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_notreallyme_

203 karma · joined August 12, 2018

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_notreallyme_··on Computational chemistry, Locally? My rant on SSH
Most issues can be solved by RTFM. They don't seem to have ever considered that...
_notreallyme_··on OpenMandriva: Statement regarding attempted distribution sabotage
I don't know if this is the case here, but I have witnessed several instances in the open source community where someone offer to help with a boring/fastidious task and some temporary admin privileges are granted to them in order to make it easier.

But then, temporary become permanent because either the task never complete or because people just forgot. It's always when the problems start to appear that the temporary privileges are finally revoked.

In my case the problems were mostly due to incompetence, but sometimes a malicious action happens...

_notreallyme_··on Websites have a new way to spy on visitors: analyzing their SSD activity
Not to mention, you would need to first train a model on your target for the fingerprint to work.

That doesn't seem even remotely useful in practice.

_notreallyme_··on Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda
Well, it was more for the overconfidence meaning than the arrogance one.
_notreallyme_··on Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda
While I mostly agree with what you say, the thing is Django was probably asked what was the best way to ship the laptop, but he probably just didn't know :

- he is from neighboring DRC, not Ugandan;

- based on his description of his travels, he lives in the overwhelmed Kyaka II camp, and was probably recently displaced due to the M23 campaign;

- he was probably already enrolled in the course before being displaced, so a young full-time student, probably not even aware of how the system work in his origin country.

My bet is that he just said to ship it to a drop location in Kampala and that he would find a way to get there to retrieve it.

In the end, the Hubris was probably not on OP's side, but on Django's side, thinking he could get a laptop shipped to him while avoiding entirely the camp's organization. Although he did manage it after all...

_notreallyme_··on Laptops with Stickers
Not necessarily startup. You can see some laptops with defcon stickers, it used to be very common for infosec auditors to have work laptops full of stickers not that long ago. Although, it is bad practice for read team audits, and some large companies don't like this kind of shenanigans for internal audits, so that may explain why it is less frequent nowadays
_notreallyme_··on Rouille – Rust Programming, in French
As a native french speaker, I have the same feeling when reading code written with french keywords, except that since I learned boolean and arithmetic in french, it makes more sense to me to read them in french. As others have pointed out, it seems to only be a matter of how you learn to read and write code.

For comparison, in mathematics I learned to read all the symbols in french, and only learned their english equivalent much later, so it feels uneasy for me when i read their english version. So it is clearly a matter of habit that took its root when you learned reading.

_notreallyme_··on Murex – An intuitive and content aware shell for a modern command line
I may be wrong, but it gives me some powershell vibe. Since it seems to be targeted for macOS, I would assume it "solves" the lack of powershell equivalent on Mac ?
_notreallyme_··on I Ported SAP to a 1976 CPU. It Wasn't That Slow
Optimizing code on MMU-less processor versus MMU and even NUMA capable processor is vastly different.

The fact that the author achieves only a 3 to 6 times speedup on a processor running at a frequency 857 faster should have led to the conclusion that old optimizations tricks are awfully slow on modern architecture.

To be fair, execution pipeline optimization still works the same, but not taking into account the different layers of cache, the way the memory management works and even how and when actual RAM is queried will only lead to suboptimal code.

_notreallyme_··on A Serious Man: On Bruno Latour
I've had him as a sociology teacher in the early 2000s, specifically on this subject (controversies).

It was apparently his first time in this school, and he was not prepared for the controversy that happened due to his (controversial) stance on the scientific method. He ended up calling us names, and privileged kids (that part was 97% true, but not entirely true...).

It's only after his death that many articles praising him appeared. I guess people capitalize on its notoriety rather than on whatever bullshit he wrote...

_notreallyme_··on France's oldest treasure hunt has been solved
Oh, thanks for the links.

What it says it that the statue should have been in bronze, but is instead in "ferrous metal" and must have been replaced around september 2005.

Anyway, the idea was that the golden one was not buried, only a "pass-out" one.

_notreallyme_··on France's oldest treasure hunt has been solved
The english version is weird. It was planned from the beggining that they would bury a bronze owl.

The bronze owl was to be exchanged with the precious metal one. In the french news, they specifically mentioned that the bronze one was found.

If you think about it, it makes more sense. The co-founder was given the rights to the original treasure hunt because he is the owner of the valuable owl. He is the one who financed the whole thing.

_notreallyme_··on Show HN: Foosbar – My autonomous foosball-playing robot
Or on official tables according to the International Table Soccer Federation.

From what I've seen during my travels, there are lot of variations for foosball tables. Each countries seem to have their own variations.

_notreallyme_··on Paris's Catacomb Mushrooms (2017)
> I wonder if the French are considering digging underneath all those obstacles?

The problem is the Seine phreatic zone, which starts usually between 15 to 25m below the surface. Some GRS galleries are actually completely inundated and others have a level of water that varies between the seasons.

In order to have some metro going underneath the Seine river, they had to freeze it first. It is not an easy task, so there must be a real advantage to going under the Seine.

_notreallyme_··on Citation Needed – Wikimedia Foundation's Experimental LLM/RAG Chrome Extension
Yes, they explicitly classify wikipedia as a tertiary source [1].

Wikipedia is good for finding secondary source, and then primary sources by following the links.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Primary_Secondary_an...

_notreallyme_··on Latency numbers every programmer should know
then, why not just using qualifiers ? from slowest to fastest. You might not know that, but you can develop bare metals solution for HPC that are used in several industries like telecommunication. Calculation based on cycles are totally accurate whether the number of cores...
_notreallyme_··on Latency numbers every programmer should know
I don't get how expressing these numbers in time unit is useful ?

I've been a developer for embedded systems in the telecom industry for nearly two decades now, and I had never met anyone using something else than "cycles" or "symbols" until today... Except obviously for the mean RTT US<->EU.

_notreallyme_··on How to make a better default Firefox UI
Actually their argument was that all other major browsers behaved like that. You can check with chrome, and indeed it behaves like firefox.

For the user hostility, there argument was that people who dislike the new behavior do not have telemetry enabled, and thus they do not deserve to have the features they want. It's quite ironic considering firefox main advantage is their privacy oriented model...

_notreallyme_··on A man has been swatted 47 times for making a joke about Norm Macdonald
While I get your point, I kept wondering why the police would continue harassing him while reading the article. I came up with two reasons:

- Inflated incidence response, probably help for asking more budget

- "real-life situation" field training

In any case, I wouldn't say the terrorism comes directly from the police, but from the stalkers. The police might benefit from the situation, however.

_notreallyme_··on Double encryption: Analyzing the NSA/GCHQ arguments against hybrids
You might have read that wrong. The article acknowledges the added complexity:

> "hybrid solutions make implementations even more complex".

> If the words are taken purely at face value then they're clearly correct

The argument here is that the complexity is mostly due to the adding of new algorithm, not the hybridization. It goes on to argue that the added complexity due to the hybridization itself is negligible, especially considering the level of security provided.

_notreallyme_··on The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)
> Like everything back then it was probably accomplished by exploiting trust relationships

That's wrong on many levels. Bold and stupid "hacks" committed by teenagers using SE tend to get a lot of traction, because it is both bold and stupid. This hasn't changed. But "back then" there was much more than that...

_notreallyme_··on The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)
You didn't get a warning for that in 2003... or maybe with the pedantic flag. And even if it were the case, it would have been drowned by all the other unfixed warnings...

The only people using linters at that time was because it was forced by regulation (like automotive, aeronautics, ...)

_notreallyme_··on The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)
The guy who did it was quite vocal about it in some circles. It was a "for the lulz" kind of hack...
_notreallyme_··on Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand
The 50% goal is against an adaptative adversary. For some reason, Zero Knowledge Proof[1] came to my mind, so I interpreted the goal as reaching a 50% accuracy on the oracle side.

Your interpretation of the goal is also valid, but not in a cryptography context, for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_knowledge_proof

_notreallyme_··on Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand
You should indeed try and target a 50% accuracy rate.
_notreallyme_··on *@gmail.com
Ah, thank you for more context.

I arrived a few months after that, so someone tried to explain to me but either my memory is wrong or the explanation was flawed.

_notreallyme_··on *@gmail.com
At amazon in 2010, someone sent an email to everyone on the "all" mailing list to ask if anyone had seen it. A reply-all storm ensued, and despite several people asking to stop hitting the reply-all button, it continued for several days.

The management had to chime in and sometimes threatened people with punishment if they continued participating to the reply-all storm.

If you ignored the conversation you may not have seen it, but most reply-all storm ended up with someone saying something the line of "we don't care about your wallet".

Anyway, asking people to stop hitting the reply-all button is far from being the latest reply-all on these kind of things...

_notreallyme_··on Politicians, scientists spar over alleged NIH coverup using COVID19 origin paper
Technically, the lab leak hypothesis has not officially been suppresssed as a conspiracy theory. It is has been ranked from "extremely unlikely" to "likely with low confidence".

The reason why you may think it has been suppressed as a conspiracy theory is probably because the people pushing the more for it actually use conspiracy theory patterns. In reaction, report about these loud yeller providing out-of-context, with often ridicule arguments, are dismissed as conspiracy theories.

There is nonetheless some objective reports a lab leak hypotheses and how improving lab security is important to prevent this kind of things either way.

_notreallyme_··on Internet Standard #80: ASCII Format for Network Interchange (1969)
> the FTP protocol had a "binary mode" and a "text mode" because you can't safely transfer binary data from machines with incompatible word sizes and endianness

I'm not sure to follow you here. The TYPE modes are ASCII, IMAGE, EBCDIC and Local byte size. The "binary mode" being Image and "text mode" being ASCII in current FTP clients.

The IMAGE mode is the one that actually transfers file as they really are without any changes. The other 3 formats are actually used for character conversion, with an additional parameters to specify telnet or ASA conversion, and even changing the byte size in case of L.

In the end, the "text mode" is the one that will tend to corrupt your file (thanks to the CR/LF, LF/CR, LF discrepancy between the 3 major desktop OS).

Always choose TYPE IN (Image Non-print) by default!

_notreallyme_··on Receiving unintentional voice transmissions from GPS satellites
Apparently it is related to some "taxes services" in China. At least that's what the author of the video says.
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