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robryk

1,089 karma · joined June 11, 2013

my public key: https://keybase.io/robryk; my proof: https://keybase.io/robryk/sigs/RU5rlFtiJ80VXVFLurDQ87GLusF5bcVplAVoAUmmqJ0

You can reach me at @robryk:wuatek.is

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robryk··on Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns
Sure, you want to optimize for total length. However, you don't have any meaningful restrictions on turn radius, which do exist when you want to build a road and which make building a road around holdouts oftentimes impossible.
robryk··on Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns
If you require client certificates then you don't need to worry about non-insider attacks on anything other than your TLS library and your client cert bootstrap procedure.
robryk··on Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns
We lost common access to the means that were used to communicate earlier. For example, anonymous and unrevocable access to the phone network used to exist in the form of payphones, which are being phased out.
robryk··on Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns
I agree with the latter part, but for the former note that Earth's surface is 2d: you can go around holdouts; unlike roads you don't care about the fiber being straight.
robryk··on Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns
If all your endpoints are at least somewhat under your control (i.e. the thing doesn't need to be accessible via a web browser on a vanilla computer) you can reduce "exploits" to "exploits of my implementation of TLS/my VPN of choice" plus the bootstrap issue.

If the endpoints are not under your control to that extent, then I'd argue that "all the residential ISPs in US" is just as bad as "all of China/Russia" due to botnets.

robryk··on AI-designed camera only records objects of interest while being blind to others
Thanks, the papers you quoted seem to describe something with low losses (though i can't find explicit statements to that effect when skimming). I was under the impression that nonlinear optics will have huge losses, because it requires multiphoton interactions (which should usually have low cross sections), so will have to figure out which part of my intuition doesn't hold.
robryk··on macOS now scans for malware whenever it gets a chance
What do you mean by "passes"? Unless it's a file on a removable medium or a remote fs, it has to be created, which requires opening it. Scanning removable media upon insertion and remote fses upon mounting is going to look mighty suspicious and, in the latter case, be cover for data exfiltration.
robryk··on U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline
Life expectancy is computed as if the model person lived all their life years this year. This means that when e.g. a new communicable disease appears which is more risky the first time one falls ill, its effect on life expectancy is outsized: we sum up the risk from getting that disease _for the first time_ over all years of life. A year later, we sum up delayed effects of getting it for the first time, etc. The article doesn't seem to address that at all.
robryk··on Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach
If they actually wanted to offer up control to the pubic in some way, how would they go about that? I guess they could create an appeals process for their decisions that's independent of them; or do you have something else in mind?
robryk··on Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach
I really mean my original question. I think what CF is doing is trying to behave like a utility, and i think it's arguably in their best interest[1]. You seem to think that it's very obviously not in their interest. Care to elaborate on why?

[1] because their business scales very well, so they'd prefer to be considered reliable, so that competition doesn't have that available as a differentiator; any attempt at applying content-dependent rules either uses lots of heuristic automation or is reactive in response to Twitter storms, neither of which is predictable and reliable

robryk··on Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach
What incentives do you claim they are under? I'm sorry, but you seem to be assuming some context i seem not to have.
robryk··on Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach
I'm sorry, i don't see how this answers my question. What do you mean by "this symptom"?
robryk··on Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach
What change would that be? I don't know of anything they could do to make themselves a utility besides behaving like one and publicly starting that they intend to do so.
robryk··on AI-designed camera only records objects of interest while being blind to others
The problem with them is that you don't get multiple layers of nonlinear operations: wave functions in simple media form a linear space after all.
robryk··on Things people blamed on bicycles
The GP is plainly wrong. ~Everyone in Switzerland does normal vehicular left turns, and the bicycle exam for schoolchildren includes making vehicular left turns correctly (i.e. signaling, waiting for cars that are in process of overtaking you, moving to the middle of the road, possibly stopping, turning when the way's free of vehicles that have right of way).

E: Source: https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/pd/de/index/stadtpolizei_zueric...

robryk··on Coping with Copilot
Yes (in the field of CS, in other fields it might vary). That said, for me the most important difference was a thing around expectations: I felt fine to spend all the time I wished on the thing that became my thesis, to the exclusion of everything else, while at the same time not feeling the obligation to do so.
robryk··on Coping with Copilot
> (...) the projects are often like (...)

This seems to suggest that asking a candidate with an MSc about their thesis might be useful

robryk··on Smoking, alcohol and high BMI are leading risk factors for global cancer deaths
I'm surprised by that. I would expect low enough exposure to cause abnormally low bone density and other calcium-related problems via "vitamin"[1] D deficiency.

[1] It's not really a vitamin, because we do produce it internally (as opposed to having to ingest it in diet).

robryk··on Study finds link between 'forever chemicals' in cookware and liver cancer
Do you know why the two plastics are different? I would naively expect that everything that would work as the inner layer in tetrapak would also work in cans (cans deform less). Is it that making the layer stick to tetrapak is simpler/different than making it stick to metal?
robryk··on Missing Darwin Notebooks Returned to Cambridge University Library
> Forged art, like counterfeit money, is illegal to own or sell.

Do you have a reference for that? At least in Poland that's explicitly not the case, and I'm curious how does that kind of legislation distinguish between a forgery and a replica.

robryk··on Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal
This works in everything that uses libreadline to accept user input (unless the binary has specifically configured library differently iiuc), so should work in all shell-like interfaces. You can customize the shortcuts in inputrc, likewise, for all libreadline-using binaries. By default, readline tries to be emacs-like. You can ask it to be vi-like, or reconfigure lots of its shortcuts to be similar to an editor you like. To be fair, "escape to real editor" is not a thing you usually do in an editor, so that will remain special.
robryk··on A userspace WireGuard client that exposes itself as a proxy
Do I understand correctly that this assumes that there's only one wireguard peer?
robryk··on What's the risk from fake Yubikeys?
The attack you're describing doesn't require wifi. If the victim visits the attacker's page, the attacker page is free to request signatures (also non-presence-attesting signatures) from the key. This can be used to send data to the key (in the nonce) and from the key (the signature is nondeterministic). I don't know if this can be done without user's awareness in the new web api for security keys, though.
robryk··on Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest
First, reactor protection systems will start reducing power down to 40% nominal if the turbogenerator load disappears (search for URB in https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...).

The power would not be dumped into a resistor: the power would be dumped in form of heat with the turbogenerator disconnected from steam. I expect that you can "just" dump it in the condenser and use the standard cooling of the condenser to dump it into the local body of water. If that's insufficient, one can dump steam from the secondary loop into atmosphere (which necessitates adding water there). You can play with a vver-1000 simulator and see how many of these things work; the simulator whose manual I'm citing above can be easily found on the internet.

robryk··on RFC-2229 – A Dictionary Server Protocol
The dictionary that dict.cc uses knows that versioning is a word, and has translations of it into other languages. I don't know what dictionary it is, nor if it contains definitions too.
robryk··on Stories Are Coming to Signal
Right now signal's infrastructure could figure out (if it stored data that everyone claims it doesn't) which IP address is sending messages to which IP address. If stories end up being implemented as a group conversation with all your contacts, everyone will be reasonably frequently sending a message to all their contacts, which changes the above into "which IPs are contacts of which IPs".
robryk··on Predict 3D position of flying bugs and pest to shoot down them with a laser
Also, can we get a laser that's collimated badly enough that the beam is ~harmless at distances where an aircraft can be, while still collimated well enough to fry the insect? (In the spirit of "the best radiation shield is r squared".)
robryk··on Redo: A recursive, general-purpose build system
What you could do is use Tup's LUA support (you can write tupfiles and tuprules in LUA, and you can define and use LUA functions in them): have each rule handle just one step of your process, generate the whole necessary DAG of rules, encapsulate all of that in a LUA function defined in tuprules.lua and call that function in tupfile.lua for every diagram you want to generate. One thing that you lose is the ability to use `foreach` with your construction (other than by creating a variant of your constructions that embeds foreachness, or by using tup.glob and iterating).
robryk··on Redo: A recursive, general-purpose build system
How does !macro rid you of that portability issue? One way or another, you'd need to have a command that does that whole sequence of operations. If it's inline, I'd expect same portability problem (`&&` in Bash corresponds to something else in `.bat`).
robryk··on Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
> Check the ToS you don't own anything on Discord you even transfer copyright for every word you type.

This is blatantly false. https://discord.com/terms under "your content" claims that I give Discord a forwardable and nonrevokable license to do anything with my content, not that I transfer copyright.

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