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mondobeon The 'else' keyword is probably a literal translation from German (2020)

Perhaps after the robot uprising... https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-program

mondobeon Facebook now charging to post more than 2 links a month

LinkedIn has seriously deranked posts with links in the past. Everything within Meta is heavily A/B tested, but it seems feasible that this will become real.

mondobeon AI Makes Me Sad

This absolutely puts a lot of what I've been feeling into concrete, scientific terms, thanks!

mondobeon AI Makes Me Sad

I actually thought of this song while writing the post. I was definitely feeling my hubris at that moment, but I would at least liked to have given it a try in 2020-2022, when WebAssembly/Rust on the web was getting good and we were all stuck inside.

mondobeon AI Makes Me Sad

Thanks! I have more substantive thoughts about AI I'd like to write down later.

mondobeon Ask HN: Would a startup for young creatives who reject AI be feasible?

Very insightful and encouraging words, thank you!

mondobeon Ask HN: Would a startup for young creatives who reject AI be feasible?

I have no problem with creative destruction, elevator operators died out for a reason. If there was a group of people who rejected automatic elevators for some reason, it stands to reason there would be a company to snatch up that market. (case in point: no-touch Shabbat elevators for Orthodox Jews)

mondobeon Ask HN: Would a startup for young creatives who reject AI be feasible?

Good point, and one I've thought about a lot. Right now, I think we're at a stage in the hype cycle where, for the overwhelming majority of founders, appealing to AI hype is much easier than lying to appeal to anti-AI sentiment. If and when this changes, it might manifest as an incentive for companies to be transparent with their source code (either fully open-source or at least "source available" or auditable).

mondobeon Ask HN: Would a startup for young creatives who reject AI be feasible?

Thanks for the perspective! I tend to consult ChatGPT with high-level queries as a replacement for Google, and I get a lot of mileage out of combining that with plenty of good old documentation-reading.

mondobeon Ask HN: Would a startup for young creatives who reject AI be feasible?

Fair point about game development. I'm definitely looking more towards creative tools (like music production apps) because making a game engine is just a Herculean task. I've found that velocity is good (i.e. one meaningful feature every day or two) in the early stages of building for the web without AI.

mondobeon Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? (2025)

I'll trust you on this subject, anal_reactor

mondobeon Vancouver PD website features Quick Escape button that wipes itself from history

The Trevor Project (LGBTQ support/suicide prevention site) has the same thing, triggered by a hotkey (press ESC three times). https://www.thetrevorproject.org/

mondobeon Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)

I've been working on a music-making website since late spring. This is my first real frontend project, and I'm writing it in pure Rust using Leptos (so far, haven't had to write a single line of JavaScript!)

Most of my work so far has been on the actual music-making interface, but I'm beginning work on the backend now. I've only worked with Django before (for a school project at Georgia Tech), so I'll be deep in the `sqlx` documentation for a while.

There's no manual, so use at your own risk (it's similar to tracker programs like FastTracker and OpenMPT): https://mondobe.com/tracker

mondobeon Show HN: Wordle-style game for Fermi questions

I think the win criteria is good. I would think about automatically showing the "How to Play" screen on a user's first visit so that they are aware of the criteria.

mondobeon Show HN: Wordle-style game for Fermi questions

Very neat! I'd love a feature where I can share my score with a link to the website (although it's possible there already is one and I just missed it).

mondobeon Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

I'm getting into frontend web development with Rust by making a tracker [1] (not the advertising kind, rather a type of music-making app that was popular with chiptune artists in the '90s).

This is my first time doing anything with frontend more complex than an image carousel, and I have occasionally felt that I'm in over my head with things like multithreading and audio playback, but it's immensely satisfying seeing the app come together.

I am extremely impressed by the Leptos framework [2], and I'm thrilled that I haven't had to write a single line of JS, even when doing DOM interactions or communicating with web workers.

Once I polish up the tracker frontend, I'd like to add a backend and potentially try to release it as a paid app.

[1] https://mondobe.com/tracker

[2] https://leptos.dev/

mondobeon Is anybody using this private key?

You only see hunter2 because I copied and pasted your stars. I just see ****.

mondobeon Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

Why was the beach using your phone?

mondobeon Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

I would guess some version of "Daniel Gackle", as seen at the very bottom of https://www.ycombinator.com/people.html

mondobeon Animals Made from 13 Circles (2016)

  interface Animal {
    Circle[13] circles();

    // Leftover from Intro to CS, remember to remove
    void make_sound();
  }

mondobeon AMC Theatres will screen a Swedish movie 'visually dubbed' with the help of AI

Works for 136.0.2 on Windows

mondobeon Microplastics in the human brain

Perfect, I was hoping to increase my neuroplasticity.

mondobeon Tomatoes roaming the fields and canaries in the coalmine

I hope the incoming administration takes "tomato government assistance" seriously. A lot of my closest tomato friends have fallen on hard times.

mondobeon Cats may be able to learn human words

Reading the title, I thought this was going to be about a backdoor in the Unix program...

mondobeon DeepMind debuts watermarks for AI-generated text

It's like a symphony of watermarks, all playing in harmony.

mondobeon AI-Generated Minecraft in real time

I do wonder if we'll ever see this type of technology advance far enough that even a textual description (rather than hours of footage of an existing game) could generate something novel and playable. It seems absurd now, but throw enough compute and efficiency gains on it over a few decades, and it might approach the realm of possibility.

mondobeon In some scientific papers, words expressing uncertainty have decreased (2023)

Including HN comments, I see...

mondobeon Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

I have a hard time seeing how this isn't obvious. 95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT, and most of that is the same stuff that Google was handling before.

From personal experience, the only thing that changed when replacing the "old" Google Assistant with the Gemini-powered one on my Pixel was that it's no longer able to create reminders.

mondobeon How I Experience Web Today (2021)

Maybe the quantity of the annoyances don't matter (see YouTube's recent anti-ad-blocking shenanigans), but the fact that the annoyances are mostly constant and known (at least, changing at a much slower rate than you view a new slop website) definitely reduces cognitive load.

mondobeon My negative views on Rust (2023)

> Rust really hasn't changed much in the past 6 years.

Even more importantly than this, Rust has a major emphasis on backwards compatibility. The author mentions a "hamster wheel" of endless libraries, but, in Rust, nothing's forcing you to switch to a newer library, even if an old one is no longer maintained.

In general, the complexity of your project is completely up to you, and (at least to me) it seems like a lot of the new features (e.g. generator syntax) are trending towards simplicity rather than complexity.