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Conlectus

732 karma · joined September 25, 2013

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Conlectus··on macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
I recommend reading more than the first two clauses of the above comment.
Conlectus··on Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC
There’s a specific downside to LLM-based development that people can get neck deep in a new project without interfacing with the existing work in the field.

In this case, this is basically a poorly specified implementation of half of XMPP. Of course, I half expect the LLM would have mentioned that at some point, but the repository does not.

Conlectus··on What About Rails?
They also say that this is “just a courtesy” and not to rely on it.
Conlectus··on I made a build visualizer to understand Bun's compile times
This is just how hacker news is now, huh?

“I did this cool useful thing”

“Great! Please describe how I can get a machine to replace you.”

Conlectus··on Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code
That’s the ideal, but if you have the person at the keyboard doing too much of the planning then it’s really easy for the other person to just check out mentally.
Conlectus··on Bug Blindness
For what it’s worth, the author would not consider this a bug. He does it (as I understand) because he distrusts the research on the impact of line length on readability.
Conlectus··on Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons
The thing that everyone always misses in these conversations is that screens over buttons is a cost cutting measure, not a first-principles design decision.

It means the UI can be designed and developed mostly independently of the physical controls, which helps reduce rework. I also expect it reduces costs for manufacture and assembly.

I’m in favour of more physical controls, but it surprises me that this rarely comes up. I suppose “people are idiots” is a more appealing explanation.

Conlectus··on You did this with an AI and you do not understand what you're doing here
The idea that Builder.ai was Indian workers being sold as AI wasn’t true, by the way. That was made up by a crypto influencer on twitter and copied by sloppy news sites. They were a consulting firm that also sold an AI product, with the two clearly separated.
Conlectus··on Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
I’m not sure if this is the point you mean to make, but Michio Kanu is one of the bigger cranks in physics communication. He said ion an (maybe the Joe Rigan interview?) that quantum computers would be able to act as a truth detector for AI. He wrote a whole book on quantum computing in fact despite clearly not understanding it at all[0].

[0]: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7321

Conlectus··on Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first
There are dozens of us. Dozens!
Conlectus··on Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first
DCOs only document that the contributor has the right to contribute the code, not the license under which they contribute it. CLAs do both.
Conlectus··on Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first
Good catch on the license in that file. I went by separate documents in the repo that said the source is available “under the licenses documented in the repository”, and took that to mean at-choice use of the license files that were included.

I think the caveat to the claim that CLAs are only useful for rug pulls still important, but this is a case where it is indeed a relevant thing to consider.

Conlectus··on Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first
I’m not sure where this belief came from, or why the people who believe it feel so strongly about it, but this is not generally true.

With the exception of GPL derivatives, most popular licenses such as MIT already include provisions allowing you to relicense or create derivative works as desired. So even if you follow the supposed norm that without an explicit license agreement all open source contributions should be understood to be licensed by contributors under the same terms as the license of the project, this would still allow the project owners to “rug pull” (create a fork under another license) using those contributions.

But given that Zed appears to make their source available under the Apache 2.0 license, the GPL exception wouldn’t apply.

Conlectus··on Xenon is an open source universal game cheating framework C++
Don’t make tools for cheating at games against real people. It’s antisocial.

—-

Cheating at games is antisocial. This means it is a behaviour that leads to a worse experience for a community of people to the benefit of those breaking the norms. For example, theft is antisocial.

I consider tools that make are dedicated to making antisocial behaviour easier to carry the same moral weight as the antisocial activity itself. Therefore I consider this tool to be antisocial, as is its creation.

Do you have an intent for this that doesn’t involve that antisocial behaviour, such as research or debugging? Or was that your intent?

Edit: Added elaboration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour

Conlectus··on The Origins of Wokeness
Lobste.rs
Conlectus··on Researchers accurately dating a 7k-year-old settlement using cosmic rays
At first I was a bit confused why this was a big deal given that Cosmogenic Radionuclide Dating[1] (which is based on cosmic rays) has been a thing for a while. But it turns out this uses an entirely different cosmogenic method based on atmospheric carbon (combined with Dendochronology from the tree rings). Very cool!

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_exposure_dating

Conlectus··on Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain
Isn’t ReLU an element of neuroscience that was incorporated into machine learning to great success?
Conlectus··on Cult of the Dead Cow – Veilid (2023)
Raw HTML: potentially. Big blocks of undifferentiated ASCII art: no.
Conlectus··on Wasmer JavaScript SDK
In my experience Wasmer is generally disliked by the rest of the WASM community. There’s a long list of reasons for this, including attempting to copyright the term WASM and pushing their own proprietary specs and calling them “standards” while not implementing existing standards.

Their main benefit, from what I can tell, is their “retargetable” compiler architecture, but Wasmtime is improving here as well. Wasmtime is also generally faster at implementing standards.

Conlectus··on ModHeader Is Now Spyware
As of a few hours ago, ModHeader started injecting a script into every page that tracks browsing activity. It also injects ads into Google Search and may be capable of remote tab capture and JS execution.
Conlectus··on Illustrated A64 SIMD Instruction List: SVE Instructions
Scaleable Vector Extension. A class of SIMD instructions.
Conlectus··on Www which WASM works
From what I can tell the issue here is that the author has produced a WASM module with minified dynamic dependencies. This is not an issue with the runtimes but with the earlier compilation toolchain.

In another thread it was suggested that Emscripten was used, but its runtime wasn’t provided.

Conlectus··on Hutter Prize for compressing human knowledge
Perhaps because they include metrics for compression time, which could easily be gamed by doing significant precomputation in the compressor?
Conlectus··on How could the early Unix OS comprise so few lines of code?
If you’ve read any of the code you’ll also know that early Unix was full of security vulnerabilities. Eg. Statically allocating fixed buffers and not checking input sizes.

I’m all for appreciating simplicity, but let’s not pretend we haven’t progressed since then.

Conlectus··on X plans to collect biometric data, job and school history
Those are separate questions. Is Google forced on people by the US Govt?
Conlectus··on Mini – The Minimal Language
I note that with a vocabulary of 1,000 words it is roughly 10x the size of Toki Pona, a conlang which also aims for minimalism.

That said, Toki Pona's goal is to help clarify thought, whereas this seems to intend to prioritize communication more highly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona

Conlectus··on Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?
For what its worth, I used to say the same thing. Now I have glasses for astigmatism.
Conlectus··on Go 1.21 will (likely) have a static toolchain on Linux
Algebraic data types (more technically sum types) are very much not “PhD level concepts”, despite the name. They’re just what C developers would call “tagged unions”.
Conlectus··on Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”
Among others:

"Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't."

Conlectus··on Performance comparison: counting words in Python, C/C++, Awk, Rust, and more
What happens when the ASCII character for space is embedded within a multibyte UTF-8 codepoint?
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