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disconnection

33 karma · joined January 20, 2019

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disconnection··on Security Disclosure
Not even that one. One day I got calls from customers saying: "why can I see other people's accounts?". Then saw that Railway had started caching arbitrary responses. Like how do you even do that without trying?

IMO Railway's response was evasive, underplayed the incident, and did not reflect the severity of this failure. As a response we pulled all our big projects off Railway.

All I want is that my data is reliably secure on some iron somewhere, without a million vibe coding features or whatever they are trying to build, distracting from basic security.

Anything hosted on Railway is at a huge risk, IMO.

https://blog.railway.com/p/incident-report-march-30-2026-acc...

disconnection··on Security Disclosure
I already moved my big customers off Railway after an earlier incident this year that leaked customer data. It’s a stunningly horrible situation to not be able to cycle environment variables after such an event. I did an emergency migration to fly.io today with minimal disruption today. I’d recommend everyone to immediately migrate somewhere else ASAP so you can change environment variables. And of course never give Railway a cent more of your money.
disconnection··on Clean room implementation of Adobe products
I don't know all the details of how this was done. But I think the big advance is that LLMs can now allow people to decompile binaries who don't know what "clean-room reverse engineering" means.

IMO either it was decompiled (a tedious but not complex task to do by hand, now automated) and illegal, or properly clean-roomed and buggy slop.

If it was me doing this, I'd anonymously dump the source onto a torrent, not parade around the media.

disconnection··on Incident March 30th, 2026 – Accidental CDN Caching
Still waiting on a reply and the logs so I can do forensics on this incident. IMO the response from Railway should have been: "all hands on deck, red alert, worst imaginable security breach for a PaaS". Not a small yellow alert popup about a CDN misconfiguration, and saying that all affected customers have been emailed, which is demonstrably not correct.
disconnection··on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
Good that he worked it out so quick. I recently spent a day debugging email problems on Railway PaaS, because they silently closed an SMTP port without telling anyone.
disconnection··on Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI
I have a hierarchy of templates, where I can automatically swap out parts of the prompt based on which LLM I am using. And also have a set of benchmarking tests to compare relative performance. I treat LLMs like a commodity and keep switching between them to compare performance.
disconnection··on Show HN: Stories for Kids Using AI
It seems you have good intentions with this system and want to do something positive for children, but I am currently listening to this podcast. I think it would be wise to explicitly distance yourself from the scams around AI children's books: https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-ai-is-com...
disconnection··on Major outages across ChatGPT and API
Lol, don't care; I run my own models locally .
disconnection··on Show HN: I recorded nature sounds for a year, then released an ambient sound app
Yup - SwiftUI is pretty immature still, so I use the latest iOS17 to get the latest features to make development simpler. For example, handling in-app purchases is hugely easier in iOS17.
disconnection··on Show HN: I recorded nature sounds for a year, then released an ambient sound app
oops, high-pass filter.
disconnection··on Show HN: MyGPT a toy LLM which can be trained on Project Gutenberg and dad jokes
Cheers! Yes, I recommend it - it's a lot of fun.

There are probably easier to install and better LLM models than mine for home use. But my project should work if you have enough Python knowledge to install all the libraries. Just throw a bunch of text files into the "data" folder and uncomment "train()" in main.py, and it will save checkpoints of the model parameters into the "models" folder.

disconnection··on Show HN: MyGPT a toy LLM which can be trained on Project Gutenberg and dad jokes
Q: What is a dog? A: To get a frog.

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road? A: Because it was Sunday.

With "Q: " as a prompt, it will make its own jokes:

Q: How do you cross a race with no cold birds? A: Because they did the toothache entirely.

Q: Why did a figureur hit a like? A: Because a joke.

Pure comic genius!

---

The prompt format is:

Q: {user question}

Here is part of the fine-tuning set (real dad jokes from the internet - not what was generated):

Q: What do you call a fake noodle? A: An impasta

Q: How do you organise a space party? A: You planet!

disconnection··on Show HN: I recorded nature sounds for a year, then released an ambient sound app
Awesome! I didn't want to go for 100% sleep-inducing sounds; hopefully it works as general background ambience.
disconnection··on Show HN: I recorded nature sounds for a year, then released an ambient sound app
I just went really far into the nature, away from main roads or human habitation.

I use wind muffs to cut wind noise, and sometimes a low-pass filter to cut out any very distant traffic rumble.

disconnection··on It's time to switch to a four-day working week, say two experts
From my own research, I would say that 4 days is still too much in many cases: http://www.disconnectionist.com/blog/becoming-a-part-time-su...
disconnection··on The Anatomy of an AWS Key Leak to a Public Code Repository
That is a scarily fast time for someone to try to exploit it.
disconnection··on Ask HN: What's the most valuable skill to pair with programming?
Technical proposal and grant writing. If you team up with people from disciplines other than programming+architecture, who can each deal with different aspects of the one proposal, you can pull in very large contracts together.
disconnection··on Freelancer.com stole from me and ruined my life
Sales is a learnable skill, and in practice I found it straightforward to cut out the middlemen/women completely and avoid platforms and agents. I wrote a sales guide here, with all the tricks I picked up over the years. I'm not selling anything or have ads, I just want other coders to have this freedom, too: https://www.disconnectionist.com/blog/sales.html