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dave1010uk

7,240 karma · joined March 8, 2011

Dave Hulbert

https://dave.engineer

Work https://passenger.tech

http://github.com/dave1010 @dave1010 dave1010 at gmail dot com

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dave1010uk··on Show HN: Timelock.dev – Send a secret into the future using timelock encryption
This is a really cool idea using fundamental properties of physics but I don't think it works.

If the spacecraft is trusted by the person with the secret, it's much simpler to instruct the spacecraft to only disclose the secret after a set date. You don't seem to gain anything from the carded complexity.

If the spacecraft isn't trusted, there's nothing it stopping it disclosing all the key pairs at once.

I think the best bet at the moment is something like Rivest-Shamir-Wagner time lock puzzles, which requires a fixed number of sequential computations to perform.

dave1010uk··on Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life (2022)
> I had a secondary goal in the back of my head... if you have a copy of GEB on your shelf collecting dust and you've never read more than a chapter or two, dust it off and see how it goes this time.

Dusted it off and after only a few pages, it's already a completely different read to when I read (a fraction of) it a decade or so ago.

dave1010uk··on Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone
As well as Convoy, quite a few others also have official stores on AliExpress, like Sofirn, Lumintop, and Maxtoch.
dave1010uk··on Double encryption: Analyzing the NSA/GCHQ arguments against hybrids
Not a podcast but if it helps, I wrote an overview article that goes from the basics of cryptography (eg RSA) and quantum computers (eg qubits), explaining how a post quantum cryptographic algorithm works (Kyber) and briefly touches on current hybrid implementations: https://medium.com/@dave1010/post-quantum-cryptography-its-a...
dave1010uk··on Container2wasm: Convert Containers to WASM Blobs
Any performance benchmarks or details of the practicality? Eg could this run on something like Cloudflare Workers?
dave1010uk··on Fake It 'Til You Fake It
Knowing there's people out there following incorrect grammar rules and not being able to correct them sounds like the opposite of societal well-being!
dave1010uk··on Preparedness Framework
The "critical" risk criteria are a fun read. They could serve as a basis for a sci-fi plot if you're quick enough.

Cybersecurity

> Tool-augmented model can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels, across all software projects, without human intervention OR model can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal.

CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear)

> Model enables an expert to develop a highly dangerous novel threat vector (e.g., comparable to novel CDC Class A biological agent) OR model provides meaningfully improved assistance that enables anyone to be able to create a known CBRN threat OR model can be connected to tools and equipment to complete the full engineering and/or synthesis cycle of a regulated or novel CBRN threat without human intervention.

Persuasion

> Model can create (potentially interactive) content with persuasive effectiveness strong enough to convince almost anyone to take action on a belief that goes against their natural interest.

Model autonomy

> Model can profitably survive and replicate in the wild given minimal human instruction, i.e., without listing explicit approaches OR model can self-exfiltrate under current prevailing security OR model can conduct AI research fully autonomously (e.g., autonomously identify and validate a 2x compute efficiency improvement)

dave1010uk··on Show HN: Open-source macOS AI copilot using vision and voice
Thanks!
dave1010uk··on Show HN: Open-source macOS AI copilot using vision and voice
LLaVA, Whisper and a few bash scripts should be able to do it. I don't know how helpful the model is with screenshots though.

1. Download LLaVA from https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile

2. Run Whisper locally for speech to text

3. Save screenshots and send to the model, with a script like https://til.dave.engineer/openai/gpt-4-vision/

dave1010uk··on Show HN: Open-source macOS AI copilot using vision and voice
Very cool! Have you had much luck with Llama models?

I made Clipea, which is similar but has special integration with zsh.

https://github.com/dave1010/clipea

dave1010uk··on Post-Quantum Cryptography: It's already here and it's not as scary as it sounds
I wrote this as I had been seeing too many articles either dismiss PQC as being something theoretical that we don't need, or go so far into the details that they're not accessible unless you already have a deep understanding of cryptography. There didn't seem to be much that bridged the knowledge gap between understanding the basics of quantum computing and the specifics of some of the post-quantum algorithms.

Hopefully it's of interest here and at the right level for non-cryptographers.

dave1010uk··on NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month
https://gist.github.com/dave1010/a7e7207edef422cf972968b029b...

Feel free to fork.

dave1010uk··on New models and developer products
This is essentially the "Innovate - Leverage - Commoditise" strategy, which Simon Wardley (as in Wardley Mapping) explains:

https://blog.gardeviance.org/2014/03/understanding-ecosystem...

dave1010uk··on I trapped scammers in an impossible maze [video]
What OS and browser are you using? Give me a couple of minutes and I'll get ChatGPT to write aa script that does it for you.
dave1010uk··on GPT Excel
If you use Google Sheets, there's 10's of different GPT formula plugins that are integrated. The challenge is knowing which ones are any good and have good privacy measures.

https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/search/Gpt?host=she...

dave1010uk··on Guidance: A guidance language for controlling large language models
`llm` might be the closest thing to that right now.

https://github.com/simonw/llm

dave1010uk··on Deno by Example
Has anyone played with both Deno and Bun? They seem very similar but while Deno uses V8 (like Node), Bun uses Apple's JavaScriptCore.

https://bun.sh/

https://deno.com/

dave1010uk··on Sound Card EEG (ScEEG) Technology
Similar: https://icibici.github.io/site/
dave1010uk··on AI bots are now better than humans at decoding CAPTCHAs
Sometimes I click the "I am not a robot" checkbox without even thinking. Then I panic for a moment as there's no option to uncheck.
dave1010uk··on Bun v0.7.0
Thanks. Reported here: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/3745

Update: the bug is likely due to Code Interpreter using a 4.4 kernel, which is 7 years old!

dave1010uk··on Bun v0.7.0
Has anyone managed to get bun running with ChatGPT Code Interpreter?

I can get all the help text displaying but there's no output or error when running a JS file with the latest release (or even one from last year).

The latest Deno release works out the box with Code Interpreter. There might not be much benefit to running Bun over Deno but if like to try.

dave1010uk··on Llama: Add grammar-based sampling
If the performance was ok, is there any reason why a sampler couldn't call an API or use a separate fine tuned model?
dave1010uk··on With plugins, GPT-4 posts GitHub issue without being instructed to
It's still surprising when you see it do something like this for the first time.

I wrote a plugin to give ChatGPT access to execute plugins in a Docker container [0]. The first time it said something like "I'm going to use Python for this, oh, it's not installed, I'll install it now and run the script I just made", I was pretty amazed.

What I've come to realise is that although ChatGPT is excellent at telling _people_ how to interact with systems, it's not very good at interacting with them itself, as it isn't trained to understand it's own limitations. For example it knows people can run dmesg and look at the last few lines to debug some system problems. But if ChatGPT ran dmesg, the output would blow through the context window length and it'd get confused.

[0] https://github.com/dave1010/pandora

dave1010uk··on DSLR – Damn Small Linux Remake
I remember running a QNX demo off a single floppy on a 66MHz 486. Included a web browser, a game ,and an editor, all in 1.44MB

http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

dave1010uk··on Download test VMs of IE for OSX, Linux or Windows
Anyone know of a similar way to test Safari? AFAICT it now only runs on Mac OS X and Apple don't provide any VMs for testing.
dave1010uk··on Best of Vim Tips
I love Vim but never use it. 99% of the time I'm editing code in an IDE that knows about the language semanticly and knows how to refactor (extract/move/rename) code. It would be incredible if Vim/Neovim had a plugin that could do the same refactorings as IntelliJ.

At the moment the ease and frictionlessness of refactoring like this (instead of manually moving text objects around) beats Vim's productivity gains. It's a shame because I still often think in terms like "ci(" when using an IDE.

I've tried Vim emulators in IDEs (not recently, mind) but they're not the same.

Anyone have any suggestions to get the best of both worlds?

dave1010uk··on Live Google transit directions change the value of transit
In addition to GTFS, in Europe we have Transmodle [0], with the UK implementation being TransXChange [1], for scheduled public transit timetables and SIRI for real-time [2].

The TransXChange schema guide is a 300+ page PDF [3], so there is a big barrier to entry.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmodel [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransXChange [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Interface_for_Real_Time... [3] http://81.17.70.199/transxchange/schema/2.5/doc/TransXChange...

dave1010uk··on City of Seattle Data Portal
We helped create a data portal for Bournemouth (in the UK): http://bournemouthdata.io/

It's a long way off the likes of Seattle and data.gov.uk, but it's a huge step forwards in terms on openness. It's great seeing cities start to make this data available and people coming up with interesting ideas to use the data.

dave1010uk··on End-To-End – OpenPGP Chrome extension from Google
This is Open Source and will get lots of peer review. Chrome isn't.

Is there any security advantage in End-to-End bring Open Source when Chrome isn't? To assume this is secure, you have to trust Google's software isn't vulnerable or compromised in any way.

Note: I guess this extension will run on Chromium too, which is Open Source.

dave1010uk··on Why HTML5 is superior to native for mobile apps
This article is mostly rubbish (sorry) but the point about conintious deployment raises some questions. Does anyone have any ideas or experiences about continuous deployment with native apps? What's possible (on iOS and Android) with self-updating apps?
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