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timschmidt

3,017 karma · joined November 26, 2014

timschmidt@gmail.com
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timschmidt··on US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans
Hey I found the person who's the reason there's a fully equipped contingent of the National Guard in every major city.
timschmidt··on Type Server Protocol
I'm not the OP, but it seemed to me that major teaching institutions settled on Python as a pedagogic language after previously having rallied around Java for same, and various other languages before that.
timschmidt··on Root shell on Samsung TV
Yup. I just find it funny that the one place it's unacceptable to show ads is over other people's ads.
timschmidt··on Root shell on Samsung TV
Hilariously enough, the sort of TVs used to display advertising in public places[1] don't have any of this annoying spy/adware installed.

1: https://tru-vumonitors.com/21in-to-65in-monitors/

timschmidt··on OpenSSL 4.1.0
Better your threat model depend on that assumption than mine.
timschmidt··on OpenSSL 4.1.0
The chosen phrasing is literally one step short of accusing the author of intent. "It could not have been designed better to [avoid detection] and cause harm" leaves open the possibility of accident, in the way that saying "this guillotine could not have been designed better to chop heads" leaves open the possibility of one spontaneously assembling from raw materials.
timschmidt··on OpenSSL 4.1.0
> OpenSSL exhibits the former, not the latter.

The OpenBSD folks came to the exact opposite conclusion after auditing the code:

"In a nutshell, This was a very effective exploit mitigation technique countermeasure. It could not have been designed better to make an attack like heartbleed both hard to detect and have dire consequences. OpenBSD's memory allocator, Valgrind, and Coverity do not notice the memory issues."

https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00007.ht...

Just a single damning slide among many here: https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/

More here: https://www.libressl.org/papers.html

Further, known exploits like the one crafted for XZ take advantage of plausible deniability and trust in contributors at every opportunity. Meaning that even if you wanted to disclaim malice, you cannot do so effectively.

timschmidt··on OpenSSL 4.1.0
Op did immediately above you i.e.: "nothing to do with malice or exploitability"

and when asked to explain you responded with: "Didn't they say it already?"

Which any reader can verify they have not at the time of 1:42pm EST Oct 23 2026.

timschmidt··on OpenSSL 4.1.0
Unnecessarily complicated APIs are a security code smell precisely because they help hide bugs, leaky abstractions, insecure state, and other exploitable issues.
timschmidt··on Apple routed a graphite pipe through the iPhone Duo's hinge to dissipate heat
> The iPhone in your pocket should've felt more like a polished stone than the palm.

And yet, due to the shape Apple chose, it did not.

"You're feeling it wrong" from the same folks as "you're holding it wrong". Yeesh.

timschmidt··on Hybrid Reasoning Agents: LLM agents that think in latent space, act through text
He's referring to this technique's effect of obscuring interpretibility. Making it much more difficult to verify chains of thought and alignment.
timschmidt··on Apple routed a graphite pipe through the iPhone Duo's hinge to dissipate heat
Palm's Pre[1] supported multi-tasking, having multiple emails open at the same time to read and compose, unified instant messaging, copy/paste and myriad other features iPhone didn't have at the time.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Pre

timschmidt··on Apple routed a graphite pipe through the iPhone Duo's hinge to dissipate heat
> Considering practically every smartphone to this day is derivative of the 2007 glass slab hardware design (and software UX), I'd say they were on to something

Lowest cost of production is what that formfactor provides.

Palm's devices, by contrast, felt like a polished river stone in the pocket. I know which I prefer.

timschmidt··on Unikernels were hard. key word: were
> Let me know when your local OS does ...

Sounds like Plan 9. Which would put that around 30ish years ago. Mainframe OSes can probably make similar claims even earlier.

timschmidt··on Mistral Large 4
> Ah, the Voight-Kampff test. Should I be worried about where this is going?

It’s a shame she won’t live – but then again, who does?

timschmidt··on ArtCraft Apps – open-source Adobe compatible suite written in Rust
I've rolled the stack into a monorepo under https://github.com/timschmidt/csgrs which should make it much easier to work with.
timschmidt··on Mistral Large 4
This feels uncannily like the ancestor of the Voight-Kampff test[0]

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umc9ezAyJv0

timschmidt··on ArtCraft Apps – open-source Adobe compatible suite written in Rust
> AutoCAD, and Solidworks too

You may want those in new high-performance infinite precision: https://github.com/timschmidt/hyperreal

Exact curves: https://github.com/timschmidt/hypercurve

Meshes: https://github.com/timschmidt/hypermesh

and more in the ~22 crate stack.

timschmidt··on Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage
> They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city

Nope. While it's technically possible via natural gas fuel cells which are near 100% efficient in combined cycle electric / heat recovery use as compared to our city's existing ~35% efficient combined cycle natural gas fired steam turbine. And one such installation was proposed for this city in the 24MW range. Our beloved local citizens believed it, without reason and in open opposition to openly shared information to the contrary, to be a water guzzling/polluting, pollutant belching, energy consuming, mass surveillance enabling dystopian thing.

Flushed $120M in local investment down the toilet and signed up for worse air quality from ageing inefficient infrastructure because a datacenter is a big faceless thing that's safe to hate.

timschmidt··on Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'
Same as everyone else's: bad when they do it to us, good when we do it to them.
timschmidt··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
> Cute but it's quite obvious I'm referring to

Comfortable with your own loose wording, but lawyering over others. I see.

> And no, the payload continues to fall and is now not even remotely close to being able to achieve the program goals

Payload was also much lower on early Falcon 9's. Virtually every rocket family is a family and not one model because they get stretched, engines get added and tweaked, etc. Reduced payload capacity is a boring, normal, and expected situation for early production design. Same goes for planes. What you see as failure is an initial qualified engineering milestone. It seems to me that you must understand the concept of iteration. It also seems like you think 50T to LEO is not incredible in and of itself.

Perhaps you are the sort of person who is unhappy at weddings?

This mindset that because something which is under development is not finished yet, it has failed or is failing, can only come from someone who has never made anything themselves. The misunderstanding is so complete. I suppose it's a mindset some folks have to unlearn to help themselves.

> "Starship is a successful program because Starlink makes it economically sustainable" to "I don't care or know what Starship is trying to do, I don't care or know how successfully they're doing it, but rocket go up is a fun ride already."

These are your constructions and do not accurately reflect anything I've said. It seems like you're just looking for arguments and not genuine understanding. I won't give you any more argument. Good evening.

timschmidt··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
> Starship's goals

Rockets don't have goals. People do. Rockets have features like payload capacity, thrust, cost/ton to orbit, reusability, etc. On which Starship seems to be doing excellently compared to... everyone else.

> SpaceX investors are not investing in a marginally more efficient Starlink deployment system.

IDK what any given investor's rationale is without asking them, and neither do you. Groups, like rockets, are not possessed of singular will.

> You seem to be suggesting that it's a foregone conclusion that ... Starship will achieve its much grander ambitions.

You seem to be the only one who's said such a thing. However, since you bring it up, I will point out that engineering is a process, akin to science, and success merely takes enough determination and resources to keep trying. SpaceX seem to repeatedly demonstrate the determination, and successfully launching Starlink with Starship provides the resources.

I see what they've achieved already, and expect them to continue applying the same process. I'm not sure how far they'll go. But it's a fun ride already. I trust the process. I'm a fan of the process. You and I get to have this conversation because science and engineering work, rockets fly because science and engineering work. I'm not sure how one would even attempt to argue otherwise.

timschmidt··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
Yes, that's the sentence that doesn't make much sense. Would you mind re-stating your question?
timschmidt··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
Frankly that sentence doesn't make much sense. Would you mind rephrasing your question?
timschmidt··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
And it's amazing how much easier it is to test and iterate when you're making regular flights.
timschmidt··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
Putting Starlink sats in orbit is the economic engine that pays for Starship development and infrastructure build-out. You really think you get to skip straight to the end goal without establishing a way to fund it?
timschmidt··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
Saturn V was the culmination of a loooooong development history which included many rockets in the same family (hence the V), and some spectacular RUDs.
timschmidt··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
> Now the goalposts

Milestones. Engineers deal in milestones. Goalposts are for sportsball.

timschmidt··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
For something impossible to complete, it sure seems to be deploying a lot of Starlink satellites.
timschmidt··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
They've reached orbit, and at the time of this comment are preparing to deploy Starlink sats. Which means they've successfully closed the economic development loop for the Starship program. Falcon 9 can't launch Starlink v3, only Starship can. They've already demonstrated successful booster catch. Even if they discard Ship in the ocean after every launch they're no worse off than with Falcon 9 (which also discards it's upper stage).

They'll ramp falcon flights down quickly. Ramp up Starship launches just as quickly. And in a couple years time we'll have a blooper reel like this one but larger by 10x: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ

Edit: Starlink deployed.

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