San Francisco, CA
Joined November 2008
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Hansen Qian retweeted
I think the fundamental YIMBY insight is that, if you live in a society which imposes artificial scarcity on basic necessities like housing and health care, then there is no amount of redistribution which will make them broadly available to the poor. You need supply-side changes.
Manufacturing a battery this month, assembling it into an unreleased iPhone, packing it, shipping it halfway around the world, and getting it into a user’s hand in less than three weeks?
Apple supply chain is crazy
Hansen Qian retweeted
There’s an argument that both the Han dynasty and the Roman Empire failed due to a massive expansion of property/land tax exemptions in a very similar vein to prop 13.
“I joke in my class that it’s the ‘Ur tax,' because they taxed it in Ur.”
politico.com/news/magazine/2…
Hansen Qian retweeted
站在今天看，俄罗斯这波操作，属于手握着一把天胡的牌打得稀烂。
如果不出兵乌克兰，今天全球AI的牌桌上，除了中美，大概率真得坐着一个俄罗斯。
搞AI、跑大模型，底层逻辑就是“吃电、散热、堆机器”。这两年全世界的数据中心老板都在为电费和机房降温发愁。俄罗斯属于老天爷喂到饭：西伯利亚开窗就是纯天然顶级空调；境内水电、核电、天然气很便宜，当年挖矿的都选西伯利亚。
另外俄罗斯人的数学和算法也强，各大国际编程竞赛，Kaggle机器学习竞赛常被俄国人屠榜。全世界除了中美，俄罗斯也搞出了自己完整的互联网生态：搜东西有Yandex，社交有VK，还有Telegram。现在在美股被炒上天的算力黑马Nebius，核心班底就是原先Yandex那帮俄罗斯人。
如果疫情后俄罗斯出地皮、出冷气、出便宜电，再拉着中国这种基建狂魔帮忙拉高压电网、建厂房、铺光纤，欧美资本开服务器工厂。俄国人完全可以成为欧亚大陆最大的“超级算力工厂”，中美神仙打架，它在中间两头收过路费。
结果呢？普京一拍大腿：不行，我得去抢那几块地。
普京的脑子，彻底停留在了19世纪沙皇俄国那种“开疆拓土”的旧梦里。什么有没有出海口啊，有没有所谓的军事缓冲带啊，就算抢方法也多的是，这可这是21世纪啊！现在的世界霸权争夺，抢的是半导体供应链，抢的是先进算法，抢的是高精尖人才。你去顿巴斯抢了几片烂泥地、几座废弃钢铁厂，代价却是把整个国家的未来都押了上去。
枪声一响，一切全崩了。稍微有点本事的程序员、算法工程师，连夜跑路。Yandex核心技术团队，宁可巨亏，惨烈的断尾求生、割裂母国，也要跑到欧洲重组成Nebius。普京把最懂未来的人，全逼成了难民和海外创业者。
在人工智能技术爆发的黎明前夜，全世界都在疯狂狂飙算力、抢占新工业革命的门票；而俄罗斯的老大，却带着几十万人，在泥潭里打着一百年前的一战式堑壕战。
再说一遍，普京不行，国内崇拜普京的那帮人也不行
Hansen Qian retweeted
We should make the essentials of life cheaper rather than continually trying to subsidize people's ability to afford expensive things.
you have good goals but some bad methods to achieve them imo
1) We've discussed this before - raising the minimum wage sounds good, but it makes it more expensive to hire less experienced workers, shutting them out of the labor market. We should want wages to rise because employers are competing for workers, not because the government mandates it.
2) Agree on ending wars! The Iran war did accomplish its main objective - to get people to stop talking about the Epstein files
3) Why subsidize trade school loans at 1% for 30 years? Haven't we seen what easy government financing has done to college tuition?
We should reduce licensing requirements, encourage apprenticeships, and make it easier for people to enter the trades.
4) We need way more housing. But let's start by making it easy and legal to build! Eliminate restrictive zoning, streamline permitting, and remove unnecessary building requirements
5) no chance Trump does anything like that but I like the push lol
broadly we should be thinking about how to make things more affordable rather than how to help people afford expensive things... imagine how much better off Americans would be if housing, education, healthcare, and energy were dramatically cheaper. We don't need to continually increase subsidies and mandates to make life affordable, we just need to remove barriers that make everything cost so much!
Hansen Qian retweeted
I wrote a short piece on declining local government capacity, pensions, and obstacles to political accountability. In short: Many people do not notice when there is a slight reduction in the number of instructional aides or police officers, nor are most aware when a city decides to postpone repaving a few street segments. Over time, these changes add up, but even if some constituents do start to notice a difference, it is virtually impossible for them to attribute the changes to decisions about pensions made by policymakers many years ago. The American system of state and local pension governance is also so complex that even the best informed, most engaged citizens would have a very difficult time knowing whom to hold accountable.
Bit by bit, retirement burdens eat up a growing share of spending—and politics makes them almost impossible to rein in.
In a new essay for Hoover's Commons initiative, Senior Fellow @SarahAnzia explains how public pensions drain local government services: thefreedomfrequency.org/p/ho…
Hansen Qian retweeted
What?! TIL!
sikorskyarchives.com/igor-si…
Hansen Qian retweeted
I think it’s a pretty bad norm in Hollywood that you can make a movie about someone that it is filled with lies and that’s ok. If someone made a movie about your life filled with lies and when you complained people just said that’s what movies do you’d he rightly mad
There’s a weird culture in Silicon Valley where even non-fraudulent entrepreneurs fib about their products and a weird level of celebration of a tech-skeptical movie whose key dramatic strategy is to make stuff up about Mark Zuckerberg.
slowboring.com/p/our-culture…
Hansen Qian retweeted
AI-generated fake documents grew 500% last year, and humans can no longer tell the difference
That's why we’re launching Extend Verify, the first document fraud detection API built for agents
Verify catches the fastest growing types of document fraud, including:
- fully AI-generated documents
- localized AI edits (down to a single modified character)
- patched text, overlays, and in-painting from Photoshop, PDF editors, and coding agents
- digital tampering after a document was signed
- and many more
In our internal evals, Verify detected over 96% of AI-generated and tampered documents.
Verify is available today: extend.ai/verify/request-acc…
Hansen Qian retweeted
Interesting that almost every form of social activity has dropped over the last 30 years except going to concerts. That has increased and probably at a very high record level. Their value rose probably because the alternatives have weakened.
Hansen Qian retweeted
What's crazy about Musk's spending on the midterms is that the amount involved is totally trivial relative to his net worth.
This is like a normal person sending $150 each to three candidates they like.
Hansen Qian retweeted
i didnt get it until i read the github description. oh my god ultrabanger. must read
(cheng. never. misses.)
Hansen Qian retweeted
Fascinating … “Rumors that OpenAI’s “Navier-Stokes” solution stole the work of two mathematicians may have been overblown … When you go to the details, it is a different approach,” says Gonzalo Cao-Labora, a mathematician at EPFL … All said that it’s increasingly clear that the company’s proof does not follow the Spanish program.”
scientificamerican.com/artic…
Hansen Qian retweeted
A new car every three years for wheat intolerance… (also there’s an incredible shot / chaser in the second screenshot).
One in seven new cars sold in the UK is paid for by a disability welfare program wsj.com/world/uk/united-king…
Hansen Qian retweeted
NYC builds the world’s most expensive subways because
(1) the unions pack every tunnel with 4x the workers needed
(2) the MTA digs stations 2x as long as the trains so every department gets its own underground offices
(3) consultants bill 21% of the budget just to manage the waste
Madrid does the same work for $110 million per kilometer. New York charges $2.3 billion.
People’s money disappears into featherbedding, oversized holes, and contractor markups while pretending density is the problem.
Hansen Qian retweeted
I made an interactive map of every farm field in California! Inspired by the @Snapchat map!
All 384k of them: lettuce in Salinas 🥬, cherries in Brentwood 🍒, dates in Coachella 🌴, and 1.6 million acres of almonds 🌰 Zoom into any field and see exactly what's growing there.
I've been obsessed with maps from years of hiking and cycling. Models like Opus 5.5 / Astra making building with them so fun!
Built on public crop data from @CA_DWR.
Click to see growing near you? 👇
Hansen Qian retweeted
Everyone is acting like this is the first time machines mogged mathematicians.
In 1976 they *lost their minds* over the first computer aided proof, quotes via new @PessimistsArc post newsletter.pessimistsarchive…
Hansen Qian retweeted
incredible that mathematicians are now running through the same argument structural chemists were making in the 1950s
