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bennofs

545 karma · joined December 9, 2014

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/bennofs; my proof: https://keybase.io/bennofs/sigs/wcPXzHZpmIhdUO3v_US4scJ5O4TGk46NqjneY_Ph6KQ ]
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bennofs··on I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux
There is microg, which implements some of this by re-implementing Google Play services but allowing you to choose your own provider for services where this is possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroG
bennofs··on Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem
There is even a website just for that: https://www.db-gebrauchtzug.de/r/gbzp/gbzp/home?session=2228...
bennofs··on Arch Linux Now Has a Bit-for-Bit Reproducible Docker Image
Both Debian and Ubuntu provide snapshot mirrors where you can specify a date to get the package lists as they looked at that time.
bennofs··on First Successful Lightning Triggering and Guiding Using a Drone
8MWh is equivalent to a few hours of electricity generation of a wind turbine.
bennofs··on Git clone –depth 2 is vastly better than –depth 1 if you want to Git push later
One major downside is that it becomes really hard to do transactions, especially across multiple files. If you store mostly immutable data though like git (where except the refs every object is immutable, mutating creates a new object) it can work nicely.
bennofs··on Uv's killer feature is making ad-hoc environments easy
I for one enjoy the convenience of automatically installing python versions. Yes I know how to do it manually. Yes it is possible to install multiple versions. But that does not mean I want to do it every time, just to test how things behave in different python versions. For that, it's also okay if it does not install the most performant version of the interpreter.
bennofs··on I am rich and have no idea what to do
The limit could depend on a lot of other things. In theory, it's possible that you are paying 100% of revenue on debt service yet still the best option is to take on more debt. This is if you believe that investing the money raised via additional debt provides returns that outweigh the increase in debt service costs. So in that situation, additional debt can even lower the debt service / income ratio.

So this is meant to illustrate that the limit on debt is more a function of the concrete circumstances. In this line of argumentation, debt is not limited by a mathematical formula that just takes GDP and similar statistics as input.

bennofs··on Translation of Rust's core and alloc crates to Coq for formal verification
My argument is that you typically also check other properties, like properties describing what your program should do. These other properties likely wouldn't be satisfied by a nop program, and hopefully the same is true for many subtle issues.
bennofs··on Translation of Rust's core and alloc crates to Coq for formal verification
Yes, that is a limitation. But this limitation is not too bad.

In many cases, a bug in the translation simply makes the proof impossible. Somebody then investigates why the proof does not go through and finds the bug in the translation.

We only have a problem if the bug in the translation specificially cancels a bug in the original code. If there is no systematic risk, it is quite unlikely that two bugs cancel each other in this way.

bennofs··on Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built
Do you know if redispatch costs are included as part of your transmission costs and how much they are? Because if they are, then investing into the transmission lines can decrease transmission costs since the providers need to pay less for redispatch.
bennofs··on Does QE Cause Wealth Inequality?
I am no economist but couldn't it be that raising pay in few sectors does not cause inflation? I would think that depends on what the people receiving more money spend it on. If they only spend it on things where we have no bottleneck and there is still excess capacity, how would that create inflation? Inflation should only happen if the increased paycheck is used to compete for scarce resources/products. So I think predicting inflation requires a more detailed analysis, especially you need to have a cycle of increased prices and pay.
bennofs··on Ode to a Streaming ByteString
How does rust do bounds checking for slice accesses if the length is not stored?
bennofs··on Why bugs might feel “impossible”
JVM also has jstack and other tools like jprofd to introspect running vms.
bennofs··on Kolmogorov Complexity: Extensions and Applications
Construct a TM which enumerates all possible variable assignments and checks if the SAT problem is satisfied then halts if so. You can construct this TM in polynomial time, and it halts exactly if the SAT problem is satisfiable. So this is a polynomial reduction from SAT to the halting problem.
bennofs··on Test for lists in Cython
But it breaks down if you have cross-language cycles, because no garbage collector of either language will see the full cycle.
bennofs··on Norwegian experts say blood clots were caused by the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine
Maybe I've missed it, but I didn't find anything in the article about whether the vaccine does need to be discontinued or not. In any case, being clear about what side effects are possible and researching them to get a better understanding is a requirement in my opinion.
bennofs··on We Don’t Use Docker
Well, turning a static binary into a docker image is basically just adding some metadata on how to run it. Whereas turning an image into a static binary is much harder, so it makes sense the world standarized on the more flexible format.
bennofs··on We Don’t Use Docker
> User, process, and filesystem namespacing. System call filtering. Ensuring even if there is a remote exec exploit there is no bash or anything else in the container for an attacker to use.

All of these are supported by systemd out of the box. You can use `SystemCallFilter=...`, and various options to restrict the file system (like `ProtectHome` and `ProtectSystem`) plus tons of other linux kernel features (capabilities, no new privileges).

bennofs··on Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon
Last I tried, telegram desktop on Linux didn't support e2e encrypted chats which is sad.
bennofs··on Common Nginx misconfigurations that leave your web server open to attack
Though deprecated, https://github.com/yandex/gixy is a nice checker for these kind of issues.
bennofs··on Nano is what Bitcoin hoped to be
For some cryptocurrencies, a 51% attack would only be able to halt the network (prevent new transactions) but wouldn't be able to cause a double spend or other safety failures.
bennofs··on Show HN: ustaxes.org – open-source tax filing webapp
norway, according to this article: https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2016/apr/11/when-it-c...
bennofs··on What’s interesting about the Florida water system hack is that we heard about it
Does wireguard support storing keys in a hardware device, so that the cannot easily be exfiltrated if the machine is compromised? You want that for security critical infrastructure.
bennofs··on Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Other Companies
Note that at least on Linux, deploying a keylogger to exfiltrate the password for a SSH key is not hard either. Even if a keylogger is somehow not possible, you can probably still replace key binaries with patched versions or change desktop shortcuts to launch modified programs.
bennofs··on Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Other Companies
Are there many package manager that do not have either pre-, post- or build scripts or plugins allowing arbitrary code execution during build?

pkg managers that do have that: cargo (build.rs), pip (setup.py), npm (install scripts), apt/rpm/pacman (postinstall hooks)

Maybe the only exceptions are Go and Java package managers?

bennofs··on System separation in the Continental Europe Synchronous Area on 8 January 2021
> Imagine the massive spinning generators as a big mass that slow down just a little bit when you switch on a light and then that generator has to add more steam (or open hydro valve or whatever).

I have always wondered, would that still hold true if the grid was fully solar-based? There would be no rotating mass in that case.

bennofs··on Deskreen – Turn any device with a web browser to a second computer screen
On Linux, I've used https://github.com/rhofour/evdi-vnc to make a secondary screen that you can connect to with any VNC client.
bennofs··on The Secure Messaging App Conundrum: Signal vs. Telegram [pdf]
Signal Desktop doesn't require the phone, so no, it doesn't work that way.
bennofs··on Semantic Clojure Formatting
One problem with this is that formatting now becomes a multi-file thing. You have now have to figure out what names actually refer to, which depends on building a project model to correctly resolve imports, etc....

Compare this with traditional formatters, which you can run on each single file individually, this is much more complex and also harder to parallelise.

bennofs··on Std::visit is everything wrong with modern C++ (2017)
Can you summarise how modern C++ database design differs from C-style design?
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