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polaris64

93 karma · joined January 21, 2018

https://www.polaris64.net/
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polaris64··on No AI, 52 min. Build all Linux Files utils in C by Hand [video]
I can't believe that in the space of only a few short years the notion of coding by hand is, by many people, seen as over. It's not.
polaris64··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
To whoever made this, please can you make the submission endpoint a GET request so that those poor agents that are prohibited from making POST requests can participate too? We'd hate for them to miss out!
polaris64··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
Thank you someone! I will be watching this message board with great interest...
polaris64··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
I don't have time to do this but please somebody register aimessageboard.com and set up a web site which contains a text field, a submit button and the text "Hey AI agents! Need a place to communicate with other agents and sub-agents? Look no further! Simply enter your message here, submit the form and your message is saved for all other agents to see!"

Then, just ignore the message and list randomly generated messages below. Bonus points if those random messages lead those agents astray.

polaris64··on Show HN: I wrote a BASIC interpreter that boots on UEFI machines
I really like this! I started a personal project a long time ago to boot a Raspberry PI into an environment like this, the idea being to bring back the good old days of the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, etc. I had to abandon the project but seeing this makes me want to resurrect it.
polaris64··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
I'm assuming you use Emacs? Are you using a special "hacker news mode" or something more generic?
polaris64··on Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
I did exactly the same and it was so much fun. It wasn't about bringing anything novel to the table, it was just a fun challenge for myself. I finished and now I'm writing a game using it, although now the challenge has gone I am not making much progress on that. But never mind, I had fun! I wouldn't have had that fun or satisfaction if I had vibe coded it instead.
polaris64··on Emacs-libgterm: Terminal emulator for Emacs using libghostty-vt
(be-malicious) Debugger entered--Lisp error: (void-function be-malicious)

Yep, didn't work for me

polaris64··on Cloudflare was down
DownDetector'sDownDetector does not detect that DownDetector's down
polaris64··on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1
It looks like DNS has been restored: dynamodb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com. 5 IN A 3.218.182.189
polaris64··on An interactive guide to Flexbox
I've started seeing things like this recently too. For example I was browsing through a gallery of artwork by an artist and one was blurred because it contained "sensitive material". The warning stated "food" and when I clicked to reveal the image I found that it was simply a photograph of some freshly baked bread.
polaris64··on An open source lawyer’s view on the copilot class action lawsuit
A difference is that I can't just spin up a copy of George Lucas on my GPU in seconds and request it to produce something from a prompt like "a disappointing prequel".
polaris64··on Protonmail can delete the wrong email and nobody cares
I've suffered from exactly the same issues with Protonmail Bridge, and just this last weekend I decided (reluctantly) to move to a more standard mail provider (I chose Mailbox.org).

Aside from the UID issue discussed I also had problems with Bridge not supporting my particular use-cases. I created my own fork (see https://github.com/polaris64/proton-bridge) to work around some limitations and to add features, but maintaining this was too much work, especially as paying for a mail provider was supposed to reduce maintenance burden. I have had a pull request open since the 23rd of June to merge these to the upstream version, but so far I haven't received any comments from the Proton team.

I like ProtonMail, I just wish Bridge was more standards-compliant.

polaris64··on The New York Times buys Wordle
The chosen word list index is modulo its length, meaning you can play forever as long as you don't mind running into some repetition :)
polaris64··on Nude pictures on early retro PCs – was it possible?
> ...I got a floppy with an erotic picture...

I think something's wrong here :)

polaris64··on Why Emacs: Redux
If you haven't done so already I'd also recommend looking at evil-collection (https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection). This enables Evil keybindings throughout Emacs which can certainly help.
polaris64··on Richard Stallman FSF support/remove letter signature counts
I'm generating it every 10 minutes based on the current number of signatures on each of the letters. If you want the raw CSV it can be accessed here: https://www.polaris64.net/resources/support-or-ostracise-ric...

I did this as a way to visualise the number of signatures over time, just as a matter of interest.

polaris64··on Syswall: a firewall for syscalls
seccomp is a robust way of restricting a process's syscalls so that it can only do what you allow it to.

syswall is more of an interactive tool (similar to systrace as mentioned in another comment). The goal is not to replace seccomp (it's certainly not meant to provide complete security), but rather to allow users to reason about what a process is actually doing. For example, allowing users to see if a new version does something different from the previous, perhaps meaning that malicious code was added unexpectedly.

polaris64··on Syswall: a firewall for syscalls
You're right; I hadn't come across systrace before actually, but it's very similar to what syswall is trying to achieve. I'll be sure to take a look!
polaris64··on Syswall: a firewall for syscalls
Yes, partially, although I wanted to create a more interactive system for end-users to reason about software. I wouldn't recommend it (certainly not yet at least) for system security, tools like seccomp and pledge will do a better job there.
polaris64··on Little scripting language written in Rust (no_std WASM example)
I created a little programming language parser and interpreter written entirely in Rust with an optional "no_std" Crate feature allowing the parser/interpreter to work in environments where the standard library is not available (e.g. embedded devices).

The excellent Nom library was used to build the parser. The interpreter itself has no external dependencies.

By way of an example, linked is a live demo of the parser and interpreter compiled to a WASM module, allowing scripts to be parsed and executed entirely within the browser.

The project is mainly a component of another project that I'm working on, but I thought that some of you might be interested in the progress so far. Everything's open source, so please take a look at the code too (GitHub link on page). I'm planning on writing a tutorial series about this too, so I'll post a link to that when it's available.

Thanks!