Hacker News: kennykartman

New comment by kennykartman in "The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy"

kennykartman — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:07:21 +0000

They're banning all AI though, so it looks pretty much anti-AI to me.

New comment by kennykartman in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"

kennykartman — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:35:22 +0000

Nice. This is the kind of technology we need when we'll have to fight back against AI overlords.

New comment by kennykartman in "Israeli soldiers using sexual assault to force Palestinians out of West Bank"

kennykartman — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:47:31 +0000

Yep, war is the shittiest of things and rarely it is described completely for what it is. Humans following orders are well known to be ruthless and humans in power places are known to abuse their power. Add this to brainwashing and religious propaganda and beliefs, makes this kind of war a particularly shitty one.

New comment by kennykartman in "Improved Git Diffs with Delta, Fzf and a Little Shell Scripting"

kennykartman — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:05:58 +0000

Be careful with difftastic, because it has at least one severe bug involving python that has been present for a long time: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/issues/587

New comment by kennykartman in "We rewrote our Rust WASM parser in TypeScript and it got faster"

kennykartman — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:41:30 +0000

I dream of the day in which there is no need to pass by JS and Wasm can do all the job by itself. Meanwhile, we are stuck.

New comment by kennykartman in "Evil in the West Bank"

kennykartman — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:14:15 +0000

> dozens of heavily armed settlers under the protection of the police and the army invaded Ras al-‘Ain and stole at least a thousand, and possibly as many as 1,500, of the villagers’ sheep and goats

This is the issue: Israeli settlers are getting weapons and money from the government (backed by the US) to systematically infringe human rights, in particular of Palestinian families.

People should stop to think that Israel is a democratic and civil country: it is not. Proofs are plenty.

New comment by kennykartman in "Minimal x86 Kernel Zig"

kennykartman — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:52:34 +0000

Because Zig is the future, Rust has clearly failed and C is simply obsolete in 2026. The rest doesn't even matter.

New comment by kennykartman in "Nannou – A creative coding framework for Rust"

kennykartman — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 22:25:18 +0000

That's true! But I was amazed to see makepad.nl's performances. That's written in Rust and I saw one of the authors, Rik, explain how they make it so fast to build. Praiseworthy job that shows that with care one can go far.

New comment by kennykartman in "Qwen3-Max-Thinking"

kennykartman — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:42:08 +0000

Sure, I agree! I did not mean to see better results because LLMs improved significantly in their visual-spatial reasoning, but simply because I expected more people drawing SVGs of pelicans on bikes and having more LLMs ingesting them. This is what I find a bit surprising.

New comment by kennykartman in "Qwen3-Max-Thinking"

kennykartman — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:14:15 +0000

Ah ah I was curious about that! I wonder if (when? if not already) some company is using some version of this in their training set. I'm still impressed by the fact that this benchmark has been out for so long and yet produce this kind of (ugly?) results.

New comment by kennykartman in "Iran is likely jamming Starlink"

kennykartman — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:23:42 +0000

Again, just for the sake of the discussion: Iran banned starlink, people are getting terminals (BTW, I'm happy they managed to). Starlink is still providing the service in the area although they are aware it's illegal and people can be behaded for owning a starlink terminal. But hey, Iran and USA are enemies. The fact that Iran is the only country where Starlink is active even if it's NOT approved is food for thought. There are other countries, where there are regimes that control communications, where Starlink is not active.

New comment by kennykartman in "Iran is likely jamming Starlink"

kennykartman — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 23:59:37 +0000

If tomorrow I owned 1 zillion dollar, that wouldn't make me able to change the course of next US (presidential) elections. It's not the only factor, ofc, but it is a very relevant one. Let's consider other factors that might be relevant: influence, visibility, arguments, fame, political weight, political knowledge, time, will. There are others. Someone with no influence on these factors and no money can hardly influence the outcomes of a nation election. If that someone was made a billionaire overnight, it can gain control over some factors, improving the likelihood of their impact over the next elections. Will they succeed? Not necessarily, but that their impact can become perceivable is undeniable.

Fair elections: in the US there are a bunch of practices related to vote that I don't consider fair. First and foremost, how votes are counted. Then, how money can be used to finance parties and campaigns. Gerrymandering is another one.

New comment by kennykartman in "Iran is likely jamming Starlink"

kennykartman — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 23:40:34 +0000

I'm aware of that and I agree. So what? My comment was that they are not the only billionaires.

New comment by kennykartman in "Iran is likely jamming Starlink"

kennykartman — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 23:37:58 +0000

People can do whatever they think is right, of course (: so there is no "should". My point was that saying that a government should not impose communication restrictions is not necessary right. So, no, people should be happy: if they are happy without freedom, then let them be. If they are unhappy without freedom, let them make a revolution.

New comment by kennykartman in "Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig"

kennykartman — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 10:07:05 +0000

I wonder what you consider a successful language.

Rust appeared in 2012. Zig in 2016. I consider them both two successful programming languages, but given they are only 4 years apart, it's easy to compare Zig today with 4-years-back Rust and see they are very far apart, in term of maturity, progress, community size and adoption.

Rust is a very successful language so far, but expecting that in 10y it can overthrow C++ is silly. Codebases add up more than they are replaced.

New comment by kennykartman in "Iran is likely jamming Starlink"

kennykartman — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:58:33 +0000

You're right! Still they are billionaires in their countries with many benefits for being billionaires! Except, steering the government where they want - which typically means getting even richer. In the USA this happened, though.

My point is that, even in self-proclamed democracies, it's quite hard to actually give power to the people, precisely as in regimes. It's not a "it's all the same" position, of course: I mean to say that taking some values as absolute is not great if we don't clearly define what we are optimizing for. The USA model of democracy doesn't optimize for individual freedom nor for general population happiness.

New comment by kennykartman in "Iran is likely jamming Starlink"

kennykartman — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:48:38 +0000

The USA centric view I was referring to is the one where lack of freedom is wrong, since it benefits the USA ideology of maximal freedom. Which is not in generally shared by all western countries (in Europe socialism and state ownership is much more present, for instance), and it's not necessary the most accurate view of real USA (there might be more "free" countries, like Switzerland), it's just that it benefits the perceived image of USA.

With this in mind, no, I don't share the view that a strong government should trust the people: people can easily be steered by foreign parties that want to gain soft power (example: Russia and recent anti-EU propaganda in Poland, Romania and Georgia). It's very hard to draw a line between what is "right" and what is "too much", but I don't think that excessive freedom is an obvious route to an healthy society (that is, a society that has peace and people are happy).

New comment by kennykartman in "Iran is likely jamming Starlink"

kennykartman — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:31:37 +0000

I think this is not true. Russia and China come to mind: billionaires are there, but they are not allowed to subvert the regime.

Edit just to clarify: presence of billionaires that are not hostile to the regime does not mean they are allies either.

New comment by kennykartman in "Iran is likely jamming Starlink"

kennykartman — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 20:59:59 +0000

I'm not conflating them.

New comment by kennykartman in "Iran is likely jamming Starlink"

kennykartman — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 20:58:39 +0000

The US democracy is quite weird, though, because it's IMHO quite far from the people: billionaires can influence the outcomes of elections by steering the votes where the most paying candidate (or the most knowledgeable, or someone else with other skills) desires. This is not something that people can influence easily, so I find hard to believe that a government is legitimate just by the label on the packaging.

I won't go down the path of "fair elections", since I don't think it applies to USA.