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zith

187 karma · joined November 3, 2010

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zith··on DeepSeek v4.1 Flash
Well, giving it access to a simple linux terminal is theoretically enough to cause more damage than most people are comfortable with, and doing so is trivial enough that it will be done (and has been, tens of thousands of times).
zith··on Bugtraq is back
Pangram says 100% - "We believe that this entire text is AI."
zith··on Git rebase -I is not that scary
A workflow I was introduced to and have worked with a lot in my teams is,

1. Everyone uses feature branches

2. Everyone cleans up their branch using interactive rebase on top of main before review

3. All merges have been freshly rebase on main

I think it works very well and keeps the history clean while preserving "each commit does one thing".

zith··on F* file system – file search that reads SSD directly bypassing OS kernel
I run as uid 0, but it's not called root, because my system is mine and I'll call it what I want.
zith··on Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
I used to complain about all the levels of indirection of modern software, running in a javascript jit, in a browser container, in a vm, on an os, etc.

I eventually just accepted it, but this new agent layer really takes things to a new level.

zith··on Filing the corners off my MacBooks
I've created my own keyboard layout plus do some key remapping on my mac. Are you sure this won't work for tilde?

The tilde key exists in the key map here: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2450...

You can see how I did mine here if you're interested: https://github.com/bruse/dotfiles/tree/main/macOS (I suspect com.local.KeyRemapping.plist is most interesting, but the key layout file is there too, with some comments on how it was generated).

zith··on Show HN: enveil – hide your .env secrets from prAIng eyes
Sure, but it's probably unwise to have your production credentials on your development machine at all. It's far more likely to be compromised than your locked down production environment.
zith··on Show HN: enveil – hide your .env secrets from prAIng eyes
I must have missed some trends changing in the last decade or so. People have production secrets in the open on their development machines?

Or what type of secrets are stored in the local .env files that the LLM should not see?

I try to run environments where developers don't get to see production secrets at all. Of course this doesn't work for small teams or solo developers, but even then the secrets are very separated from development work.

zith··on Your app subscription is now my weekend project
It's interesting, because a few years ago I would have put this strictly under the "not invented here" fallacy, where we'd now be stuck maintaining another project for the foreseeable future. I used to press pretty hard to avoid it.

Now I wonder if the maintenance cost for this type of internal system has gone down to a level where that is no longer an issue.

zith··on How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground
Interesting! I know Sweden was not first, but Stockholm has had 3g coverage in the subway since 2005 and 4g since 2016.
zith··on Data breach at major Swedish software supplier impacts 1.5M
If I understand correctly the only thing not public that was leaked was the role each person had in the government.
zith··on MitM Flaw in Bitchat: Identity Is a Bitchat Challenge
I guess "don't roll your own crypto" is as valid as ever.
zith··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
Of course, majority is not very cleanly applicable yous politics. Less than half (which according to Mirriam Webster is the definition) of the votes cast in the last election went to Trump/Vance, and with such a poor voter turnout it was even further from a majority. Meanwhile the electoral college is working against the idea.
zith··on Ask HN: Teams using AI – how do you prevent it from breaking your codebase?
When using aider for development, do you typically review the generated diffs in aider itself or do you use an external tool?

Trying to figure out what a good workflow looks like.

zith··on Debanking (and Debunking?)
I wonder why Andreessen needs to use disinformation to shape opinion if the actual problem is so bad? I find it very unlikely that he does not know how PEP actually works.

It is so demonstrably false. Anyone who has worked in an finance adjacent industry likely knows the definition of a PEP.

zith··on Ladybird surpassed Servo in the number of successfully passed web-platform-tests
It seems like Servo has gotten a lot more contributions lately, after a prolonged pause.

https://github.com/servo/servo/graphs/contributors

zith··on Homegrown Rendering with Rust (2021)
Does anyone know if Embark are still using a lot of rust in their production games? They seem to be a very well funded studio (lots of employees, big fancy office, competes with other AAA FPS-games). I wonder if these experimental-sounding projects have given way to more classic tech in the churn of building games that are profitable.
zith··on Companies with return-to-office mandates face losing their most valuable workers
This is my experience in very small companies (think a <10 person startup). The value of everyone knowing a lot of what's going on from immersion is immense. You can have very little processes around information sharing (which takes time to set up and fine tune!), very little time to convince people what needs to be done (it's obvious from the conversation the other side of the room is having), and all the nuance of in-person communication is kept.

Once a company gets a little bit bigger, the processes around information sharing, planning and other communication has to be in place anyway. Teams need to collaborate, work needs to be tracked, there has to be meetings for planning. Once you're already doing that you might not lose anything by going remote.

zith··on A skeptic's take on beaming power to Earth from space
https://www.reflectorbital.com/
zith··on Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
I worked in the robotics lab at my university for a few months. That was a really nice way of making software more tangible. Seeing things move through physical space made it more real.
zith··on ESA satellites to test razor-sharp formation flying
They'll use one spacecraft to block the sun shining on the other spacecraft,yes.
zith··on BYD is launching its next-gen Blade EV battery – more range and even lower cost
Perhaps semi-off topic, but it will be interesting to see if silicon anodes (like https://www.silanano.com develops) will take off. They promise up to 20% increased capacity from switching from carbon anodes alone, which sounds amazing.
zith··on Google restricts Gemini chatbot election answers
This sounds sane to me. I don't think people in general have a good understanding of how these generative AI products produce their answers, and I think many would assume hallucinated information to be true.

This is bad in all cases, but certainly misinformation in the democratic process is up there with the worst. Of course, perhaps more importantly for Google, it's a PR disaster waiting to happen when Gemini starts touting incorrect information seemingly supporting one political party or another.

zith··on Klarna says its AI assistant does the work of 700 people
Because it's not true? Anyone who has ever been close to the customer support role knows that there is a constant battle to help the customers answer questions on their own, and you will never be completely successful.

It seems some people prefer calling/chatting to finding info on their own. Even trivial info.

zith··on Largest natural gas leak from Nord Stream pipeline
You can easily sail from the other countries that have a baltic sea coast line though? It's not far. A small yacht can definitely do it.
zith··on Patrick McKenzie (patio11) on navigating complex systems
I've come to the same conclusion as you. I sometimes find it very hard to parse, but given all the praise he gets from very smart individuals, I put it down to not being native.
zith··on Learning bimanual mobile manipulation with low-cost whole-body teleoperation
I have not been close to this field in over a decade, but this is the internet, so I will comment anyway!

I think one of the issues is that in some parts of academia, progress is made one PhD at a time. And a PhD is almost always too narrow to bring all of these fields together. I'm sure they are solvable problems, and I'm sure they will be solved. But maybe it will take some other research structure? Private? Guaranteed long time funding for academic teams?

zith··on Learning bimanual mobile manipulation with low-cost whole-body teleoperation
Adding to that, even if we had perfect end-effectors with a good sense of touch, understanding the real world enough to manipulate it is hard.

These days we have 3d cameras, but they still only see part of the objects we want to manipulate. The back side is hidden. So you need to either specify and model all objects to interact with, or have some word of a world model where we can predict what the full object, it's weight, center of gravity, surface texture, etc, is like.

And before we even decide to manipulate it, we have to detect it, categorize it and segment it (where does the pan stop and the stove begin?). We have to plan out a manipulation task, including finding grasp points, finding movement patterns that do not interfere with the rest of the environment, etc.

It's a whole bunch of separate problems that need solving all at once. There's motor control, building the right manipulators with the right sensors, bringing all the sensor data into something where we can make a single decision, understanding of the world and what happens during manipulation, and higher level planning.

zith··on What it will take to unleash the potential of geothermal power? (2021)
This is how Fervo Energy was founded. https://fervoenergy.com
zith··on Hiew Hex Editor
In the end of the 90s I was 11-12 years old and used this to crack a copy of the video game SiN. I didn't really know what I was doing, but followed random tutorials for generic game cracking. They guided me through the w32dasm disassember, finding code referencing the "input your cd key" string, finding related jmps jumping to this part of the code, noting the address, opening up the executable in hiew and mulling them out.

It worked! I thought I was a genius. Now I'm amazed how I almost randomly got it right.

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