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chaps

5,452 karma · joined November 14, 2019

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chaps··on US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
It's not as obvious of an answer as it initially sounds. Coming at this from a stint in investigative journalism where even beginning an investigation requires getting grants and grants involve convincing other people that the money is going to good use. Also having been told that an investigation I ran was nothing by multiple editors that turned out to be something big... it really shifted how I perceive investigations and what it means to stick your neck out when everyone's telling you that something isn't happening even when it is.
chaps··on US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
Is that not still incredibly vulnerable to timing attacks?
chaps··on US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
Unfortunately a lot of investigations start out as speculation/vibes before they turn into an actual evaluation. And getting past speculation/vibes can take a lot of effort and political/social/professional capital before even starting.
chaps··on Benchmarking OpenTelemetry: Can AI trace your failed login?
I'm not sure that finding and killing the correct process is something I'd consider to be a "sysadmin task". That's something you learn in the first day of just about any linux course/primer and there are many examples of its use online.

It's more that the default is to overuse tools that cast too-wide nets like pgrep and pkill. And it doesn't know how to use the output well enough. Like, when these systems do ps, it identifies random processes in the list instead of identifying the most recent process that it, itself, started.

It's as if some SRE-type person decided to hard code pgrep and pkill because it's their personal preference.

chaps··on Benchmarking OpenTelemetry: Can AI trace your failed login?
This is definitely not a context problem. Very simple things like checking for running processes and killing the correct one is something that models like opus 4.5 can't do consistently correct... instead of recognizing that it needs to systematize that sort of thing -- one and done. Like, probably 50% of the time it kills the wrong thing. About 25% of the time after that it recognizes that it didn't kill the correct thing and then rewrites the ps or lsof from scratch and has the problem again. Then if I kill the process myself out of frustration it checks to see if the process is running, sees that it's not, then gets confused and sets its new task to rewrite the ps or lsof... again. It does the same thing with tests, where it decides to just, without any doubt in its rock brain, delete the test and replace it with a print statement.
chaps··on FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
Not to add fuel to the fire, but a lot of what you're saying is hard to take seriously when Obama himself's been known to brag about how good at killing he is.

You're right that things are significantly worse now, but it's important to recognize that what came before was still bad and in many ways is the foundation for where we are.

https://slate.com/business/2013/11/double-down-obama-said-he...

chaps··on Benchmarking OpenTelemetry: Can AI trace your failed login?
Having done app support across many environments, um - yes, multiple microservices is usually pretty simple. Just look at the open file/network handles and go from there. It's absolutely maddening to watch these models flail in trying to do something basic as, "check if the port is open" or "check if the process is running... and don't kill firefox this time".

These aren't challenging things to do for an experienced human at all. But it's such a huge pain point for these models! It's hard for me to wrap my head around how these models can write surprisingly excellent code but fail down in these sorts of relatively simple troubleshooting paths.

chaps··on In a genre where spoilers are devastating, how do we talk about puzzle games?
Really glad they brought up Outer Wilds -- it's exactly the sort of game where the tiniest detail is a spoiler. Knowledge discovery's the game, so any piece of information about the game that doesn't need to be discovered is like cutting ahead to the next chapter in a game. Like playing on someone else's game file.

Wish someone would wipe my memories of that game so I can play it again.

chaps··on FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
When talking to someone at-risk of deportation earlier in the year, they asked me, "Why should I do anything differently? Obama and Biden did the same exact shit."

And there's a lot of truth to that which a lot of people need to reconcile with.

The fact that we don't have DACA solidified into a path towards citizenship by now is just sad.

chaps··on Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
"In every way"

About ten years ago I took a three day cross-country Amtrak trip where I wanted to work on some data analysis that used mysql for its backend. It was a great venue for that sort of work because the lack of train-internet was wonderful to keep me focused. The data I was working with was about 20GB of parking ticket data. The data took a while to process over SQL which gave me the chance to check out the world unfolding outside of the train.

At some point, mysql (well, mariadb) got into a weird state after an unclean shutdown that put itself into recovery mode where upon startup it had to do some disk-intensive cleanup. Thing is -- systemd has a default setting (that's not readily documented, nor sufficiently described in its logs when the behavior happens) that halts the service startup after 30 seconds to try again. On loop.

My troubleshooting attempts were unsuccessful. And since I deleted the original csv files to save disk space, I wasn't able to even poke at the CSV files through python or whatnot.

So instead of doing the analysis I wanted to do on the train, I had to wait until I got to the end of the line to fix it. Sure enough, it was some default 30s timeout that's not explicitly mentioned nor commented out like many services do.

So, saying that things are "much better in every way" really falls on deaf ears and is reminiscent of the systemd devs' dismissive/arrogant behavior that many folk are frustrated about.

chaps··on Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
As someone who's lost many hours troubleshooting systemd failures, I would like an answer to this question, too.
chaps··on Microsoft will give the FBI a Windows PC data encryption key if ordered
I might actually the details wrong. We requested informally at first whether Microsoft could provide information and they declined. Doesn't look like we ended up going down the subpoena route in the end so it didn't really matter.
chaps··on Microsoft will give the FBI a Windows PC data encryption key if ordered
As many, many people have pointed out -- many people don't know that their drives are encrypted or know that these protections exist. You're also assuming that the FBI doesn't investigate just random people. "I'm not doing anything bad, why should I worry?"

You're making a lot of assumptions about how people use their computers, their understanding of their own devices, and the banality of building argumentation around what someone should have done or should not have done in the face of how reality works.

chaps··on Microsoft will give the FBI a Windows PC data encryption key if ordered
Heh, I subpoena'd Microsoft once in part of some FOIA litigation I did against the White House OMB back in 2017. They, in no unclear terms, denied it. We were seeking documentation.

I realize it's not a court order, but just want to add to the stack that there are examples of them being requested to provide something within the public's interest in a legal context (a FOIA lawsuit) where their counsel pushed back by saying no.

chaps··on How I Became a Quant (2007) [pdf]
This matches my experiences as a non-quant, but havin done support work for quite a few of them. You can feel the novelty slough off of them as they get burned down into realizing they're just fitting curves.
chaps··on Convert potentially dangerous PDFs to safe PDFs
Incredible, thanks for sharing! Can't wait to use it for my pdf pipelines :)
chaps··on Convert potentially dangerous PDFs to safe PDFs
Yes please! And another helping of snark, please.
chaps··on Convert potentially dangerous PDFs to safe PDFs
Not much further than their documentation, friend! But thanks for finding that, that's actually super helpful! I hope somebody puts in a pr for updating the documentation to make it clear what functionality their tool has.
chaps··on Convert potentially dangerous PDFs to safe PDFs
I'm the target audience for this sort of tool. :)
chaps··on Convert potentially dangerous PDFs to safe PDFs
Heh, I've seen this a bunch of times and it's of interest to me, but honestly? It's sooooo limiting by being an interface without a complementary command line tool. Like, I'd like to put this into some workflows but it doesn't really make sense to without using something like pyautogui. But maybe I'm missing something hidden in the documentation.
chaps··on Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry
Surprised it's not more, but it makes sense when you consider the sources of the data. Gotta have data sharing agreements, yeah?
chaps··on Iran report says 16,500 dead in 'genocide under digital darkness'
Just to be clear, I never said I disagreed with you. But I've seen a lot of infighting happening in these spaces that stems from shit talking -- people who can no longer work together anymore because of how the shit talking bifurcated the work instead of building layers between.
chaps··on Iran report says 16,500 dead in 'genocide under digital darkness'
I get you -- when I was doing investigative reporting about policing and technology, the Intercept's energy was basically "great pitch, but we want you to do 8mo more work before we'll talk; good luck not being able to afford rent in the meantime".

But, friend, with love -- shit talking about what people are doing or not doing is not the answer. Lead by example.

chaps··on The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis
(that wasn't what I was responding to.....)
chaps··on Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing
I totally understand the apprehension towards SQL. It's esoteric as all hell and it tends to be managed by DBAs who you really only go to whenever there's a problem. Organizationally it's simpler to just do stuff in-memory without having to fiddle around with databases.
chaps··on Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing
Yeah, my experiences match yours and I very, very much work with messy data (FOIA data), though I use postgres instead of duckdb.

Most of the datasets I work with are indeed <10GB but the ones that are much larger follow the same ETL and analysis flows. It helps that I've built a lot of tooling to help with types and memory-efficient inserts. Having to rewrite pipelines because of "that one dataframe API" is exactly what solidified my thoughts around SQL over everything else. So much of my life time has been lost trying to get dataframe and non-dataframe libraries to work together.

Thing about SQL is that it can be taken just about anywhere, so the time spent improving your SQL skills is almost always well worth it. R and pandas much less so.

chaps··on The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis
> Another quick aside since I suspect this is a second point of confusion, "lethal force" does not mean "with the intent to kill", it means "force that is likely to cause severe injury or death".

It.. is not. I suspect that you have some fundamental misunderstandings of firearm safety and I would not feel safe at a range with someone who thinks this way.

chaps··on The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis
> That doesn't mean she deserves it, but that she was doing something stupid without realizing just how stupid it was

Am I right to say that your argument can be summarized as, "She didn't deserve it, but her actions were deserving of it"? Or maybe "merited"?

I'm genuinely confused by what you mean by "deserves".

(just to be explicit, the disagreement we have here is very much about what the word "deserves" means rather than anything productive)

chaps··on The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis
Please understand where I'm coming from:

My mom's dad was shot and killed by police. Absolutely nobody in my family knows anything about it, but the default is "he was a bad person and deserved it" or, "he probably did something wrong." The coroner's report shows his death as a suicide, despite police shooting and killing him. This was a time before cameraphones and before I was even born, so it's impossible for me, let alone anyone else to know what happened.

A lot of how you approach this discussion reminds me of the side of my family that defaults to thinking that the police did nothing wrong, or that their actions were justified or within policy, even without knowing the full facts (or, any; it's willful ignorance out the wazoo), plus a handful of assumptions. And, just -- a person died and that's all you can muster? Callousness and an air of benevolence?

You can do better, friend.

chaps··on The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis
I'm sorry that you think she deserved death.
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