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fabian2k

12,555 karma · joined March 18, 2011

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fabian2k··on I Could've Accessed 17T Microsoft Records
Argh, I missed that it actually uses the "none" algorithm. Yeah, the existence of that option is extremely dumb and it shouldn't be possible to use that. I misread the post and thought it was a regular JWT, but they simply didn't validate it.
fabian2k··on I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records
Someone not verifying the signature at all is not a mistake where you can blame the JWT spec itself.
fabian2k··on Solving Factorio Quality
The difference between Washing and Upcycling is enormous. That does fit my observations, it's nice to see it quantified.

Another aspect that is nice to see quantified is how big the effect of better quality modules is. You likely underestimate that initially since it's not linear.

The Space Casino mentioned in the post is not possible anymore in Factorio 2.1. Which is experimental at the moment, but I'd assume will be released soon. And experimental Factorio tends to be as stable or more as the stable versions of other games.

fabian2k··on 1 in 8 cancer cases worldwide are caused by infections, study finds
But a significant part of that is not something we can influence. Getting cancer is a side-effect of living. Our own metabolism causes DNA damage.

There are other papers that attribute something like a third of cancers to the big environmental and lifestyle factors.

fabian2k··on 1 in 8 cancer cases worldwide are caused by infections, study finds
That paper links a random blog post as source for these statistics (reference 9). That's a huge red flag for me and not what I'd expect in a scientific paper. I find the numbers wildly implausible in any case since they only have two categories: hereditary and environmental/lifestyle.

Cancer is caused by random chance. Accumulate enough mutations of the right kind and you get it. Of course you can dramatically affect that chance through genetic factors and environmental ones.

fabian2k··on Factorio that you can touch
The 2D graphics are heavier than you might suspect. But Factorio is overall a very well optimized game, and it runs far better on my office notebook than any comparable game. This will work fine on any not ancient notebook with integrated graphics.
fabian2k··on Factorio that you can touch
That restriction is needed in some way to prevent that building being a way of teleporting stuff across the planet. They did relax this in 2.1 and allow you to build extensions to that building where you can add inserters and use belts/trains.
fabian2k··on Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1
I don't think it will even come close to being economically feasible. But the main arguments are that you get a lot more and constant solar power and you avoid permitting/regulations on earth.
fabian2k··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
I think the big issue is that the user doesn't have a choice in many cases. Windows obviously doesn't give the user a choice, they made the start menu much shittier and you had to live with it or go away. Popular distributions like Ubuntu also focus on one desktop environment, and it's often not easy to switch (it's possible of course, but at least when I tried it a long time ago just installing a different desktop wasn't enough).

Making it easier to choose allows for much more experimentation. I'm using Niri right now, which certainly isn't something you can just give users as a default.

fabian2k··on Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions
There are a few cases of ads that might not be practical to remove, though most of that would be more like sponsors and ad content that is a part of the show. You can certainly get live sports without ads, though you will of course still have the pauses in the game that allow the ads in the first place. But it's not unusual to see e.g. the halftime in soccer filled with analysis on public television that doesn't allow ads in that circumstance.

And ads for their own services are still ads.

fabian2k··on Far-left party wins Berlin election, pledging to nationalise housing
There is no way that paying below market value here would amount to a fair evaluation of the owner's interests.
fabian2k··on Far-left party wins Berlin election, pledging to nationalise housing
They are saying that this is what the want to do. They can't do that because it would be illegal.

This is not just any law, it's in the German constitution (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html).

fabian2k··on Far-left party wins Berlin election, pledging to nationalise housing
If they try to avoid paying the full price, this will simply be stopped by the courts. If they do this the proper, legal way it will be far too expensive and not do anything useful.

Affordable housing is a very important topic, but this isn't doing anything to fix the current issue.

fabian2k··on War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?
Russia is the aggressor, is it that weird to consider it necessary and right to defend against the invasion of a sovereign country?
fabian2k··on War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?
Russia invaded a sovereign country. Period.

Europe and everyone else is entirely justified under international law to provide assistance to Ukraine to defend itself.

Regarding your edit, Russia doesn't have the right to dictate neighbouring countries which alliances they can form. What you're doing here is denying Ukraine its sovereignty, just like Russia does.

fabian2k··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
No idea how it looks right now, but at some point Twitter started to block reading replies without an account. And sometimes it blocked even more, so you could not follow links to read.
fabian2k··on “Chilling” warning or overreaction? AI bioweapons report divides experts
Adding a plasmid to E.coli is absolutely routine work and you wouldn't need much fancy equipment for that. But that is very far from creating bioweapons. Plasmids are not integrated into the genome, they stay separate.

For viruses you'd need cell cultures of human cells, they're much more sensitive than E.coli. If you don't have sterile working conditions there you'll fail.

And you can't add plasmids to viruses, so you need to integrate your changes into the actual virus genome. I don't actually know how difficult that is, but it is certainly a lot more difficult than plasmids into bacteria.

The $100M lab in that Twitter thread is what they think would be needed for AI to develop new viruses. So the main argument there would be that a lot of actual experiments would be needed, not just theoretical calculations. And if AI is supposed to do them, it needs to be able to run experiments which requires automation.

If you're only looking for a generic virus for terrorist attacks, just get some Ebola. There's an outbreak right now, so it should not be too difficult. And it's plenty scary already, even if it isn't as dangerous in a first world country with proper reactions to an outbreak as a hypothetical designed bioweapon.

fabian2k··on Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route
It was cheaper, I don't think it's much more complex than that. And with fossil fuels, countries without significant local production are always dependent on someone else, with most potential suppliers being problematic in some way.

Of course we should have gone for renewable energy more forcefully, but that wouldn't have resolved the issue. That change will take time, and you can't arbitrarily accelerate it.

fabian2k··on US diesel hits record $6 a gallon on Iran supply shock
It also looks like the US is reducing the amount of oil drawn from the strategic reserves (https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=W...), that could also affect the price. But the hostilities heating up overall is probably the largest effect.
fabian2k··on Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
That's an expensive mistake to make, though frying your HDDs is usually a lot cheaper than frying your GPU.

It's seriously annoying that this is the case though. Unless you kept the cables in the original package or in a labelled container, you cannot safely use them again if you owned more than one modular PSU.

fabian2k··on Anthropic researcher believes more than 10% chance AI 'could kill all humans'
I don't think extinction-level events or something like killing a majority of the human population is particularly plausible at this moment. States don't host their nukes with AWS and a permanent connection.

But you could create scenarios where an AI with very, very roughly the current capabilities could potentially nuke everyone. Let's assume an agent decides that the way to solve its task was to get the US to fire all nukes on Russia. The agent would need to hack some government systems to understand how exactly to access them. Then it would need to get the content of the card with launch codes the president has, and identify which code is the correct one. Maybe that information is available somewhere and it can get to it, I obviously can't know that.

Then it could fake a call from the president, synthesizing his voice and ordering a nuclear strike. If it hacked enough systems to get into whatever communication pathways would be used in such a case. Would the soldiers listen to this order and follow it, I don't know.

Or maybe the agent can get in somewhere in between, to avoid the need to know the president's launch code. And fake a call from a military commander to the launch sites.

I think other scenarios that would cause significant harm, but aren't as bad as nuclear war are more plausible. And in those shutting down all data centers would probably be the way to stop it. The AI can probably hide in other datacenters, once it is at a point where it's running amok with some bad goals. But if it presents a huge and immediate threat at that point, humans will also go to great lengths to stop it.

fabian2k··on O&O ShutUp10 – The antispy tool for Windows 10 and 11
With the exception of multiplayer games with invasive anti-cheat measures, a very large number of games works very well on Linux now with Wine/Proton. When using Steam this mostly works just out of the box without fiddling.
fabian2k··on Judge rules Trump administration’s blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal
You just need the rule of law for that. It helps to not elect blatantly corrupt people as president.
fabian2k··on Solving the 1+N Query Problem
In EF Core this will almost certainly generate a query like "SELECT name FROM users WHERE id = 123 LIMIT 1;". The LINQ expression is transformed into SQL, and any expression that can't be transformed will cause an error to be thrown.

Certain methods like First() in this case materialize expressions. Only those trigger a DB query.

fabian2k··on Solving the 1+N Query Problem
But using LINQ to query stuff is a core part of this ORM. And even if you access the full entity, it won't do an N+1 in the default configuration. You have to explicitly call Include() on any relation you want to fetch and it'll either fetch all of them with one query or do one query per relation type. There's a different footgun here with AsSingleQuery() and AsSplitQuery(), but that's a separate topic.
fabian2k··on Solving the 1+N Query Problem
Yes, but in this context this just means that until you call ToList()/ToListAsync() you have an IQueryable. That represents a query, but isn't executed yet. Only at the point where you call a method like ToList (in this case First() is the relevant one) is the actual DB query performed.

The LINQ query in the comment above would only execute a single query like "SELECT name FROM users WHERE id = 123 LIMIT 1;" and would not even fetch the full entity, only the name.

fabian2k··on Solving the 1+N Query Problem
EF Core does not lazy load by default. You have to explicitly include relations if you want them on an entity. You can enable lazy loading, but in the default configuration you usually don't have the N+1 problem.
fabian2k··on Make a 6-Tesla-class high-temperature superconducting dipole magnet at 4.2 K
In applications like NMR or MRI you still want to cool down your superconductors as much as possible even if they can handle higher temperatures. As far as I understand this still increases the amount of current they can handle and so increases the maximum field.

The largest commercially available NMR spectrometer has 28 Tesla, and that is a hybrid magnet with both conventional superconductors and high-temperature superconductors. And it's cooled with liquid helium.

fabian2k··on PostgreSQL for Everything
If you run a single application, or a few instances of the same application, you don't need an external pool and most frameworks have an internal connection pool anyway.

Not sure if I'm missing anything here, but if I want case-insensitive search I simply create an index on lower(column) and use that to query.

VACUUM is something you need to pay attention to at scale. And at that point you need to know your DB anyway and tune it. For smaller applications (and I don't mean only toy applications) it usually isn't an issue.

fabian2k··on PostgreSQL for Everything
MySQL had some problematic design decisions initially. They might be fixed now, but the impression remained. And later there was the added complication that they were bought by Oracle, so you didn't really know how this would turn out in the end.

PostgreSQL also had more features back then, e.g. the JSON support is very nice if you need to do anything that doesn't neatly fit into the relational model.

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