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knuckleheadson '500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds

If others find beauty in something, should I not want to also try and see it?

Some things take time to learn to enjoy. I've bounced off things in the past several times before I started to really enjoy them later on. I'd like to think my experience with media is not just a random walk through whatever is in front of me and that I can direct that experience, at least a bit.

knuckleheadson '500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds

I’ve tried both! Both fun in their own ways but they never caught me long term. Sausage rolls was fun but it just got too hard.

knuckleheadson '500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds

I am generally not a fan of Sokoban puzzles, but I told myself that Order was the best chance to fix that so I’ve been forcing myself to play it. I don’t find myself actively wanting to sit down and play it, the puzzles don’t attract me that way, but once I do, I’ll play for about five hours at once. Great game.

knuckleheadson Emitting metadata early makes building/checking Rust up to twice as fast

Good question! They get marked as such and then typechecked as part of the early work before metadata is written/sent out. If they error out, crate fails, nothing happens, same as today. In practice, on the crates I was testing, there was more "regular" functions than these, so we could still get some good perf gains. https://github.com/PowderworksCode/headstart/blob/1c9d5cd691... https://github.com/PowderworksCode/headstart/blob/1c9d5cd691...

knuckleheadson Emitting metadata early makes building/checking Rust up to twice as fast

It’s a neat idea. My impression is that it would go against the grain of the compiler currently. The rmeta file and lots of the other rust outputs aren’t meant to be that stable that it could be portable like that. I’ll certainly mess around with this some and see if anything comes of it though!

knuckleheadson Emitting metadata early makes building/checking Rust up to twice as fast

I would be very curious to know how that test went please!

knuckleheadson Emitting metadata early makes building/checking Rust up to twice as fast

Yes, if you mostly have no extra cores already or if you have very wide unrelated deps, this mostly does nothing. Typically, this is not the case though so there is some good perf gains.

knuckleheadson Emitting metadata early makes building/checking Rust up to twice as fast

I wanted everything in one repo and this worked well enough. For presenting to rust compiler team I forked the repos in question and made branches for review with the patches.

knuckleheadson Emitting metadata early makes building/checking Rust up to twice as fast

Yes it's a pretty well thought out policy. It feels bad for someone to put in a month of work and have their code ultimately rejected, but if an llm does something sloppy with some light guidance in a few days, then great, experiment with some weird stuff and see what happens, then once you know it probably should work, go in for that month of work and make it happen.

knuckleheadson Emitting metadata early makes building/checking Rust up to twice as fast

(Copying and pasting from what I posted in rust zulip)

There is an .early-rmeta file that is generated that contains the result of type checking the outer part of the functions (arguments, returns) that is then passed down to all the other dependencies that can use it and get a "headstart" on their work. -Zearly-metadata is the flag for Rustc here to turn that on. It also needed to learn how to swap the real metadata in for the early stuff that it was previously using, once the real stuff showed up.

Rustc needs to be able to pause and resume at certain points and Cargo needs to be know how to look for and react to that, which is what -Zheadstart does for Cargo. So there's some changes job_queue that happen to there. I haven't checked this directly yet, but my understanding is that it doesn't kill the process, it just has it sit and wait, which normally would occupy a slot, but doesn't any longer. ---

So not a cache, just being able to pause and start work and better utilize the available slots.

knuckleheadson Emitting metadata early makes building/checking Rust up to twice as fast

Talking with them presently! This specific set of changes won't get in (LLM written, little to no thinking through of the broader design), but I am hoping something like it shows up sometime.

knuckleheadson How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026

https://github.com/PowderworksCode/headstart

^ run setup and give it a whirl. Will send to Rust compiler team when I have some pr's up etc.

knuckleheadson How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026

Depends on what you are editing I would say, if it's something deeper in the stack then it should help. The last numbers I have is that this is a 6-8% improvement for incremental editing of the code for cargo itself, but I'm having the benchmark be rerun now, as I've landed a fair amount of changes since then.

knuckleheadson How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026

Result:

Headstart on codex-rs (16 cores, clean builds, median of 3 alternating off/on pairs):

                          off       on     saved
  cargo check           383.8s   277.1s    28%
  cargo build           530.7s   330.8s    38%
  check, -Zthreads=8    220.0s   190.5s    13%
  build, -Zthreads=8    317.3s   249.2s    21%

Not helpful for compilation yet, but it's something :)

knuckleheadson How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026

I will email you when I have something up for sure! First cargo check has it at about 28% reduced on codex rs, from 383 seconds down to 277 seconds on a 16 core machine. No -Zthreads yet though, and that typically has a similar effect and reduces the speed up the early meta data gives.

knuckleheadson How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026

Yes I think I read a post of his from like 2019 were something was tried like this before. My guess is that this will be an interesting and hopefully informative PR for you all to see, but will likely not be merged as is. I had to add the ability for rustc to pause after early meta data emission and that was hacked together I feel, not well designed per se.

I view this as speculative execution/compilation and just throw out any errors from a crate that depended on another crate that ultimately errors out. It has the same outcome (same errors are printed in both cases) you just have a chance of having totally wasted some cpu time (that was otherwise just sitting around though).

knuckleheadson How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026

This thing is a monster, blows out the disk space on a Claude code web session. Will run it on my test server later and let you know.

knuckleheadson How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026

Funny to see this now. I’ve got a private branch I am in the process of shaping up this weekend to show the compiler team. For deep nested projects like rust analyzer, if you emit the meta data about function types earlier for downstream slots to use, before successful type checking, you can start other crates earlier and use all the slots you have instead of sitting around waiting for the full type checking of the bodies (which other crates largely don’t care about). Something like 40% wall time speed up, maybe 10% to 15% if you have the parallel frontend on.

knuckleheadson Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics

Better for who? If I don’t care about the welfare of mathematicians and just the advancement of mathematics, would AI doing the math not be better for me?

As well, if the open models were as good as the proprietary ones, do you think they wouldn’t still have complaints?

knuckleheadson Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics

Maintaining the existing standards is in fact a form of protection from AI disruption. They are asking the AI companies to follow their norms, instead of them having to conform to new norms created by AI. They don’t want to have to change the way they do things, understandably!, and are asking the companies to accommodate their way of life.

knuckleheadson Ask HN: What are you reading?

Mother of Learning is pretty good, similar vein, does some interesting things. The Wandering Inn is also pretty good, I'd say more challenging than Dungeon Crawler Carl while still being entertaining.

knuckleheadson Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics

I don't see why mathematicians should be protected from AI anymore than any other profession. It's either everybody or nobody, not fair on the face of it otherwise.

knuckleheadson Made by Mechanical Means

> One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. In recent years, such barbarisms were abundant in Dadaism. It is only now that its impulse becomes discernible: Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial—and literary—means the effects which the public today seeks in the film.

> Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demands will carry beyond its goal.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935 https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf

Edit: to put a finer point on it, AI art like this is, through it's rigorous application in almost every previous medium, showing that there is a demand and energy for a new art form that depends on the changing technical standard and capabilities that AI has introduced. I don't know what it will be, but you can see some of the edges of it with how it is making waves in all the other mediums.

knuckleheadson “I just chose words carefully”

Agents get a little upset when you ask them to do this and then check their work with a hook. They do not enjoy the process and create some weird looking text!

knuckleheadson Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights

I couldn't get past all the network errors on OpenCode. Seemed smart enough, and was useful when I was low on usage on Claude, but beyond that, really hard for me to say whether it was Good or Bad.

knuckleheadson We never use AI. For anything

Handcrafted software will find it's own market the same way that handcrafted clothing, furniture and other previously industrialized goods that became commodities did. They'll be more expensive generally and it'll be a smaller market overall, you'll always have some people who will love them all the same. Not my choice, but I can understand why they would want it.

knuckleheadson Breaking the WAL

The scheduler in the Linux kernel jumps out to me as a place where it would be cool to find something of this nature.

knuckleheadson A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

RIP to a real one. Have you considered using one billion Chinese residential ips to address your problem? I’ve heard one billion Chinese residential ips really does the trick here.

knuckleheadson Software is about people, not code (2020)

"Software [ought to be] about people, not code"

Related but not quite the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

knuckleheadson A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

Previously, I had done a fair amount of research into how Google's monopoly on web crawling further entrenches their monopoly in the search engine market. You can read more about this here, https://knuckleheads.club, there is a long report from ~2020 or so that explains how it worked at the time. The club is mothballed, I am doing other things with my life, and I'm happy to say that we played a very small role in the DOJ ordering Google to share their crawl data with qualified competitors (a work in progress, but it's progressing).

Chatbots have super charged this dynamic though, to the point that it is showing up in the robots.txt data. The last few weeks I've been having Claude rerun some old analysis of Common Crawl from back then, when I have spare usage and time. What I've found is that you can see pretty clearly the rise in people outright blocking AI chatbot related crawlers likely because of how aggressive they have become.

  Quarter  Crawl    GPT     Claude  CC      G-Ext   Byte    Bing    Google
  2023 Q1  2023-06  0.00%   0.00%   0.16%   0.00%   0.06%   0.47%   0.39%
  2023 Q2  2023-14  0.00%   0.00%   0.18%   0.00%   0.06%   0.45%   0.38%
  2023 Q3  none       —       —       —       —       —       —       —
  2023 Q4  2023-40  2.21%   0.00%   2.12%   0.04%   0.11%   0.39%   0.27%
  2024 Q1  2024-10  0.53%   0.05%   0.31%   0.09%   0.18%   0.34%   0.31%
  2024 Q2  2024-18  0.55%   0.09%   0.32%   0.11%   0.24%   0.32%   0.31%
  2024 Q3  2024-30  0.68%   0.22%   0.36%   0.20%   0.38%   0.24%   0.33%
  2024 Q4  2024-42  1.10%   0.50%   0.44%   0.32%   0.50%   0.25%   0.40%
  2025 Q1  2025-05  1.14%   0.66%   0.54%   0.42%   0.66%   0.25%   0.44%
  2025 Q2  2025-18  1.37%   0.93%   0.63%   0.70%   0.92%   0.29%   0.19%
  2025 Q3  2025-30  1.42%   1.07%   0.74%   0.62%   1.01%   0.31%   0.27%
  2025 Q4  2025-43  1.92%   1.51%   1.23%   1.15%   1.52%   0.27%   0.19%
  2026 Q1  2026-04  2.13%   1.76%   1.68%   1.58%   1.77%   0.22%   0.15%
  2026 Q2  2026-17  2.80%   2.38%   2.26%   2.13%   2.50%   0.22%   0.14%
  2026 Q3  2026-30  3.45%   3.01%   2.89%   2.71%   3.16%   0.21%   0.14%

GPTBot is OpenAI, ClaudeBot is Anthropic, CCBot is Common Crawl, Google-Ext is a way for website owners to indicate they don't want their content to be used for AI, Bytespider is Bytedance, Bing and Google are the last two. Take these numbers with a truck of salt, haven't had time to verify them.

It's very clear that website owners do not like getting their content scraped and are indicating to GPTBot et al. that they are not welcome. It's a shame that CCBot is caught in the cross fire, but that's life. Bing and Google are doing just fine though, almost like having significant power in the search engine market gives you an advantage in other markets too. Who knew!