that FSD was/is a "few decades away"

Same for programming. We can take our hands off the steering wheel for longer stretches of time, this is true, but if you have production apps with real users that spend real money then going to sleep at the wheel is far too risky.

Programmers will become the guardians and sentinels of the codebase, and their programming knowledge and debugging skills will still be necessary when the AI corners itself into thorny situations, or is unable to properly test the product.

The profession is changing, no doubt about it. But its obsolescence is probably decades away.

Obsessive Compulsive Personality disorder (OCPD) is actually way more common than people realize, but it barely gets talked about compared to other mental health issues - and it may even be more of a root cause of things like anxiety, depression. and it is often confused with autism.

What’s interesting about this research is that it points to a possible biological reason why something like psilocybin might help, I.e it seems to loosen really rigid brain patterns. That’s basically the core issue in OCPD: being stuck in overcontrol and perfectionism. It’s not a treatment yet, but it does help explain why psychedelics could be useful for this kind of rigidity.

Would love to see more talk about this - OCPD is often overlooked both by the general public and unfortunately by those impacted by it

Impulse Labs is doing exactly this..

I believe there master plan foresees a future where batteries are more integrated with a house for decentralized grid storage. But the additional consumer advantage is better hardware - i.e cooking time.

In my experience I have found this to be entirely true.

I find happiness to be "the art of expectation setting", and the "art of reframe".

Mindfulness meditation and introspection help a lot.

But, becoming "good" at this skill comes with a particular loss, of which I have some wistful feelings for.

Life no longer feels like it is happening to me. I do not experience large swings of emotion, great loss, unexpected turns, high highs, low lows. Music doesn't hit like it once did.

I have traded the turbulence of life for predictable, stable growth. It is less exciting, and I have mourned the loss of my previous way of seeing, but I am much happier now.

You can't legally hunt for mushrooms with dogs in England?

High quality ("beautiful") code is as simple AND legible as possible, while remaining logically correct. All must be present.

It is a balance. And legibility is a fuzzy attribute that depends on the intellectual capacity of the collective observer.

But, beauty is subjective.. some people think maximally terse code is beautiful so... shrug

By impeaching and removing him, yes

Surprised no mention of space per person. The sweet spot is not yet fully known to me. But maybe about 8-10 square feet per person. You want that intoxicating social energy, but people need the space to bop from circle to circle

It’s not doublespeak. Multiple people can share the same role. Downsizing reduces redundancy. The number of roles can remain the same even with a smaller headcount.

I'm convinced I probably have aphantasia.. maybe even quite extreme. On a scale of 1-10 probably 1 or 2 vividness.

But if I take shrooms.... I can actually see objects with my eyes closed. I can rotate them. Morph them. It's so fun! Huge bummer that I miss out on stuff like this in my daily life.

What's weird is that I can still "rotate objects" and correctly predict their final state when I am sober (up to a point, of course). But I am blind to the actual visual. It's hard to explain. It's just not registering in my consciousness - but perhaps it's there behind the curtain.

So, the mind is undoubtedly capable of performing this feat. However, my brain in sober state is not wired to transfer information in this way.

There is a minimum threshold that a partner must make in order for it to be economically advantageous due to "doubling up" and sharing resources. Below this threshold, the partner is not pulling their weight relative to median living expenses.

That threshold is about 38-40k USD as of 2025.

About 40-55 percent of single men in the US meet that threshold.

So - there is probably not a serious shortage of "economically advantageous" men. Where marriage would make perfect sense.

But I don't doubt there is a shortage of "economically attractive men". Women seem to prefer a partner that makes the same or more than them. And the same goes with level of education... oh and they must be tall, oh and ideally a symmetrical face with a happy family ... this pool of men is diminishingly small.

I was spoiled at my first company out of college. My director cared deeply about product specs, acceptance criteria, and making sure engineers actually understood product and business decisions. It was so nice.

Oh, how sweet and naive I was to the world… hahah.

It still blows my mind that product isn’t treated like a soft engineering discipline in its own right. When product doesn’t do its own thinking, the cognitive load shifts to engineering. Suddenly, engineers are doing parts of product’s job. The result is predictable: engineering gets stretched thin, and both Product and Engineering fail to fully document or even understand what they’ve built.

The project falls apart because Product drops the ball, but Engineering is the team at the end of the funnel, so the blame naturally tends to land on them. Product’s output is often hidden, and it’s easy for them to say, “Well, we did our part. Engineering just didn’t deliver.”

I'm still using cursor and it seems fine. What does CC and Codex offer that's so much better than Cursor. Idgi

I like Project Kamp and have been following them for years. However, I feel they’re moving quite slowly and often making mistakes on problems that have already been solved. For example, it took them a while to figure out their composting toilet, and even now it’s not a great solution.

They tend to have what are essentially interns do a bit of “research” and then piece together a solution. That said, I do applaud their efforts. It’s very entertaining to watch, and they seem to be hiring people lately who are more knowledgeable in their fields.

So, I very much appreciate this open-source-ecology “academic approach.”

There is plenty of reason to welcome death. And be optimistic about its presence.

As Max Planck observed: "Science progresses one funeral at a time".

And really, the same can be said for political beliefs.

Humans are stubborn creatures that stratify power. Death has always been the great equalizer. But perhaps soon, no longer.

Do we have enough info here?

This article seems to be predicated on a couple sentence in their YouTube.

"Lyrics from the heart. AI assisted vocals and instrumentals".

..."Assisted"

We have no idea how much human input went into these songs.

Either way, though, it's crazy how we're starting to enter this unknown territory.

That's standard pay for expert witness.

Do you think that simply getting paid to provide expert witness voids all reasonable credibility?

Do we know what his exact testimony was in this case?

You realize it's also possible for a judge to be wrong. Why are we just assuming that the judge's opinion trumps the expert witnesses opinion on how to properly review the literature?

here were the expert defendant witnesses:

These are the five general causation experts for plaintiffs in the Tylenol MDL:

Dr. Andrea Baccarelli, MD, PhD, is a leading expert in the field of environmental health science. Dr. Baccarelli is Chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University. His research focuses primarily on exploring the chemical and molecular links between human disease and exposure to certain drugs or chemicals. He has published over 600 articles, if you can imagine. Dr. Baccarelli is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and he is also President of the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology Dr. Robert Cabrera, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Cabrera is a molecular & cellular biologist and his expertise and research focuses on chemical causes of birth defects during embryonic development.

Dr. Eric Hollander, MD, is a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Hollander has been the primary investigator in numerous federal grant studies on the causes of autism. These have included several major studies on autism causes funded by the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Hollander has published hundreds of scientific articles on autism and edited over 20 medical textbooks including Autism Spectrum Disorders (American Psychiatric Publishing, 2017), and the Textbook of Autism Spectrum Disorders (American Psychiatric Publishing, 2011).

Dr. Stan G. Louie is a Professor of Clinical Pharmacy at the University of Southern California. Dr. Louie’s current research and work focuses on the testing and development of new drugs for inflammatory diseases, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Brandon Pearson, PhD, is a neuroscientist and toxicologist and currently an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University. Dr. Pearson is an expert in neurotoxicology, epigenetics, and cell biology and he is currently involved in laboratory studies focusing on genetic and environmental factors causing autism. Dr. Pearson has never previously testified as a litigation expert but was compelled by a sense of moral duty to provide his expertise in this case.

.....

and heres the judge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Cote

She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from St. Mary's College in 1968 and a Master of Arts in history from Columbia University in 1969, after which she taught U.S. history, world history, and African-American history at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a school in Manhattan. Cote then attended Columbia Law School, where she was Notes & Comments Editor of the Columbia Law Review, and she received her Juris Doctor in 1975.[3]

His comments... if you actually read them.. remain reasonable.

The article itself clarifies..

> Baccarelli’s published statement to the White House only referred to the “possibility of a causal relationship” between acetaminophen and autism. In both his statement and the August paper, Baccarelli called for further study.

...

"Possibility"

See also

https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2025/mount-sinai-s...

No offense but your comment is basically HN parody. OpenAI created AI tech decades ahead of estimates. And they just signed a 100B deal with Nvidea. They are actually doing the things that are astonishing.

Every engineer I see in coffee shops uses AI. All my coworkers use AI. I use AI. AI nearly solved protein folding. It is beginning to unlock personalized medicine. AI absolutely will be a fundamental driver of the economy in the future.

Being skeptical is still reasonable.. but flippant dismissal of legitimately amazing accomplishments is peak HN top comment.