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Groxx

21,070 karma · joined December 16, 2009

Basically your average geek.

Contact me: hn@username.is . The "hn" helps me organize; it's unnecessary, but appreciated.

I'm also currently @groxx@hachyderm.io

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Groxx··on Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance
TPM can solve the "neither side gets info about who you are or where it's used" part, but it seems like that might mean any TPM leak also means a single token can be used infinitely without detection, yea? Otherwise it's uniquely identifying, which wouldn't be even slightly private.
Groxx··on Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance
I should really look into blinding strategies some time - there are some very interesting possibilities in there.
Groxx··on Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance
Yes, that allows collusion. Which has historically happened quite regularly any time money or politics are involved, which means we should not accept that strategy.

For some isolated scenarios, that collusion risk may be completely fine. But not for something that is poised to control access to the internet as a whole, or in any way relates to maintaining safe free speech on the dominant public platform for doing so (the internet). People need protection from their government (present and future), or it's not a "right", it's just temporary retroactively-revokable permission.

Groxx··on Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance
It has? I've been under the impression that the "solutions" are "trust us, we don't allow that" (relying on an authority with full knowledge, as partial knowledge isn't sufficient) and "use more resources than anyone can feasibly contest" (bitcoin).

You could build a merkle tree to say "we exist after X" but not "there is no other X". And publishing that tree for verification would seemingly violate "zero knowledge", unless you know of some way to scrub that, and also hide timing information, because timing information can identify visitors to observers.

Groxx··on Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance
I've been trying to figure out how zero-knowledge stuff would work in practice for age verification, where "when issued" (or extremely coarse, like what year), "to whom", and "where it's used" are hidden from everyone except the individual holding the proof (since that's the gold standard, and the only one worth accepting).

I get that ZK techniques work, and reveal "nothing". That's useful.

But if they reveal nothing, isn't it wide open for abuse? Couldn't one over-18-person's proof become everyone's proof, because they can't tell it's the same proof, and the issuer can't tell where or how often the proof is being used? Or are there ways to construct data leaks that are not user-identifying but are abuse-identifying (and what would that even mean)?

Groxx··on How We Made IPFS Content Publishing 10x Faster
The "Early Return" sections describe it more, I don't think it's as bad as it sounds in that first bullet. They're returning after 15 out of 20 complete,and it sounds like even if only those 15 end up succeeding it'll still generally be fine. (Exactly how fine / is that violating some common expectations and will cause problems: I dunno. Not familiar enough with IPFS's internals)

That said:

>In practice, at least one of the 20 follow-up requests fails in the vast majority of operations, and a single unresponsive peer can stall the entire phase waiting for a timeout.

It continually surprises me how often systems lack a Fast Fallback-like strategy¹. Or at least sound like it. Just an absolute flood of apps and websites and systems that try to do something once and then never tried an alternate route until that finishes, something like a minute or two later... for a process that usually takes less than a second. It's maddening. By the time you're considering one to be "stalled" and delaying everything unnecessarily, you probably should've already started trying two or three alternate routes!

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs

Groxx··on Nano Banana 2 Lite
Quite a few times I've seen permanent light fixtures that don't exist, vents that don't exist, room sizes that are obviously implied to be much larger than reality (e.g. they show a full-size bed, but there's only like 4 feet of space in that location), etc.

I don't particularly mind fake furniture, but if it's very much not to scale I think it's pushing "probably fraud". And when permanent fixtures are fabricated, "blatant fraud, penalize immediately, revoke license on repeats". Using an automated tool does not absolve you of consequences, particularly one nigh-universally well-known to fabricate things.

Groxx··on Instagram is incorporating users' photos in ads for Meta Glasses
Almost literally every single social media site in the past ~15+ years has had those exact terms in it.

Everything you upload, almost everywhere, can be used by the site owners to do whatever they like for their own purposes (reselling is somewhat often excluded / non-transferrable). There are a handful of exceptions, but they're very much exceptions, not the normal rule.

Groxx··on Show HN: DRM-Free Books
All of Brandon Sanderson's epubs from his website ( https://brandonsanderson.com -> https://dragonsteelbooks.com ) are DRM-free: https://support.dragonsteelbooks.com/support/solutions/artic...
Groxx··on I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
Any medical-field-position that recommends homeopathic stuff is instantly in my "full of shit and not trustworthy on anything" list, and I'd go elsewhere immediately and file complaints anywhere I could. There's no excuse at all, they're either fools or scammers, and I want neither anywhere near my (or anyone else's) health.

That said, while I do see homeopathic stuff with that name, it's worth verifying that it isn't just a naming conflict. They're not always unique, particularly across countries, and Traumeel seems to be more of a brand than a specific thing.

Groxx··on Incident CVE-2026-LGTM
Under Microsoft's ownership? She'll get through the goat-farming queue well before then.
Groxx··on Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
Low-skill work that used to be outsourced will go to cheaper LLMs, unless wages are depressed enough / running costs are high enough to keep using humans as cogs in the machine. This will also consume a ton of small-scale things, like personal-sized automation and small-business customization of better-crafted things (stuff that normally wouldn't be paid for in the first place, or only extremely rarely). Some will obviously exist, because paying someone else to farm out a ton of mediocre output with LLMs is still worthwhile sometimes, but it's going to be gutted as a general statement.

Especially with prototyping-style work, LLMs are clearly good enough for a ton of business-oriented proof-of-concepts, and that line of work is essentially dead. Unfortunately a lot of mid-tier art falls into this category as well, particularly because execs very clearly can't tell good art from bad (on a "customers like this" scale, with functionality being the judge, which is fairly objective. not a subjective "this is good art").

High-skill work is still necessary, but it's hard to tell if it's actually going to be more important (because skill is obviously still needed for actually-good results, and I honestly see no evidence that this will change with current tech) or less (primarily due to less demand, and it being significantly harder for non-skilled to judge skill when everyone can prototype something seemingly-impressive in a weekend). Some will very obviously continue to exist though.

Whether this means "high-skill people are going to be fine, stay the course" or "<10% of high-skill people will be fine, you had better be scrambling right now or looking for a new line of work" is... much less clear.

Groxx··on Ending respiratory infections
I don't think anyone (not insane) actually doubted we could reach the moon, they were just unsure how much money it'd take per launch, and if it'd ever be worth it. Because we had already reached orbit, "add more fuel" is essentially a guaranteed success, if infinite money is allowed - at worst you do it in multiple launches and join up the parts in space. 2, 10, 1000, it'll eventually succeed, there's no reason to believe it wouldn't.

Reaching another star? Definitely more expensive, but entirely feasible if we all got our shit together and decided it was going to happen.

Medical stuff though? Humans are complicated, and there are practically no guaranteed routes, regardless of money (currently).

Groxx··on OAuth for all
>Earlier this month, we announced self-managed OAuth, making it easier for customers to create and manage their own OAuth clients for delegated access to the Cloudflare API.

They're letting you host an OAuth system to approve/deny access to your own resources, so you can build whatever logic you like, rather than waiting on them to allow you to do X under Y conditions. Essentially "log into CloudFlare" -> CF sees you're using this self-managed OAuth -> redirect to your OAuth -> CF trusts your response, and approves access to your account if you approve access.

Groxx··on Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
Perhaps this is related to the "Mythos is too dangerous and cannot be exported" movements? It'd be a fairly effective way to justify extreme actions in combating it.

One could even wonder if they requested it, as a tactic to support their eventual IPO valuation.

Which is part of the problem of such an obviously-corrupt government: conspiracy theories are somewhat reasonable, as they keep getting validated.

Groxx··on 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
(ab)using fresh water in vast quantities is cheaper.

currently.

and also more energy efficient, because evaporating water away takes a lot of energy with it. you have to raise radiators to a higher temperature to keep up with that, or have much more surface area.

Groxx··on FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model
Finally! Usable! Between this and the excellent dictation, it's finally looking good enough that I can probably recommend it to anyone.
Groxx··on Mark Zuckerberg directed Meta to create a prediction markets app
And then Thiel money. That tends to help too.
Groxx··on Mark Zuckerberg directed Meta to create a prediction markets app
>Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook.

Seriously? Of course they did. An easy counter-example is MySpace, which launched several months before Facebook's very first appearance as a Hot Or Not mimic (which predates Zuck by 3 years), and had many millions more users for years (especially while FB was restricted to colleges).

Major competition and a lot of money was going into social media around then (and for a couple years prior), FB is just the eventual winner.

Groxx··on F3
Hm. I can kinda see it replacing self-extracting EXEs, but a lot of why you choose specific file formats is for specific features they offer - any self-describing system can fall into "there are too many competing features and nobody handles them all" exactly as easily as any other format.

Like, can this file be efficiently mmap'd? Maybe if it emulates tar internally, but you don't know until you run it. Can it be seeked to specific bytes to only decompress part? It only supports a pre-release version of ISO-36898533 seeking, and your file library dropped support for it 6 years ago. If I rewrite 1MB in the middle, can it only change those pages on disk (and maybe an index), or do I have to rewrite the whole thing? Well the wasm blob supports 97 different APIs for it (there are 35 copies of one with different names), so it's larger than the data (but nobody paid attention to that), so you have 19 options that you recognize, but your CPU's native WASM accelerator only handles two or three so you've still got to specialize your code heavily.

At least with "*.tar.gz" you have some idea of what's possible.

Groxx··on Excessive nil pointer checks in Go
Don't forget mutability! Go throws that on top too.
Groxx··on Bun has an open PR adding shared-memory threads to JavaScriptCore
Are you hoping to, like, run postgres in nodejs or something?

You can get parallelism with web workers and shove sqlite over there if you like, e.g. for running more intensive queries. Beyond that I kinda don't see much of a reason to use JS for databases, except maybe for isolation (e.g. via wasm).

Groxx··on How many of the 170k English words do you know?
>Required Reading

>Read the dictionary from A to Z. It's a gripping tale with a terrible plot.

I actually have! I was very bored with the barely-above-"see spot run" books in the classroom at around 8, and we didn't yet have open access to the school library. The dictionary was a better option than all the others I had access to (in class).

Any other dictionary-completionists in here? Regardless of size - I'm fairly sure mine was rather small, though not a pocket-sized one.

Groxx··on Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
Having run into quite a few managers who used to be programmers who can barely do fizzbuzz after a few years of managing: yes, I think it's pretty similar. Much of your brain is "use it or lose it" and that's not using it.

I do think there's more than enough room to claim that LLMs are probably significantly worse than that kind of human delegation though, in part because you have such a rapid cycle time that not-incredibly-rich people can't afford from humans.

Groxx··on Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28
I initially took it for an ad too, and just didn't bother looking at it. Then I noticed it was oddly small, and the more I looked the stranger it got.

It adds a fair bit to that "did anyone proof-read this? pretty obviously no?" vibe.

Groxx··on There are no instances in ATProto
it's somewhat similar, yeah. minus the part where bluesky itself is by far the majority host of people's data. that puts it more in the realm of "Office 365 Online + OneDrive storage" than "Word" - a lot of people will lose a lot of data, though something resembling it can be started up again. and people with backups (their own PDS) will just move to OpenOffice for a bit.

Blacksky finishing their full forking does finally give them a much stronger leg to stand on for "bluesky is decentralized", though.

PDSes are great and I really wish Mastodon would support something similar. Mastodon's lack of account portability / data ownership / lightweight hosting is a massive issue.

Groxx··on There are no instances in ATProto
if mastodon.social goes down, people would rightfully say that mastodon.social went down even though it's open source and anyone could run their own.

>"But where are all the Bluesky instances?"

I agree that it doesn't mean "atproto went down", and I don't mean to imply that. but "bluesky went down" is completely accurate, and bluesky is the one claiming to be decentralized due to using atproto. there are no other instances in bluesky's network, only partial ones (blacksky, last I heard they were still working on a major piece?), hence the "no it's not" responses. and that's also how they're directly encouraging people conflating the two.

Groxx··on There are no instances in ATProto
It's a comparison they are directly inviting, by constantly claiming it's decentralized. And then its defenders get upset when people rightfully point out that there is only a single instance, because that single instance going down takes the whole thing down. Like in Google Reader.
Groxx··on Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28
I'm confused about the 2008 Bloomberg article image in the first slot... right after implying the effort started in 2014. With nothing mentioning anything in there.

Is there a way we can request a "flag as AI garbage" downvote for articles? Or should we just flag them?

Groxx··on .gitignore Isn't the only way to ignore files in Git
it helps a lot if you make an effort to keep your dependency tree relatively small
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