Hacker News: Conscat

New comment by Conscat in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

Conscat — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:40:07 +0000

I've got really comfy `just` scripts for generating Clang "intermediaries" in my CMake project. I can generate `.ii` files which get formatted and edited in a manner making them directly recompilable, along with `.ll`, `.bc`, and `.s` files. All the above are per-translation unit or post-LTO and I can constrain the output to specific functions or files, and the LLVM bitcode can take optimization passes or optimization levels to very easily introspect how my work in this codebase optimizes.

I've also got a clang-repl wrapper for this codebase that is very easy to use and makes interactive programming much easier for me.

New comment by Conscat in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

Conscat — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:15:21 +0000

Obviously 5 year olds deserve access to safe abortions whether they are trans or cis. It's not safe to carry a pregnancy so young.

New comment by Conscat in "Flipper Zero Zig Template"

Conscat — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 22:36:42 +0000

The point here is that these examples need to be updated because @cImport, the syntactic feature of Zig, is being deprecated and removed. That there exists an alternative isn't relevant.

New comment by Conscat in "Nvidia Cosmos 3"

Conscat — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:54:06 +0000

These demos honestly look pretty good to me. But it is objectively true that this and similar technologies are used at huge scale by every leading autonomous vehicle manufacturer, so we can inductively reason that it _is_ good enough for that use-case. I don't work on Cosmos, but I am currently working on a superficially similar non-open technology at Nvidia used by many of these leaders which, in my opinion, produces similar quality. Some of the open research for it is here:

https://github.com/nv-tlabs/3dgrut/

https://github.com/NVIDIA/harmonizer

https://github.com/NVIDIA/instant-nurec

https://github.com/nvidia/ncore

Nvidia also is integrating Gsplat into at least what I work on and contributing upstream.

https://github.com/nerfstudio-project/gsplat

New comment by Conscat in "KDE at 30"

Conscat — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:19:25 +0000

Does anyone else miss KWrite? I had it configured as a very slightly more advanced Notepad.exe clone. I really enjoyed opening it for quickly writing out thoughts that crowd my ADHD brain, and I feel like the full Kate takes much longer to open up and looks much much heavier and emotionally oppressive for what I want to do.

New comment by Conscat in "Noroboto: Lying Fonts and Mitigation in Rust"

Conscat — Sun, 24 May 2026 19:36:06 +0000

These are some very extreme examples of this that push the feature's limits:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256810

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26495059

New comment by Conscat in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

Conscat — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:46:59 +0000

Fwiw, nobody has ever suggested to me that I employ token compression in my daily workflow. I don't pay full attention in all the AI workflow demos I'm supposed to attend, but I don't recall that even being discussed. Is this an Nvidia blog or tweet you're referencing? I'm actually interested to see what they have to say.

New comment by Conscat in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

Conscat — Sun, 17 May 2026 17:48:52 +0000

I'm not, I work higher level products. I've talked to a few people who do but I don't recall if they have different standards.

New comment by Conscat in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

Conscat — Sun, 17 May 2026 05:25:27 +0000

At Nvidia, we have no limit for Anthropic or Open AI models (for now) and are heavily encouraged to use them as much as possible.

New comment by Conscat in "Greek Alphabet Cards"

Conscat — Sun, 17 May 2026 05:16:45 +0000

I learned to read Devanagari by putting generic Google images cards on my phone's wall paper.

New comment by Conscat in "Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux"

Conscat — Sat, 16 May 2026 18:22:30 +0000

I had never heard of low background steel. That's a fascinating problem it solves (and I love the analogy).

New comment by Conscat in "Cisco workforce reductions"

Conscat — Thu, 14 May 2026 07:46:49 +0000

In the bay area, I've met relatively few NRIs who don't know Hindi well, even if it's not their first language. Most of them that I've met are not even Kannadiga, Mallu, Telugu, or especially not Tamil. Sample size of at least several dozen.

New comment by Conscat in "Cisco workforce reductions"

Conscat — Thu, 14 May 2026 07:44:39 +0000

Studying Hindi has felt very rewarding to me, and it impresses people disproportionately to my actual skill, but I don't feel it has affected my ability to communicate with coworkers whatsoever.

New comment by Conscat in "Google says criminal hackers used AI to find a major software flaw"

Conscat — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:11:34 +0000

Any media company which deliberately rids itself of everyone willing to speak vaguely positively of transsexual people may not be attracting the most free thinking writers.

New comment by Conscat in "Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable"

Conscat — Sun, 10 May 2026 07:18:43 +0000

That feels reductive. It's actionable to get OCI, renounce US citizenship, and become Indian after a decade. It's just not very practical for most people. I know many people who don't work their dream job, but switching to a favorable company isn't currently practical for them.

New comment by Conscat in "Mojo 1.0 Beta"

Conscat — Sat, 09 May 2026 03:54:13 +0000

My understanding from speaking with a few Tile IR devs on dates is that its primary motivation was providing better portability for programming tensor cores than PTX offers. Nobody ever told me they saw it as a response to anything other than customer feedback.

New comment by Conscat in "Mojo 1.0 Beta"

Conscat — Sat, 09 May 2026 03:47:51 +0000

Every reasonable language has a Python interop story. All it takes is C FFI. But what Mojo promised early on was the eventuality of compiling a large amount of Python code if not entire wheels as Mojo.

New comment by Conscat in "GitHub is having issues now"

Conscat — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:03:44 +0000

At least it doesn't go down as often, I guess. I think most users do want a centralized forge that gives them discoverability and star graphs.

New comment by Conscat in "Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed"

Conscat — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:51:13 +0000

An under noticed ninja feature I adore, which was implemented relatively recently, is the ability to configure how its build progress is printed. In my fish config, I have the `NINJA_STATUS` envvar:

    set -x NINJA_STATUS "STEP: %f/%t  
    [%p / %P] 
    [%w + %W]
    "

Which prints the time elapsed and projected in a readable multi-line format.

New comment by Conscat in "C++26 is done: ISO C++ standards meeting Trip Report"

Conscat — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:47:12 +0000

Rust cannot take a const function and evaluate that into the argument of a const generic or a proc macro. As far as I can tell, the reasons are deeply fundamental to the architecture of rustc. It's difficult to express HOW FUNDAMENTAL this is to strongly typed zero overhead abstractions, and we see where Rust is lacking here in cases like `Option` and bitset implementations.