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cobbalon Arbitrary shell command evaluation in Org Mode (GNU Emacs)

Emacs already restricts what variables can be set as file-local. It will prompt you to ask what to do if you open a file containing:

  ;; -*- eval: (message "arbitrary code") -*-

any mode associated with a file extension should be at least as secure against code execution.

cobbalon Fixing a memory leak of xmlEntityPtr in librsvg

You should see how much difference adding or removing a '*' can make in C when setting something to 0. I've written that bug before.

cobbalon Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns

They have both. In the demos they were sending select complex tasks out to chatgpt with a large UI alert confirming the data was leaving Apple's walled garden.

cobbalon SoftBank's new AI makes angry customers sound calm on phone

Perfect. We'll just build an AI to translate things into a "genuine" tone for the customer. All problems in society will be solved by adding a layer of AI indirection.

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cobbalon MLow: Meta's low bitrate audio codec

The more complicated the codec, the more fascinating the failure modes. I love watching a digital TV with a bad signal, because the motion tracking in the codec causes people to wear previous, glitched frames as a skin while they move.

cobbalon Elixir 1.17 released: set-theoretic types in patterns, durations, OTP 27

HM is worst-case exponential, but it just happens to have good performance in practice.

cobbalon Apple blocks PC emulator in iOS App Store and third-party app stores

I'll go a step further and say that users should be able to distribute software without needing to get apple's approval. Instead we get the lie of "_ is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the Trash."

cobbalon Show HN: XPipe, a brand-new type of remote file browser and shell connection hub

Reminds me of tramp-mode, but without being stuck in emacs. Nice!

cobbalon AI vs. a giraffe with no spots (2023)

Checking that we've gotten better at dealing with novelty seems like a very hard thing to do. Everyone knows black swans exist, they're famous for it!

cobbalon Hurl, the Exceptional Language

Maybe even dependency ejection.

cobbalon Abusing url handling in iTerm2 and Hyper for code execution

It will only open the URLs after presenting a confirmation banner that says: "open this URL? http://example.com/", or if you command-click on a link.

cobbalon So We've Got a Memory Leak

Is this a property of JavaScript or the engine running it? This feels like something a sufficiently-smart™ closure implementation should be able to prevent.

cobbalon So We've Got a Memory Leak

There are (at least) 2 definitions of memory leak.

The upsides of the definition you gave are that it's simple, well defined, and maximally precise (nothing that is safe to collect is considered live)

The significant downside to this definition is that it's uncomputable. To know if memory is used requires knowing if a loop halts.

The second definition of memory leak is "unreachability" which is a bit harder to nail down. It's a conservative approximation of the first definition, but is more popular because it's computable, and it's practical to write programs with or without GC that don't leak

cobbalon Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 1: Intro and Value Types

    enum List<T> { case empty; indirect case cons(T, List<T>) }

cobbalon ScreenAI: A visual LLM for UI and visually-situated language understanding

I'm now envisioning an ad framework, where instead of selling rectangles of content, advertisers bid to use an llm to rewrite the whole article with at least {{4}} mentions of {{how refreshing pepsi is}}.

cobbalon It's time to stop using SMS (2021)

It's also time to stop using medium for anything. I wonder if the author really opted to unpublish this piece from the internet, or if they just got defaulted in when medium "released a new feature"

cobbalon Type-Safe Printf() in TypeScript

The static types depicted in typescript are entirely fictitious. Any similarity to runtime types is purely coincidental.

cobbalon New jet engine enables efficiency at every speed for cheaper orbital launches

The electron rocket used batteries to drive the fuel pumps for a liquid engine that could get into orbit. It used a lot of LiPo batteries, which it jettisoned as they were used up.

cobbalon Final images of Ingenuity reveal an entire blade broke off the helicopter

It's never aliens. This helicopter was obviously built here on mars. Use your brain! Helicopters don't even work in space!

cobbalon Why is everything based on likelihoods even though likelihoods are so small?

Multiplying them together certainly magnifies the effect, but it would magnify it the other way if the likelihoods were larger than one. (Easy to get, just tweak the variance of the normal distributions to be smaller). Likelihoods are more like infinitesimal fractions of a probability, that need to be integrated over some set of events to get back a probability. In the case of the joint distribution of 50 Gaussian, you can think of the likelihood having "units" of epsilon^50.

cobbalon Representation Engineering: Mistral-7B on Acid

This article was very fun, and felt like a good counterpoint to the "You Sound Like a Bot" post recently that was talking about how AI is getting bland.

On a less serious note. This sentence should be something a fiction writer knows will only end in trouble for humanity:

> I especially challenge someone to find a "self-awareness" vector that isn't contaminated by ... human emotion!

cobbalon Feds want to ban the Flipper Zero – Experts say it's a scapegoat

For one, we never quite managed to convince people that the wiggly bits of metal were an important secret that should not be photographed. Cryptography can in principle be harder to duplicate/impersonate. (If, and big if, it's implemented correctly)

cobbalon Should toggle button show its current state or the state to which it'll change? (2010)

Should the LED indicate mute on or mic on? I could see it both ways, and so I would also have a hard time trusting this UI at first.

cobbalon What Does "With Continuation" Mean? (2020)

Variables are written once, and data flow is made explicit.

cobbalon Funimation End of Services

It's pithy, and I certainly wish more things were sold instead of licensed, but by this logic anything in a museum is also free for the taking.

cobbalon The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance

Sure they have crypto, they've had TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256 since at least 2017. Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/43249703/73681

cobbalon Strawberry case study: What if farmers had to pay for water?

Hubble's constant is typically measured in kilometers per second per megaparsec, which can be converted to Hertz.

cobbalon Granting pardon for the offense of simple possession of or use of marijuana

The page mentions DC specifically, which is under federal jurisdiction. The headline may indeed be overselling the implications.

cobbalon OpenAI Begins Tackling ChatGPT Data Leak Vulnerability

But clicking captcha squares is itself a data exfiltration vulnerability! https://varun.ch/history

cobbalon The Onyx Programming Language

The integer literals might be misleading from the real point here, which is that every node in an expression tree in C has a type. The compiler infers most of these types. It infers that (1 / 2) is an int and that (1 / 2.0) is a double. That is type inference, and it's exactly the same as the sort of type inference that figures out what "auto" means in C++.