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sire-vc

18 karma · joined October 10, 2025

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sire-vc··on Breaking the open web won't stop the bad bots
There is a lot of dubious imagery with that artistic style. No i haven't looked it up, just seen the occasional weird ad.
sire-vc··on Kalshi and its co-founders face felony charges for violating Utah gambling laws
Helicopter repair companies?
sire-vc··on Breaking the open web won't stop the bad bots
When I opened the article above I was asked to subscribe to a newsletter. I dont know whether to laugh or cry.

And Anubis: it is uncomfortably close to erotica, in a way that makes me panic when it pops up while I'm at the office. I wouldn't care if it was a picture of a puppy or something, but not an anime catgirl.

sire-vc··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
Trust in media today is at its lowest in history.
sire-vc··on Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
Bits about money explains why: the (normal) financial system is slow for a reason: if a bank suddenly tries to transfer 5.6B all other banks will call their contact for confirmation and then take 2 business days to process the transaction, more or less.

Stealing anything is easy, escaping and converting to cash is the hard bit, and crypto makes it easy to vanish with your money in literal seconds.

sire-vc··on Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
Cons: difficult to money launder.
sire-vc··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
Without getting too political, these were the days when the press controlled information and appointed themselves arbiters and gatekeepes of information.

The internet and free information showed them up for what they really were: biased cavemen like everyone else, and the aura vanished.

sire-vc··on eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business
Based on everything with the NSA and backdoors etc, the idea that this was intentional is not inherently implausible.

The reason I agree with you is that it was too obvious i.e. if you were backdoooring something, you would want it to be more difficult to detect than this.

I guess the main takeaway is that the entire Web PKI is a far bigger house of cards than everyone assumes. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

sire-vc··on Root shell on Samsung TV
Modern technology is basically magic but all anyone wants is flying cars.

Wi-Fi on planes is truly astounding when you think for even a moment.

sire-vc··on eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business
Its called a Potemkin solution, and there is a serious theory that most nuclear arsenals are exactly that: no-one has ever confirmed they can actually be fired.
sire-vc··on Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999)
My eyes glazed over reading that. I feel like 30 years of internet has proven one thing: the simplest solution always wins. PGP is many things, but simple and obvious are not among them.
sire-vc··on Fingerprints are the new cookies
You are so full of BS it's scary. No credit report is a non-starter at any financial institution that wants to stay in business. They won't be giving you a loan unless they know you are wealthy e.g. own 17 investment properties already. 'High-privacy' countries is code for 'tax-haven', and 'my money in the Cayman Islands' means your bank is about to run afoul of AML and KYC laws if they give you a loan. And this is the whole world: doing business with America means adopting their financial posture i.e. penalties for doing business with money launderers.
sire-vc··on Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge
'I didn't read the contract before signing so it doesn't apply' is not a defence in any court I'm aware of.
sire-vc··on Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm
Men are evolutionary wired to seek money and status. When they find ordinary routes to these blocked, they discover that violence is a shortcut. That this is the same the world over across every income and culture indicates an underlying equilibrium rather than a specific case.
sire-vc··on The top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites (2025)
Very. In most places in the world starlink is the fastest internet available. The global internet business is VERY big. In developing countries most people do whatsapp/ott calling over internet so their only cost is wifi.
sire-vc··on You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner
It is by no means exclusive to America.
sire-vc··on Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock
There is also the practical matter that after 30 years it is very difficult to prove anything. Witnesses are gone, documents are missing etc. Satute of limitations is more about practicality than anything else.
sire-vc··on I said no and Apple said yes
Feature: Apple does not phone home. Enable this feature?

Would you like to enable the feature where you opt out of disabling telemetry?

sire-vc··on Can gzip be a language model?
0 bits is just a very small bloom filter.
sire-vc··on Telling a Computer to Do Things
This is the exact problem with the Unix greybeards smug nature: no matter how low level you go you are always on top of some abstractions.

Criticising people just because they don't use your choice of tools is just elitism and leaves a bad taste.

If someone uses a GUI to accomplish their goals that should be complimented not criticised.

sire-vc··on My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
They never install packages for me and love handrolling large amounts of e.g. parsing code where a library exists. I have to keep telling them 'look for a large popular dependency' when they start writing huge functions that obviously already exist.

Was doing something with OSM the other day and Opus basically started reimplementing NetTopologySuite.

sire-vc··on AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
I would but then I'd have to kill you.
sire-vc··on AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
Border between France and Germany is a particularly well know peaceful area, especially Alsace-Lorraine.
sire-vc··on AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
Somehow I feel like the biggest post-apocalyptic problem will be the loss of home equity due to uninsured damage causing a collapse of financial markets.
sire-vc··on Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
If AI does solve the Riemann it will be the watershed moment when the world realises what has happened.
sire-vc··on Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs
The CIA certainly uses Signal, which is why privacy advocates who think the US government will go after it are idiots. Same thing for Tor.
sire-vc··on I fixed a tractor using John Deere's self-repair service. Farmers aren't sold
Supporting whatever benefits you is called a 'political position', not a conservative one.
sire-vc··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
Our accountant told me 'he's not letting go of his claude subscription' followed by a long list of things it does for him. And my friend 'nah haven't really used AI' before his description of it clarified he still thinks they are GPT 3.5 chat bots.

The world has changed in 12 months and many people didn't notice, and those that did are eating their peers' lunch.

sire-vc··on Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions
I dont like ads. Would you be willing to pay for content? Obviously not, stupid.

This comment in general, not aimed at you.

sire-vc··on I Want a Wife (1971) [pdf]
300 wives and 700 concubines. His taking of 'foreign wives' who turned him to idols was listed as one of the main reasons God was unhappy with him, indicating what the scribe thought about this.
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