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egberts1

2,485 karma · joined May 5, 2015

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egberts1··on More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
LIES!

We all know 20% more also means take 20% off gets us the exact same value.

NEXT!

No? Isn't that the beauty of gullibility?

egberts1··on Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces (2025)
I think of tokens as fractional digital librarians.

None of the analyTical.

egberts1··on Pixel 11 Pro Fold feels like the end of an era
At $2,000 (USD), ya think the phone would be gift-wrapped and delivered to you, UNLOCKED?
egberts1··on SQRL wan't wrong, it was early
Or we hope his armpit is infested with fleas from a thousand imaginary camels.
egberts1··on Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone
Napkin, someone literally used it at lunch time.

Some of us ribbed him: "Destruction of classified material!", "call Security!", "PM's (program manager) behind you".

No. Wasnt classified, but company-owned.

There are clues above.

egberts1··on Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone
Done on company property. Design Owned by company. We did not object for maximum marketing.
egberts1··on Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone
Ummmm. In 2007, near a certain defense contractor, we demonstrated a 319'-wire trebuchet mounted horizontally but slight vertical a-skewed for distance/aiming.

Used a gnarly large helical gear but with integral diminishing ratio.

Gravity-powered in same way but with a 20-meter-ish tower. (Cheaper than a standard 800'-tall trebuchet.)

At release time, achieved 10 G-force (payload goal), it's velocity speed was audibly a speed of sound (arguably higher, math says Mach 2.7).

That was our lunchtime project, all started from several stage bets, a napkin diagram, and different loser(s) pay for weekly food deliveries.

Even demonstrated to some brass from an unrelated project.

Fun-time.

Oh, yes, lest I forget, bunker-required for safety (where exactly would you stand?).

egberts1··on Assembly Hall of Shame
My favorite is having an XOR opcode modifying the operand of its next IMUL operand.

Fools QEMU and makes for a good "am I on a VM" logic test.

A function of precalculating XOR operand inadvertly twice at QeMU TLB compute time AFTER retrieval of and toward its cached IMUL operand value.

In short, emulation doing preparation of registers twice (negating XOR)

Now you have a logic test revealing QEMU thru minute differential of IMUL operand value and its different multiplication results.

ROT13, anyone?

Disclaimer: works only on RXW memory page. It is literally a self-modifying code.

egberts1··on The web server deployment model breaks at hobby scale
That is why my webserver only server-negotiate Cha-Cha/Poly at TLS level and rejects all else.

No caddy. No cache. No proxy.

A lot of scrapers give up.

Log rate remains low. Actual visits even lower.

Peace of mind, for a while:

https://egbert.net/blog/articles/index.html

egberts1··on How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
Nowadays, we see movies being made deep on the heart of Texas!
egberts1··on Show HN: What should the GUI for AI agents look like?
Videos are not playable on Apple iPhone.
egberts1··on BMW Is Showing Commercials on Their Car's Dash Screens as a Treat
Where's my sledgehammer?
egberts1··on Opkssh integrating single sign-on with SSH (2025)
Disclaimer: I code-review OpenSSH yearly.

Just by looking at the diagram, the mere presence of a third-party IdP is enough for most of enterprise and homelab to be deterred and look elsewhere for a more self-contained self-host identity provider server.

But then again, I could be wrong.

Still, using certificate in OpenSSH (instead of public key) is easier for me once it starts to scale beyond 5 or more hosts. Even do dual-cert, by host and by user combo, while using brittle OpenLDAP-OpenSSH for other class of users.

And smashed all my notes on certificates and OpenSSH on my ad-free, revenue-free, JS-free Pelican blog. It's personal on both note-wise and server.

Oh, certain browser will not work with this blog if it cannot negotiate ONLY for Cha-Cha/Poly. It's by design as a showcase of why that particular web browser refuses to do that.

https://egbert.net/blog/articles/ssh-openssh-certificates.ht...

egberts1··on [dead]
Original mission statement of Voice of America is still unchanged and defined by its Charter, which became U.S. law in 1976.

It has three core principles:

1. Provide accurate, objective, and comprehensive news.

2. Represent America as a whole, reflecting the diversity of American society and institutions.

3. Explain U.S. government policies clearly, while also presenting responsible discussion and differing opinions about those policies.

Sure they lamented lack of a travel budget but the mission is all about United States and US government, not the world.

egberts1··on I built a page that tells you what AI model your laptop can run
Ive got a tack server collecting dust.

How do I plug in a specific hardware?

egberts1··on Most Supreme Court Rulings Are Secretive Votes with Little Justification
Little Sisters v United States became that inflection point around late 2013 to early 2014.

The mechanism: emergency injunctions against executive implementations.

The “switch” was not Congress changing SCOTUS authority. It was the Court becoming more willing to use existing tools:

* Supreme Court Rule 22 emergency applications

* All Writs Act (28 U.S.C. §1651)

* stay/injunction authority pending appeal

The important doctrinal shift was that the

Old model:

“We need to prevent irreversible harm while the courts finish deciding.”

Emerging model:

“We will temporarily block a major government policy while litigation continues.”

That distinction is what later became controversial.

Several forces converged:

ACA litigation created repeated emergency applications

The Affordable Care Act produced many disputes where:

* federal agencies were implementing rules,

* plaintiffs sought immediate relief,

* district courts and circuits disagreed.

Little Sisters (2013-2014) became THAT template, not the Clean Power Act of 2016.

egberts1··on Who's running all those tiny RPKI servers?
More accurately, running web sites using latest RFCs.
egberts1··on Who's running all those tiny RPKI servers?
17.6% of assigned BGP-able IP address space are assigned but not actively broadcasting BGP packets???

(Deep-breath in, warning: rant)

This makes for a very problematic of continual hijacking AS link pathways between two hosts, notably between two countries.

BGPsec is well designed but remains largely unused (due to high-speed carrier-grade router's unwillingness to update firmware for new packet datagrams within BGP, not to mention requiring the addition of expensive de-crypt/re-crypte chipsets.

Interim SW-based solutions like BGP-ROA and BGP-ASPA are like HTTPS CAs, need to do PGP-style "trusting your friends' trusting other friends', ad naseum.

Alice trust Bob who trust Charles who trust Dave but Dave stabs Alice in the back. Um, no.

27 years of hosting my websites and DNSSec, but I can't prevent an island of Antigua to hijack my very own AS ... without all engaging in BGPSec. Unless all participate in BGPSec.

Crappy workaround such as the self-hosting of a RPKI API server is the HTTPS CA for that BGP AS hijack problem and it's still a wild, wild Internet.

Even then, that boondoggle infrastructure (Google/CloudFlare/DigiCert/LetsEncrypt) of mass Certificate Transparency (CT) monitoring station is trying to do fingerprint imprints of all the CAs' hash values for all websites; that design approach is time-sensitive and is a glaring weakness for not using dTLS/mTLS (where web servers ALSO authenticates its clients as well as the standard TLS client also authenticates web servers.

It is a lame brain scheme to ensure expansion of CT.

The correct architectual security stance is to prevent expensive audit scenario and ensure that the complexity moves from after-the-fact detection (CT) into stronger identity enrollment and authorization (DNSSEC, policy records, key continuity, CA constraints, possibly multi-CA approval).

People making more useless work, yet profit massively.

By doing individual CA with each websites, browser can then ditch the cookie tracking. And privacy restored (it leaks only to that website what you say)

But the $710B data collection industry will have questions.

I absolutely love the idea of auto-creating mTLS/dTLS for each client-website pairing at account creation time.

Ancillary infrastructure crumbles. Backends simplified. Things are faster and simpler for all parties involved (except those evil 3rd party scrapers/sniffer/email-reading scourges.

AI responded as: Benefits:

* eliminates password reuse

* reduces phishing surface

* eliminates many cookie-tracking mechanisms

* allows per-site identity isolation

* improves API/service authentication

the endpoints own the trust relationship; intermediaries provide transport, not identity.

Exactly how a well-designed military or critical-industrial equipment in the field should behave (to prevent inadvert usage of captured/hijacked endpoints)

/end-of-rant

egberts1··on Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work
Hard working. Need more of that
egberts1··on Show HN: Getting GLM 5.2 running on my slow computer
I'm running an archaic Dell PowerEdge T710 dual-Xeon E5690 (6/12 CPU, 3.73GHz turbo) with 192GB DDR3-800 (was 288GB but now PassMark 14,328).

Token rate is 0.091 per second.

Good for an overnight job.

egberts1··on California bans 'sell by' labels, hoping to cut food waste
Can't rip the plastic wrap off to smell for rottenness.

Absorbent pad adds to the price also hides the "purge".

Harder to find meat without thousand poked holes (tenderizing)

Can't tell if meat are colorized to hide browness.

Time for me to visit my local butcher for a quarter cow, butchered.

Also a bigger freezer chest too!

"Packed On" or "Processed On" is the most accurate way to label meat, IMHO.

egberts1··on Why I Stopped Arguing with People
This ASCII character '|' is a bar.
egberts1··on Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work
Shorter title: why lazy workers resist on-site work.
egberts1··on No Systemd
Disclaimer: original RedHat investor here.

My home lab requires:

* Option 42 (custom NTP configuration)

* Option 66/67 (TFTP/PXE boot)

* Option 119 (Domain Search List)

* Vendor-specific options (43)

* Option 121 (Classless Static Routes)

* Custom enterprise options

+ DNS name Regex replacement (iPod/WII/Lucent DSLAM)

In RedHat dominated network, NetworkManager remains the dominant choice for:

* Enterprise desktops

* Laptops

* Many enterprise servers

* Complex managed networking in the Red Hat ecosystem

RedHat is still struggling to replace my network-manager's ultimate stackable network interfaces (VxLAN-VLAN-Bond-GRE-IPSec).

Furthermore, it isn't about hate. It is about KISS: it is about keeping PID 1 as simple as possible, something that all embedded systems and secured system should still aspire to do.

PId 1 should be pro forma and semantically secured as possible with minimal dependencies.

And process certainly should not be default all-privilege.

Simplicity of integration over complexity.

egberts1··on Why problem statements aren't enough
Problem Statement

Think hard (time, money, resources)

Write down solution

Profit!

egberts1··on Solving Wordle using information theory
I have a tree.

I always started with 3 words

POINT LASED CRUMB

This eliminates not only the most frequent letters but least frequent letters (Bloom filter), leaving rest of infrequent letter set to guess by narrow deduction.

Never failed me.

egberts1··on The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
methylcobalamin B-12 plus Vitamin D3 is the preferred form.

Skip the D2 vitamin.

egberts1··on UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s
Is it just me or did I missed a notice that Bluesky is not on the list of UK's banned social media?
egberts1··on AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
You need a slave driver to whip those AI in line.

Or a psychiatrist to tame the craxy LLMs

Or an elected leader to lead the Luddites.

https://github.com/vishal-dehurdle/state-harness

egberts1··on Oh good, screwworms are back (2025)
Other than chronic South America and Libya outbreaks, screwworm has been around forever.

Coupled with SIT, pyrethroid, doramectin, ivermectin, debriding, dressing are just about 100% effective.

Thanks to our enlarged 230-strong Federal-contracted field workers.

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