Hacker News: Conlectus

New comment by Conlectus in "Why don't more developers “use the platform”?"

Conlectus — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:27:41 +0000

The history here, as I understand it, was that they imagined you would use custom elements from multiple third parties, so any shared CSS definitions would cause breakages.

See eg the (now removed) HTML imports standard.

New comment by Conlectus in "macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess"

Conlectus — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:23:40 +0000

I recommend reading more than the first two clauses of the above comment.

New comment by Conlectus in "Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC"

Conlectus — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:27:36 +0000

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.

New comment by Conlectus in "What About Rails?"

Conlectus — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 18:05:51 +0000

They also say that this is “just a courtesy” and not to rely on it.

New comment by Conlectus in "I made a build visualizer to understand Bun's compile times"

Conlectus — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 18:43:27 +0000

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.”

New comment by Conlectus in "Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code"

Conlectus — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 23:58:16 +0000

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.

New comment by Conlectus in "Bug Blindness"

Conlectus — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 01:20:05 +0000

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.

New comment by Conlectus in "Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons"

Conlectus — Sun, 03 May 2026 18:43:17 +0000

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.

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.