zero_k
Joined 12 years ago
Karma
862
Submissions
132
Member since
Feb 1
Recent submissions
Comment · 12 days ago
I'd love to have one that randomly fails, so we could debug e.g. databases and other apps that are supposed to be resilient. I'd call it "havocfs". Doesn't corrupt data, just randomly fails reads/writes/etc. Some software is supposed to handle that gracefully. Would be a great test tool...
Comment · 14 days ago
I feel the pain. We have been delaying release because sooo many bug reports have come in. AI is finding a lot of obscure, and interesting, and annoying bugs.
Comment · 26 days ago
Thanks, I tried :)
Comment · 26 days ago
LOL I love this and also hate it. You are the best and also the worst. I am actually laughing :D Who cares about deepening our understanding? Curiosity? Hoping to understand some deeper connections/meaning? Let the AI write 10 papers to top conferences per year, and be done with it. If this is what people think science is, that's what we should do. Incentives -> outcomes, in the purest form. Loving it. And hating it!
Comment · 26 days ago
Yes, the proxy (here, papers & citations) becomes the goal, and so we end up in strange places :(
Comment · 26 days ago
Fair, but I just don't know how to fix it. Eventually, whatever metric you come up with, it will be gamed -- p-hacked, if you will. Not sure what the solution is. I am just dissatisfied with whatever is going on, and I felt like sharing it. Maybe you have some good ideas? It'd be nice to fix this...
Comment · 26 days ago
I'm sad to hear that. I know of a PhD student who confided in me that his professor didn't believe his suspicion that the results of a well-known, supposedly top tool, are wrong. According to his view, not being able to replicate or improve that tool has prevented him from being allowed to graduate. While I cannot confirm this, I suspect there to be a grain of truth in the story. The results are indeed wrong, but I suspect the results are too big to fall -- too many people made too many mistakes (reviewers, editors, awards committees, hiring committees, etc.). It's sad.
Comment · 27 days ago
It's a fine line. Fraud? No, they are just sloppy, and so one questions whether they ought to be amended, retracted, or a note by the editor attached. The solution you propose, about a follow-up paper is that who will accept a paper that simply demonstrates that the original work was so full of bugs/issues/misconceptions, that many/most of the claims of the paper don't hold? Would you accept that paper into a top-rated conference? And if it's in a 2nd or 3rd rate conference, wouldn't most people question it authenticity (remember, 2nd and 3rd rate conferences have less rigor in reviews) or simply not hear about it? I think these are legitimate concerns.
A slightly sad side-effect of the follow-up-paper idea, is that it sometimes means that the authors get one more citation, and furthermore, since some of the authors may themselves write part of it, it would mean even more papers by the authors, potentially further cited. So we may be unfortunately incentivizing sloppy research -- the authors can now make two papers: one sloppy, and one fixed. Not sure that's great.
I am not saying what you are proposing is wrong. But it has side-effects that are not great.
Comment · 1 month ago
If you are interested in the original, high-quality article: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
Only in case you are interested in the original source, of course. If you like the copywrited version of it, you can go to techdirt :)
Comment · 2 months ago
Lol in Germany, internet is soooo slowwwwwwww. I used to live in France, and Free (i.e. free.fr = kind of a bad choice of name) was absolutely demolishing the local big carrier (France Telecom?), but in Germany, there is very little competition to Telekom, so it's really bad.
Comment · 2 months ago
This is very important work. If it interests you, and you want to dig further, it's broadly called "Safety II". You probably want to read Erik Hollnagel [1] or Sydney Dekker. I put together a presentation once about how this translates to IT security [2]. But broadly:
Safety I Learn from Errors, Safety defined by absence,Reactive approach, Understanding what goes wrong, Accident causation models, Avoidance of errors, Reducing losses
Safety II Learn from successes, Safety defined by presence, Proactive approach, Understanding what goes right, Repeat what goes right, Enforce successful behaviours, Create new processes based on successful behaviour
If anything, think long and hard about this: "Post-accident attribution to a ‘root cause’ is fundamentally wrong." It's a true statement. If you truly understand this sentence, you have mastered Safety II to the level that a light bulb will come on, and you won't be able to un-see it. This light bulb is a curse, a beautiful curse.
[1] https://safety4sea.com/cm-safety-i-vs-safety-ii-an-overview [2] https://www.msoos.org/largefiles/safety2.pdf
Comment · 2 months ago
Markus Anders, who wrote the symmetry breaking system (satsuma) they use for SAT is pretty much a genius. His version of Kissat won the SAT Competition this year, with satsuma of course:
https://satcompetition.github.io/2026/downloads/satcomp26sli...
See slide 18. It was really nice to see him win. I have always been a huge fan of symmetry breaking, CryptoMiniSat (that I develop) had a symmetry breaking system, BreakID (which is _way_ slower than Markus' satsuma), in it for many years now.
Comment · 2 months ago
Build walkable cities instead. Stop car-brain-rot. Your cities could be beautiful, full of life and children running around and having fun. Walking, cycling, and taking public transport, brings life to a city. It allows random connections and makes you see "the other". It could significantly improve your quality of life. Open up your eyes, there's a whole beautiful world out there.
Comment · 3 months ago
Wow, so true! Domain expertise is apparently not a requirement. At all. Wow.