Hacker News: chroma_zone

New comment by chroma_zone in "Emacs 31: An unofficial guide to Markdown-ts-mode"

chroma_zone — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 17:46:12 +0000

If it can't find an LSP binary, Eglot will prompt you to pick one, and tell you which one it was looking for. That seems reasonable to me. I wouldn't want Emacs to download and install random binaries on my system automatically.

New comment by chroma_zone in "Latent Space as a New Medium"

chroma_zone — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:47:36 +0000

If all that the author was saying was "LLM weights are highly compressed encodings of knowledge", I wouldn't have any complaints. He is making much bolder claims than that.

And if he was describing LLMs as "just another tool", I wouldn't be complaining either.

New comment by chroma_zone in "Latent Space as a New Medium"

chroma_zone — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:22:36 +0000

There's a lot of very strong claims made at the start of this article.

(emphasis mine)

> A Large Language Model (LLM) is like a small zip file that contains all human knowledge.

> In a strange but real way the resulting tiny file contains all the information that is on the internet and in our libraries.

> Likewise, the LLM could recognize the face of almost any person, and it could generate any possible human face,

All writings? All of human knowledge in general? Any person??

The example he gives for writing is Shakespeare, which might be one of the most overrepresented writers in the entire training dataset. So yes, of course LLMs can replicate his writings with high accuracy. That doesn't mean that the same applies to literally all of human writings and knowledge.

> We've never had a system to integrate everything we know and everything we can imagine.

Yeah, we still don't.

At first I thought he was just being intentionally hyperbolic for effect, but the rest of the article is even worse. From the closing paragraph:

> We’ll soon depend on this oracle to such an extent that we’ll wonder how we lived without it.

No! AI is not an oracle! That is honestly an extremely dangerous way to think about this technology.

This is the type of baseless hype that OpenAI and Anthropic have been exploiting for years, and I really wish it would stop.

New comment by chroma_zone in "TypeScript 7"

chroma_zone — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:02:19 +0000

I'm glad the JSDoc type syntax is still getting some focus. It's my favorite way to use typescript in my own projects. Some of the syntax changes will be annoying to update but most of them seem to be for the better.

New comment by chroma_zone in "Programming a GBA Game on an iPhone"

chroma_zone — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:07:47 +0000

Very cool. It's not the ideal environment but it's nice to have those tools available when you need it / are bored. Termux saved me on a few homework assignments in university.

New comment by chroma_zone in "If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know"

chroma_zone — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:28:34 +0000

Minus the policy restrictions, this has always been true for all LLMs in general.

New comment by chroma_zone in "Claude Fable 5"

chroma_zone — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:58:29 +0000

My life has changed, but not necessarily for the better.

New comment by chroma_zone in "Why I don’t vibe code"

chroma_zone — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:56:29 +0000

Yep. If it weren't for cheap / freely available tools (and their limitations) I wouldn't be where I am today. I think about this every time I make a tool of my own.

New comment by chroma_zone in "The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born"

chroma_zone — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:43:54 +0000

Microsoft has done their part too. Try using a modern Office 365 program and see how many clicks it takes to get to an actual file browser.

New comment by chroma_zone in "People Hate AI Art"

chroma_zone — Sat, 09 May 2026 02:54:45 +0000

They were right about cars, to be fair

New comment by chroma_zone in "I have officially retired from Emacs"

chroma_zone — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:59:53 +0000

My experience with wxWidgets based apps is that they tend to not handle DPI scaling well. Audacity is a good example, IIRC that's one of the reasons they're moving to Qt.

New comment by chroma_zone in "Human Source License (HSL)"

chroma_zone — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:17:31 +0000

No mention in the README either. Sneaky

New comment by chroma_zone in "The beauty and terror of modding Windows"

chroma_zone — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:22:02 +0000

A lot of basic tweaks to windows behavior require those types of unstable hacks. The point is that developers or users who want to modify their system are forced into sketchy software.

New comment by chroma_zone in "The beauty and terror of modding Windows"

chroma_zone — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:58:14 +0000

Having spent a few years trying to write Windows utility software, it is really exhausting to be in an antagonistic relationship with Microsoft and have their updates constantly break your work.

The article mentions ExplorerPatcher -- the changelog [1] of that project is informative. Every release involves fixing a bunch of things that Microsoft broke, intentionally or not. Some of this is understandable given how it (necessarily) messes with low level OS components, but there is still zero transparency and you just need to roll with whatever changes. I can't imagine doing that kind of work anymore.

[1] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/releases

New comment by chroma_zone in "Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers"

chroma_zone — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:44:28 +0000

The terms of those licenses are still relevant...

New comment by chroma_zone in "Leaving Google has actively improved my life"

chroma_zone — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:36:29 +0000

You may have turned this feature off (like I did) but by default Gmail sorts your emails into categories like Promotions, Social, Updates...

New comment by chroma_zone in "Windows: Prefer the Native API over Win32"

chroma_zone — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:17:56 +0000

Does Debian Stable count?

The page didn't include a download link, so I found it here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/96.0/linux-x86_...

And yes, it runs perfectly fine on Debian 13.

New comment by chroma_zone in "Windows: Prefer the Native API over Win32"

chroma_zone — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:36:46 +0000

Sounds like the iOS model: your app only exists as long as you are alive and able to pay $99/year. This mentality is a nightmare for software preservation.

New comment by chroma_zone in "Instabridge has acquired Nova Launcher"

chroma_zone — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:39:37 +0000

I paid for "Square Home" a couple years ago and I'm very happy with it. It's highly customizable. The Windows Phone style layout probably isn't for everyone but it works well for me.

New comment by chroma_zone in "Our approach to advertising"

chroma_zone — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:43:06 +0000

At least put the ads in a consistent location so I can cover it with masking tape