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> I agree that "from scratch" is a misrepresentation.

I believe in the UK the term for this is actually fraudulent misrepresentation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misrepresentation#English_law

And in this context it seems to go against The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2008/1277/made

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/13/section/226


I very much don't believe for a second anyone would manage to get a judgement against them on this in the UK.

For starters, the language is highly subjective, and they'd be able to show vast amounts of discourse about software engineering where "from scratch" often does not involve starting with nothing, and they'd then go on to argue that the person suing haven't actually had any reason to believe that they would be able to replicate a setup that was described as a complex large-scale experiment without much more information.

The person suing would have an uphill battle showing that whatever assumptions they made were something that was reasonable to infer based on that statement.

And to have a case, a consumer would also then need to have relied on this as a significant factor in choosing to buy their services.

But even if we assume the court would agree it is fraudulent, the remedy is only "directly consequential losses".

In other words, I doubt anyone would lose sleep over this risk.


That's very interesting, thanks! I had no idea that legionella risk was a thing for data centers. This article mentions that to avoid the risk most data centers treat the water with disinfectants which are sometimes toxic:

https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/making-the-energy-efficienc...


They're really nasty bacteria and once in a system they are hard to get rid of because then you have to heat everything to temperatures that the system normally might never reach.

That's why central heating systems that run 'low' every now and then stoke up to 60 degrees or more on the secondary circuit for tap water.

And data centers are the perfect location, endless 35 to 45 degree water. Cooling towers are the main problem for this, another is aerosols of water that has been sitting in the sun for a while, for instance in a garden hose exposed to the sun.


Last year I had to deal with a contractor who sincerely believed that a very popular library had some issue because it was erroring when parsing a chatgpt generated json... I'm still shocked, this is seriously scary

"SELECT isn't broken" isn't a new advice, and it exists for a reason.

I guess it was a Fairphone 2 from 2015? They are still selling screens, cases and camera modules but not the rest of the parts unfortunately:

https://shop.fairphone.com/shop/category/spare-parts-4?categ...


Full title is too long for HN: "First Lady Melania Trump Inspires America’s Children to be Curious, Use AI to Achieve their Career Ambitions"


"Borrow" is an interesting choice of word, see for example this:

    /// The quirks mode of the document.
    #[inline]
    pub fn quirks_mode(&self) -> QuirksMode {
        self.quirks_mode
    }
https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/3e5bc78b075645...

And then this:

    /// The quirks mode of the document.
    pub fn quirks_mode(&self) -> QuirksMode {
        self.stylist.quirks_mode()
    }
https://github.com/servo/stylo/blob/71737ad5c8b29c143a6c992a...

It seems ChatGPT is still copying segments of code almost verbatim, although sometimes it does weird things, compare these for example:

https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/3e5bc78b075645...

https://github.com/servo/stylo/blob/71737ad5c8b29c143a6c992a...


Interesting, I remembered that when trying out Stable Diffusion, once I ventured outside of the realm of anime waifus, the images ended up being so similar to existing sources, that image search could find the references.

Which is also kinda crazy since superficially there was very little similar between the 2 images, but I guess AI models used for image search converge on similar embedding than the ones used for AI generation.


Well, could it be because it was instructed to kinda "study" Servo?

https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/3e5bc78b075645...


Just for context, this was the original claim by Cursor's CEO on Twitter:

> We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week.

> It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM.

> It kind of works! It still has issues and is of course very far from Webkit/Chromium parity, but we were astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely correctly.

https://xcancel.com/mntruell/status/2011562190286045552#m


Has anyone tried to rewrite some popular open source project with IA? I imagine modern LLMs can be very effective at license-washing/plagiarizing dependencies, it could be an interesting new benchmark too


I think it's fair enough to consider porting a subset of rewriting, in which case there are several successful experiments out there:

- JustHTML [1], which in practice [2] is a port of html5ever [3] to Python.

- justjshtml, which is a port of JustHTML to JavaScript :D [4].

- MiniJinja [5] was recently ported to Go [6].

All three projects have one thing in common: comprehensive test suites which were used to guardrail and guide AI.

References:

1. https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/justhtml

2. https://friendlybit.com/python/writing-justhtml-with-coding-...

3. https://github.com/servo/html5ever

4. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/

5. https://github.com/mitsuhiko/minijinja

6. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/14/minijinja-go-port/


As the author, it's a stretch to say that JustHTML is a port of html5ever. While you're right that this was part of the initial prompt, the code is very different, which is typically not what counts as "port". Your mileage may wary.


Interesting, IIUC the transformer architecture / attention mechanism were initially designed for use in the language translation domain. Maybe after peeling back a few layers, that's still all they're really doing.


This has long been how I have explained LLMs to non-technical people: text transformation engines. To some extent, many common, tedious, activities basically constitute a transformation of text into one well known form from another (even some kinds of reasoning are this) and so LLMs are very useful. But they just transform text between well known forms.


And while it appears that lots of problems can be contorted into translation, "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Maybe we do hit a brick wall unless we can come up with a model that more closely aligns with actual human reasoning.


Note that it's not clear that any of the JustHTML ports were actually ports per se, as in the end they all ended up with very different implementations. Instead, it might just be that an LLM generated roughly the same library several different times.

See https://felix.dognebula.com/art/html-parsers-in-portland.htm...


More vibe coded browser modules:

V8 => H8 - JavaScript engine that hates code, misunderstands equality, sponsored by Brendan Eich and "Yes on Prop H8".

Expat => Vexpat - An annoying, irritating rewrite of an XML parser.

libxml2 => libxmlpoo - XML parsing, same quality as the spec.

libxslt => libxsalt - XSLT transforms with extra salt in the wound.

Protobuf => Probabuf - Probably serializes correctly, probably not, fuzzy logic.

Cap'n Proto => Crap'n Proto - Zero-copy, zero quality.

cURL => cHURL - Throws requests violently serverward, projectile URLemitting.

SDL => STD - Sexually Transmitted Dependency. It never leaves and spreads bugs to everything you touch.

Servo => Swervo - Drunk, wobbly layout that can't stay on the road.

WebKit => WebShite - British pronunciation, British quality control.

Blink => Blinkered - Only renders pages it agrees with politically.

Taffy => Daffy - Duck typed Flexbox layout that's completely unhinged. "You're dethpicable!"

html5ever => html5never - Servo's HTML parser that never finishes tokenizing.

Skia => SkAI - AI-generated graphics that hallucinates extra pixels and fingers.

FreeType => FreeTypo - Introduces typos during keming and rasterization.

Firefox => Foxfire - Burns through your battery in 12 minutes, while molesting children.

WebGL => WebGLitch - Shader compilation errors as art.

WebGPU => WebGPUke - Makes your GPU physically ill.

SQLite => SQLHeavy - Embedded database, 400MB per query.

Vulkan => Vulcan't - Low-level graphics that can't.

Clang => Clanger - Drops errors loudly at runtime.

libevent => liebevent - Event library that lies about readiness.

Opus => Oops - Audio codec, "oops, your audio's gone."

All modules now available on GitPub:

GitHub => GitPub - Microsoft's vibe control system optimized for the Ballmer Peak. Commit quality peaks at 0.129% BAC, mass reverts at 0.15%.


Not me personally, but a GitHub user wrote a replacement for Go's regexp library that was "up to 3-3000x+ faster than stdlib": https://github.com/coregx/coregex ... at first I was impressed, so started testing it and reporting bugs, but as soon as I ran my own benchmarks, it all fell apart (https://github.com/coregx/coregex/issues/29). After some mostly-bot updates, that issue was closed. But someone else opened a very similar one recently (https://github.com/coregx/coregex/issues/79) -- same deal, "actually, it's slower than the stdlib in my tests". Basically AI slop with poor tests, poor benchmarks, and way oversold. How he's positioning these projects is the problematic bit, I reckon, not the use of AI.

Same user did a similar thing by creating an AWK interpreter written in Go using LLMs: https://github.com/kolkov/uawk -- as the creator of (I think?) the only AWK interpreter written in Go (https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk), I was curious. It turns out that if there's only one item in the training data (GoAWK), AI likes to copy and paste freely from the original. But again, it's poorly tested and poorly benchmarked.

I just don't see how one can get quality like this, without being realistic about code review, testing, and benchmarking.


> up to 3-3000x+ faster than stdlib

Note that this is semantically exactly equivalent to "up to 3000x faster than stdlib" and doesn't actually claim any particular actual speedup since "up to" denotes an upper bound, not a lower bound or expected value. It’s standard misleading-but-not-technically-false marketing language to create a false impression because people tend to focus on the number and ignore the "up to".


When you say "up to" about a list of data points, it's not just a bound. At least one has to reach that amount or it's a lie.


With the “up to 3-3000x+” language the plus leaves us with the entire number line.


Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/870/


Saying “up to” means that bound is the maximum value of the data set. It may be far from the median value, but it is included (or you’re lying). With any other interpretation the phrase has no meaning whatsoever.


I will concede, proactively, that "up to" could refer to some maximum possible bound, even if the current set doesn't include a value at that bound, though I would argue that's likely deceptive wording. For example, you could say that each carton of of eggs on a pallet contains up to 12 eggs, because that's the maximum capacity of the carton, even if none of the actual cartons on this pallet actually have 12 eggs in them.


3000x Faster Optimized Random Number Generator: https://xkcd.com/221/


Oh yeah, I recognize this guy. The author of most commits in coregex posted his vibecoded projects to Reddit.

I've looked at his other repos and it's the same shit. Responses are also quite funny, does he not realize this reads like the worst of AI?


To be fair, good benchmarking is hard, most people get it wrong. Scientific training helps.


I used one of the assistants to reverse and rewrite a browser-hosted JS game-like app to desktop Rust. It required a lot of steering but it was pretty useful.


I think you are confusing The Dark Project, which is the first game of the Thief series from 1998, with some mod or maybe The Dark Mod? :)


Gaaaah, words. Yes thank you ! Coz in another thread I was mentioning both.

The above post -which I can no longer edit- compares The Black Parade / TBP (a mod for Thief I / The Dark Project / TDP) to The Dark Mod (TDM, a mod for the doom3 engine). Phew :D

As for the original question of comparing TBP to TDP: I’m personally not fond of Thief I and prefer Thief II, as it focuses on what works: stealth! Thief I is wildly creative, but also full of muddy combat with unconvincing monsters & zombies, and annoying maps / missions. So, to me, TBP (which is pleasingly weird and avoids TDP gameplay pitfalls) kinda beats its parent game TDP at its own game.


CNN interviewed Stephen Miller last night:

Stephen Miller Asserts U.S. Has Right to Take Greenland

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509694

Here is a clip:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tidejP41CBk


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