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IggleSniggle

4,274 karma · joined April 8, 2018

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IggleSniggle··on LLM Honeypot
Streaming HTML and Transfer-Encoding: chunked have existed since 1999 at least. I don't actually care about this argument one way or the other, but you can continue updating the site with HTML/CSS indefinitely, zero js required, simply by never completing page load.
IggleSniggle··on AI Is a Bad Tool
Depends on the writer.
IggleSniggle··on AI is a bad tool
Speaking only for myself, I _love_ coding. But I haven't done refactoring by applying a needle (with a steady hand) to a roll of magnetic tape in _YEARS_ /snark.

I love monkey-patching some python or js. But never have I ever suggested that anyone would should do it. Writing everything in Haskell sounds lovely but I wouldn't advise that either.

I honestly don't care what language I'm writing in. LLMs bring us back to the smalltalk days: your code is data and your data is code. LLMs bring a translation layer so that even if you're writing some high-level language, some DSL that exists only on some 1-off platform that no one else is aware of, _everybody_ has access to a self-bootstrapping codebase.

I feel more empowered to _code_ than ever: now, every single input carries semantic weight that gets carried through the "compiler." Every claim of determinism can much more easily be fuzz-tested and made more robust. "'sup, this broke, fix yo" and "Would you be so kind as to fix this error?" contain semantic context that actually affects the output of the generated code. That restores empowerment around code _authorship_ while still preserving the guarantees we want from the published artifact.

"Deep understanding" doesn't disappear when you gain the ability to be more expressive. "Deep understanding" disappears when people become incurious.

IggleSniggle··on Half-Baked Product
I loved it. It was cathartic to read, too. It's really a rather short story. There's no accounting for taste.
IggleSniggle··on What the Fuck Happened to Nerds
Back in those times we made a distinction between nerds and geeks, with geeks really being a sort of subset of nerds that was just interested in the technicals.
IggleSniggle··on I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
Some artists use a brush, but others use a chisel.

And then there's the bullshit artists.

Just because we never had the option of a chisel before doesn't mean all chiselers are bullshit artists.

IggleSniggle··on Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
I apologize. I didn't mean to suggest it is a super power, and it has also been a struggle in my life. I find it useful to frame this way because the struggle is not only because of the way that I am, but also because of the way everyone else is. I'm not asking anyone to change on my behalf, but it took me a long time to accept myself as I am. It took me a long time to accept that I didn't need to change for the benefit of everyone else.
IggleSniggle··on Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
For me, one of the big improvements is the ability to legitimately work via text message. That probably sounds dystopian in a bunch of ways to some people. But there are times that I want to work, but couldn't, previously.

Now I can work from wherever, whenever, by speaking into my headphones, and have it persist. Sure, I want to be in front of a screen to do final syntax review, but I don't mind planning out architecture and guiding an LLM towards a cohesive result while going for a walk or jog. That's just not a workflow that would have been viable 3 years ago.

IggleSniggle··on Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
I always thought of myself as merely ADD, but your comment is so incredibly relatable across all dimensions that I find myself wondering how far along the autism spectrum I am. Although, in my personal opinion, neither term is especially helpful: it's not a sensory/executive processing disorder if it's clearly benefiting both yourself and the people around you. It might make being sociable difficult, but that's the tradeoff for being willing to engage your mind in ways that others filter out as "too much information."
IggleSniggle··on MCP is dead?
They are building them because they can ask an AI to spin it up. They could have asked it to spin up the public API just as easily. The MCP choice is a fashion choice vs an openapi spec with similar documentation (or any number of other human+machine readable tooling). It might accidentally win or accidentally lose just because of the timing / network effects.
IggleSniggle··on MCP is dead?
Right; isn't this already captured by an openapi spec with RBACs? Plus the benefit that your ai agent can keep using all the pre-AI tools that already interface with those specs. What is MCP bringing that an openapi spec doesn't?
IggleSniggle··on Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust
Source?
IggleSniggle··on A couple million lines of Haskell: Production engineering at Mercury
Caveat emptor, I'm not a Haskeller, just an admirer. But Haskell let's you run functions over the type system itself very elegantly, so you can have a type that is derived from a type that composes three types that are derived from several functions' declared runtime behavior. This kind of type inference can provide arbitrarily rich information about anything in the entire program, letting you encode more than just range-types etc at compile time.

This comes with some design drawbacks. I think Rust's borrow checker would be implementable but unreasonable in Haskell: Haskell already does lazy-evaluation on types to enable its arbitrary depth of type expressivity. But the borrow checker also wouldn't really make sense for Haskell because the default programming model uses a GC. I think Linear Haskell might be a kind of Rust-in-Haskell, though.

Again, caveat emptor.

IggleSniggle··on Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?
Great story thanks for sharing
IggleSniggle··on Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild
Depends. Within the US, there are data export laws that could make the "whoever" part illegal. There are also conspiracy to commit a crime laws that could imply liability. There are also laws that could make performing/demonstrating certain exploits illegal, even if divulging it isn't. That could result in some legal gray area. IANAL but have worked in this domain. Obviously different jurisdictions may handle such issues differently from one another.
IggleSniggle··on Jellyfin LLM/"AI" Development Policy
What do you recommend if I've been regularly producing blog-length posts in Slack for years, no LLM present? It's where I write man...should I quit that out? I try to be information dense...
IggleSniggle··on Jellyfin LLM/"AI" Development Policy
To me, you are describing a fluency problem. I don't know you or how fluent you are in code, but what you have described is the case where I have no problem with LLMs: translating from a native language to some other language.

If you are using LLMs to precisely translate a set of requirements into code, I don't really see a problem with that. If you are using LLMs to generate code that "does something" and you don't really understand what you were asking for nor how to evaluate whether the code produced matched what you wanted, then I have a very big problem with that for the same reasons you outline around prose: did you actually mean to say what you eventually said?

Of course something will get lost in any translation, but that's also true of translating your intent from brain to language in the first place, so I think affordances can be made.

IggleSniggle··on What happened to WebAssembly
Totally agree on js, but it doesn't have the same easy same-language comparison that you get from compiled Lua vs LuaJIT. Although I suppose you could pre-compile JavaScript to a binary with eg QuickJS but I don't think this is as apples-to-apples comparison as compiled Lua to LuaJIT.
IggleSniggle··on When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe
I think it's worth remembering that this was a storage procedure that was also already abnormal/odd because of the specifics of the existing shielding. I think it's somewhat understandable for a technician to trust that the chemists know what they're doing in that kind of circumstance. If they had concerns, they may have even voiced them, but as is often the case, if the authority confirms that even though it's strange it's correct, it's not surprising that a technician would follow the directive. Even the authority figure may have verbally confirmed, "you said an organic absorbent??" "Yes, that's right, inorganic absorbent." Maybe even in a meeting that was meant to clarify written procedures.
IggleSniggle··on What happened to WebAssembly
Compiled Lua vs LuaJIT is a major example imho, but maybe it's not especially pertinent given the looseness of the Lua language. I do think it demonstrates that the concept that it is possible to have a tighter type-system at runtime than at compile time (that can in turn result in real performant benefits) is a sound concept, however.
IggleSniggle··on 65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform
I simply choose to believe that people do this out of a place of genuine curiosity / excitement to share knowledge. I believe this approach of assuming the best of intentions is even in the HN guidelines! Or maybe it was just the old Reddit ones from long long ago when Reddit was more like what HN is now. Either way, maintaining the background assumption, even when it is challenging to do so, makes HN a far more pleasant place to inhabit.
IggleSniggle··on Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings
In the broadest sense of the word, aliasing refers to a problem where an insufficient number of samples create a misrepresentation of an intended signal source. I was being a bit poetic, because in graphics programming, where the term "antialiasing" is most often encountered by lay audiences, antialiasing generally refers to X/Y sampling coordinate correction rather than representations across time. It's not usually considered a major issue in vision, because our brains naturally fill in the gaps pretty easily across time for motion (they already naturally do this for eg blinking, you don't see your eyelids when you blink). So usually antialiasing across time is only an issue in audio domains for the layperson, where a misrepresentation of a sample might be perceived as an entirely different pitch, since our ears need >40k samples per second (for accurate high pitches) vs the 24 samples per second that we are accustomed to getting in old fashioned film. When our eyes "miss" a frame or two, our brain is happy to fill in the gaps, ie "antialiasing."

Edit: to clarify, I'm suggesting that some people might prefer to let their brains "fill in the missing frames" rather than see the extra frames shown explicitly. For example, you might be more likely to notice visual tearing at 60Hz than you are to take note of visual tearing at 24Hz when you're already accustomed to filling in the missing pieces, or to a greater extreme, across two panels of a comic strip portraying motion.

IggleSniggle··on Netflix Open Content
But they said it sends them to Netfçix? That seems incorrect
IggleSniggle··on Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings
Just because someone has different taste doesn't make it bad taste. Books have lower resolution still, and they evoke far greater imaginative leaps. For me, the magic lies in what is not shown; it helps aid the suspension of disbelief by requiring you imagination to do more work filling in the gaps.

I'm an avid video game player, and while FPS and sports-adjacent games demand high framerates, I'm perfectly happy turning my render rates down to 40Hz or 30Hz on many games simply to conserve power. I generally prefer my own brain's antialiasing, I guess.

IggleSniggle··on Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
That's good, because the "O" should never be dotted. You use slash OR dot for zero, unless you vaguely remember them both as useful for disambiguating but forgot that both marks are for zero and vary by typeface. Mostly dotted zero was just during the dot matrix era. I wouldn't mind being shown counter examples.
IggleSniggle··on AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society
The Luddites weren't against automation, they were retaliating against the capital class. Their demands were to have dignified work, not for automation to go away. They attacked the machines because it was the tool the capital class used to deny them their livelihood.
IggleSniggle··on I don’t need a Steam Machine
Rivals of Aesther - like Super Smash Bros but with Steam Workshop support for player-made characters... TARS (interstellar) vs Ronald McDonald vs Obama anyone??

nidhogg - deserves to be in an arcade cabinet but honestly this one is ALWAYS a hit...just 2player though

Broforce - 80s action stars in 80s action movie multiplayer platformer

Ultimate Chicken Horse - competitively build a platformer level and then race to complete the level first, best with 4 players

TowerFall Ascension - 2-4 players, also deserves to be in an arcade cabinet

Screen Cheat - FPS made for the couch; think N64 Goldeneye or Quake, but all the players are invisible, so the only way to figure out where your opponents are is to look at their quadrants (screencheat)

Overcooked 2 - it's pretty kid-oriented on the surface, but it's a game where you must out-communicate the absolute chaos unfolding around you in order to succeed...such a good couch-multiplayer experience, but best for experienced gamers imho

Rocket League

Magicka

Regular Human Basketball - control giant basketball automatons by jumping inside them and operating the manual controls in a team v team. Minimum 4 players to really work well, supports up to 10 players shared screen

That should get you started! But oops that wasn't my casual coop list, more my "makes for memorable group experiences" list.

It Takes Two, Portal 2, Untitled Goose Game, Halo Master Chief Collection was like $10 recently, all come to mind as positive local coop experiences I've had.

IggleSniggle··on I don’t need a Steam Machine
This is why I've been all in on Steam for so long! The catalog is so huge, there's a massive number of fantastic couch multiplayer games. It is indeed a bit more fiddly... I've found that it's generally easier to connect my Steam Deck to the TV and play lower fidelity games than it is to fiddle with a Windows machine that needs to be prepped for friends popping in every other month.

Although, Nintendo is still doing a good job at keeping the couch-social experience alive, and building 1st party games that can be good solo experiences but really shine when played next to a friend sitting on the same couch.

IggleSniggle··on Ask HN: How does one stay motivated to grind through LeetCode?
That's been me before. If you're wondering why people ghost at the technical when they seemed like great candidates: sometimes, at least, they like engineering because it's a discipline where they can get things "right" within some defined band / acceptable tolerance. In interview context, where there's somebody watching and judging, the degree of tolerance is unknown, and you know you won't be given time to choose the most correct approach regardless, and that solving the technical problem is just an indirect proxy for solving the "is this person a good social fit" problem (because you know you have the technical ability), all acts as anti-motivator for practicing for leetcode style interviews.

Its easier to say "I just didn't study and that's why I didn't get the job" than it is to say "even though I spent a bunch of time optimizing for this interview scenario and know I absolutely aced the technical interview, they still didn't like me."

Heck, I've been in interviews where I found the technical aspect a relatively easy bar to pass, and I blurted out something strange just to sabotage myself. If they can look past that and still see that I know what I'm doing and bring a lot to the table, I know they are people that I can do my best work with without needing to be constantly second guessing myself in conversation.

Some companies seem to forget that interviews go both ways, and that job candidates are screening for something different than what companies are screening for.

IggleSniggle··on Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
It does if you do DNS over TLS or HTTPS, although I guess that information would still be knowable to your DNS provider if they terminate your TLS behind the scenes
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