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Randor

292 karma · joined March 20, 2019

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Randor··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
Have a look at https://github.com/ThorOdinson246/whatisit-nl2sh

It seems to get shell scripts right most of the time.

Randor··on Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords
Microsoft allows you create a second "login only" account username to access your e-mail and other services. I was having the same problem as you but much worse. Check into it, only takes a few minutes to setup.
Randor··on WorstFit: Unveiling Hidden Transformers in Windows ANSI
That was a long read. Just be happy that you never had to deal with Trigraphs. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-language/trigraphs?v...
Randor··on How is my Browser blocking RWX execution?
A brilliant idea, maybe all software should block DLL without English names. Could even incorporate the new technique into the operating system.
Randor··on How is my Browser blocking RWX execution?
It's a very common security technique to avoid being targeted by malware. I believe even the Microsoft KSLDriver drops randomly named DLL and device drivers along with creating a randomly named system service. Uses 8 hex characters.

Several third-party vendors use the same technique, mostly security vendors.

Randor··on How is my Browser blocking RWX execution?
Some horrible code in there too:

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/xre/dll...

Indiscriminate blocking of any DLL in the world with 12/6 hex digit filenames.

Randor··on Moonshine, the new state of the art for speech to text
Looks like Moonshine is competing against the Whisper-tiny model. There isn't any information in the paper to see how it compares to the larger whisper-large-v3.
Randor··on Love being interrupted when my monitor asks me to accept user agreements
No, if I remember correctly it was a local beverage company. It wasn't unusual for Microsoft to back local businesses. I remember a very talented Indian software engineer that left Microsoft and purchased 3 "food trucks" and decided to serve food instead, true story. He parked his truck outside building 88 for a few years.
Randor··on AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95%
Yeah, I get what you're saying but both are challenging the current MatMul methods. The L-Mul paper claims "a power savings of 95%" and that is the thread topic. Bitnet proves that at least 70% is possible by getting rid of MatMul.
Randor··on AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95%
> I don't know what that means. It seems like some dubious math with percentages.

I would start by downloading a 1.58 model such as: https://huggingface.co/HF1BitLLM/Llama3-8B-1.58-100B-tokens

Run the non-quantized version of the model on your 3090/4090 gpu and observe the power draw. Then load the 1.58 model and observe the power usage. Sure, the numbers have a wide range because there are many gpu/npu to make the comparison.

Randor··on AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95%
The energy claims up to ~70% can be verified. The inference implementation is here:

https://github.com/microsoft/BitNet

Randor··on Love being interrupted when my monitor asks me to accept user agreements
I know you guys are joking, but there use to be a Microsoft energy drink, that was only available to employees.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Microsoft+employee+Talking+R...

The blue one actually tasted really good. Was available on campus for several years in nearly every building. :)

Randor··on Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency
Yes, it was me that backported some of that telemetry to both Windows 8.1 and Windows 7, circa 2015 when I was working on the WU team but we used WER to upload that to our endpoints. I don't think there was any telemetry at all before 2015 in the base operating system.
Randor··on Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency
What Windows 7 telemetry are you referring to? Other than WER, there was no telemetry in Windows 7 to my knowledge. There was an update a few years ago that back ported telemetry to Windows 7 right before the final stage of extended support and final EOL.
Randor··on Initial details about why CrowdStrike's CSAgent.sys crashed
As a former member of the Windows Update software engineering team, I can say this is absolutely false. The updates are signed.
Randor··on Convolutions, Fast Fourier Transform and polynomials (2022)
Thanks, not often we see Knuth erratas. :)
Randor··on Show HN: CPU Prices on eBay
It's working for me. It's probably due to the high traffic from posting the site here on HN.
Randor··on Why isn't Bluesky a peer-to-peer network?
No worries. We faced some of the the same choices when we were designing the Windows 10 Delivery Optimization service. We initially based it off the Bittorrent protocol with a modified BEP30. I think MSDN just says "Cloud Managed". ;)
Randor··on Why isn't Bluesky a peer-to-peer network?
Would it be correct to call Bluesky a "federated multi-cloud"?
Randor··on On the dimensionality of spacetime (1997) [pdf]
Took me a minute to figure out what you are saying. Then I realized you are referring to the 16pi^3/15 surface area ratio of a 7-sphere. After n>7 it does seems to infinitely move towards zero. But the heat equasion is different in higher dimensional space and governed by the parabolic Harnack inequalities. I'm not sure how surface area makes sense here.
Randor··on Haroldbot, client-side tool that checks 32-bit bitvector arithmetic equivalence
Yep, Z3 can do exactly this using BitVec and passed to prove() or just compare the expressions directly..
Randor··on Kalman filter from the ground up
>> our internally developed algorithms out-performed Kalman

Could you tell me more about this? What other algorithms are used for position tracking and motion estimation. I have seen various ML models... RNN/DNN used. I'm guessing with VTMIS you are doing time-series predictions?

Randor··on Kalman filter from the ground up
>> Do anyone here have industry experience where Kalman Filters is actually used in prod?

Yes, ship/vessel navigation software heavily use Kalman Filters. Especially on the inputs received from the various position reference sensors.

Randor··on Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
I can assure you that I perfectly understand the bug and corresponding patch/fix. The patch fixes Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) and how it allocates temp buffers.

The speculation about SQLite at the top of that Mozilla bug report is mostly irrelevant.

Randor··on Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
Where did you get that idea? Sqlite? Windows Defender isn't using sqlite at all.
Randor··on MSI's (in)Secure Boot
The modes "Allow Execution" at 0x2 and "Query User" at 0x5 are both documented in the UEFI security spec.
Randor··on Windows 95 went the extra mile to ensure compatibility of SimCity, other games
I don't know why SimCity and just a few titles are getting media attention on this. There perhaps a dozen more games and quite a few applications that were being patched at runtime.

At Microsoft this eventually became a feature: Application Compatibility Database

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/devnotes/app...

Randor··on How Asus and a Microsoft Bug Almost Broke Remote Work
As the blog correctly identifies, the WPAD specification is still in draft:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-0...

In other words there really isn't a standard to follow. You can't add features to operating systems if there isn't a formal specification.

I'm not sure who's to blame here.

Randor··on US Government building AI tech to unmask anonymous writers
Hmmm,

Not sure how effective it will be against the latest NLP tools. You can also generate writings in the same style as others.

Randor··on Mold/macOS is 11 times faster than the Apple's default linker to link Chrome
Do you have any plans for supporting other binary executable file formats?
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