Econ-Flavored on Andrew Quinn's TILs

Claude Mythos and the EU Cyber Resilience Act

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As of writing this I can find no Hacker News comments containing both the words “mythos” and “CRA”, which suggests I might have a first-mover advantage in writing something interesting. At last!

Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview on 2026-04-07. Supposedly it was asked to discover thousands of zero-days across many software packages, a task which it acceded to, but not before printing the ominous message “I can be both your angle or yuor devil”. This scared them so they made the model VIP only. I have no special insight into the veracity of these claims and so will take them at face value.

Incentivize grandchildren by writing them into your will

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of economics-inspired solutions to otherwise hard problems. The other day I happened across an old post by GMU economist Bryan Caplan which I think does this very elegantly, for a problem of some interest to me.

The vast majority of wills evenly divide the residuary estate between children. Mine evenly divides the residuary estate between (children and grandchildren).

I like this a lot. It makes it unambiguously clear where your priorities in the case of your untimely demise lie. It is also self-reinforcing; children of yours who have no children themselves will recieve less, but when it comes time to write their own wills, they won’t have any children or grandchildren to bequeath to anyway. Children of yours who have many children themselves, perhaps inspired by this very policy, might decide in the end they were duped - but it seems far more likely to me they’ll cite it as one of the biggest reasons they ultimately went for 4 instead of 3, or 2 instead of 1, or 1 instead of none. After seeing it work in practice on themselves, they might decide they want to incentivize bringing their own grandchildren into being in kind.

The second wave of spaced repetition apps

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Spaced repetition has been around for a long time. If you’ve never heard the term before, it’s best described as flashcards on timers. an algorithm such as SM-2 or the more recent FSRS keeps track of how you did on the flashcard, makes a guess as to how long it could possibly wait to show you the flashcard again before you below, say, a 90% chance of getting it right the next time, and then schedules the flashcard for a new day.

Vibe coding and complementary goods

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Peanut butter and jelly are complementary goods, as are cars and gasoline, newer cars and electricity, electricity and basically everything else.

We don’t normally think of, say, Docker and Kubernetes as complementary goods in software engineering, because you can get both for the low price of free. Or can you? You still have to invest time in learning both, and as the famous saying goes…

Say it takes X hours to learn Docker adequately. If Docker suddenly becomes easier to learn, such that it now takes only X / 2 hours, it’s reasonable to assume Kubernetes will become more popular in tandem, because one of its complements now costs less and is hence supplied in greater quantities anyway. You don’t want a peanut butter only sandwich, do you?

Enforce GPL compliance by offering bounties?

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Epistemic status: Very unclear, also I Am Not A Lawyer This Is Not Legal Advice Get Off My Lawn

(N.B.: I"m using “GPL” with broad strokes here, to point at “open source licenses it’s straightforward to run afoul of”.)

Policing is always hard in a world of limited resources. Especially when one is targeting sophisticated, well-monied criminal organizations, it can take an awful lot of time and effort merely to credibly reveal that wrongdoing has taken place. Would it surprise you if I said the average criminal software organization is probably, on the margin, more sophisticated than the average criminal organization? If so, you should probably expect that the former’s crimes are brought to life even less often than the latter’s.

The self-hosted to DevOps engineer pipeline

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What’s the best way to get a job? Show someone with a job to do that you can do the job within their iron triangle. What’s the best way you can show someone you can handle a complicated k8s deployment, with 7 different CNCF-approved add-ons, zero-downtime rollouts and a whole bunch of YAML files? Probably by competently and publicly running your own complicated k8s infrastructure.

Self-hosters remind me a lot of the sysadmins of yore, who mostly ended up in the profession because they just couldn’t help but mess around with their underlying computing machine until they knew all kinds of weird nooks and crannies within it. I trace my own lineage in software deveopment back to the day my parents finally purchased a Dell laptop and a 300 Kbps Internet connection (residential wiring in Boston left something to be desired), and promptly broke the Windows registry and installed Ubuntu without them ever realizing anything had changed. The next year I got my first internship through a high school program as a Unix admin intern at Akamai, and the rest is history.

Software engineers as mental athletes

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week I achieved a modest personal dream of mine I’ve had since I was a high schooler: I purchased a proper standing desk, with a low-profile treadmill underneath.

The total cost for a setup here in Finland came out to only about $350, something I can easily afford with a week’s take-home pay. The primary hurdle for me was psychological: How could I justify spending so much money on a more ergonomic setup when I’m not even sure this whole “software engineering” thing will work out for me? Nevermind that I taught myself to program at 14 from a Civ 4 hacking tutorial, nevermind that I’ve been living my life as a budget cyborg for the last 15 years, nevermind that every job I’ve ever had post-college has been at least 60% WFH – how could I be sure this investment in my home office will pay itself back?

Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions.

The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the app. You’re 80% sure you know how to handle the infra you’ll need to get it online. And you’re 70% sure you know how to get your first customer. What is your chance of successfully going from zero to first customer? 0.9 * 0.8 * 0.7 = a little over 0.5. That’s … a lot less encouraging than any of the previous numbers, if you buy my multi-step modelling.

Most "life lessons" you hear are about scaling back

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I

Robert Anton Wilson was, is, and always will be a fascinating and hiliarious writer to me. I first read The Illuminatus! Trilogy when I was 13, and while it was coincident with a total and suffocating blackout of meaning, I no longer think reading it actually caused that to happen in any significant sense. Au contraire: Teen me found refuge in his absurdity - it felt bedrock nihilstic, sure, but a far more artfully and deeply buried nihilism than I was able to find elsewhere at the time. (My words, not his. RAW wouldn’t describe himself as anywhere close to a nihilist. I think the glove fits.)

Beware those who promise increasing marginal returns

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The law of diminishing returns needs no introduction. Your second slice of pizza is less satisfying than your first. Your second million dollars is less valuable to you, personally. If you think econ 101 has any life wisdom to impart, it deserves being elevated to the status of “life heuristic” - especially because, unlike some other concepts in econ 101 (comparative advantage anyone?) it feels true in a boring way, not in an actively counterintuitive way.