Hacker News: __alexs

New comment by __alexs in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

__alexs — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:15:56 +0000

As a post modernist I must grant you the right to interpret what I wrote however you want to but it feels like you're probably just rage baiting yourself for lulz.

New comment by __alexs in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

__alexs — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:33:33 +0000

Not exactly a problem for cloud gaming.

New comment by __alexs in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

__alexs — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:33:08 +0000

Radical does not just mean untraditional. It can also mean "advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs". Which do you think I meant?

New comment by __alexs in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

__alexs — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:13:58 +0000

Nvidia would have to ship game ready drivers for H100s but it could work.

New comment by __alexs in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

__alexs — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:05:50 +0000

This all comes back to Dualism. A radical and dangerous ideology that is fundamentally unscientific but all too common.

New comment by __alexs in "LLMs Are Closer to Religion Than They Appear"

__alexs — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:51:18 +0000

Basically all op-ed level pieces on AI make me feel like dialectic materialism really needs to make a come back. Public discourse has given up on engaging with the physical constraints of the world in a meaningful way.

New comment by __alexs in "Creatine raises brain energy levels and slows cognitive decline: study"

__alexs — Sun, 31 May 2026 22:51:30 +0000

Also don't smoke or do any of the other things this study didn't control for but do correlate with caffeine consumption in the general population.

New comment by __alexs in "Creatine raises brain energy levels and slows cognitive decline: study"

__alexs — Sun, 31 May 2026 22:48:22 +0000

Alzheimer's has quite high heritability. A family history seems like sufficient explanation.

New comment by __alexs in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

__alexs — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:16:08 +0000

I don't think the unit economics are too terrible. Expensive, but not impossible.

200m knowledge workers in US and EU. Total salary around $15T/year.

$1T/year in token spending is about $5k/year per person. A big number, but not totally mad. That's the low end for office space per person for example. Probably close to the existing SaaS spend per person for a lot of roles.

We are still early in the deployment cycle for these tools so I would expect them to get better and also cheaper too.

New comment by __alexs in "The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't"

__alexs — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:18:04 +0000

I disagree. Lots of people are so laser focussed at only the close to the code aspects of programming they are unable to leverage the enormous increase in scope it can offer them.

There is absolutely room for head count reduction while companies restructure around this.

New comment by __alexs in "Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?"

__alexs — Mon, 18 May 2026 11:05:58 +0000

Photoshop (and many traditional SaaS products) solve hundreds of different use cases. Most users probably only care about a handful of them. You don't need to do every use case to kill SaaS if you have a tool that can allow users to solve their 2-3 use cases on their own with custom tooling.

New comment by __alexs in "I'm going back to writing code by hand"

__alexs — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:11:12 +0000

I read all the code I generate with Cursor and some of it smells a bit weird but is easily fixable and most of it is as good as what I would write or better.

New comment by __alexs in "Phel v0.36.0 – Lisp on PHP, now with numeric tower and first-class Vars"

__alexs — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:56:08 +0000

Culture wars are not worth anyones time participating in. Stop it.

New comment by __alexs in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

__alexs — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:42:42 +0000

The current state of the technology is that you must read at least some of the code, but everyone keeps shipping tools that are focussed on churning out more and more stuff without giving you any affordances to really understand the output.

Claude Code in particular seems really uninterested in this aspect of the problem and I've stopped using entirely because of this.

New comment by __alexs in "Talking to strangers at the gym"

__alexs — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:09:24 +0000

> it's a sort of red pilled book that teaches you how to manipulate people.

This is not an unfair view of the book IMO. While OPs excerpt is lovely, the core of the book is all about getting people to say yes and do things you want them to do.

Carnegie is just so good at this, he's even managed to convince you that he has your best interests at heart by trying to teach you how to do this to people.

New comment by __alexs in "Agent Skills"

__alexs — Tue, 05 May 2026 09:49:16 +0000

I'm sure lots of people felt this way about steam power too.

New comment by __alexs in "The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility"

__alexs — Mon, 04 May 2026 10:17:13 +0000

gemini-cli is not some volunteer maintained open source thing.

Google generally try to be good at accessibility and even publish conformance reports for most of their products https://belonging.google/accessibility-conformance-reports/

New comment by __alexs in "The Road to a Billion-Token Context"

__alexs — Mon, 04 May 2026 10:14:08 +0000

Does having 1 billion tokens mean more total tokens in the context window are actually good quality, or do we just get more dumb tokens?

New comment by __alexs in "Why TUIs are back"

__alexs — Mon, 04 May 2026 08:14:55 +0000

I spent decades using vim and Emacs but having moved to GUIs a few years ago I can't see myself going back.

This whole TUI thing just seems like a fashion trend.

New comment by __alexs in "Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants"

__alexs — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:59:42 +0000

I grew up only a notch or two above poverty, I know what it's like and you can still be a good parent and not well off.