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zelcon

68 karma · joined March 24, 2016

Paul Graham was wrong about LISP
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zelcon··on Fingerprints are the new cookies
There are numerous fingerprinting opportunities from just layer 4 packet analysis.
zelcon··on Making big downloads resumable in Firefox
Rust for web browsers…how’s Servo going?
zelcon··on Threat of AI share crash puts world financial stability at risk, says IMF
Anthropic IPO will be a better example.

NVIDIA is still a widget business.

zelcon··on Threat of AI share crash puts world financial stability at risk, says IMF
Investors like a story that lets their imagination run wild. TSLA offers that. AI / NVIDIA has that 10-fold. It’s “man’s last invention” - you couldn’t come up with a better hook to raise capital.

Short of an emergency rate hike to 10%, nothing stops this bubble.

zelcon··on Threat of AI share crash puts world financial stability at risk, says IMF
Cash because no AI bubble means the market is cooked for a decade or so
zelcon··on Threat of AI share crash puts world financial stability at risk, says IMF
Honestly a crash upward is more devastating for the working man
zelcon··on AI models can provably hide arbitrary capabilities
Many U.S. corporations have built solutions based on one of the free local models.

If you spend a ton of money, time and goodwill to situate your trojans inside someone’s infrastructure, you don’t just blow it immediately. They would wait for a declaration of war.

zelcon··on AI models can provably hide arbitrary capabilities
You’re simping for a totalitarian regime that still practices communism
zelcon··on No portable way to detect string-to-float conversion errors in standard C
C++ can do this as well with tuple unpacking. Rust copied it from C++.
zelcon··on Type-safe HTML templating in Zig
Why are people trying to implement PHP in 2026?

A much better exercise I’d like to see is using C++26 reflection to accomplish the same thing. Because that will actually be used while Zig will not.

zelcon··on AI models can provably hide arbitrary capabilities
I have zero doubt that every model coming out of the CCP has some Manchurian code word built in. Being “local” is a nice way to get root.
zelcon··on Kevin Kelly's 2016 AI Predictions, 10 Years Later
People in the 1950s also perfectly predicted AI in its current form. It wasn’t entirely hard to see coming.
zelcon··on 'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey
Ok, and?

His comment seems to imply there was some inherent virtue in doing the thing rather than letting the machine automate it.

zelcon··on Thinking will become a hobby
Only if the electric grid shuts down. At this point, I have more faith in Anthropic continuing to exist as a going concern than I do for the U.S. government.
zelcon··on Leaving Tech
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zelcon··on Leaving Tech
Every single one of these cases is someone who is too old applying to be an IC. That’s the elephant in the room no one is ever going to acknowledge but everyone knows.
zelcon··on Strengthening our defenses against distillation attacks
This is basically like the RIAA/MPAA in the early 2000s trying to lobby politicians to crack down on torrents. It won’t work either.

Today, movies make money from in person theater tickets and records make money from tours. I don’t know what the equivalent would be for AI (maybe IRL robots?) but it does not look promising.

zelcon··on Passkeys are a trap
I have always wondered why TOTP is always the “2nd” factor and not the 1st. The password should be the 2nd factor you opt into if you’re paranoid.

For grandma, include a Login with Facebook button.

zelcon··on Strengthening our defenses against distillation attacks
Startup idea: Crowdsource Claude tokens for distillation, routing a copy of all your tokens to your friendly Chinese distiller, compensating users with a small rebate on token cost (payable in Google Play gift cards to avoid CCP capital controls).
zelcon··on Thinking will become a hobby
> If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly

No, it actually doesn’t follow. Atoms are a lot harder to move than bits.

zelcon··on Janas: Run LLMs larger than RAM by streaming experts from SSD
I think GitHub repos should have a new tag listing the model used to write it along with the token cost.

I don’t want to bother reading anything sub-Fable, and this one looks sub-Fable.

zelcon··on A Modern Web App in C
For any greenfield project, pick up Rust instead of C++. Why? Ask any AI and it will pick Rust. Since AI is writing the code now and it likes Rust, because the pre-AI internet in its most trustworthy training dataset liked Rust. Therefore all code will eventually be Rust.
zelcon··on A Modern Web App in C
There is a third option, which doesn’t involve making your small application responsible for reinventing the wheel.

Take whatever is pushing the site over the wire (nginx, Apache, lighthttpd) and use its public APIs to implement your web application.

You can make your nginx.conf list the routes along with the C functions for each route, which nginx looks up in your shared library.

You can host numerous web apps just by updating adding an .so and updating the nginx conf.

This is also structurally more efficient your hand rolled web server which in all likelihood has to reverse proxy via nginx anyway.

zelcon··on A Modern Web App in C
That’s ironic because 99% of PHP code today is served using PHP-FPM which is essentially a FastCGI wrapper around PHP.
zelcon··on A Modern Web App in C
These things usually get 1 visitor per month and it’s Googlebot
zelcon··on A Modern Web App in C
Both nginx and Apache have modules that keep a Python/PHP/Perl interpreter loaded and invoke your entry point using FastCGI, completely leaving HTTP handling to the real web server. They went out of style for some reason, but there’s nothing stopping you from using them.
zelcon··on A Modern Web App in C
You can write a ngninx module. That would be the actual 2026 way to write C web apps. Used to be a huge pain, but now AI can just read the nginx source and do it correctly.
zelcon··on Free software hasn't won
Why would anyone want free software to win? Dont most of us here draw an income from software that’s explicitly not free?
zelcon··on Mistral OCR
Release the weights or buy an ad
zelcon··on Bcvi – run vi over a 'back-channel' (2010)
Look at what they need to mimic a fraction of our power (TRAMP)
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