creatonez

Correct, the file must be flushed to disk! I'm so used to libraries handling it that I forgot to mention that.

I believe syncing the parent directory is only needed for durability and not atomicity, but if you're using this method you're probably not caring about durability in the first place, because you've designed a system that doesn't let you do durability in a fine-grained way without severe performance loss.

All public torrents are monitored by the movie studios, that has nothing to do with how The Pirate Bay is run. Users can just hop jurisdictions with a VPN and use these public torrents without ever getting any complaint letters.

> mostly widely available on YouTube already anyways

Problem is, when music disappears due to licensing nonsense, it generally disappears from all streaming services at the same time. Most music goes through only a few gigantic distributors / labels.

> potentially jeopardize

Nothing is in jeopardy if the operators remain completely anonymous, which it seems like they will.

For the simple case, it isn't necessarily that fragile. Write the entire database to a temp file, then after flushing, move the temp file to overwrite the old file. All Unix filesystems will ensure the move operation is atomic. Lots of "we dump a bunch of JSON to the disk" use cases could be much more stable if they just did this.

Doesn't scale at all, though - all of the data that needs to be self-consistent needs to be part of the same file, so unnecessary writes go through the roof if you're only doing small updates on a giant file. Still gotta handle locking if there is risk of a stray process messing it up. And doing this only handles part of ACID.

This is some truly exceptionally clownish attention seeking nonsense. The rationale here is complete nonsense, they just wanted to put "because AI" after announcing their completely self-serving decision. If AI cyber offense is such a concern, recognize your role as a company handling truckloads of highly sensitive information and actually fix your security culture instead of just obscuring it.

> the "advanced flow" for power users is delivered through Google Play Services, not the Android OS. That's the whole game.

What is the source for this claim? I can believe it, but I haven't seen where the claim actually comes from, and it doesn't seem to be mentioned in Google's announcements.

Then you lose the benefit of having the current URL actually linking to the resource you are currently viewing. If the app is not properly making use of URL modification and the history API, getting back to where you were requires navigating the whole maze each time.

Hetzner Storage Box is not even remotely a similar product to B2, considering the only reliability offered is the disks being in RAID. There is no geo-redundancy at all. The number of simultaneous connections is also quite limited, though this might not matter for many use cases.

Hi-DPI displays have convinced web designers it's okay to use ludicrously thin fonts with barely any contrast.

Nice genocide denial you got there.

The Gaza Genocide is a verified fact. It has been recognized by a United Nations special committee and a commission of inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, B'Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, International Federation for Human Rights, and almost all genocide scholars.

What has happened? Mass killings, deliberate starvation, prevention of births, blockading, destroying healthcare facilities and killing healthcare and aid workers, blocking medical evacuations, systematically killing journalists, destroying civilian infrastructure, intentionally causing mass displacement, mass torture and death camps, the use of crying drones to inflict psychological anguish, the use of mass surveillance that far exceeds what any other population experiences, tracking militants to their home to intentionally bomb their entire family, sexual violence, destruction of agriculture, ecocide, and the intentional destruction of educational, religious, and cultural sites. It's likely that more than 150,000 people have been killed by the IDF in Gaza. All of it has been confirmed countless times, and the perpetrators have admitted to it countless times.

Part of it is just because the ocean is difficult to photograph. The parts of coastline that do have ocean surface imagery have crazy artifacting from the sun reflection, and the color is inconsistent from constantly changing sediment and algae levels.

By not providing imagery of the ocean surface, it also gets to display ocean floor topography data it wouldn't otherwise get to show without having to add another mode.

I assume another reason is that it reduces the total size of the imagery, which would have been a plus on the 2001 computers that Google Earth was originally developed on.

I believe you can get this imagery from other sources (aside from things that are government-censored), but you face the same problem Google did in how to stitch it together without it being a patchwork of different moments in time.

Yes, he had to distance himself from it because his audience turned out to be significantly more horrible than him and it was getting on his nerves. But he still holds significant sympathy towards race science views.

Public satellite imagery is heavily censored these days.

This is a worthless AI slop summary of this article (^1), posted to a random forum to drive traffic.

^1: https://www.psypost.org/intelligent-people-are-better-judges...

> Require open codecs everywhere.

Which ones, though? Dropping patented codecs from software sounds great, but it may just make the industry angry about the ones that seem open but are likely to have patent risks.

> However, our recent analysis found over 90 times more malware from sideloaded sources than on Google Play

Google has seemingly never seen an elderly person's phone, where it is completely infected with crap including literal popup ads (that somehow overlay other apps), yet all of it was downloaded from GPlay.

I never actually thought about this. How are people making HTML emails so responsive? Email HTML is stuck in the IE6 era, right? So everything is just a horrible workaround with tables and ancient CSS?

And once you start adding these accessibility problems, people will respond by using weaker passwords.

Sorta reminds me of the i3lock screen locker. It shows an incredibly confusing circle UI where every keystroke randomizes the position of the sector on a circle, with no explanatory text on the screen (^1). To new users, it's not clear at all that you are entering your user password or even that it's a screen locker at all, because it just looks like a cryptic puzzle.

Of course, once you do understand that it's just a password prompt, it's great. Completely confuses the hell out of any shoulder surfers, who will for sure think it's a confusing puzzle, and eventually they will get rate limited.

^1: Example of it in use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvT44BSp3Uc

Covered in detail here: https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/human-biod...

> and people selling murder for hire on the Darknet.

When this existed, it was quite literally done using the prediction market model. It was an early prototype for all this insanity.

You should have lost your respect for the "rationalist" "community" a long time ago. They are aggressively wrong about everything, and most of them are eugenicists.

Problem is, it took until around 2016 for IE6 to be fully dead, so people continued to justify these hacks for a long time. Horrifying times.

For IE7 support, yes... https://caniuse.com/mdn-javascript_builtins_json_parse

It has? Many distros have it enabled by default, too. The article discusses it quite a bit.

IMO the key behavior is that LLMs are really good at fuzz testing, because they are probabilistic monkeys on typewriters that are much more code-aware than a conventional fuzz tester. They cannot produce a comprehensive security audit or fix security issues in a reliable way without human oversight, but they sure can come up with dumb inputs that break the code.

The results of such AI fuzz testing should be treated as just a science experiment and not a replacement for the entire job of a security researcher.

Like conventional fuzz testing, you get the best results if you have a harness to guide it towards interesting behaviors, a good scientific filtering process to confirm something is really going wrong, a way to reduce it to a minimal test case suitable for inclusion in a test suite, and plenty of human followup to narrow in on what's going on and figure out what correctness even means in the particular domain the software is made for.

> For example, it focuses a lot on doing "ablation studies", by which it means removing random layers of an already-trained model, to find the source of the refusals(?), which is an absolute fool's errand because such behavior is trained into the model as a whole and would not be found in any particular layer.

That doesn't mean there couldn't be a "concept neuron" that is doing the vast majority of heavy lifting for content refusal, though.

> Valve

This is a funny thing to say when Valve hasn't actually released any ARM device yet, and the Steam Deck is still fully reliant on x86. The ARM hardware they do plan to release relies on x86 emulation, which is something that historically usually doesn't pan out.

> We put a particular focus on improving GPT‑5.4’s ability to create and edit spreadsheets, presentations, and documents.

Nothing infuriates me more than an LLM tool randomly deciding to create docx or xlsx files for no apparent reason. They have to use a random library to create these files, and they constantly screw up API calls and get completely distracted by the sheer size of the scripts they have to write to output a simple documents. These files have terrible accessibility (all paper-like formats do) and end up with way too much formatting. Markdown was chosen as the lingua franca of LLMs for a reason, trying to force it into a totally unsuitable format isn't going to work.

No one actually knows what the payload from basemetrika.ru contains, though. So it's possible it was originally intended to be more damaging. But no matter what it would have caught attention super fast, so there's probably an upper limit to how sophisticated it could have been.