kartoffelsaft

This has been my goto for personal toy projects for a while now. Trivial to slot in to basically anything that can display text and takes mouse input.

I will mention, however, it's kinda abandonware at this point. There is some bug with the draw call iterator which does a misaligned pointer access, which, if your environment is set up to catch that, can get annoying (Zig for example panics on it). There's a github issue that some have used as reason to fork it but all the forks I tried were subtly wrong, for what that's worth.

> The template metaprogramming C++ offers is the most powerful of any imperative language

I'm curious what languages you're comparing to here. Feels like it's only slightly more expressive than pure generics, but I admittedly haven't done much template metaprogramming myself. How does it compare to, say, Zig's comptime?

  Location: Seattle, WA
  Remote: Preferred
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Git, Docker, .NET, Postgres, Angular, C/C++, Zig, pi ai agent, llama.cpp
  Résumé/CV: https://blog.kartoffelsaft.dev/extras/resume.pdf
  Email: ben [dot] g [dot] findley [plus] jobs [at] gmail [dot] com

Hello! I'm a recent graduate from the University of Washington (Dec 2025). I love getting into the gritty details of solving problems, and so enjoy systems programming the most, but I'm open to (almost) any opportunity. For a little more about me: https://blog.kartoffelsaft.dev/about

The funny thing is that all the reasons you listed to use the new design... existed before in basically any 3rd party app.

I keep seeing this argument in various places on HN that usage implies a positive opinion, when it very much does not. AI has put most people in prisoner's dilemma, and in prisoner's dilemma you can simultaneously play the game and hate the game. To go through a few of your examples:

> Students using AI to do homework

Either you don't use AI, where you have to spend a lot of time studying or graduate bottom of your class, or you do and get on with your life. You can acknowledge that the studying is the valuable part (most students do in my experience) yet skip it for whatever reason (procrastination / life issues / etc).

> Teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students

We've added an extra step to their already overloaded schedules. If they don't do this they're basically encouraging students to cheat this way.

> Translations

You can now easily get a translation with much better accuracy than before (presumably, I'm a monolingual English speaker), but now you aren't talking to any other human beings for this information. This goes for a lot of other knowledge-value work / hobbies too where asking questions is valuable.

Those numbers sound... unrealistic to me. Just doing some napkin math: 65 $/user/month / 0.01 $/ad ~= 6500 ads/user/month, which is about an ad per minute if you assume someone is using the chat interface 4 hours a day including weekends. Maybe you see that behavior from "my GF/BF is AI" types but I'm also already assuming 0.01 $/ad which is super high to my understanding (if you work in adtech please correct me if I'm wrong). I don't forsee over 50% of your workday or leisure time spent in ChatGPT as likely, especially if the ad rate is well beyond YouTube's nigh-unusable amount it is now.

I described a bit of this in reply to thinkingemote, but to:

> And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?

They aren't being told it's their future. They're being told they have no future because AI will remove the world's dependence on them (well, the professional side of it at least).

As a recent graduate, both headlines read as plausible and non-contradictory. Students right now are faced with two things:

1. a machine that can do the things asked of them faster, more accurately, and higher quality.

2. the threat that that machine completely or mostly invalidates their education, in particular for getting an entry-level job because they don't exist anymore.

The former headline is a result of point 1 and the latter point 2. They're using it not because they think "it's good, actually" but because they're resigning themselves to their education not mattering for their professional development and taking the easy path. That breeds the resentment that you see with "students are anti-AI".

As the article touches on, it's not just about what happened in 2020, but why it hasn't rebounded. It's been long enough we can't use 2020 as an excuse.

I made a post here a bit ago where one of the few replies I got was one of these conversational ad-bots, albeit on the more obvious side. It was getting flagged which gives me hope that HN is good at filtering it, but I also mildly worry I'm (or we're) just missing it when it's subtle. I do suspect it's a huge volume in terms of comment count either way though.

The problem is that vibe-coding, when it fails (i.e. it's non-useful, at least for a bit), is usually solved by more vibes. Try again and hope it works. Ask it to refactor and hope the cleaner code helps it along. If you're willing to think about the code yourself you'll likely ask it questions about the codebase. High vibe-code usage is both a metric that it is working and that it's failing.

Tiling merely changes the idiosyncrasies, and I say this as someone who primarily uses them. (hyprland in my case)

If you created a window right now, where will it go? Which window will it take its space from? Does it use your focused window? Your mouse position? If your WM supports mixed floating & tiling, how does it go when you flip a window between them? etc. That's all cognitive load when you aren't familiar and still requires some hand control when you are.

I want to know what power I have as just some guy to do anything about this? (even if just for myself)

I ask because it seems like every job I apply to asks for a linkedin profile, and I've heard floating around that if it's not filled in enough most employers assume you're a bot. Heck, one of the forms from the "who's hiring" thread yesterday straight up said if you have < 100 connections they'd throw out your application. So, in order to get my foot in the door, I need to hand over vast and intricate data about my personal life to a third party?

I've noticed a very sudden uptick in users of FOSS software being so low trust that they will see a small change, assume it's much larger, and then retreat to some rationalization that it's still bad when shown it's pretty small (slippery slope / boiling frog type arguments). I'm not too familiar with this story in particular but I have been following the Systemd birthdate field controversy, and it's exhausting. I don't even think of myself as that high trust compared to the people taking issue, but it's like they're in a completely different world. Is this actually a trend (in specific, not the general loss of institutional trust) or am I only now paying attention?

Searching for Great Recession posts is actually an interesting tip, I'll be taking a look into that.

As for the Hytale suggestion I do find that competition interesting but I'm afraid that I mightn't actually care that much about the game itself; from the gameplay I've seen it looks like it's taken cues from all the parts of Minecraft I don't find interesting, and the stuff that's unique for it's genre (like it's combat mechanics) looks underwhelming to me if I zoom out a bit. I, of course, haven't played it so I might be wrong about that (I was with Valheim, not with Vintage Story).

I think we disagree either on what detail-oriented or vibe-coding means.

When I say vibe-coding, what I'm referring to is telling an AI your requirements and then using it's output without reading and/or understanding it. If I can point to some of the code and ask what it's doing there, and no one can answer that as if they're an author of that codebase, then it's vibe-coded. To not be able to is to imply those details were not important enough for any programmer to have considered.

I've done that before, in fact; I made a daily habit tracker for myself that way to cater to my own weird needs. I just find not knowing the details of a project intensely uncomfortable, and if I were to pay enough attention to it's output to alleviate that discomfort it would no longer be vibe-coding.

> you can use the technology of today in ways people with adhd can't.

You say this, but funnily enough I've seriously considered that I might have ADHD and should get examined for it. It feels like there's dozens of symptoms people describe as ADHD that I have, from weird things like sleeping immediately after having caffeine to having trouble listening to a full sentence. My inability to form habits intentionally has been pretty bad for my health already, and I'm not even that old.

As a frequenter of Lemmy (and I suppose PieFed because it's federated), it's really the opposite of HN culturally for better and worse. The only thing that feels the same is that most Lemmy users only look at the "All" feed so it basically becomes one feed like here on HN. I haven't browsed Reddit since the API issue, but I remember it being a lot more usable in the way GP suggests, i.e. subscribing to individual communities to engage with. I've found the SNR on Lemmy to also be poor for quite a few reasons, so if you're right about Reddit's being worse then I have to wonder how it's still as popular as it is.

I'm inclined to believe that the difference that makes the upper bound of human writing (or creativity) higher than that of an LLM comes from having experiences in the real world. When someone is "inspired" by others' work or is otherwise deriving ideas from them, they inevitably and unavoidably insert their own biases and experiences into their own work, i.e. they also derive from real-world processes. An LLM, however, is derived directly and entirely from others' work, and cannot be influenced by the real world, only a projection of it.

> Would you rather have the novel that the LLM generated (the output), or the prompts and process that lead to that novel?

The "process", in many cases, is not necessarily preferable to the novel. Because an important part of the creative process is real-world experiences (as described above), and the real world is often unpleasant, hard, and complex, I'd often prefer a novel over the source material. Reading Animal Farm is much less unpleasant than being caught in the Spanish Civil War, for example.

Most man pages are written for someone who knows pretty precisely what they want to do, but don't recall which nobs to turn in the program to get that done. The Arch wiki instead focuses on someone who has a vague idea of what tools to use but doesn't know how those tools operate.

I've found that with an intermediate understanding, the Arch wiki is so much better that I often times won't even check the man pages. But on the occasions where I know the thing pretty well, they can be quite spotty, especially when it's a weird or niche tool among Arch users. So, depending on how you define "more detail", that might be an illusion.

The roadblock there is a cultural one. Among Rust devs if you ever find the need for an unsafe block then you need an explanation to back it up. If anything, the Rust language would benefit from adding as much friction to unsafe code as possible, so that you're only going to use it when you actually need it.

In other words, the Rust approach to safety is to make as few unsafe LoC as possible, and the Zig approach is to make every unsafe line as safe as possible. As long as their philosophical approach to safety is such that Zig makes writing unsafe code easy and Rust avoids it as much as possible, then writing unsafe code in Zig will always be easier.

I hear Cardon get mention on rare occasion, and with how rare that is I have to assume it's been completely stagnant. Does it offer anything over C++ in current year? Seems like C++ interop begets turning your language into C++ with different syntax in a way that C interop just doesn't.

Cars are the most sensitive form of transport to both traffic and parking, and even then the only other form of transport I can think of where parking is an issue is biking. If you could walk or take public transit, there would be no need to park, and traffic would be much lower because much less space is needed per commuter. Wider roads and more parking spaces are easy to point to as solutions but the real problem is subpar, uncomfortable, or even non-existent public transportation.

> but then they might not be economically viable

I want a source for this. I've never been to Tokyo or Amsterdam, but everyone I know who's been there describe the zoning working exactly this way and it seems economically viable.

There has to be a point when the struggle is no longer enjoyalble, right? Outer Wilds had a puzzle that I was struggling hard with (for those who've played: the jellyfish one), and I had felt I did every permutation of things to complete it, but nothing worked. I only "figured it out" from a friend giving progressively heavier hints; and when I did I concluded I could not have completed the game at all without being nearly told.

Have you never had a puzzle like that? Where the "struggle" would entail sitting there staring at the puzzle with 0 clue for a few hours? A majority of puzzle games I've played have 1 or 2 of these, and they aren't even bad games.

Counter Strike makes matchmaking far more prominent than community servers, so I don't think this is that good of an example. For a game like Team Fortress 2 where the options are presented more equally, It seems the players are closer to a 50/50 split. The reality is that most people follow the light patterns that get them in a game, which most modern multiplayer games make that matchmaking.

The thing that makes that different though is the packing/unpacking experience. With a laptop it's just... opening and closing the lid. With a steam deck (or really any mini PC with a screen and battery), if you go wireless as you suggest, there's now at least 3 devices (deck, KB, mouse) that need to be handled and charged separately. Given my previous negative experiences with BT I'd go wired but that makes every move take even more effort.

I could see a setup with a case for the deck gives it a laptop form factor, but that doesn't seem like what you're suggesting. I might also ask how often you move your setup? My schedule requires I do so at least 8 times/week.

> Then, when a bunch of rich people move in, that’s people that are no longer chasing all the other apartments.

Maybe? Seems to me that there's a certain level of wealth where this no longer is true. Housing has (unfortunately in my eyes) become one of those black boxes that you put money in and money comes out; it's an investment. But what you're telling me goes contrary to what I know about the housing market: no, actually, houses depreciate in value because they'll have to ask poor people to buy / rent the place at some point. Can I go buy a mansion built in 1930 for a bargain price?

(I do agree about the private equity part, just the first bit doesn't pass a sniff test from me)

I don't think you understood their point at all. "Don't use it" isn't necessarily a valid choice when it's where all of your friends and/or family are. The "investment" is not monetary; instead, it takes the form of having connections on the platform. You are invested in the platform if your primary connection to someone is hosted there, and it costs a ton of time and effort to transfer that somewhere else.

Seeing as the subject of the sentence is the pig organ, it's saying the organ is the one doing the surviving and only tangentionally mentions the person surviving by calling then living. I (and presumably we) only come to a different interperetation because I have the context that the latter is the important bit. If I give some other similarly structured sentences but without context, how would you interperet these?

- This is the fastest Alice had driven since Bob broke the speed limit.

- This is the oldest tree still standing in the burnt forest.

- This is the most stable chemical additive to our long-lasting concrete.

Without context, to me these examples sound primarily about Alice going fast, the tree being old, and the chemical being stable. But if those appeared in articles about traffic law, natural disasters, and sidewalk design, then these phrasings might be less ambiguous if flipped (as another commentor pointed out).

I've found the way minecraft has evolved over the past 14 years to be unsatisfying for this reason. Most of the games systems feel like they exist for the purpose of being exploited, and the rest of the systems encorage the player to interact with the former.

As an example, if I want to go exploring, I'm thinking I'm going to want food, so I'll want crops either to eat them directly or to breed livestock. If I want to do that in a way that doesn't require waiting I'll need bone meal. But at some point they changed it so you require more bone meal to fully grow. And now the game has funneled me into building a mob grinder when I actually wanted to explore.

Sure, there are mobs out there you can fight who drop those items, and that's more engaging, but "fun" and "effective" are so misaligned in the game currently that I find myself avoiding it. So much so that I end up mostly either playing really old versions that aren't this way (b1.7.3 in particular) or modpacks that do a better job of this kind of progression.

Not knowing the exact language used by the C standard, I suspect the reason GCC doesn't cause these issues with most programs is that the wording of "array object" refers specifically to arrays with compile-time-known sizes, i.e. `int arr[4]`. Most programs that do out of bounds pointer arithmetic are doing so with pointers from malloc/mmap/similar, which might have similar semantics to arrays but are not arrays.