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chrischen

11,581 karma · joined August 7, 2009

Founder of Instapainting.com chris@instapainting.com

YC Winter 2011

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/notchrischen; my proof: https://keybase.io/notchrischen/sigs/h5vpKspt8FRZESGwtNyv3ZKbfddR7J5V0NDWXJistyM ]

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chrischen··on Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120K
The line between vibe coding and just coding has now moved. Vibe coding is specifically when the output is not understood by the prompter. Even in the back in the days of the earlier models i used the models to do my basic typing because it was easier than me typing it out…
chrischen··on Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
The Gen AIs are doing the search for people. So hopefully this forces google to switch their business model from manipulative ads against human users to just charging for API access for Gen AI models.
chrischen··on iPhone Duo
Apple tv was a miss as well for like 4 generations.
chrischen··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
Yea i've been frequently, and maybe last year being the most recent. There's definitely been a revolution in development but in my opinion public toilets are probably the least revolutionized out of everything in China.
chrischen··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
China, clean?? Some of the worst toilets, public or private, I've encountered in China. Can't say how Europe compares but I'd rank China a distant last amongst Australia, Vietnam, Japan, America, Canada, and South Korea (there's more countries to fit in there but I'm not going to list them all).
chrischen··on Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
To be fair, closing the straight of hormuz has probably put a dent in carbon emissions.
chrischen··on Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library
I've been using Resgraph, but it's based off Rescript, a fork of ocaml.
chrischen··on Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library
Curious how this compares to Melange which is used by Ocaml shops as well to double up on Ocaml for both front and backend (ahrefs being the major user and sponsor). Does this mean giving up a lot of the JS ecosystem (React, graphql, etc)?
chrischen··on Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
This is the workflow that Vs Code Copilot does. All the AI generated code changes are in a git worktree and you can step through them all. This is what I missed after Claude forced third parties to start charging API pricing and now I have to use Claude directly and I have to do this same review process in a clunkier way via my git client.
chrischen··on Writing by hand is good for your brain
Whew... reading just the title I thought this was about me having to write code by hand.
chrischen··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
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.
chrischen··on The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
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.
chrischen··on The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
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.
chrischen··on The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
This is the same argument people were making about how stealing music was the same as stealing a physical product.
chrischen··on The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
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.
chrischen··on Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
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.
chrischen··on Leaving GitHub for Forgejo
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.
chrischen··on Leaving GitHub for Forgejo
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.

chrischen··on DeepSeek v4
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.

chrischen··on DeepSeek v4
The US starts wars… they just often happen to be with dictatorships. The US definitely also supported dictatorships (like Taiwan and South Korea).
chrischen··on DeepSeek v4
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!
chrischen··on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
A photo is easy to take but hard to reproduce.
chrischen··on US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]
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.

chrischen··on US Military leaders meet with Anthropic to argue against Claude safeguards
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.
chrischen··on Comma openpilot – Open source driver-assistance
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.
chrischen··on Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
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).
chrischen··on I program on the subway
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.
chrischen··on I program on the subway
Was it the github issues copilot integration? I found that to be slow compared to natively running copilot in the IDE.
chrischen··on I program on the subway
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.
chrischen··on The "confident idiot" problem: Why AI needs hard rules, not vibe checks
I also try to do verbose type classes using Ocaml's module system and it's been handling these patterns pretty well. My guess is there is probably good documentation / training data in there for these patterns since they are well documented. I haven't actually used coding agents with Haskell yet so it's possible that Ocaml's verbosity helps the agent.
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