TheColorYellow

Joined 10 years ago

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260
Submissions
124
Member since
Nov 9
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Recent submissions

Comment · 4 months ago
I've always wondered what happens at the deeper levels of a DB beyond just SQL-literacy. The memory-management tricks (pages, overflows, pointers and remains techniques etc.) is always a great reminder of low-level abstractions I am blessed to not worry about. True programming seems to lie in the OS...
Comment · 5 months ago
Not OP, but: Moving back to Austin, the overwhelming number of cumulus clouds in the sky reminded him how much he enjoyed their marshmallowy appearance. They don't exist in the Bay, hence his first sentence being true.

Presumably he spent his youth in the Midwest. Austin is a pretty transient city so OP likely moved there.

Funny enough I have felt similar to OP about Texas skies compared to the East Coast. The plains landscape and the heat (common to the Midwest) seems to create a cloud overlay so very different from what you find on the coasts. Me, I'll keep my stratocumulus and cirrocumulus beautiful sunsets of the South Eastern United States anyday!

Comment · 5 months ago
> two parties have to be able to agree on which key grace@key is bound to without consulting anyone in particular. They need a shared, append-only record of which names exist and which keys they belong to. And that record can’t have a signing key to steal, an operator to coerce, or a committee to lobby

Having studied this problem space for some time, this is also my read of what the ultimate solution requires. That said, as the author also mentions, the biggest challenges in this paradigm are social, not necessarily technical. Therefore, I think the new solution requires a protocol approach rather than just a technical standard or implementation.

The KERI protocol (https://keri.one/) has been the best attempt I've seen at this. They focus on a similar concept, persistent long lasting identifiers built on top of cryptographic primitives, but they do so with a microledger approach than a monolithic blockchain as the root. The core primitive is what is known as a Key Event Log which tracks verified attestations of key transactions such as issuance, revocation, delegation, rotation, interaction, and so on. It is a very powerful concept that then facilitates stronger trust assumptions via end-to-end verification. And maybe most importantly, enables some very clean key management procedures that then can anchor the protocol behavior needed to optimize for those social challenges discussed earlier.

Regardless, adoption of KERI and other solutions like Spaces has not been very productive. I fear we've reached a tipping point where the external threats are too large now and top-down authoritarian-like solutions that address these issues head on will be the winners, leaving out dociety with very poor tradeoffs in such a critical area.

https://keri.one/

Comment · 9 months ago
I'm not so sure thats correct. The Labs seem to offer the best overall products in addition to the best models. And requirements for models are only going to get more complex and stringent going forward. So yes, open source will be able to keep up from a pure performance standpoint, but you can imagine a future state where only licensed models are able to be used in commercial settings and licensing will require compliance against limiting subversive use or similar (e.g. sexualization of minors, doesn't let you make a bomb etc.).

When the market shifts to a more compliance-relevant world, I think the Labs will have a monopoly on all of the research, ops, and production know-how required to deliver. That's not even considering if Agents truly take off (which will then place a premium on the servicing of those agents and agent environments rather than just the deployment).

There's a lot of assumptions in the above, and the timelines certainly vary, so its far from a sure thing - but the upside definitely seems there to me.

Comment · 9 months ago
This is a technical forum, isn't pretentious name dropping kind of what we do?

Seriously though, I appreciated it because my curiosity got the better of me and I went down a quick rabbit hole in Sugiyama, comparative graph algorithms, and learning about the node positioning as a particular dimension of graph theory. Sure nothing ground breaking, but it added a shallow amount to my broad knowledge base of theory that continues to prove useful in our business (often knowing what you don't know is the best initiative for learning). So yeah man, lets keep name dropping pretentious technical details because thats half the reason I surf this site.

And yes, I did use ChatGPT to familiarize myself with these concepts briefly.

Comment · 1 year ago
Although this is clearly the equivalent of Cloudflare propaganda, they are trying to address the issue of connecting a user and an agent in a way that respects the users privacy.

They effectively use credentials and cryptography to link the two together in a zero-knowledge type of way. Real issue, although no one is clearly dying for this yet.

Real solution too, but blind credentials and Chaumian signing is equally naive to think it addresses the root issue. Something like Apple will step in to cast a liability shield over all parties and just continue to trap users into the Apple data ecosystem.

The right way to do this is to give the user sovereignty over their identity and usage such that platforms cater to users rather than the middle-men in-between. Harder than what Cloudflare probably wants to truly solve for.

Still, cool article even if a bit lengthy.

Comment · 1 year ago
As a Fireman/EMT of 7 years whos been in high-tech for almost 10 - I feel sorry for this guy.

Sure, some parts of work will definitely get better and feel different. But a lot will get worse.

Say goodbye to good working conditions and simple problems. Work life balance is meaningless when your work has a habit of sticking around everytime you close your eyes. And the hero culture of EMS wears off quick when you realize 90% of the time you're societies janitor. That 10% you make a difference is amazing, but for the most part it's medics who are really making an impact and that world is almost as political and overmanaged as technology is.

The real problem is trying to make your career your life source rather than just an income stream. Tech utopia is no different than emergency-medicine utopia - its all fantasies that have no bearing to real life.

I wish the author the best of luck, and the issues they bring up are oh so real, but the source of the problem lies elsewhere in my humble opinion.

Comment · 2 years ago
As a southerner who has also pondered this, I think it's simply the basic nature of the menu and local nature of the employees.

Food is basically just pre-made batter, eggs, potatoes, and processed meat; all of which holds well and only requires limited refrigeration. Staff is pretty basic crew: Cooks and customers can order directly at the register if waiter isn't available.

Add to that a culture of staying open at all costs and there you go.

Comment · 2 years ago
It's never the encrypted database that gets hit, it's always the other database that was made because our first database was encrypted....
Comment · 2 years ago
I don't think this is relevant. Even on-prem "air gapped" networks get breached. I would say it happens on as frequent a basis as any other network tbh. Microsoft hacks get headlines because Microsoft is a public company; there are lots of undisclosed breaches happening out there.

Security vulnerabilities come from the same place they always have. Where IO happens, where transactions happen, and where an operating system does a lot of work. How attackers get to these points, what happens when they do, and then how the system reacts when a malicious event occurs are the factors that matter.

In today's world of complex technologies, I have yet to meet a single organization that is invulnerable to these threats. I've seen a lot of organizations limit damage, patch vulnerabilities, and generally manage their risk profile effectively - but losses are a part of the business.

IMO, the only thing that will really make a difference is when we have technologies that are sufficient enough to male the user more resilient. Only then can we have a truly safer web.

Comment · 2 years ago
How is YJS different from introducing CRDT? Doesn't it basically just do that for you anyways?

If CRDT is complications and difficult to manage, either YJS resolves that completely, or more likely that complexity will leak out of the abstraction layer no matter what.

To me it seems more like that OP should compare and contrast concurrency solutions, one of which is CDRT via YJS or another could be something like concurrency based on Go routines.

Edit: Should obviously mention Loro, the literal thread we're in now lol

Comment · 2 years ago
Because at this point it's a well known API. I bet people want to recreate AWS without the Amazon part, and so this is for them.

Which, to your point, makes no sense because as you rightly point out, people use S3 because of the Amazon services and ecosystem it is integrated with - not at all because it is "good tech"

Comment · 3 years ago
The preceding lines in this surah explicitly mention this is addressed to wives of the Prophet who are unlike other women. The answer in your link even explicitly mentions this is their interpretation outside of what is explicitly written.

Islam is no different from the other Abrahamic religions. It is the culture of organized Islam that is uniquely violent, conservative, and extreme in its views today.

But please, DYOR.

Comment · 4 years ago
Does this give credence to cryptoeconomics?
Comment · 4 years ago
It's mostly neglect on behalf of the teams. In this case, the code was never audited and was created by a rather immature team that was rushing for production. So recupe for disaster.

In truth you can write code that is upgradable or ammendable, but always within limits of Ethereum transactions being immutable. However, when a project wants to emphasize that immutability, because that's perceived as the need by the users and the devs, then you end up in this situation.

So, as usual, the problem is solvable with a little diligence. The challenge is for crypto culture to get over itself and mature and actually perform that diligence.

I will say that there are very mature, very well developed projects that you don't hear about getting hacked, because they take advantage of the wealth of experience that's been built on this subject.

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