nullc

Joined 16 years ago

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Dec 24
gmaxwell

http://nt4tn.net/

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Comment · 1 day ago
Do you wish you had tailscale because you locked yourself out of your computer and adding a process that listened using MPTCP would have let you exploit CVE-2026-98432 to get back into your computer?

Because that property-- or rather its mirror image in the hands of an attacker-- is a reason I was glad today that I've never had tailscale.

Comment · 1 day ago
This is how virtually all "crypto" exchanges work -- especially the closer you get to "shitcoin casino". Proper role and system isolation is a challenge if you support just one cryptocurrency. It would be incredibly hard for dozens, assuming service supporting dozens bothered.

I agree it's a grave fuckup but its a common one. You should just assume that when you deposit coins somewhere there are dozens of people who could just walk off with everything on their own. It's remarkable that it doesn't happen more often.

Comment · 1 day ago
Though in that case the crash was directly due to "effectively altruist" SBF fraudulently dumping customer assets in a half-brained and presumably stimulant-addled attempt to manipulate the market and reduce his liabilities.

Not making any market predictions here-- just saying that it's probably not that useful to generalize from that event.

Comment · 1 day ago
> likewise avoiding being a platform for libel and the lawsuits that come with that

I'd state that differently. The law is the limit on how bad you can act and get away with it. Wikipedia shouldn't be smearing people because it's an evil thing to do, not because its a potential tort.

This is particularly important because not libeling someone is not sufficient to prevent them from suing you anyways in any case. :) ... and focus on legal limits results in outcomes like telling people reporting serious crimes that you don't care because you're not obligated to under S230.

In any case compared to practically every other large internet site Wikipedia does a much better job behaving ethically. I've wasted weeks trying to get reddit to take down posts of hacked nudes on a subreddit specifically about posting hacked nudes and sending them to the victim's coworkers. Google does nothing about scam videos/adds reported to them, etc. With english wikipedia, you can hop into a chat channel or mailing list and reliably something which is obviously wildly inappropriate will be immediately handled. 95% of this is because whatever their flaws the site is operated by human beings that care about doing the right thing, rather than some accountability free corporate human-centipede. The remaining 5% is because Wikipedia Is An Encyclopedia, and so some of the free expression tradeoffs that might show up elsewhere just don't apply.

Comment · 1 day ago
Notable means unusual/unexpected. The engineer(s) that invented the energy absorptive highway railing has probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives-- but finding their name(s) would be a serious research task, they were just doing their jobs. The man who bites a dog is an irrelevant trivia that has no consequence outside of himself and the dog's owner-- but there will be a hundred stories on it.

Fundamentally it's a flaw in Wikipedia's heavy reliance on media coverage which exhibits this bias most strongly. It's a total mismatch: the media is fixated on the unexpected and irregular, but an encyclopedia is about how things are-- not primarily about the exceptions.

Of course, Wikipedia is also perfectly happy to cite reference works ... but tabloid crap out volumes it be a huge factor and is also a lot less accessible.

I think sometimes about an alternative history where we prohibited newspapers and other current events media publications as citations for WP-- these problems would be diminished but I think the result would be a lot less good for the world.

It's okay that things are flawed... it's just important to be aware of the flaws. One of the ways Wikipedia deals with this is by having a higher bar for inclusion in pages about living people.

Comment · 1 day ago
having one is truly bad news for a lot of people.

For many people no one cares about the page except some rando that has some grudge against you because you dated the girl they liked 30 years ago or even no reason at all-- some internet malcontent you've never met might just randomly decide that you're whats wrong with the world.

And because you're obscure there is nothing about you online except that one article they got their buddy to run about you in some obscure publication that implies you hate pets. So inevitably that's what the article will be-- Three sentences of biographic details and four paragraphs about how you hate pets.

This is generally a bias wikpedia has: 99% of the substance of a person isn't remarkable by the standards of the tabloids wikipedia counts on as the factual basis of most of its material-- your hopes, your dreams, most of your accomplishments, that time you helped a stranger change a tire,... almost everything that makes you who you are--, so it doesn't show up in any citations and has no chance of staying in an article if someone who knows the game wants it gone. But that one time you said something dumb on the internet-- it's notable specifically because it's unusual, it's well cited so good luck keeping it out if anyone wants it in. So that's what exists and that's what the article will be about at least as soon as a single person wants that. For truly famous people there are biographies and such, and those articles at least have a chance of being well rounded. For everyone else, a WP article about them is just a coat-rack for a piece of the most unusual part of their life that some hater could dig up, or at least one of those just waiting to happen.

It's like the Bill Murray quote: "I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it.". Having a WP article often turns out to have many of the downsides of being famous, without the upsides that normally come with other processes for being famous.

Comment · 1 day ago
Having a wikipedia page is no kindness particularly as a relatively obscure person, unless you're some raging narcissist that values the attention over all the downsides.

Sufficiently obscure pages are dumping ground for random defamation, delusions, and pranks. The flip side is that they turn into self-promotional orgies-- and fund the operation of PR firms shitting on the project's content to support their clients. None of it is good.

Comment · 1 day ago
I learned today that the son in that episode is Patrick Stewart's son.
Comment · 2 days ago
Hm. I wonder if having a differentiable CPU in fixed weights might be useful-- you could propagate gradients through it. At inference time it could be replaced with a conventional implementation.

I think the RNN sidebar does the reader a disservice. Ordinary casual attention can do exactly the same thing-- it's just less computationally efficient (state grows with the number of bits vs the number of accesses) and so not as useful for qwenputer compiler.

Comment · 4 days ago
Then remove GLM-5.3 from the title.
Comment · 4 days ago
> the number of operations needed to solve satisfiability will always be exponential in the size of the problem, no matter what algorithm is chosen

A common complexity theory misunderstanding is that statements like this applies to all or even most instances-- and it leads to objectively bad engineering of the form "oh look this is actually 3sat, it's unsolvable".

(Great fodder for a midwit meme: idiot and genius say "my heuristics go brrr!"-- midwit says "No no no! NP problems can't be efficiently solved!")

Any specific instance may be efficiently solvable (and perhaps all instances coming from your particular problem set -- a subset of all possible 3sats).

So I would add to that paragraph "at least for some 3sat instances".

Comment · 5 days ago
> in the continental US, you cannot refuse to accept a dollar note

Absolutely untrue. Outside of some local laws governing cash at retail you're under no general obligation to trade with someone if you only want payment in cybertrucks and all they've got is dollars.

Comment · 7 days ago
It's funny to juxtapose the doomerism claims of superpowerful AI when they refuse to use mechanisms already commonly used for high security systems.

You create an airgapped network and monitor the systems using that. This is not rocket surgery.

Comment · 7 days ago
Make cyber not cyber.
Comment · 7 days ago
> New features will produce new bugs, unless everyone pays for the tokens to scan every release with the top-of-the-line agents

Insufficient. Models available to you are already cyber-gimped today and seems likely that they will be moreso in the future (see the recent K3.1 announcement for example). There will be attackers that lack such handicap.

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