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deprave

489 karma · joined February 29, 2016

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deprave··on Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back
Another thing that bit me is that automatic updates reserve disk space even if no update is available. It makes sense when you have plenty of disk space but on my MacBook Air with 256gb of storage it was about 10% that I got back after turning off automatic updates. I’ll get a Mac with more storage next time so I don’t have to do that.
deprave··on Plan mode is dead
Apologies, I didn’t mean to imply it’s a benchmark, I just wanted to provide a reproducible example of where I see models make decisions that seem to be fine initially but might paint the software architecture into a challenging corner. I don’t expect models to read my mind, but I do see them produce a lot of verbose output, none of which is used to say “here’s a simple response to your ask, but have you also considered...”
deprave··on Plan mode is dead
I disagree with the assertion that the model gets it. Here’s a practical example I just tried with Fable 5.1. I gave it this prompt: “Write a Go function that can be used to establish secure communication to a remote system using a certificate. Keep it short, single function, and explain how to use it.” The output forced the use of a private key stored in a file even though that wasn’t specified anywhere as a requirement. The function Claude wrote takes a private key file argument and calls a Golang function that requires a private key file (tls.LoadX509KeyPair) even though Go has crypto.Signer which could support private keys in various other manifestations like HSM or KMS. I argue that a person who “gets it” (or who is reasonably experienced in security) would have opted for not requiring private key material for this to work.

For the record, this isn’t unique to Claude. ChatGPT and Gemini do the same, each with its own quirks. ChatGPT got extra credit for being the only one who allowed the function to also take a CA file for server authentication.

Don’t get me wrong: LLMs are the future (maybe even the present) of software development but I think there’s some way to go before they can be entirely hands-off in some areas. I still find myself having to course correct designs and plan mode helps me with that.

And of course, thank you for your work on Claude. :)

deprave··on Git-bug: Distributed, offline-first bug tracker embedded in Git
Thank you for working on this, I love the idea. What surprised me was the way user identities is managed, I assumed you’d use whatever git uses. Would you mind elaborating on that?
deprave··on Forging 1024-bit RSA signatures in nearly SNFS time [pdf]
It’s important to note that by “raw” they mean without padding, which is more rare than just a signing oracle, see section 7 of the paper.
deprave··on Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
To me, there’s a difference between ads that help me learn about brands or products, or make me laugh or have some positive emotion (Super Bowl ads, billboard signs, and movie previews come to mind) and ads that take over search results, interfere with the content I want to consume on an already-small screen, or are just distasteful to me. I can’t say I like ads but I recognize that I specifically dislike some ads more than others.
deprave··on macOS Tahoe
That’s the important question. Someone else on the thread suggested it was to divert attention from one failure (AI) and now they have two. I wonder how Steve Jobs would react to this mess. Maybe he’d say he would not have been in such a mess in the first place. :)
deprave··on Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year
I thought the same thing. Some of the commenters said this move might be related to stock price or appeasing shareholders, so I wonder if that, too, was directed at them, as in “we’re big and we plan on getting even bigger”
deprave··on White House in Talks with Intel for 10% U.S. Government Stake
My hypothesis is that this is government response (own stake in Intel) to another government’s action (hint take over of Taiwan) and as such is outside the free market. But I have no evidence to support it, it’s just an opinion and it could be that they view Intel as “too big to fail” or something like that as you suggest.
deprave··on White House in Talks with Intel for 10% U.S. Government Stake
I agree, and I think the government’s incentive might also be a having strategic production capability in the US. Maybe they’re concerned about TSMC’s future with the tension between China and Taiwan?
deprave··on AI agents: Less capability, more reliability, please
What would be a superhuman result for booking a flight?
deprave··on Encryption at Rest: Whose Threat Model Is It Anyway?
Encryption at Rest makes it easy to reason about data hygiene, since access to the data is gated through access to the keys.

You want to delete data? Toss the keys. You want to confidentially process data? Make the keys available to a TEE or such. You want to prevent yourself from having constant access to the data? Let the client provide the keys. And of course, you want to protect the keys? Use an HSM.

deprave··on Xmas.c (1988)
I learned that from The Office :D
deprave··on Facebook says Apple is too powerful – they're right
I have been a member of and donated to the EFF since 1998. After reading this article, I have decided to not renew my membership and not donate again.

My criticism isn’t about right or wrong. It’s about priorities and weaponizing the corporations and business practices the EFF should work against.

deprave··on Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
Interviews are more thorough because firing became harder.

It used to be that if you hired an employee and found out they aren’t good at their job you could fire them. Today it is complicated and can backfire if the employee believes they were fired because of any reason other than their skills, or were not provided with ample opportunity and support to succeed.

The solution is a lengthier process based on the assumption that once hired, the company is stuck with the employee unless they decide to leave.

deprave··on U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub
So I can pay my utility company $100 a month for energy I consume, or pay $40000 for a bitcoin representing energy someone else consumed? Got it.
deprave··on Google proposes changes to Chromium which would disable uBlock Origin
This was only expected. Why would an advertising company care about web experience, security, or privacy?
deprave··on By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation
Google is known to be against new and safe technologies. Google Finance still uses Flash, and Android has the worst IPv6 support despite it being based on Linux. What's your point?
deprave··on Firefox 54: E10S-Multi, WebExtension APIs, CSS Clip-Path
It's simple. There is no way Firefox can guarantee anywhere near the level of stability and security Chrome offers without a process per tab. OS primitives operate in terms of processes (scheduling, memory, sandboxing, and so on) and Firefox will not be able to use any of them. I really want to use Firefox, but I'm almost certain not doing a process-per-tab will be the last nail in its coffin. The code will be more complex to maintain, and no advantages in security or performance will be gained, leading to less users and thus less maintainers.

If there was one thing that caught my attention with Chrome back when it was released (2008?) it was its reliance on OS primitives (processes) as the building blocks for a stable and secure browser. This is essentially the same argument the Varnish folks did when comparing to other proxy solutions like Squid back in the day. I don't understand why Firefox is taking this route.

deprave··on Firefox 54: E10S-Multi, WebExtension APIs, CSS Clip-Path
Please DO process-per-tab. I have a lot of memory. I want you to use it. If it's not enough, I will buy more memory or a stronger device. But please, whatever you do, don't make security or stability trade offs for me. The M:N threading model has never worked out. We know 1:1 works. Please do that. Please, please, please use a process-per-tab.
deprave··on Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker
Some of the times they're harmed, some of the times they're not. There's no correlation, ruling out the slightest possibility of causation. Is it risk management, then? No, because a product with a well known and trusted brand has much higher chances of success. Is Google internationally reducing the success chance of their billion dollar bets? No. The only reasonable conclusion to make is that Google doesn't want to taint their new offerings with the existing brand.
deprave··on Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker
The premise that visible business failure harms brands is false. It's your opinion and it sounds like it makes sense, but it's not supported by any data.
deprave··on Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker
That has already happened. One of the reasons Goole renamed itself "Alphabet" and started using different brand names (e.g. "Waymo") for other products is to confuse consumers about their source. The "Google" brand has become synonymous with advertising and invasion of privacy, and the reversal of strategy (used to stick the brand on everything vs. isolating it to search and ads) is a hedge against the growing consumer distrust.
deprave··on We plan to have Chrome hide ads that do not comply with the Better Ads Standards
Mark my words: This will be the basis for legitimizing out-of-band popups from publishers on Chrome asking you to disable your non-Chrome ad blocker.
deprave··on Essential Products – Andy Rubin’s new hardware company
He dumped the pile of insecure garbage called Android on us and now he's moving on to reinvent iOS. Got it.
deprave··on Google and Paint.NET need to stop misleading users (2013)
People must remember that Google is first and foremost an advertising company. 90% of its revenue comes directly from advertising. Anyone who thinks they will prioritize anything over ad revenue is either very naive or very stupid.

Google's CEO declared it's "AI first" and they developed TensorFlow. If they wanted to, they could have easily prevented those ads from entering their network.

deprave··on PfSense 2.5 and AES-NI
I see pfSense playing two possible roles the SD-WAN. The first is customer-centric, and will allow pfSense edge devices to connect to a third-party SD-WAN service or one provided by Netgate itself. The other is vendor-centric, and will allow SD-WAN vendors to use pfSense for their Point-of-Presence software when building the geographically distributed network for SD-WAN traffic optimization.

Both are smart strategies and well within your core competency. As long as you're not building your own SD-WAN service you're golden.

deprave··on PfSense 2.5 and AES-NI
If I had to guess, I'd say Netgate is working on an SD-WAN service of sorts. Many players in this market are displacing the edge firewall, and offering a built-in service of their own or in partnership with a third-party might be a smart move.
deprave··on Facebook Australia allowed advertisers to target teens’ emotional states
People working at Facebook and Google lie to themselves that they're doing something important while working for a "cool" tech company. They're ignorant to the fact that these companies make their entire revenue from advertisements.
deprave··on Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python
Kite feels a lot like malware.

It sends your code to the cloud. You have not addressed people's concerns who asked about keys embedded in source code, not entire files to ignore. The uninstall process looks and feels a lot like stopping a rogue process that keeps respawning. You've silently integrated with an unrelated project (autocomplete-python) to collect data.

I applaud the idea and UX in the video. I'd love to use a tool that does all that. That said, I completely condemn everything else about you. I strongly recommend anyone who has installed Kite to remove it from their computers immediately as it seems that the people behind it don't have the community's best interests in mind.

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