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stestagg

804 karma · joined January 3, 2015

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stestagg··on Pickle’s Nine Flaws
> * Python only: what's this for, then? http://www.picklingtools.com/

From the picklingtools FAQ:

What versions of Python does PicklingTools support? Historically, versions 2.1.x to 2.6.x have been tested extensively. More recently, 2.7 has been tested and should work, but it has not been tested as much as the other versions.

   3.x has not been tested: We are waiting for our main paying customer to adopt the 3.x series.
[edit] formatting
stestagg··on Finding secrets by decompiling Python bytecode in public repositories
In the last 12 years of writing python, I have only hit had issues with .pyc files a handful of times, and always with python < 2.7. Anaecdotally this experience is shared with everyone I have worked with.

If you’re seeing this regularly, it suggests there may be something unique or uncommon in your set-up. You may wish to isolate and change whatever that is.

stestagg··on How to detect if an object has been garbage collected in JavaScript
It’s a map from a ‘WeakRef’ to a value. So if you have an object reference, you can associate a value with that object. But not the other way round
stestagg··on Stealing secrets from developers using WebSockets
Admittedly the example was a bit fake :)

I /have/ put other secrets into frontend code before, strictly for small temporary projects where the cost of implementing secret management outweighs the size of the project. And obviously not in code that was anywhere close to being deployed outside my own box.

Unfortunately the method outlined in the article allows access to environments that would otherwise be considered trusted and not-accessible over the internet, hence the problem

stestagg··on Stealing secrets from developers using WebSockets
Seems to be related to this: https://github.com/webpack/webpack-dev-server/issues/1604

It's not clear (without a lot more digging) what impact the sockjs changes have on this issue.

stestagg··on Stealing secrets from developers using WebSockets
I threw the code together last night. It's running on cloudflare backed by an S3 static file, so shouldn't be capacity issues

It was only tested on Firefox, as a basic proof-of-concept. AIUI, chrome et al offer similar functionality but maybe the API is different

It may also take a few minutes to find and connect to the websocket, I think CRA webserver maybe only binds to one client at a time, so maybe it would pick up the connection after a webpack-dev-server reload or two.

stestagg··on Text exceeding maxlength will no longer be truncated when pasted in Firefox 77
you can replace with this:

    function shorten(text, length) {
      return new Promise((a, r) =>
      fetch(`http://leftpad.io/shorten?l=${length}&v=${encodeURIComponent(text)}`).then(rx=>rx.text().then(a, r), r));
    }
stestagg··on Progress on Plasma
No disagreement here.

I don't use gnome desktops, for similar reasons (although I'm also not the target audience for adopters, as I currently use Linux as my primary desktop environment!)

I use cinnamon, as, for my personal preferences, it strikes the best balance between familiarity, 'prettiness' and functionality of the options I've tried.

stestagg··on Progress on Plasma
> Like how the file explorer has a built in terminal that follows the folder you're in.

That’s a nice feature. But it has little to do with Windows/OSX equivalence.

It also highlights something I felt last time I tried KDE (admittedly a while ago).

There were lots of nice UX innovations and polish. But they didn’t feel familiar to me (as a user of many desktop environments). This makes switching much less of an appealing prospect to me.

stestagg··on TCP Sucks
There is a hitherto-unwritten rule that it is allowed to comment...
stestagg··on Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification
This is the plan. Once google have verified the advertisers, they can ‘help users understand the source of the advert’ by replacing the mini Ad icon with the advertisers’ favicon, to increase transparency..
stestagg··on Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act
I think you're mistaking "It just works" for "It just works in the way I want it to"

Unfortunately if you go with the suggested methods for using zoom, it is very easy to join a meeting

stestagg··on One way to fight a coronavirus recession: $1k for every American
The thing about rural areas, is that not many people live there.

We live just ouside a mid-sized UK town (and cities down to small/mid sized towns covers a really high % of the population). Between public transport and good cycle/pedestrian routes, a car is not a major living requirement for many.

stestagg··on How many users block Google analytics? (2017)
Back in 1995 all websites shared one global stylesheet.

Every time a new rule was added, you had to wait up to 24 hours for the css servers to propagate.

stestagg··on Python dicts are now ordered
From the docs: "CPython implementation detail: Keys and values are listed in an arbitrary order which is non-random, varies across Python implementations, and depends on the dictionary’s history of insertions and deletions."

So I would claim that equates to non-deterministic

stestagg··on Show HN: Mute.vc – Mute Investors on Twitter
It’s fast coz the cpu be blazing ;)
stestagg··on The Linux codebase has over 3k TODO comments, many from over a decade ago
Workflows are full of trade offs. Different people & teams value different features in different ways. It’s what makes software development such a vibrant ecosystem.
stestagg··on NASA satellite finds crashed Indian Moon lander Vikram
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2019/vikram-lande...
stestagg··on Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut
> Uh, I'm not very confident on this helping; wouldn't this mean fewer people will be using and evaluating beta components?

Probably. But the benefit gained by doing this is that every issue discovered should be directly attributable.

If everything is broken, it’s very easy to normalise broken behaviours, or to deflect responsibility.

stestagg··on Teaching a neural network to use a calculator
Yeah. I only trained addition. Actually exploring the impact of training a net to perform a range of operations on the minimum plausible neuron count would be quite interesting

I don’t see any reason why it would be significantly harder to do, however

You’re right about accuracy. I didn’t let the model train enough to push the error low enough to guarantee exact results over the input range. But then again this was designed as a toy experiment, not something people should rely on

stestagg··on John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
A child comes pre-programmed to put things in their mouth. They also have very sophisticated reward functions built-in that identify tasty sugars entering their mouth.

Very quickly (assuming said child doesn't eat something too bad), in the absence of an external oracle, the child learns a very productive mental model of what an apple is.

This type of feedback loop seems eminently translatable to machine learning, assuming we can encode the concept space in a way that allows the model to be encoded and trained in a reasonable set of constraints

stestagg··on Teaching a neural network to use a calculator
Here’s one that does so using roman numerals:

http://static.offd.es/numerals/

It’s unsurprisingly easy to implement

stestagg··on Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
I think in this context it relates to the overheads of provisioning new services.

Traditional virtualized hosting environments typically also come with varying levels of technical overheads when setting up new boxes.

What bofa have is a virtually self-service (some business approvals needed) user interface with the ability for devs to set up new virtual servers with little/no knowledge of the underlying hosting infrastructure.

stestagg··on Soli
> I am wondering why they decided to first release it in a phone, where it seems like it has the least benefits...

Google wanting something in your phone that allows it to track engagement? I can't think why.. :)

> Engaged > Soli anticipates when you want to interact.

stestagg··on Soli
Especially as the privacy statement you quoted is immediately followed by a diagram showing how Soli can tell if you're paying attention to your phone or not, and how many people are near-by.
stestagg··on The Navy's Patent for a Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor
My working theory on that is the military are concerned about foreign surveillance UAVs.

And by reigniting the UFO narrative, they are more likely to receive reports and data from the public who may be looking for Aliens.

Interestingly, if this were true, it might imply that there is some pretty funky military tech out there, not owned by the US, that might have some interesting capabilities.

stestagg··on Do you have a problem? Write a compiler
One reason, from our similar experience is that showing non-Technical business people (in some environments) text with brackets, semicolons and the general code annotations you show here effectively “scares” them.

This isn’t always true. But it tends to be institutional when it happens. In some places people learn deeply that code is the realm of the tech teams and they should not engage with it.

Getting them to engage with the executable tests can be fantastically useful but it can also be a delicate sales game, where simple things like using a DSL can be key

stestagg··on Do you have a problem? Write a compiler
Interestingly we’re doing something very similar, but using cucumber syntax. So the tests are much more chatty

In our situation we probably have more concepts (middle office) but the interactions we’re modelling are simpler.

Going down this route is quite interesting because initially we got a lot of scepticism from other groups, but over time the solution has evolved with more and more documentation / traceability, and they ended up pretty complete documentation.

Every time someone decides that the development teams have life too easy and try to impose specific extra paperwork or documentation burdens on the day to day work, giving them that test pack seems to make them go quiet :)

stestagg··on Dropbox CTO Resigns
I, for one, recently cancelled my long term Dropbox subscription based on only a few similar stunts they’ve pulled.

There’s anecdotal evidence that others have too.

stestagg··on Free AI-generated headshots put stock photo companies on notice
Apologies if you know this already, but ...

That's likely exactly how these pictures were generated.

Generative adversarial neural networks (the typical approach for this type of problem) have two nets that compete against each other.

One net tries to generate images that look like the sample data, the other one tries to tell them apart.

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