Hacker News: cptroot

New comment by cptroot in "Correlated randomness in Slay the Spire 2"

cptroot — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:28:53 +0000

The motivation boils down to trying to make runs with the same starting seed feel "similar" in meaningful ways. It's "better" in a vibes way if both you and I were offered the same card choices in runs with the same seed, even if we took different amounts of turns on the first battle.

New comment by cptroot in "Measles surge in Utah sparks fears US could undo decades of progress"

cptroot — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:05:32 +0000

This is likely about Orin Hatch's dedication to the idea of a "balanced federal budget", to be paid for with program cuts instead of taxation.

New comment by cptroot in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

cptroot — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:33:45 +0000

> AI can currently do if given enough context

It's worth noting that you can substitute "dollars" for "context" in that sentence, which seems to be where many of these impressive achievements are coming from. As ever, it's unclear whether these models will get cheaper while remaining better, since all of the recent breakthroughs appear to be of the "think more" kind. For translation specifically, I'd be very surprised if the "think more" LLMs would help given the per-unit cost expected of the output.

New comment by cptroot in "Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'"

cptroot — Fri, 29 May 2026 00:47:13 +0000

> and squeezed a lot more juice out of it than I’d realised was there to be squozen.

I barked out loud when I read this.

New comment by cptroot in "On Labubu and the Hyperreal"

cptroot — Wed, 27 May 2026 23:16:16 +0000

I recently watched an excellent video about that incident. [1]

The takeaway was that this was yet another move by rich assholes designed to siphon money from the pockets of small time gamblers just so that the rich could get richer. They did it to Pokemon cards, destroying the experience of playing the actual game, and they tried to do it to Manga (although they hopefully won't succeed there).

[1] https://youtu.be/W2x-UQpiARc?si=eVwXhHAtD0keH2ON

New comment by cptroot in "He Lost It at the Movies"

cptroot — Mon, 25 May 2026 23:11:47 +0000

Film Crit Hulk continues to put out good essays on film and much more besides, over on Patreon [1]. I agree that finding good critique is hard now that we're past the heyday of magazine critique.

[1] https://www.patreon.com/filmcrithulk

New comment by cptroot in "Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust""

cptroot — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:42:04 +0000

Man that issue got way too many comments from non-contributors. I agree that this shouldn't have been merged in in it's current state, but that doesn't mean posting about it on GitHub is a worthwhile way to fix the problem.

New comment by cptroot in "Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games"

cptroot — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 02:14:42 +0000

If we're talking about recursion, Patrick's Parabox is another stellar pick.

New comment by cptroot in "Surelock: Deadlock-Free Mutexes for Rust"

cptroot — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:02:32 +0000

I appreciate that this appears to be an incremental improvement on Fuschia's tree_lock, with the sharp edges sanded off. Good work! I hope I won't have to use it :p

New comment by cptroot in "We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How"

cptroot — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:12:02 +0000

I really appreciate how this finds a common thread through all of my current engineering anxieties.

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

cptroot — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:39:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47544980

Points: 414

# Comments: 383

New comment by cptroot in "Torturing Rustc by Emulating HKTs"

cptroot — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:18:20 +0000

This was incredible, even as it rapidly outpaced my PL and mathematics knowledge.

New comment by cptroot in "Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill"

cptroot — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:21:52 +0000

Please explain how this law (or the CA one for that matter) require government IDs. It is worded specifically to _not_ require ID.

New comment by cptroot in "I built a programming language using Claude Code"

cptroot — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:00:35 +0000

If you read TFA, you'll find that the author agrees with you - at least on your first point.

While I agree "AI is bad", well-written posts like this one can provide real insight into the process of using them, and reveal more about _why_ AI is bad.

New comment by cptroot in "Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy"

cptroot — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:23:48 +0000

I think you'll find the luddites to be a more informative historical analogy. A new tool arrives in an industry staffed by craftsmen, providing capital a lever to raise profits at the expense of quality. Is it surprising that worker co-ops would choose not to pull that lever?

New comment by cptroot in "A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification"

cptroot — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:51:24 +0000

So because there is no requirement for the age to be accurate, it would be pretty easy to say "all student accounts are the age of the youngest allowed school entrant for that school year", right? That resolves the age issue and also prevents both PII leakage as well as possible school bullying opportunities.

New comment by cptroot in "2028 Global Intelligence Crisis"

cptroot — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:44:13 +0000

Here's an annotated version of this post (TW Ed Zitron) that I found more informative than reading the original: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/1p1n0y1ip48ianok9dvbp/Annotat...

New comment by cptroot in "Loon: A functional lang with invisible types, safe ownership, and alg. effects"

cptroot — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 21:06:27 +0000

Aha, here's the syntax in case you're curious (using an example lifted from the playground)

  [type Shape
    [Circle f64]
    [Rect f64 f64]
    Point
  ]

  [sig test_sig : Shape -> Float]
  [fn test_sig [shape]
    [match shape
      [Circle r] [* 3.14159 [* r r]]
      [Rect w h] [* w h]
      Point 0.0
    ]
  ]

Unfortunately it seems like this doesn't currently work as expected when I use it in the playground, so I'm going to go file an issue

New comment by cptroot in "Loon: A functional lang with invisible types, safe ownership, and alg. effects"

cptroot — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:43:55 +0000

Good news, there's a line in the "Coming from Rust"[1] page that says

> You never annotate a function signature unless you want to for documentation purposes.

so it sounds like function annotation is still an option for the purposes of communication, just no longer required in all cases.

[1] https://loonlang.com/concepts/from-rust

New comment by cptroot in "Loon: A functional lang with invisible types, safe ownership, and alg. effects"

cptroot — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:14:40 +0000

Neat! I think the website could use a bit more information about how the "global" Effect handlers work, and whether it's possible to opt-in to that functionality yourself when writing Effects.

That being said I took a look at the roadmap and the next major release is the one that focuses on Effects, so perhaps I'm jumping the gun a tad. Maybe I'll whip this out for AoC this year!