Hacker News: Conlectus

New comment by Conlectus in "You did this with an AI and you do not understand what you're doing here"

Conlectus — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 12:44:24 +0000

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.

New comment by Conlectus in "Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ"

Conlectus — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 18:20:37 +0000

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

New comment by Conlectus in "Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first"

Conlectus — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:52:41 +0000

There are dozens of us. Dozens!

New comment by Conlectus in "Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first"

Conlectus — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:22:45 +0000

DCOs only document that the contributor has the right to contribute the code, not the license under which they contribute it. CLAs do both.

New comment by Conlectus in "Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first"

Conlectus — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:20:21 +0000

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.

New comment by Conlectus in "Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first"

Conlectus — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 23:53:12 +0000

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.

New comment by Conlectus in "Xenon is an open source universal game cheating framework C++"

Conlectus — Thu, 08 May 2025 12:20:11 +0000

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

New comment by Conlectus in "The Origins of Wokeness"

Conlectus — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 19:31:37 +0000

Lobste.rs

New comment by Conlectus in "Researchers accurately dating a 7k-year-old settlement using cosmic rays"

Conlectus — Tue, 28 May 2024 22:13:38 +0000

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

New comment by Conlectus in "Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain"

Conlectus — Sun, 19 May 2024 14:40:57 +0000

Isn’t ReLU an element of neuroscience that was incorporated into machine learning to great success?

New comment by Conlectus in "Cult of the Dead Cow – Veilid (2023)"

Conlectus — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 13:37:08 +0000

Raw HTML: potentially. Big blocks of undifferentiated ASCII art: no.

New comment by Conlectus in "Wasmer JavaScript SDK"

Conlectus — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 20:04:19 +0000

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.

New comment by Conlectus in "ModHeader Is Now Spyware"

Conlectus — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 19:00:22 +0000

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.

ModHeader Is Now Spyware

Conlectus — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 19:00:21 +0000

Article URL: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/modheader-modify-http-hea/idgpnmonknjnojddfkpgkljpfnnfcklj

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37756056

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by Conlectus in "Illustrated A64 SIMD Instruction List: SVE Instructions"

Conlectus — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 12:40:54 +0000

Scaleable Vector Extension. A class of SIMD instructions.

New comment by Conlectus in "Www which WASM works"

Conlectus — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 02:21:23 +0000

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.

New comment by Conlectus in "Hutter Prize for compressing human knowledge"

Conlectus — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 11:17:54 +0000

Perhaps because they include metrics for compression time, which could easily be gamed by doing significant precomputation in the compressor?

New comment by Conlectus in "How could the early Unix OS comprise so few lines of code?"

Conlectus — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 10:44:52 +0000

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.

New comment by Conlectus in "X plans to collect biometric data, job and school history"

Conlectus — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 16:45:41 +0000

Those are separate questions. Is Google forced on people by the US Govt?

New comment by Conlectus in "Mini – The Minimal Language"

Conlectus — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 18:51:46 +0000

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