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diskmuncher

296 karma · joined October 31, 2018

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diskmuncher··on GPT-6 Astra has made a major breakthrough in the Goldbach Conjecture
Have only seen Chinese language or Chinese-related explanations. I am not a mathematician. But the case for multiples of 4 is at a junior IMO level (number theory) and, I agree, does seem to demonstrate "insight".

https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3992525310802946 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AplpSdUub5s

diskmuncher··on From Quantum Relative Entropy to the Semiclassical Einstein Equations
Sabine Hossenfelder's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxmTqIkToTg
diskmuncher··on Fill probability estimates in institutional bond trading with quantum computers
News release from HSBC

https://www.hsbc.com/news-and-views/news/media-releases/2025...

diskmuncher··on Stop Worshipping the American Tech Giants
http://archive.today/tKfmh
diskmuncher··on Twitter engineer explains how it will break in the coming weeks
I hope for the good of humanity that a difference here is that Twitter has some utility, whereas the comparable code bases at large tech firms are mostly useless features/products (i.e. bullshit work).
diskmuncher··on Curving the Space by Non-Hermiticity
What are the implications on quantum gravity?
diskmuncher··on Curving the Space by Non-Hermiticity
Basically the same article from Purdue.
diskmuncher··on New Ghostscript PDF interpreter
How interpreting PDF in Postscript became untenable
diskmuncher··on Exploiting a Use-After-Free for code execution in every version of Python 3
I was wondering how the "io" module was involved when the exploit claimed to not use any import. The answer is "io = open.__self__" [1]. Allowing "open()" would be an oversight if a sandbox intends to block "io".

---

[1] https://github.com/kn32/python-buffered-reader-exploit/blob/...

diskmuncher··on ‘A Form of Brainwashing’: China Remakes Hong Kong
The writing was on the wall in the summer of '89.
diskmuncher··on 30k U.S. organizations newly hacked via holes in Microsoft Exchange Server
MSFT still outperformed SP500 index this week.
diskmuncher··on My tutorial and take on C++20 coroutines
> Basically the only languages with full stackful coroutine support in wide use are Lua and (sort-of) Go.

Aren't Javascript Generators also coroutines?

diskmuncher··on A New Kind of Spy: How China Obtains American Technological Secrets
Were there no Japanese spies in the 1930's with similar backgrounds and motivations? What's so new about it?
diskmuncher··on Apple has threatened to ban Parler from the App Store
Let's assume that all the issues are binary (i.e. you are either for or against a proposition). But there are a large number of them. Humans are lazy. We try to use few categories to organize people we come into contact with (e.g. left or right, colored or white).

What will happen next? We feel that "the other side" seems to be all around, almost half the population. Example: many who oppose abortion probably also believe Black Lives Matter.

diskmuncher··on What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry
> Seek Consensus — Take the time to bring your whole team along. Let discussion and disagreement bring you to the best solution.

There you have it! What the political leaders in this country have been failing to do.

diskmuncher··on Chain loading, not preloading: the dynamic linker as a virtualization vector
The details in the article may be useful for malware research. But in most situations, when the target executable is PIE and is not sensitive about how it is run (which normal programs are), you can just "dlopen()" it like a shared library and invoke its "main()" function after changing the runtime environment in your own executable.
diskmuncher··on The father of fiber optics passed away today
For anyone who wonders what about Charles Kuen Kao (高錕):

... Despite Kapany's work, the loss of signal over long distances via optical glass fibre was a recurring problem. What Kao did was work out how to fix this problem, and calculate how to transmit light over long distances. It was Kapany's work which led to the fabrication of the first ultrapure fibre in 1970. This was a game-changer in modern communication systems. ...

https://www.ibtimes.co.in/narinder-singh-kapany-passes-away-...

diskmuncher··on Quantum supremacy, now with BosonSampling
The more interesting question may be what innovation was achieved in performing the experiment, mainly I assume, in controlling and measuring the large number of photons accurately. Hints on those seem to be Fig. 2 [1].

In the spirit of sensationalizing "China" and "supremacy", does anyone know if this technology is relevant to some Star Wars weaponry for example?

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/12/02/scie...

diskmuncher··on Notion.clone: open-source notes editor like in Notion
Is there any risk here of violating copyright or patent protection held by Notion.so?
diskmuncher··on OpenMath
I am not a mathematician. But there is also a JSON representation [0] besides XML. As an exchange format between pieces of software, isn't it usable?

[0] https://www.openmath.org/standard/om20-2019-07-01/omstd20.ht...

diskmuncher··on OpenMath
Why so little interest and activities?
diskmuncher··on Navy F/A-18 squadron commander's take on AI repeatedly beating real pilot
The setup of the game is simply unfair for a comparison between AI and human. If you want to keep the perfect data link between the simulator's outputs and the AI player computer, then at least let the human play by watching the (God's eye) display with the aircraft sprites sporting those kill-point spears and ditch the HUD. The objective would simply be to touch the enemy aircraft with that spear.

The HUD is cool and all. But how do I know where the enemy is if it is outside of the HUD's field? Think about how the AI knew. :) And while we are at this, maybe just invite a young gamer instead of a real pilot.

diskmuncher··on Speculative Dereferencing of Registers: Reviving Foreshadow [pdf]
A thought just came to my mind. Let's say 30 years ago, I said to a colleague with whom I shared accesses to some Unix systems, "You know, I can use 'ps' to see what processes you are running. If I know the details about certain flaws of those binaries, I may be able to run a custom binary simultaneously on the system and figure out some of your data!" Would he/she be surprised or alarmed?
diskmuncher··on Emotionally Expressive Text to Speech
History has shown us that technological advancement of this kind will be adopted first by ...

Obvious application: H-anime. Reduced parameters for the "emotion" as well.

diskmuncher··on A first look at Unreal Engine 5
Final Fantasy 7's "cutscenes" are mostly rendered in real time. I wonder why the combat screens are not as good?

Someone's hack of the save files: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfZbFXSLLtk

diskmuncher··on Final Fantasy VII Remake Cutscenes Rendered in Real-Time?
More in uploader's channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf7y6pZ-rnrFtHpX0vqB5HQ

He said he only hacked the save files.

There were reports that at least a few cutscenes were pre-rendered and cannot be changed.

How far are we from "procedural scene generation"?

diskmuncher··on The evolution of the web, and a eulogy for XHTML2
I guess no one would object if you want to write an SPA using HTML5 and ES2020 that retrieves an XML semantic Web document and displays it in all kinds of CSS glory.
diskmuncher··on Streamlit: Turn a Python script into an interactive data analysis tool
I am not sure "rerunning the script from top to bottom" is a necessary condition but for the code layout to reflect the expected behavior.

How would people compare this to Observable [1]? 1. Javascript vs. Python 2. Client-only vs. server-required?

Does the market already give advantage to Python and server-required because the data sets are too large and live on the server, and the users (data scientists) prefer Python and the existing libraries there?

[1]: https://observablehq.com/

diskmuncher··on Working at Facebook vs. Google as a S/W Engineer (The TechLead/Patrick Shyu)
Looks like this guy is on someone's radar now. But before you flag this, I think what makes his videos hilarious is that like a great comic, while not telling the 100% true story, there is often some deep truth behind the gag.
diskmuncher··on All treatment approaches for depression had failed, but then they adopted a pet
I hope the patients won't regress when their pets almost inevitably die before they do.