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zaroth

24,371 karma · joined December 23, 2011

Some of my endeavors; - Founder of TapLink, now called BlindHash - 2nd prize winner at MassChallenge 2016 - Co-Founder of Club Benchmarking and Dynamic Benchmarking - Bitcoin contributor (inventor of Micropayment Channels and first implementation of Stealth Addresses) - Operating an honest Tor Relay

Reach Out: jspilman at blindhash dot com

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zaroth··on DOGE Takeover of USDS Allows Them to Surveil the US Government from the Inside
> The Service’s mandate allows it the wide-ranging ability to enter any government agency and access its software or technical systems with the goal of helping to streamline or reform existing systems.

That’s actually cool they have that ability. I’ve always been a huge fan of USDS, I think they just got massively supercharged, and look forward to watching them achieve this mission.

zaroth··on Nation-scale Matrix deployments will fail using the community version of Synapse
Whatever you think a “rug pull” is, this ain’t it.

FOSS owes you literally nothing. Go build what you want for yourself, geez. Oh, and feel free to give it away to the world… OR NOT!

zaroth··on Agents Are Not Enough
Exactly what DeepSeek3 is doing.
zaroth··on Agents Are Not Enough
Tell me you haven’t used the latest models, without telling me you haven’t used the latest models?

They do hallucinate at times, but you’re missing a lot of real utility by claiming they are basically bullshit engines.

They can now use tools, and maintain internal consistency over long context windows (with both text and video). They can iterate fully autonomously on software development by building, testing, and bug fixing on real world problems producing usable & functioning code.

There’s a reason Microsoft is putting $80 billion dollars on the line to run LLMs. It’s not because they are full of shit!

zaroth··on 30% Drop In o1-Preview Accuracy When Putnam Problems Are Slightly Variated
Maybe by the time it’s doing a trillion dollars a year of useful work (less than 10 years out) people will call it intelligent… but still probably not.
zaroth··on 30% drop in O1-preview accuracy when Putnam problems are slightly variated
Downvoted for… too conclusively proving OP wrong?
zaroth··on Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
I wish it were so! That was true until they turned this feature on by default.
zaroth··on Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
Everything about what they did was absolutely fantastic and amazing, until they turned it on by default.
zaroth··on EU law mandating universal chargers for devices comes into force
That doesn’t mean the first phone is waste! There’s nothing wrong with wanting to buy a new phone.

The law won’t reduce smartphone ewaste. It will just satisfy the people who want removable batteries over sleaker design.

The battery is serviceable and it can be done quite easily and cheaply. In fact it’s done billions of times over.

Really just nanny state regulation, which as typical, will not bring any benefit and impose tremendous compliance costs and actually make some products worse.

zaroth··on Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
I don’t even use iCloud Photos and this was on by default. Very bad move by Apple to ship my photos off my device, without my permission, in any shape or form, I don’t care.
zaroth··on Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s
It’s not even advice, and it’s not wrong.
zaroth··on Ask HN: Resources for general purpose GPU development on Apple's M* chips?
They literally spent months trying to work out the bugs. It’s an absolute admonishment of AMD’s software stack.

Just look at their market value and it says everything you need to know about how much “better” AMD is than NVIDIA.

zaroth··on $8k Suzuki from India received a 5-star crash test rating
You should not give these sites the benefit of rendering their own HTML.

Ask your agent to convert the URL to markdown, and read it in VS Code or whereever.

zaroth··on Private Cloud Compute Security Guide
That’s not, in fact, what Apple is saying.
zaroth··on Standardizing Automotive Connectivity
Grain of salt due to the source? What is that supposed to mean?

Tesla is so far ahead when it comes to these things (48V architecture), there literally is no other source in this case.

zaroth··on The EU Throws a Hand Grenade on Software Liability
It’s even worse to proscribe liability when the “flaw” is not even an actual operating failure, but the ability for a bad actor to break the software maliciously.

Software is only as insecure as the user’s willingness to expose it to untrusted inputs, combined with the user’s willingness to give the software unfettered access to sensitive data.

“Don’t let hackers control the input stream” is literally the end of any and all security issues.

zaroth··on The EU Throws a Hand Grenade on Software Liability
This is neither a best practice, nor does it result in bug free code.
zaroth··on The EU Throws a Hand Grenade on Software Liability
TFA specifically states that US has gone in a totally different direction than the EU on this?
zaroth··on The EU Throws a Hand Grenade on Software Liability
If this actually becomes law, it instantly makes it too dangerous to bother for me to ever ship software into the EU again.

Under this law, consumers can claim compensation for damages caused by defective products without having to prove the vendor was negligent or irresponsible. In addition to personal injury or property damages, for software products, damages may be awarded for the loss or destruction of data. Rather than define a minimum software development standard, the directive sets what we regard as the highest possible bar. Software makers can avoid liability if they prove a defect was not discoverable given the “objective state of scientific and technical knowledge” at the time the product was put on the market.

Look the the liability standard they are pushing! Not willful negligence, not reasonable care, but rather it sounds more akin to “could the bug have even theoretically been prevented given perfect information and unlimited funds”.

Yeah, no thanks, I’m human, so I won’t be accepting that level of liability for words I write into a text editor any time soon.

And kinda mind boggling that anyone who knows anything about how software actually works wouldn’t see this as completely batshit insane.

A more reasonable standard (malicious intent or reckless disregard for human safety would be a good starting point) would go a long way toward fixing this.

This current standard would get any developer sued out of existence by armies of AI lawyers long before you can ship a patch when someone complains that your software divide by zero bug caused them “damages”.

And get a load of this;

Burden of proof: When the injured consumer is faced with excessive difficulties to prove the defectiveness of the product or the causal link between its defectiveness and the damage, a court may decide that the claimant is only required to prove the likelihood that the product was defective or that its defectiveness is a likely cause of the damage.

There’s a reason why EU GDP has completed stagnated versus the US, and the EU tech sector is a virtual rounding error in the world… and this trash mentality is a big part of it.

But wait, it gets worse…

Circular economy: When a product is repaired and upgraded outside the original manufacturer’s control, the company or person that modified the product should be held liable.

Bye bye downstream distro patches! And knowing the EU, they’ll say that “import Foo from Bar as MyFoo” is a “modification” and try to make anyone with cash in their pocket liable for any bug in any dependency they link to…

Online platforms can be held liable for a defective product sold on their platform just like any other economic operators if they act like one.

Bye bye app stores! Of course some will probably cheer this blindly ignoring or not comprehending the extraordinary value creation app stores are responsible for.

zaroth··on The EU Throws a Hand Grenade on Software Liability
What “best practices” are you even taking about. Point to one piece of bug free software that performs a useful task. I’ll wait.
zaroth··on The EU Throws a Hand Grenade on Software Liability
This is obviously a completely useless carve out. The EU will define something as commercial based on even having paid support or enterprise features, so if there’s any company behind the open source code at all, you can be sued by your free users picking it up and misusing it.

So this seems like a really great way to stop any software from being released into Europe.

zaroth··on Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
Is the $1000/ton a law a physics, or could that ever possibly scale up and come down an order of magnitude?
zaroth··on Tesla's Robotaxi event still not started after 40 minutes [video]
The bus can only transport 100 people because it forces everyone to take the same route, regardless of where they are actually headed. This is not merely inconvenient, but a delusional take on the future of mobility.

You cannot eat on the bus. You cannot bring your grocery bags on the bus. You cannot bring your pets on the bus.

Also, there’s the fact you have to sit with (and smell) 99 other people. Some of them you may find are mentally unstable shitbags that will possibly assault you.

No thanks.

zaroth··on Tesla Robotaxi
You can argue semantics, but it’s not an implementation detail that doesn’t matter, it’s fundamentally misrepresenting the truth.

A “recall” that does actually involve bringing the car in for service, a.k.a. recalling the car, is not accurately described as a “recall”. Words mean something.

The NHTSA is being idiotic (unsurprisingly) in not distinguishing between a software update and a recall, because legacy auto doesn’t have the software chops to successfully replicate Tesla’s approach.

News agencies that lean into that idiocy in a slanted attempt to denigrate Tesla are only denigrating themselves. It is not good coverage, and it is willfully misleading their own readers.

Call it a mandatory update if you want. But nothing was recalled, so insisting on calling it a recall is like insisting on calling cars “horseless carriages”.

zaroth··on Tesla Robotaxi
Looks like VW sold 250 of them (ever) for $125k a piece.

Tesla will apparently be selling it for $30k before the end of 2016.

I’m super curious about the induction charging rate! The robot they showed cleaning it was also pretty interesting.

zaroth··on Tesla Transport Protocol over Ethernet (TTPoE)
It’s for FSD, which when fully realized, will have a global market cap of over $10 trillion.
zaroth··on How the iPhone 16's electrically-released adhesive works
Actual fines and settlements added up to about $500 million.
zaroth··on How the iPhone 16's electrically-released adhesive works
Millions of dollars of research and materials science, successfully integrated into Apple’s billion dollar iPhone manufacturing line, solving a real repairability problem in a way that’s almost magical…

And you are honestly asking if they thought to maybe try heating it up?

zaroth··on NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users
Does Tor Browser disable cookies? I think not.

You don’t have to login to be given a cookie that’s then stored and tracked across each new IP that Tor cycles through.

zaroth··on Why do electronic components have such odd values? (2021)
Beautiful if true!
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