Hacker News: chrischen

New comment by chrischen in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

chrischen — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:22:15 +0000

Whew... reading just the title I thought this was about me having to write code by hand.

New comment by chrischen in "Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%"

chrischen — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 14:20:02 +0000

They've also been making things smaller. Some would argue that it's a cultural thing, but being poor also means you have to start adopting austere cultural habits as a coping mechanism.

New comment by chrischen in "The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies"

chrischen — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:10:03 +0000

If I understand the correctly the initial models were done by scraping the internet off public data. They now probably pay for access, especially to companies that hold the data. Even in the latter case, the content creators probably don't see anything because they signed away their rights using whatever free service they uploaded their work / comment to. In hacker news' case I'm sure some bot is scraping my prose right now and training something with it, which I'm totally fine with because the act of trying to rent seek my 0.00001 cent of value in this post is not worth the detriment to AI advancement.

New comment by chrischen in "The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies"

chrischen — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:08:12 +0000

They already "stole" it. They aren't giving it back and they've established their valuations based off of that. If they start paying now, it's simply going to be impossible for any more upstarts to do this or even release open-weight models because everyone with data will become rent seekers. Imagine if they started off with rent-seekers, we'd simply not have the benefit of these models at all at this point.

New comment by chrischen in "The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies"

chrischen — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:06:32 +0000

This is the same argument people were making about how stealing music was the same as stealing a physical product.

New comment by chrischen in "The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies"

chrischen — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:36:59 +0000

Yes but all the AI companies took all the public data, so when you pay for an AI model you are paying for the marginal service of building a model off that data, not for the data itself. What we should do is ensure that the data is available to more people to train AI models... but sadly this doesn't seem to be happening. Instead AI companies that were first-movers got to train off public data, and as the companies and businesses that own this data get wise they're going to start charging people to train off the data. This will make it much more difficult for anyone to train a model in the future as it will become expensive, and the companies that did happen to already train off public data will get a bit of incumbent's advantage.

New comment by chrischen in "Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore"

chrischen — Mon, 25 May 2026 15:51:48 +0000

One the things I hate about Google is being forced to have location-aware search. I love how Kagi actually lets me override the country.

New comment by chrischen in "Leaving GitHub for Forgejo"

chrischen — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:50:24 +0000

I guess it doesn't matter if they allowed OpenAI to do it or not because it seems other models were allowed to train off it too. I guess we should probably be giving kudos to GitHub and Microsoft for not trying to charge for access to this data.

New comment by chrischen in "Leaving GitHub for Forgejo"

chrischen — Wed, 13 May 2026 15:05:36 +0000

What exactly did they train? Copilot is powered by claude, gemini, or ChatGPT these days.

Did they train autocomplete? I mean the code is open source so anyone can scrape it and train it too. I'm kind of glad they did train it because otherwise we'd still be stuck with Apple level AI models right now.

The whole reason we have so many models, including open weight models, that are all competitive with each other is because the data is free and anyone can be training off it. If the goal was to monetize the source code I guess the authors shouldn't make it open source.

New comment by chrischen in "DeepSeek v4"

chrischen — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:46:03 +0000

The US starts wars… they just often happen to be with dictatorships. The US definitely also supported dictatorships (like Taiwan and South Korea).

You can argue all day about whether A is slightly more rotten than B, but if they are both rotten then in the grand scheme they will both end up being the same thing if something doesn’t get fixed.

New comment by chrischen in "DeepSeek v4"

chrischen — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:45:04 +0000

The US starts wars… they just often happen to be with dictatorships. The US definitely also supported dictatorships (like Taiwan and South Korea).

New comment by chrischen in "DeepSeek v4"

chrischen — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:42:27 +0000

Whether a country massacres its own people is not really a good litmus test since there are countries that treat its own citizens well but foreigners really badly. One such country is… oh the US!

New comment by chrischen in "Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft"

chrischen — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:10:27 +0000

A photo is easy to take but hard to reproduce.

New comment by chrischen in "US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]"

chrischen — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:32:53 +0000

The whole concept of intellectual property rights is a social and legal construct designed to promote innovation in an economy. If you don't care about that, then there really isn't any moral or immoral aspect to it. The immorality of it and associating it with stealing was just MPAA propaganda to try to shame people into paying for stuff.

If I found some DVD lying on the ground and watched it and I didn't pay for it, it's really up to me to decide if I want to pay the creator so they can continue to produce content. If I don't pay then obviously it doesn't help them produce more content... but the consumption of the content itself neither felt nor heard by the creators.

New comment by chrischen in "US Military leaders meet with Anthropic to argue against Claude safeguards"

chrischen — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 06:29:29 +0000

Yesterday I was trying to figure out if my expired nacho dip would be safe to eat and wanted to know how much botulism would be toxic if I ate it and so I asked Claude. It refused to answer that question so I could see how the current safeguards can be limiting.

New comment by chrischen in "Comma openpilot – Open source driver-assistance"

chrischen — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 03:45:31 +0000

It beeps at you if you stop paying attention, which is superior. Hands on wheel is an arbitrary design decision more likely to placate what a layman would think is necessary to ensure safe AI steering.

New comment by chrischen in "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"

chrischen — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 07:12:50 +0000

This doesn't mean that it's over for SO. It just means we'll probably trend towards more quality over quantity. Measuring SO's success by measuring number of questions asked is like measuring code quality by lines of code. Eventually SO would trend down simply by advancements of search technology helping users find existing answers rather than asking new ones. It just so happened that AI advanced made it even better (in terms of not having to need to ask redundant questions).

New comment by chrischen in "I program on the subway"

chrischen — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 08:42:18 +0000

To be fair with the languages I use there are only a finite number of ways a particular line or even function can be implemented due to high level algebraic data structures and strict type checking. Business logic is encoded as data requirements, which is encoded into types, which is enforced by the type checker. Even a non-AI based system can technically be made to fill in the code, but AI system allows this to sort of be generalized across many languages that did not implement auto-complete.

New comment by chrischen in "I program on the subway"

chrischen — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 08:39:41 +0000

Was it the github issues copilot integration? I found that to be slow compared to natively running copilot in the IDE.

New comment by chrischen in "I program on the subway"

chrischen — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 17:14:19 +0000

With coding agents AI almost never manually type code anymore. It would be great to have a code editor that runs on my phone so I can do voice prompts and let the coding agents type stuff for me.