Hacker News: ch4s3

New comment by ch4s3 in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

ch4s3 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:03:44 +0000

My aim isn't cynicism so much as an interest in clear an evidence based information about these systems which are clearly important technological developments for the future. It may turn out that there is something analogous to cognition going on and that would be quite significant and require us to think differently about the technology, but we need to be very sure of something like that.

> Therefore I find Anthropic's uncertainty, and careful, caring investigative process, well grounded given the evidence.

I'm inclined to agree mostly, but from the outside its impossible to separate marketing, belief, scientific inquiry, and just plain enthusiasm. Its all to opaque.

New comment by ch4s3 in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

ch4s3 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:53:16 +0000

I'm saying that the burden of proof is on Chris Olah.

New comment by ch4s3 in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

ch4s3 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:12:11 +0000

This is an incredibly strong claim and I’ve never seen any particularly strong evidence for them beyond “trust me, I’ve seen into the abyss.”

New comment by ch4s3 in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

ch4s3 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:19:21 +0000

It means that the types are built on unions, intersections, and negations[1]. It's a polymorphic type system with inference at the function level. It also does some type narrowing with pattern matching.

[1] https://www.irif.fr/_media/users/gduboc/elixir-types.pdf

New comment by ch4s3 in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

ch4s3 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 02:05:34 +0000

Claude seems to work well.

New comment by ch4s3 in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

ch4s3 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:05:41 +0000

I've used it, but I've very rarely needed to do so.

New comment by ch4s3 in "Elixir v1.20 released: now a gradually typed language"

ch4s3 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:48:23 +0000

> Elixir gives you too much freedom on how to write something on a syntax level

This is true perhaps compared to python or go, but not compared to Java, JS/TS, or some others.

> socket "/ws/:user_id", MyApp.UserSocket, websocket: [path: "/project/:project_id"]

Socket is a behavior, which is like a trait or interface. MyAppWeb.UserSocket implements the behavior. It's basically a convenience over having to write a bunch of repetitive WS or long poll handling every time you want a socket like thing. Its pretty well documented https://phoenix.hexdocs.pm/Phoenix.Socket.html.

New comment by ch4s3 in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

ch4s3 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:37:10 +0000

This is great, and it looks like 1.20 is compiling our large umbrella app quite a bit faster.

New comment by ch4s3 in "Elixir v1.20 released: now a gradually typed language"

ch4s3 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:35:04 +0000

> whether you understand the answers is a whole different story.

You can always ask follow up questions for clarification, people there are generally really friendly.

New comment by ch4s3 in "OpenAI frontier models and Codex are now available on AWS"

ch4s3 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:33:16 +0000

Any sufficiently large company will be prepared to fight this out in court where Amazon would eventually lose.

New comment by ch4s3 in "Florida sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over AI risks"

ch4s3 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 22:02:48 +0000

It was 18 years ago, and I did point out other metrics to support my case.

New comment by ch4s3 in "Florida sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over AI risks"

ch4s3 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:19:47 +0000

Not really anymore. The house seats are 20R and 8D, they haven't voted blue for president since Obama, and haven't elected a democrat as governor since the 90s. Voter registration is also heavily skewed republican.

New comment by ch4s3 in "Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success"

ch4s3 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:23:06 +0000

Consider this critique of his claims https://csanr.wsu.edu/regen-ag-solid-principles-extraordinar...

New comment by ch4s3 in "Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC"

ch4s3 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:06:11 +0000

I'm curious to know if they generated this with Claude and what the prompt looked like.

New comment by ch4s3 in "Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success"

ch4s3 — Wed, 27 May 2026 03:07:19 +0000

In Smil’s book? There’s tons of foot notes.

There’s just not compelling evidence for your claim comparing the same varieties, the research exists.

New comment by ch4s3 in "Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success"

ch4s3 — Wed, 27 May 2026 03:05:10 +0000

I referenced one book. I grew up on a farm, I’ve read a number of books, and I garden.

Thanks for condescending.

New comment by ch4s3 in "From Rust to Ruby"

ch4s3 — Wed, 27 May 2026 02:33:09 +0000

I get a similar feeling from Elixir and Phoenix without the method_missing foot gun.

New comment by ch4s3 in "'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused"

ch4s3 — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:09:43 +0000

Allbirds sold their shoe business and is basically a SPAC that spun up an AI company under the existing publicly traded company. For all intents and purposes it’s just a new AI company.

New comment by ch4s3 in "Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success"

ch4s3 — Fri, 22 May 2026 21:01:24 +0000

That doesn’t mean the food is more nutritious.

New comment by ch4s3 in "Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success"

ch4s3 — Fri, 22 May 2026 21:00:50 +0000

> healthier more nutritious plants

No data I’ve seen supports that claim. In fact Vaclav Smil’s book “How to Feed the World” collects a lot of data refuting this claim.

> producing dead soil

If less land needs to be under cultivation this doesn’t matter. You can rewind or reforest old disused agricultural land.