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19h

2,352 karma · joined April 23, 2011

Software Engineer at Hex-Rays SA

https://github.com/19h

kenan [at] sly.mn ksulayman [at] hex-rays.com

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19h··on Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek exposed as decade-long GRU spy
Did you remove Wirecard from your LinkedIn?
19h··on Apple drops PWA support on iOS for EU users
All of the PWAs on my iPhone running 17.4 will now open in Safari instead of in fullscreen, and iOS itself warned me the first time I opened a PWA from the home screen after installing 17.4 that iOS will now open all „linked websites“ in the „configured default browser“.

They’re obviously trying to prevent companies from bypassing their extortion proposal in response to DMA by simply offering a PWA to users that can work around the „core tech fee“..

19h··on Latest ChatGPT 4 System prompt (1,700 tokens)
Pretty sure that’s exactly what Steve Jobs decided [0] :-)

[0] https://www.wired.com/2010/04/steve-jobs-porn/

19h··on AdGuard Home: Network-wide ad- and tracker-blocking DNS server
It’s open source software.

MacPaw lists Russian-developed software as a risk because the government can access your data at any time — this is self-hosted open-source software though.

The FSB can’t just access your local server with an arbitrary court order.

Therefore this doesn’t feel like a legitimate concern but more like Russophobia, which I understand but also think is utterly unasked for as I know first hand how much Russian developers are suffering from the stupidity of their government.

19h··on Inside .git
Off topic:

This is especially good to know when you’re exfiltrating .git folders that are unprotected and publicly accessible on websites :-)

Seriously though, make sure you’re deleting .git folders from deployed websites - or at least prevent them from being accessed. In at 300+ of the 1000+ website .git folders I downloaded from random websites there were private access credentials to AWS, GitHub, OpenAI, etc.

19h··on An eruption has begun north of Grindavík
It's crazy to think that just one week before all of this started me and my girlfriend were hiking to Gunnuhver hot springs and stayed at pretty much the exact spot over the night where the eruption happened next to Grindavik, mostly because there's nearly absolute darkness ... except for the bright light above Grindavik that looks like an island of light in the middle of nowhere, it was really magical.

Iceland is such a beautiful place.. although I was angry and sad for most part of the trip seeing how tourism changed Iceland over the last 20 years. As recently as 2014 we had to ask the locals in mostly sign language and paper maps how to navigate the Westfjords; there's 5G now in even the last corner of the island.. guess I'll need to resort to Svalbard and Greenland to go truly off-grid in the future :-)

19h··on Alaska Airlines 737 Max makes emergency landing due to depressurization
Please, Stan the Man will blame the pilots, the passengers, the Wright brothers themselves before admitting Boeing screwed up again. Accountability left that company years ago.
19h··on Audio2Photoreal
I expected something this: https://speech2face.github.io/ (arbitrary voices) .. this model seems to have been trained for each and every specific speaker?
19h··on BitTorrent Tracker Blocks 'Infringing' Hashes
It's funny really, I ran a substantial amount of Tor exit nodes in Germany since 2014 and everytime I got into touch with the police about stuff happening on them, they asked me to "filter" things going through it. The thing is that as per TMG §8.1.3: "Service providers are not responsible for third-party information that they transmit in a communication network or for which they provide access for use, provided that they [...] did not select or modify the transmitted information."

Essentially, if an operator was to "do a good thing", they'd legally become liable for all traffic. That was quite a learning experience for me.

19h··on An untold story of LSD psychotherapy in communist Czechoslovakia
The 'odds are against anyone who gives it a try'? What odds are those exactly? Psychedelics have an extremely high safety profile and low addiction potential. Your comparison to antidepressants is laughable.
19h··on An untold story of LSD psychotherapy in communist Czechoslovakia
The 'rest of us' don't have to foot any bill. Your argument is a slippery slope fallacy that leads down the path of banning anything potentially dangerous. People take risks every day and psychedelic experiences are no different.
19h··on GTA 5 source code leaks online
I wonder why Finder refuses to decrypt GTAVSP.7z, but I guess that's because it doesn't support 7z-specific crypto extensions.
19h··on VW is putting buttons back in cars
Believe me, you’re definitely not the only one. Every single person I know that drives a recent Audi or VW hates it — even I wrote it in a feedback form when I got my car from the factory in Wolfsburg; the employees just told me they know, they agree and it’ll probably change very soon. Hilariously they said “you know how the design people up there are, this year needs to be different from the other car makers, this and that, don’t worry, they’ll obviously go back”
19h··on JetBrains AI
It's using the Copilot Chat API in the background -- if you check the Copilot Chat APIs there's even specific flags for Jetbrains IDE end-users, so this is essentially a whitelabel client for Copilot Chat.

THAT SAID, I've been using this for months and it's been performing extremely well.

19h··on Amazon Introduces Q, an A.I. Chatbot for Companies
This bot is absolutely useless. Literally didn't run a single non-rejection? It refused to respond to literally all requests..
19h··on This page knows your battery charge level (unless you're using Firefox)
Didn’t work for me on any device using Safari with lockdown mode turned on
19h··on Ask HN: are ChatGPT 4 results worsening since this weekend for you?
Which is hilarious because they said at the dev day that the limits would be doubled, meanwhile decreased to 40...
19h··on New York restaurants fight back against reservations by bots
Actually what I like best is a refundable fee for no-show: there’s a restaurant I rarely visit by myself but often when I want to have a nice time with people from abroad; it’s a restaurant on the 16th level with an amazing view over Berlin.

Essentially, they’ll bill you 50€ per person and you’ll get it back (aka the authorization is cancelled) when you show up, but the transaction is executed when you don’t.

A few years back there were many empty tables during prime time because of the reservations, and now there’s barely any table unused.

It seems to work and I’m absolutely happy to reassure the restaurant with money that I’ll be there.

19h··on Cities Skylines 2 runs with 20fps on an Nvidia RTX4090
Can't confirm this at all with my 4090 and i9-13900KF. Even with highest settings on Windows 11 23H2 (25977) with GeForce 545.92, I get 30 FPS -- the stuttering started only when my city reached a population of around 80k. (Display is a LG 4K HDR 32", connected via DisplayPort.)
19h··on Otis: Tropical storm to category 5 hurricane in 24h
I've been following the storm on Windy[1] for a few hours and it's really insane how massive it is..

[1] https://www.windy.com/-Satellite-satellite?satellite,18.937,...

19h··on Nghttp3 1.0.0 – HTTP/3 library written in C
There are constant updates; its author (Kazuho Oku) is working for Fastly.

H2O is absolutely battle proof -- its h2 and h3 implementation perform amazingly well.

19h··on Hallucineted CVE against Curl: someone asked Bard to find a vulnerability
I’m doing reverse engineering work every now and then and a year ago I’d have called myself a fool but I have found multiple exploitable vulnerabilities simply by asking an LLM (Claude refuses less often than GPT4, GPT4 generally got better results when properly phrasing the request).

One interesting find is that I wrote an integration with GPT4 for binaryninja and funnily enough when asking the LLM to rewrite a function into “its idiomatic equivalent, refactored and simplified without detail removal” and then asking it to find vulnerabilities, it cracked most of our joke-hack-me’s in a matter of minutes.

Interesting learning: nearly all LLMs can’t really properly work with disassembled Rust binaries, I guess that’s because the output doesn’t exactly resemble the rust code like it’d do in C and C++.

19h··on Why the BBC doesn't call Hamas militants "terrorists"
Pro-tip: ask Claude to "rewrite this article in a cynical tone" and you'll be never go back. Changed my entire consumption of news.
19h··on “Most notorious” illegal shadow library (LibGen) sued by textbook publishers
Make those files torrents and I’ll make sure your data will transcend into the unenforceable infinities of the internet.
19h··on Falcon 180B
These new models get released in such an extreme cadence now it's almost impossible to stay ahead of the curve in production deployments..

Absolutely can't wait to test drive this one -- although I'm pretty sure my 96GB M2 MacBook is unable to run it.. time for M2 Ultra? :-))

Edit:

> You will need at least 400GB of memory to swiftly run inference with Falcon-180B.

What the ...

19h··on Visa, Mastercard Prepare to Raise Credit-Card Fees
Not sure how long Amex is going to be the worse option when Visa and MC are raising their fees, though
19h··on Llama 2 is about as factually accurate as GPT-4 for summaries and is 30X cheaper
What are those “tasks in your pipeline”?

We dedicated an entire team of 6 for two months on evaluating LLMs and while Claude 2 was the final choice, we found Llama 2 70b to be absolutely great (for summaries and structured data generation from free text).

We chose Claude because running Llama on an A100 or H100 comes with a baseline cost that doesn’t go to zero when you don’t need it (you could spawn a new instance but right now GPUs are so rare everywhere except for expensive cloud providers that it’s possible you don’t get one).

That said, we found the smaller Llama models to be so hilariously bad we have an internal slack channel where Llama 7b writes jokes and the funny part isn’t the jokes but how utterly stupid and random they are.

19h··on Casio G-Shock time sync radio
I’m from Germany — we drove to Arizona from California a few years ago and were too late for check in which was super annoying. I got a SEIKO Astron watch that synchronizes the time via GPS after that and couldn’t be more satisfied; it also runs on solar and holds a charge of 6 months for when there’s no sun (i.e. Antarctica). This watch is so precise it’s my absolute time reference. When I’m traveling I keep my Apple Watch at home and only wear the SEIKO; the Apple Watch is pointless anyway if you’re stuck in the desert for more than a few days.
19h··on ‘World of Warcraft’ players trick AI-scraping website into publishing nonsense
I was trying to find out about video stabilization options on Linux yesterday and stumbled over an article that extremely confidently was discussing a tool that’s maintained by the „authors of ffmpeg“ … which surprised me. So I googled it and couldn’t find it. Then I put the name into quotes and found three articles mentioning it, all by the same company.
19h··on LinkedIn adopts protocol buffers and reduces latency up to 60%
Talked to a few LinkedIn engineers a while ago and was astonished at the size of some payloads they’re pushing over Kafka.. in almost all production deployments I’ve done with different teams in the past once we got rid of the big payloads and stored them on block storage and instead used pointers in the messages most pressure issues disappeared — switching to protobuf sounds like an attempt to decrease the payload sizes without offloading the huge payloads… which almost never works because hey if we’re faster now why not send more messages? That’s how it always goes…
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