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brians

2,449 karma · joined January 19, 2014

Chief Architect, Information Security, Akamai Technologies. I do not speak for my employer.
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brians··on Mastering Layout Engines in Graphviz: Dot vs. Neato vs. Twopi vs. Circo
If you don't even explain neato vs fdp, what's the point?
brians··on Apple Watch Ultra 4
Yup. This tells me the AWU is not the adventure watch for me. I love my Apple Watch (8? I think?) and I love my Garmin Instinct Solar with 40d battery life. One of these is for daily wear as a communicator; the other is for weeks in the mountains or offshore.
brians··on Autistici/Inventati's main .org domain goes dark after US terrorism designation
Those are largely domestic, though some have quiet foreign support. And there’s no law for designating domestic groups as terrorist. The FBI does a ton of work here though
brians··on Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache
That’s a Mac bug if so—it should be always using dumb udp/53 for captive detection, not some fancy DoH thing.
brians··on The Case Against Formal Verification, 50 Years Later
Well. Facebook has invested a fortune in proving that its systems follow expected properties of respecting consent—that all the data flows that happen are permitted. That turns out to be helpful for them in avoiding fines.
brians··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
Actually that makes it really easy to tell. If one side were very rare maybe we’d miss a subtle effect. But at 3:1 we should see plenty!
brians··on Building a Rust Inference Engine That Matches Llama.cpp
This text is clearly AI and not your own words. What did you actually learn?
brians··on Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
I think any browser will allow it but not allow data read back.
brians··on Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
They offer it as an option but default it to false! This is still a --footgun option but it’s the least unsafe version I’ve seen yet! Well done, Apfel authors.
brians··on Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
I’ve seen several projects like this that offer a network server with access to these Apple models. The danger is when they expose that, even on a loop port, to every other application on your system, including the browser. Random webpages are now shipping with JavaScript that will post to that port. Same-origin restrictions will stop data flow back to the webpage, but that doesn’t stop them from issuing commands to make changes.

Some such projects use CORS to allow read back as well. I haven’t read Apfel’s code yet, but I’m registering the experiment before performing it.

brians··on Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
I do not agree with your interpretation of copyright law. It does ban copies: there has to be information flow from the original to the copy for it to be a "copy." Spontaneous generation of the same content is often taken by the courts to be a sign that it's purely functional, derived from requirements by mathematical laws.

Patent law is different and doesn't rely on information flow in the same way.

brians··on Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)
The US FDA requires that schools not serve whole milk or any products containing normal and natural saturated fats, and instead serve “low fat” versions which literally remove the fats and replace them with sugar.

You say nobody is doing this, but all the subsidized meals for my kids do this.

brians··on Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
A major difference is when we have to read and understand it because of a bug. Perhaps the LLM can help us find it! But abstraction provides a mental scaffold
brians··on Gpg.fail
No. You can always take the MIT-licensed source. And GnuPG got used through a CLI “API” anyway.
brians··on Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo
Having something that read everything I read and could talk with me about it, help remember things and synthesize? That’s awesome. Follow links and check references.
brians··on 10 Years of Let's Encrypt
Having run an EV issuing practice… they were required to contact you at a D&B listed number or address.
brians··on Pixar: The Early Days A never-before-seen 1996 interview
…all of them. Which is why the scene in Ralph Breaks the Internet works. And why some of the Shrek jokes work.
brians··on All praise to the lunch ladies
And now every kid in Massachusetts gets free lunch—funded through the millionaire’s tax. Unfortunately, the food is in general pretty gross. It has to conform to Federal guidelines, which means low fat, low sodium, high sugar to hit calorie targets.
brians··on Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
The permitted number of rat parts per pound of breakfast cereal is not zero.
brians··on Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark
There are. But there are many more such bugs in DirectX on Windows, and it’s a much bigger target. If a national intelligence organization wants to burn a Proton zero-day on my Steam Deck, cool!
brians··on My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4
We have different eyes and different purposes, I think.
brians··on Amber Room
What an amazing construction. It reminds me of a story from the metallurgist who visited the Breakers, the elaborate mansion complex of the Vanderbilt family, and on a tour was shown the Morning Room. The guide said the brilliant silver-white walls were silver plate. “How do you keep it from tarnishing?” He asked. The guide didn’t know, so the scientist asked for permission to test it.

Stories vary on whether he tested it or someone stopped him before taking a sample, but all agree on the technology used: that’s not silver. They coated an entire room with platinum.

brians··on About the security content of iOS 15.8.5 and iPadOS 15.8.5
From first sale, right? The interesting date to me is years of support from last sale—when a company would still sell you a device as new.
brians··on Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership
It’s a language for communicating about decisions. It doesn’t make the decisions for you
brians··on Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership
I had lunch with the Amazon leader most responsible for ensuring all staff in the fast-moving-cardboard half of the company had health insurance from day one of employment, no waiting time. Of a decades long career, that was the one thing I saw most animate her—care for fellow humans.

When the 90th percentile employee has a GED and works warehouse or delivery, actions to earn “best employer” may be invisible or worse to the 5% who are software people. I’ve worked at Meta too, and Meta absolutely had better coffee. And WAY better health insurance. But Amazon’s health insurance is uniform for all staff, and that means something.

brians··on Internet Access Providers Aren't Bound by DMCA Unmasking Subpoenas–In Re Cox
Electronic communications privacy act, to start.
brians··on Electromechanical reshaping, an alternative to laser eye surgery
There’s a current product that does simple mechanical remodeling: sleep with this chunky contact lens in and the next morning you see better. But it wears off in ten hours or less.
brians··on Optimizing a Math Expression Parser in Rust
Can you help me understand what’s happening between the split and the filter on “a <space> <space> <space> b”? I expect that to be a series of calls to split, each yielding an empty slice. So the whole iterator yields a slice pointing at a, then a slice pointing at b—but it’s had to handle three intermediate slices to get the b. Right?
brians··on Windows 10 EOL
Well, yes, but it’s much brighter over here beneath the streetlight.
brians··on Oniux: Kernel-level Tor isolation for any Linux app
It’s really, really not. Idiots are ingenious. The operational care to use this in ways that preserve anonymity is beyond most users.
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