Hacker News: ChaitanyaSai

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "I've been waiting over a month for Anthropic to respond to my billing issue"

ChaitanyaSai — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 04:02:56 +0000

It's been more than a year for us in India. We've resorted to using openrouter. How is Mythos or whatever their latest is not realizing that this is a priority - customers WANT to pay you and cannot!

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

ChaitanyaSai — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:50:06 +0000

Here's my armchair two cents: Whoever it is, has to be British. The language is unmistakeably British or Commonwealth. It's likely him. I'd wager if there was a polymarket bet. But I also feel for him. Does this make him a target for both half-wit criminials and rogue nation states?

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era"

ChaitanyaSai — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:14:55 +0000

I am sorry but perhaps some use of AI or grammar-check would help? A lawn that's not overly manicured has its charm, but if it has one too many barren patches of clumps of overgrown grass, it doesn't appeal as much? This essay feels a bit like that.

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

ChaitanyaSai — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 07:28:24 +0000

Huh wow just noticing it. That was definitely my own writing. Kinda sad I failed the captcha

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "Regular army and reserve components enlistment program: Summary of change"

ChaitanyaSai — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:37:20 +0000

I thought you were joking about the date! They actually picked that one :)

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

ChaitanyaSai — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 02:34:32 +0000

AI has made it easier for me not to worry about how pretty or polished my comments are. What used to be a sign you cared has now been devalued nearly completely by AI. This is freeing and allows me to think about the substance. I still do read it, but don't care too much about the typos. It's now a a proud badge for artisanal thinking!

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "Show HN: DenchClaw – Local CRM on Top of OpenClaw"

ChaitanyaSai — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:21:51 +0000

Ah, that makes a lot of sense!

(Do not use imessage, a Whatsapp user, and we can access that through the browser, which means you can plug it into an extension)

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "Show HN: DenchClaw – Local CRM on Top of OpenClaw"

ChaitanyaSai — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:02:25 +0000

Question: Why do people want to do this with their mac mini? Can you not do all of this with a hosted VM instance? A mic mini makes it easier for people to set up? Everything still has to talk to data on the cloud right?

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model"

ChaitanyaSai — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:13:26 +0000

Agree. But there are some use-cases where images can still be of huge help. Making textbooks come alive for instance. We are trying to do that and make a whole bunch of Indian textbooks into comics and free for students. (zerobyheart.com if anyone's interested and would like to make suggestions; the panel-to-panel continuity is still off and something we are working on )

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”"

ChaitanyaSai — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 06:36:05 +0000

The whole next word thing is interesting isn't it. I like to see it with Dennett's "Competence and comprehension" lens. You can predict the next word competently with shallow understanding. But you could also do it well with understanding or comprehension of the full picture. A mental model that allows you to predict better. Are the AIs stumbling into these mental models? Seems like it. However, because these are such black boxes, we do not know how they are stringing these mental models together. Is it a random pick from 10 models built up inside the weights? Is there any system-wide cohesive understanding, whatever that means? Exploring what a model can articualate using self-reflection would be interesting. Can it point to internal cognitive dissonance because it has been fed both evolution and intelligent design, for example? Or these exist as separate models to invoke depending on the prompt context, because all that matters is being rewarded by the current user?

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]"

ChaitanyaSai — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:01:05 +0000

Fascinating read! And very interesting in the light of recent advances in AI to think about what makes this ability possible. How far can we go with increasing long-term memory and working memory? Does increasing comprehension follow with competence?

Long-term retention is is hard when encountering new symbols. He seemed quite comfortable at that age absorbing the new stuff and manipulating it. Where does that comfort come from? Is there a way to test that explicitly? Finally, there is the ability to take the new and use it well. What about creating new shorthand? Being able to divine hidden patterns and articulate them?

Ramunujam seems to have had this.

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use"

ChaitanyaSai — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:12:21 +0000

OK I hope someone from anthropic reads this. Your API billing makes it really hard to work with it in India. We've had to switch to openrouter because anthropic keeps rejecting all the cards we have tried. And these are major Indian banks. This has been going on for MONTHS

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "I miss thinking hard"

ChaitanyaSai — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 04:31:55 +0000

I miss the thrill of running through the semi-parched grasslands and the heady mix of terror triumph and trepidation as we close in on our meal for the week.

What balance bikes teach us about learning

ChaitanyaSai — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 13:14:32 +0000

Article URL: https://saigaddam.medium.com/what-balance-bikes-teach-us-about-learning-33b6f6c87016

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45899738

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

What Balance Bikes Teach Us About Learning

ChaitanyaSai — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 12:17:01 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.comini.in/p/what-balance-bikes-teach-us-about

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45886439

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "'World Models,' an old idea in AI, mount a comeback"

ChaitanyaSai — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:44:17 +0000

Interesting! Documenting this anywhere?

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "What brain surgery taught me about the fragile gift of consciousness"

ChaitanyaSai — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 07:01:01 +0000

Yup, it's the short sentence cadence.

"And yet, hours before surgery, with death still in the room, I didn’t feel fear. I felt something quieter. Stranger. I felt connected. To her eyes. To my breath. To the weight of my feet against the floor. To the wind brushing the window."

The usage of these short sentences (which, people do use, but sparingly) is a good marker. My hunch is this is because of how they call attention to themselves and are rewarded by human RLHF participants. I don't know if incentives including spending time on essays like this but if they don't and the rater is trying to do a speed-read, these stand out.

Have written about other markers here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/it-isnt-just-x-it-s-y-54cb403d6...

One along those lines: "Not just that we think. But that we feel. That we can marvel. That we can sit in silence across from someone we love and feel time slow down and become something."

Writing is a superpower in this AI age

ChaitanyaSai — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 06:53:18 +0000

Article URL: https://learn.betterschooling.in/p/writing-is-a-superpower-in-this-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461803

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

The Flynn Effect tells us we have been getting education all wrong

ChaitanyaSai — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 12:23:55 +0000

Article URL: https://betterschooling.in/collection/the-flynn-effect-tells-us-we-have-been-getting-education-all-wrong

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44223752

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ChaitanyaSai in "What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours"

ChaitanyaSai — Thu, 29 May 2025 04:42:52 +0000

As brains get bigger, you get more compute, but you have to solve the "commute" problem. Messages have to be passed from one corner to the other, and fast. And there are so many input signals coming in (for us, likely from thirty trillion cells, or at least a significant fraction of those). Not all are worth transporting to other corners. Imagine a little tickle on your toe. Should that be passed on? Usually no, unless you are in an area with creepy crawlies, and other such situation. So decisions have to made. But who will make these decisions for us? (Fascinating inevitably recursive question we'll come back to)

This commute is pretty much ignored when making artificial brains which can guzzle energy, but matters criticallyfor biological brains. It needs to be (metabolically) cheap, and fast. What we perceive as a consciousness is very likely a consensus mechanism that helps a 100 billion neurons collectively decide, at a very biologically cheap price, what data is worth transporting to all corners for it to become meaningful information. And it has to be recursive, because these very same 100 billion neurons are collectively making up meaning along the way. This face matters to me, that does not, and so on. Replace face with anything and everything we encounter. So to solve the commute problem resulting from a vast amount of compute, we have a consensus mechanism that gives rise to a collective. That is the I, and the consensus mechanism is consciousness

We explore this (but not in these words) in our book Journey of the Mind.

You'll find that no other consciousness model talks about the "commute" problem because these are simply not biologically constrained models. They just assume that some information processing, message passing will be done in some black box. Trying to get all this done with the same type of compute (cortical columns, for instance) is a devilishly hard challenge (please see the last link for more about this). You sweep that under the rug, consciousness becomes this miraculous and seemingly unnecessary thing that somehow sits on top of information processing. So you then have theorists worry about philosophical zombies and whatnot. Because the hard engineering problem of commute was entirely ignored.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60500189-journey-of-t...

https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...

https://saigaddam.medium.com/conscious-is-simple-and-ai-can-...

https://saigaddam.medium.com/the-greatest-neuroscientist-you...