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perching_aix

2,958 karma · joined July 23, 2024

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perching_aix··on Landline phones will switch off across Britland in 100 days, no extensions
and landline won't? it's also oversubscribed. pretty sure it isn't guaranteed e2e circuit switched either, and that it hasn't been for quite a while.
perching_aix··on AI agent swarms in Minecraft fail to build civilization, drown in bureaucracy
I personally find that to be a bit of an inversion. People will utilize leverage and identity in whatever context, so mixing that in doesn't seem cogent to me.

But maybe the two are genuinely tied together enough that it's deserving to be a part of the definition, I don't know. Tried looking up the definition, I'm not really convinced.

For the longest time I considered the "hate on bureaucracy" more of a reactionary trope rather than anything actually coherent. Maybe this is just another one of my cultural differences of many. It's not as if people forming consensus, keeping count, or delegating authority were ever actually possible (or desirable) to escape, comes with scale. So to try and paint it as some odd devilish plague always came across to me as dilettante, though maybe it's more me who's simply never grasped the whole dynamic and the cultural position around this fully.

perching_aix··on AI agent swarms in Minecraft fail to build civilization, drown in bureaucracy
> human-like social pathologies - such as bureaucratic inertia

Isn't bureaucracy just the sociological manifestation of synchronization overhead? Sounds shortsighted to file it away as just some weird social pathology that emerges out of nowhere specifically affecting humans.

perching_aix··on Some Thing is Happening A note from the AI companies
that's true. instead they (device dependent) butcher calculations by accumulating arbitrarily large numerical error and/or by using binary floating point math, which is so much better... /s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-off_error

perching_aix··on Some Thing is Happening A note from the AI companies
> in a world that has had deterministic calculators for the better part of a century

so rewind that clock and see the above comment miraculously start making sense

perching_aix··on Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code
i.e. they burn a fraction of the cost it would otherwise take and it may end up as a discarded dud?

yeah, i think they'll survive whatever the outcome

perching_aix··on AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them
I work a "dev"ops job, and like yeah, I'm pretty sure this field is even more fucked than software engineering is.

IaC codebases, configs, utility scripts are relatively tiny, and fit into context windows whole. Models are eating them for breakfast.

They're really good at incident response. Sadly, much better than our dedicated colleagues from <location> ever will be. They'll chew through cloud service logs, application logs, application code, iac code and config, CI output, etc. to get whatever is needed, cause wide knowledge is no issue. Even disassembling stuff is no barrier, tracing things down from app level, to runtime level (e.g. JVM), to native calls.

They're really good at handling deployments, end to end infra setup and migrations, following checklists. Hell, they don't even really need checklists. Something that cannot be said about other dedicated colleagues from <location>, who cannot breathe without a checklist, will skip over steps, or otherwise very creatively misinterpret them or improvise something wicked.

They're really good at spinning up mad nice dashboards, and keeping business types happy with impressive looking write-ups they'll never read. It's really refreshing to not have to write those write-ups anymore (or the aforementioned checklists).

It's straight up both not looking good and looking better than ever. Having it be fully hands off remains an issue though.

perching_aix··on AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them
Something tells me they were not very big on doing that even prior to 1 BC (Before Claude).
perching_aix··on Why a program doesn't work when run from a batch file, but works when clicked
i envy the folks who can actually make sense of msdn docs. they were tedious and overwhelming decades before ai made that the premiere style this year.

some parts are better than others, but god is it a quest to find anything in there.

perching_aix··on Backdoor in Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace
I'm guessing it was the easiest quick workaround available, but obv wait for official confirmation.

Reads like Cursor's extension marketplace got compromised, hence how the OpenVSX and MS marketplaces can be unaffected.

perching_aix··on CVE-2026-98432: Linux TCP Use-After-Free Risk and Patch Validation
You severely underestimate humanity's goalpost moving capabilities.

The state of cope:

- models are still not intelligent, they're just like, uhh, really good semantic fuzzers! so you can just put them in the loop, they'll fuzz your code, and all is good :)

- the number of bugs is "finite", so - esp with agentic help - we'll just catch up and all will be good :)

Annoyingly, the cope frontier is kinda right about both of these, so the joke shall go on. The only real counter to it would be to bring up that this finiteness claim only really applies to a frozen set of security boundaries and attack surfaces, but they'll probably just raise this being "an academic tier concern" and just tell you to ""fuzz"" more.

So ironically, it looks like these practices are rescued once again, and the bare minimum stays winning. It also starts being moved to the territory of the magic box, but I guess nobody cares about that anymore. Local AI will just get really good too, fully competitive and self hostable even. Any day now.

From the horse's mouth, in case you were suspecting these descriptions to be in bad faith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnV_cWeoo5Q

perching_aix··on Why is this fingerprinting script creating bioweapons?
how so? the whole idea is that they don't even see/read the thing and so it sneaks by. and many even disclose ai use up front cause - gasp - they're not dickheads. pretty sure if github added a button to pre-flag one's own posts as ai, it'd be widely used. there's already a precedent for this on other platforms, like pixiv.
perching_aix··on Why is this fingerprinting script creating bioweapons?
this guardrail tripping thing is cute, but a simple identifier substitution and comment stripping should defeat it completely. probably a good practice to do that anyhow.

wouldn't be the first time manipulation like this was used, just that earlier the targets were humans (misleading them about functionality or country of origin). except for humans, the overhead induced, even with renaming, was significant. not so much for models, they don't give a fuck.

perching_aix··on Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI
There isn't one. There's a story involving Socrates criticizing writing, arguing that it weakens memory, borrows wisdom, and is impossible to argue with interactively.

This specific circlejerk has blessed this industry a number of times already as well. People first became idiots thanks to higher level languages, then thanks to syntax highlighting, then thanks to IntelliSense.

It's a wretched trope that's been with us forever, and will probably never go away. The worst part is that it isn't even entirely meritless, just incomplete.

perching_aix··on Three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics
no
perching_aix··on Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics
was it the "bears on" that you caught? :)
perching_aix··on Europe's summer heat wave killed more han 50k people in urban areas
That's the point. GP deceptively suggests that what the EU escapes in gun deaths, it makes back in spades in heat deaths, providing GP with great ideological schadenfreude. Except this doesn't actually follow, in part because these are fundamentally different mortality categories indeed (and in part because the counting methodologies involved are drastically different, etc).
perching_aix··on Europe's summer heat wave killed more han 50k people in urban areas
> there are songs written about the temp. being 35C because it was that really special heat day

Do you mean "28° in the shade" perhaps, a French song from 1978 by Jean-François Maurice? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpPnr0mCka4

Been a while I heard it, had to look it up. :) I also recalled mid-30s something, guess that was wrong. Or this is another case of the Mandela effect.

perching_aix··on Europe's summer heat wave killed more han 50k people in urban areas
Pretty much this, it simply genuinely hasn't been a part of the culture until recently. The energy use angle didn't help, nor did the cost of the units. In case GP forgot, the eastern half of Europe only got rid of Soviet occupation in the 90s, and has been playing quite the catchup. We bought fans and that was kinda it. Can't really comment on western Europe, but I'm sure he can. :)

GP's big leftist overregulation fantasy is adorable though, and definitely no stereotypes were hurt in the writing of his comment, but the reality is that mini split heat pump aircon installations in particular are booming here, usually paired with solar. So unless he's referring to something from the past millenium, which would be pretty weird to do without explicitly noting it, that's a swing and a miss.

The spooky statistics "difference" comes down to a difference in measurement methodology afaik. This exact talking point he's raising has been very popular in certain circles as of late, actually.

But I'm sure his position is entirely his own and actually way more informed than mine, he simply omitted his sources and rationale for brevity :)

perching_aix··on A mathematician reads the AI future
Plain common sense. The same common sense that enabled people to discard the words of idiots on Reddit who claimed that ChatGPT was just Indians in a call center (a real talking point I ran into multiple times back then).

OpenAI does seem to be genuinely just high on their own supply for a little over a half of the manuscripts they released, but for the other half that is machine checked, either ((internal model)) managed to find a way to cheese 4 independent Lean checker kernels at the same time, and OpenAI somehow hasn't noticed / didn't report despite the heavy reputational risk, or the results are just plain correct. Go figure.

But even for the half that wasn't machine checked, there's an awfully big quiet regarding any defects in them. Given the insane schadenfreude potential and the highly potent David vs Goliat framing associated, one would expect any counterarguments to be frontpaged immediately, and be circlejerked to oblivion. Given that is yet to happen as well, go figure even harder.

perching_aix··on Listen and read USA nuclear forces Emergency Action Messages, heard on 11175 kHz
i tend to run a pass of sol 6.1 at its output, cleans up the language well and finds defects opus missed
perching_aix··on A practical guide to AI image generation, from diffusion to agents
would be, yes... are we going to pretend that botch jobs don't exist, and that everyone credentialed actually does an equally (or at all a) good job or something?

you either trust and/or verify. the people clearly cannot verify and clearly do trust. vagueposting about ai bad won't break that vacuous trust, on the contrary, due to the incentives involved, induces distrust on the human expert side.

so maybe you wanna actually elaborate?

perching_aix··on Broccoli2Shell: Brotli decoder RCE in Node.js, Python and more
the article above is about a defect in google's brotli compression library (CVE-2026-111497). compression libraries don't really do web serving, or communicate with networked resources at all, they're hermetic. so exposure depends on the context this library is deployed in as a dependency.

put it in the network path, it can become an RCE.

put it in a privileged context, it can become privilege escalation.

put it in a hardened environment, it can become completely inert.

in no sane perspective is me listing off the applications shipping with vulnerable versions of this codec off-topic. just because the article is hellbent on portraying this as some sort of second php2shell, the actual underlying issue here is still CVE-2026-111497.

perching_aix··on A practical guide to AI image generation, from diffusion to agents
how will they tell that the person hired did a good job if they can't tell if the ai cocks up?
perching_aix··on Broccoli2Shell: Brotli decoder RCE in Node.js, Python and more
git for windows is vulnerable even in its latest release (2.56.0.windows.3), careful pulling repos over https from random ass servers (prolly uncommon but hey). they already merged the fix on the repo, it's just in a snapshot build only; should prolly arrive on Monday (2.56.0.windows.4).

also affects codex (gui), which ships its own git, could be more of a problem there, when the LLMs get quirky at night. still unlikely to be a problem though.

speaking of, update codex (and wipe its cache at ~/.cache/codex-runtimes), ships its own node. update python.

stuff like wireshark and imhex remain vulnerable, even on their latest repo commits, which may or may not be spicy.

also Microsoft 365 Copilot still has its own unpatched brotlidec.dll from Oct 7, if anyone uses that. no fix available for that one afaik, not sure about how it can be made to access the vulnerable decoder.

perching_aix··on An alignment assessment of the UK AISI cybertesting incident
sounds like it's not just these models that could really use a thesaurus
perching_aix··on LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale
Nohow, because the real world is informal. This is as far as coding can and will ever go, basically.

And like yes, it does just launder defects to a layer higher, but another way to phrase that in this case (and in many other cases) is that it raises the bar.

Instead of defects being mostly about nonsense minutia (relative to business logic), they are about actual design decisions and their correspondence to reality, i.e. the actual original goal and point of this god forsaken, navel-gazing field.

perching_aix··on Several Linux kernel vulnerabilities accidentally posted to public mailing list
Definitely at best a "sort of" type perfection. The endgame here is formally verified everything, at which point the only question is whether the then-consistent model that's implemented is any reasonable in practice.

Think "this is not a vulnerability, as no security boundary is being unexpectedly crossed" except the way the security boundaries are laid down is utterly stupid and hilatiously nonsensical. Same for non-security related defects ("working as expected, wontfix" -> "the way it works is dogshit, and so your expectations are idiotic too").

Now, since these things are supposed to align with human sensibilities and are supposed to capture the human semantic understanding of our world, theoretically, this should still leave us in a pretty good spot. But not a guaranteed good spot, as that is not actually tractable, ever, and fundamentally so.

perching_aix··on Publish fake stats, get cited in LLMs
So when this will inevitably result in a paid web emerging with higher trust information for an additional fee, a fee that these companies will happily offload and/or partner away, will you be there to cash in as a mighty coincidence, or is this realization still awaiting you? Among the many other hilariously fucked realizations.
perching_aix··on Publish fake stats, get cited in LLMs
What's the paradox about this? It's just basic lying and deception.
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