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vconnor

1,166 karma · joined June 12, 2025

https://unfocus.org
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vconnor··on US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
The masculine/feminine question of the name Andrea is made weirder by the fact it literally derives from the Greek word for ‘adult male’ (andros)
vconnor··on Supermarket freezers across Europe hit by second suspected cyber-attack
Their cybersecurity departments (next to fresh produce) are all over this.

Snark aside, supermarkets are not in the tech business. The extent of their involvement is ringing their IT vendor to complain about it.

vconnor··on AI delivers 'zero financial payoff' to most companies, Apollo economist says
Usually, things that aren’t clearly correlated with profit tend to get ignored and canned by businesses.

Think security, optimization work, refactoring, etc. Today everybody is drunk with AI, but what happens when the hype is over and you can’t justify to the finance dept. why the company is spending X on tokens?

vconnor··on Show HN: I rebuilt my old canvas 3D library as a small WebGL 2 library – phoria2
WebGPU still isn’t supported on Linux (Brave or Firefox, in my tests)

WebGL2 runs on toasters.

Why do you need WebGPU when WebGL2 is enough?

vconnor··on OccupySaaS
Everything is made with LLMs today. Even sites that claim to be anti-LLM. I guess vibe coders are immune to hypocrisy.
vconnor··on AI fan wikis riddled with errors are muddying the waters of games culture
And of course they had to use high-background steel to build this site.

You know it’s not gonna be updated, because it was created on a whim and the author has already moved onto 79 other projects since.

vconnor··on Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now
There is no post-hoc Luddism.
vconnor··on Restrooms along the Norwegian Scenic Routes
I had to disable my adblock
vconnor··on The Ocean 'Was the Color of Chocolate.' Mexico Declares War on Seaweed.
Whoever's dubbed it so doesn't know it's a quixotic effort they'll never win, just like the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.

A strange case of nominative determinism.

vconnor··on No AI, 52 min. Build all Linux Files utils in C by Hand [video]
Why would one would like to truncate an existing file? To overwrite it. It's a very common use case.

What I have never found any use for personally is opening a file in read-write mode, while also truncating it, which is the full extent of w+ behaviour. I cannot think of many reasons to have an output stream to also function as an input.

vconnor··on An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted them
> there's zero reason anyone would ever think that science is omniscient

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

Quote: [The term has been adopted] as a pejorative term with the meaning "an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)"

Scientism is very much in vogue, especially in the "rationalist" community which is often tangent with the HN populace. It's "science, the religion."

vconnor··on Restrooms along the Norwegian Scenic Routes
The UK is a large place.
vconnor··on Restrooms along the Norwegian Scenic Routes
Well, that's a pretty good ad from Visit Norway: now I'd really like to visit.

In fact, if they weren't so damn rich and everything so expensive compared to my Southern European way of live, I'd consider moving there just to enjoy the gorgeous nature.

vconnor··on An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted them
There’s people that die on a Twinkie diet. Here’s more food for thought.

Living or dying is a bit coarse a metric, don’t you think?

vconnor··on I post trained a model on Demoscenes
Quit with the doomposting. How long before you guys go on the street chanting ‘AI is coming for all of us?’
vconnor··on I post trained a model on Demoscenes
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.
vconnor··on An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted them
Consider the possibility that there are nutritional values that are NOT being measured. We should accept that science is not… omniscient.
vconnor··on Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament
If only there was a law to uphold this.

I would love to be governed by 500 average Joes and Janes, chosen at random, for a mandatory 4 years of (political) conscription.

But eventually they will themselves vote to abolish this in favour of career politics. It is one of those cursed problems there are no valid solutions to.

vconnor··on Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament
Because a working group of 80 career politicians is more effective?
vconnor··on Building an AI-native engineering org
I guess they didn’t read Simon Willison’s latest post on how to make fun games with AI assistance.
vconnor··on Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code
#goals
vconnor··on OpenAI raises less than half of $30B target
Maybe it’s their day job… they seem to be the kind of commenter that doesn’t have any interest outside of LLMs.
vconnor··on Tools Hacker News keeps asking for
6 Paid search without ads - never launched.

Me and my Kagi sub are a bit dubious of this claim.

vconnor··on Geist Serif
> At Vercel, Geist Sans runs the product.

Groan.

vconnor··on After 28 years walking across the globe, he's almost home
Love hearing from the morality police in face of such incredible feat of human effort and ingenuity.

No one who embarks in such an adventure is a ‘well-adjusted’ person, and their personal demons are theirs to face. Yet it is so simple for many to just point and blame at someone else’s fault instead of just appreciating what single-minded effort is able to achieve.

I well expect to be downvoted, as the modern internet culture revels in blame and negativity. Any achievement an opportunity to demolish it. The Puritan morality is stronger than ever. “Let the sinless one among you throw the first stone.”

Congrats to this person, and hope they have learned something about themselves and their place in the world.

vconnor··on The October inflection point for vibe game development
I guess fun truly is subjective.
vconnor··on Opus 5.5 causing an identity crisis is real
I live to see what kind of tech culture passionless, careless people like you will build.

Thank God you are not tasked to build actual bridges.

vconnor··on Opus 5.5 causing an identity crisis is real
Meaning != cause != destiny

I am likewise atheist and I have spent half a decade thinking about meaning. It has nothing to do with religion or God, though some find their meaning there.

I’m not trying to be snarky, but you should read more philosophy. Everybody asks about meaning at one point in their life, and find themselves woefully unprepared.

vconnor··on AI execs may be too out of touch to build for the general public
Caring for a family usually came with help from the community.

Then we decided that nuclear families were the way to go, so we gotta do everything ourselves now, and with both parents working because one breadwinner isn’t enough to live on.

vconnor··on The October inflection point for vibe game development
My God, imagine having to learn stuff. Imagine having to care, having a burning passion inside, a message that you need to share with the world in any medium.

We can do away with all that. No need to strive to be a complete person, no need to grow, to challenge yourself.

All you need to do is snap your fingers. What do you mean you still feel hollow inside? You should have asked the machine to also give you a dose of Accomplishment for the task you didn’t put any effort in.

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