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WatchDog

3,291 karma · joined September 30, 2012

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WatchDog··on John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
Carmack himself has done a lot of work on end to end latency, during his time at oculus.
WatchDog··on DDoSecrets publishes 410 GB of heap dumps, hacked from TeleMessage
Great example to use whenever legislators want to ban or add backdoors to e2e encryption.
WatchDog··on Show HN: Undetectag, track stolen items with AirTag
You can disable it on iPhone by:

Go to: Settings → your name → Find My → Find My iPhone

Toggle “Find My network” → OFF

It should be noted that this will also disable your ability to find your own airtags.

WatchDog··on Ex-UK Special Forces break silence on 'war crimes' by colleagues
I guess I'm thinking more about GWOT special forces specifically.
WatchDog··on Ex-UK Special Forces break silence on 'war crimes' by colleagues
So Australian and now UK special forces have been implicated in similar war crimes.

How is it that US special forces haven’t been implicated in similar war crimes?

Does the US have a genuinely better culture, or are they just less accountable?

People like Chris Kyle are treated as heroes, but it seems unlikely that he got so many kills by following the rules of engagement properly.

WatchDog··on Will supercapacitors come to AI's rescue?
Sounds like an issue that would be cheaper to address by just adjusting the software.
WatchDog··on I'd rather read the prompt
When using Claude Sonnet 3.7 for coding, I often find that constraints I add to the prompt, end up producing unintended side effects.

Some examples:

- "Don't include pointless comments." - The model doesn't keep track of what it's doing as well, I generally just do another pass after it writes the code to simplify things.

- "Keep things simple" - The model cuts corners(often unnecessarily) on things like type safety.

- "Allow exceptions to bubble up" - Claude deletes existing error handling logic. I found that Claude seems to prefer just swallowing errors and adding some logging, instead of fixing the underlying cause of the error, but adding this to the prompt just caused it to remove the error handling that I had added myself.

WatchDog··on The 12-bit rainbow palette
Ah right. I did read it, but I didn't comprehend it properly, because she also happened to also only choose 12 colors for the palette.

I see now, she's saying that it's 12 bit, because instead of using a 6 digit hex code, she is using 3 digit hex codes, at four bits per hex value, it's 12 bits.

WatchDog··on The 12-bit rainbow palette
In the context of the original post, or in the context of talking about color depth in general?

In the context of the original post, it seems like Kate is just talking about 12 total colors, it's not 12 bit in any logical sense.

In the context of color depth sure, 12-bit color[0] would be 4 bits per channel.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth#12-bit_color

WatchDog··on The 12-bit rainbow palette
Right. A 12 bit palette would be 4096 colors.
WatchDog··on Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash
It’s so bland I don’t understand why it elicited any response at all.
WatchDog··on Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks
The author of the blog post, Micah Lee, appears to be one of the directors of Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets)[0].

DDoSecrets appears to be an anarchist/communist affiliated activist group.

Basically you've got two groups from extreme sides of the political spectrum fighting each other, the Guy Fawkes LARPers upset about Jan 6 of all things, and the seal team 6 LARPers upset about "stolen" elections and ivermectin.

[0]: https://ddosecrets.com/about

WatchDog··on There Was a Texas Lottery Arbitrage
I mostly agree with your take, the linked article itself seems a little missleading, claiming that you could make money by placing losing bets.

As far as if the regular punter is getting screwed, I'm not so sure. They certainly aren't getting as good of a deal as the professional punters are getting.

However, if the punter feels like they have some special insight into the race and the predictive performance of the horses, then they stand to win much more money by having the professionals put money into the pool.

WatchDog··on Yoke: Infrastructure as code, but actually
I've had less such issues with CDK, versus raw cloudformation, or terraform, but it can still happen.
WatchDog··on There Was a Texas Lottery Arbitrage
Tabcorp
WatchDog··on Tesla gets more than 20% of parts from Mexico, it will be affected by tariffs
Regardless of what it's mission is, and which military branch operates the base, it still counts as the US having a military presence.
WatchDog··on There Was a Texas Lottery Arbitrage
I used to work for the Australian parimutuel(aka tote or pool)[0] betting operator.

All the proceeds for a race are placed in a pool, the operator deducts a percentage of pool as a takeout, and the rest is divided among the winners, or. is carried over into a jackpot.

We had special bulk betting integrations for quantitative bettors, and even offered rebates on the takeout revenue, it's not secret, although it's not widely publicised.[1]

There are stories of traders that have made lots of money betting in parimutuel markets[1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parimutuel_betting [1]: https://www.sportstradingnetwork.com/article/rebates-global-... [2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambl...

WatchDog··on Apple's Software Quality Crisis
Yes, I used it on windows, I also spent lots of time curating my music library, but I mostly used winamp for that.
WatchDog··on Apple's Software Quality Crisis
My last experience with iTunes was a long long time ago, in the iPod days, when you needed to use it to sync music, but it was a horrible piece of software back then.
WatchDog··on Yoke: Infrastructure as code, but actually
I'm quite happy with CDK[0].

My experience is only with the main AWS cloudformation based version of CDK, although there is also CDK for terraform, which supports any resource that terraform supports, although some of what I'm about to say is not applicable to that version.

What I like about CDK, is that you can write real code, and it supports a wide range of languages, although typescript is the best experience.

Provided that you don't use any of the `fromLookup` type functions, you can run and test the code without needing any actual credentials to your cloud provider.

CDK essentially complies your code into a cloudformation template, you can run the build without credentials, then deploy the built cloudformation template separately.

You don't need to worry about your terraform server crashing half way though a deployment, because cloudformation runs the actual deployment.

[0]: https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk

WatchDog··on Turning a Bluetooth device into an Apple AirTag without root privileges
Yeah

- you need code execution on the victim device

- you need internet connectivity

- you need bluetooth permission

- if the victim device has GPS itself, then this attack is pointless because you may as well just use that directly.

WatchDog··on I Went to SQL Injection Court
It seems like an unnecessarily ambiguous term.

Without additional context, I would interpret the term “file layout” to mean the file and directory structure of an application.

Such an application could potentially store data as plain files, the names of those files may contain personal or sensitive information.

WatchDog··on Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code
3.7 completed a lot more than 3.5, without seeing the actual results, we can't tell if there were any regressions in the edit format among the previously completed tasks.
WatchDog··on The best way to use text embeddings portably is with Parquet and Polars
Parquet is fine and all, but I love the simplicity and simple interoperability of CSV.

You can save a huge amount of overhead just by base64 encoding the vectors, they aren't exactly human readable anyway.

I imagine the resulting file would only be approximately 33% larger than the pickle version.

WatchDog··on AWS S3 SDK breaks its compatible services
It's one thing when the changes are obviously designed to damage competition, like Microsoft's embrace extend extinguish strategy, but in this case, the breaking changes seem to be pretty obviously motivated by a real need, and there isn't anything preventing so called "S3-compatible" storage services from implementing this new feature.
WatchDog··on Anyone can push updates to the doge.gov website
> Maybe people were voting for him because they were dumb? Or they were lied to?

I cant tell if this is intentional irony or poe’s law.

When democrats that are curious about why people vote for Trump, conclude that the voters are dumb or naive, it’s kind of an unintentional demonstration of the kind of thinking that turns people away from the Democratic Party.

WatchDog··on What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
I’ve watched the video now, and after watching it and reading more, I think you have changed my mind on the lab leak being the most likely cause.

I’m still not happy with the letter that Fauci and Daszak co-signed early on in the pandemic, nor with Fauci’s offices attempts to obstruct the foia process.

It’s disappointing that so little physical evidence was collected early in the pandemic, i don’t think we will ever have conclusive proof of the origin of the virus.

WatchDog··on What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
> That is a subcommittee of the House of representatives- I'm not sure why you didn't mention the House, or mentioned Biden instead?

Fair point, you are right, it's irrelevant, I guess I was just trying to preemptively dispel an association to trump. The committee is bi-partisan, but it did have a republican majority at the time the report was released.

The senate report is of course not the only government report on covid origins. Most recently the CIA has commented that the virus is "more likely" to have leaked from a lab.[0]

> The virus is not closely related to any known wild viruses that have or were being studied by humans.

The closest known virus is RaTG13, collected by WIV in 2013[1]. WIV took down it's online database of bat viruses on 12 September 2019[4]. Potentially to conceal it's custody of a closer related virus.

> The technology and knowledge to create a working virus like SARS-CoV-2 from known distantly related viruses does not exist- it simply could not be done accidentally or intentionally.

Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance, applied for funding[2] to insert human proteolytic cleavage sites into SARS-like coronaviruses[3].

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9qjjj4zy5o

[1]: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declass...

[2]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...

[3]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363729325_DRASTIC_-...

[4]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349073738_An_invest...

WatchDog··on What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
The US select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic, under Biden, concluded that the virus most likely originated from the Wuhan lab

https://x.com/covidselect/status/1863637371624862163?s=46

WatchDog··on What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
The strategy is: Shut down everything, and see who complains.

If the complaints seem well reasoned, then you adjust course.

You can certainly argue that it is crude, but it’s simpler than trying to deeply analyze and understand a very complicated system.

Carl Icahn has a story[0] about firing 12 floors of people that seems relevant

[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WSatPoD2W-o

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