jagrsw

Played around with coverage-guided fuzzing using honggfuzz and Intel BTS/PT a while back. Didn't have much time to fine-tune, but it seemed solid. It'd need a couple of months to properly dial in and see real results. The coverage was increasing, and aligning with the symbol tables, it was hitting the right parts of the kernel.

Harness: https://github.com/google/honggfuzz/tree/master/examples/lin...

Are you trying to be 'technically correct' here? :)

A cool article by Maciej Ceglowski (https://pinboard.in) in the spirit of the original article (and times too):

https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm

Not that I agree with it, just another wittingly-written take on the topic.

> where he holds the James and Carol Collins chair

What is the academic impact of holding an endowed chair like the 'James and Carol Collins chair'? It it related to any specific advantages or responsibilities? Those titles seem like they serve as a form of recognition for donors, is there a deeper significance behind them?

In US it also seems to be popular to use L for liter (or litre:)

Somehow 500m high tsunami destroying "only" 3.5 sq.km. of land doesn't strike me as monstrous. I was thinking it can maybe reach 5-10 km. into the land.

I may be mistaken, but does JSON offer the ability to define a schema with default values? Utilizing a single .proto file, I can tackle both the issues of default values and configuration structure, eliminating the need to manually check for missing mandatory sections.

However, I presume there are now JSON extensions that provide similar functionality?

nsjail author here (the original one, as the tool is also maintained by others), good job!

Irrelevant nit: .proto files are protobuf definition files (like this one: https://github.com/google/nsjail/blob/master/config.proto), a text representation of a specific protobuf contents is typically called (as per man clang-format): .textpb .pb.txt or .textproto - I use .config for examples distributed with nsjail, but it's licentia poetica :)

> you will be subjugating a possibly conscious mind into servitude.

Is the distinction between a protein-and-salt-water model versus an electronic-gates-and-memory model meaningful? From a computational standpoint, they both manipulate states and store data. Does substrate matter unless we're invoking metaphysical claims?

Regarding the video (https://twitter.com/Scobleizer/status/1716312250422796590), the device seems untypically polished but also a bit sus. Even if it contains living neurons, their functionality appears limited to mere survival rather than meaningful data processing. The claim that it's/can-be "more efficient than a GPU" (even if in the future) is premature at this point IMO.

There's one register called CCR on m68k and CR on PPC, so that's probably not an accident ;)

Since the 1990s PowerPC/POWER has been touted as viable alternative to the x86 architecture. Initially, they gained traction through PowerMacs and Amigas with accel-cards, as well as via PPC versions of Windows and OS/2. Next, they aimed to compete in the cloud, where ARM eventually outpaced them.

I have first-hand experience porting https://phoenix-rtos.com/ to PowerPC back in the early 2000s and it's a very sane CPU arch (in comparison to x86). However, it's evident that POWER lags behind x86, ARM, and now RISC-V, both in terms of use and public attention.

Incorrect. It's a bit problematic to compare EU as a whole, because countries join and leave, but if you compare bigger EU countries to Canada, Canada is not significantly better.

Also Canada has a higher real population growth which skews the data (per capita would be better), and on the per capita basis Canada looks pretty bleak.

https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

(nominal)

  Canada: 2000: 742B 2018: 1710B (230% growth)
  Germany: 2000: 1940B 2018: 3940B (203% growth)
  France: 2000: 1360B 2018: 2018: 2770B (203% growth)
  Poland: 2000: 198B 2018: 585B (295% growth)

(PPP)

  Canada: 2000: 916B 2019: 1970B (215%)
  Germany: 2000: 2390B 2019: 4693B (196%)
  France: 2000: 1683B 2019: 3241B (192%)
  Poland: 2000: 451B 2019: 1316B (291%)

Per capita (PPP):

  Canada: 2000: 29900 2019: 51600 (172%)
  Germany: 2000: 29400 2019: 56400 (191%)
  France: 2000: 28600 2019: 49800 (174%)
  Poland: 2000: 11700 2019: 34700 (296%)

Edit: my mistake, you said "last decade", but the 2010-2019 comparison is even more damning to Canada, 7% growth over 10 years vs 14% for Germany and 25% for Poland. (GDP - nominal).

In the current Confidential Computing landscape, trust is being shifted from the cloud service provider to the hardware vendor. Whether it's AMD-SEV or Intel's SGX/TDX, the trust "root" becomes the entity responsible for creating the secure enclave or confidential VM.

It's important to recognize that this 'root of trust' must still exist somewhere.

While homomorphic encryption offers an possibility for computational privacy without the need for this kind of trust, it isn't a one-size-fits-all solution due to its computational overhead and limitations. (although I'm not an expert on that).

  > In order to have any chance of successfully rallying of people you do need
  > to appeal to some of their base instincts

I understand your point about the role of nationalism in Russian politics. However, it's crucial for us in the proverbial "West" to have a nuanced understanding of Navalny, because it's too easy to equate "political victimhood" == "purity of intentions".

I'm not questioning his courage or opposition to Putin; my aim is to highlight that his political ideology isn't straightforward.

Should he unexpectedly assume presidency, his past statements make it unclear whether he'd reverse Russia's actions in Ukraine, (but there would be a chance).

While Navalny's courage in facing political persecution is commendable, it's important to contextualize his earlier views to understand him fully.

Before his imprisonment and prior to the escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, Navalny held positions that some might describe as nationalistic. For example, his stance on Crimea has been ambivalent, with statements that sometimes tacitly accept Russia's annexation of the region.

Navalny has a history of ethnocentric comments and has been involved in nationalist rallies in Russia. This complicates the narrative that he is solely a liberal figure fighting for democracy.

He opposes Putin's regime, but his political ideology doesn't necessarily align with values of international law, human rights, and economic freedoms.

What's the theoretical max bandwidth in LEO's near-vacuum? Could we use a wide 1GHz-1THz channel for directional beams to hit 1Tbps, given a decent SNR?

Cosmic dust and H atoms seem like non-issues for 1000km links? Would power or thermal reqs be an issue here?

I understand it's only about satellite-to-satellite, but still it's interesting.

Violence during uprisings is often targeted at military structures and is generally not classified as terrorism under international law or ethics. This is obviously not a case in the discussed topic.

Blanket condemnation oversimplifies a complex issue.

In the limit sure, but technically it was Anatolia (Asia Minor) or Caucasus (Asia).

Or Europeans displacing the peaceful Neanderthals from their homelands.

malloc can use mmap (aside from s/brk) - it's impossible these days to sandbox any more complex program and not allow mmap (arguments can be limited though to only a subset of flags).

Polish radio (Program 1) brodacasted (and maybe still does) a time signal at 12:00 every day. It's a series of beeps and the end of the last and the longest beep marks 12:00. Here's how it sounds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p34LVMQI19M&t=129s

Fun fact, in the past (I suppose it's obsolete by now, since time and distance are defined in terms of the speed of light now) the carrier of the Program 1 (225kHz - as visible on the video) was an official standard of frequency in Poland.

HN comments' section most likely :)

I vaguely remember those days, late '80s and early '90s, and a lot of it probably had to do with IBM's reputation. Amiga had its pro uses - like smaller TV stations using it with VideoToaster or Scala for broadcast management. But PCs had this vibe of being "serious" or "professional" that Amiga, Atari, and Mac just didn't have.

On the technical side, Amiga had some downsides too. Its OS was in ROM, and while it was way ahead of DOS and early Windows back in '87, it got outdated by the early '90s. Smaller Amiga models didn't support hard drives without buying a pricey add-on, making them more like game machines where you were stuck swapping floppies.

But if you look at OS and CPU architecture, it was almost like comparing a well-designed system to a mess. DOS was clunky, and x86 had its weird quirks: limited registers, awkward 8-bit compatibility, segmentation over paging, unnecessary IO mode/addressing instead of MMIO, messy assembler (prefixes, segments, adhoc instructions) you name it.

While I get the sentiment, implementing full Unicode support directly in the keyboard firmware would pose challenges. Consider mechanical keyboards where keys are swappable; you'd need a mechanism to inform the firmware of the current configuration, either through dip switches or a separate firmware tool. It's not as straightforward as it might seem.

Quick nitpick on Polish keyboard layouts. The "Polish (standard)" is more often referred to as the "typist" layout in Poland. IBM's docs say this is required for government contracts. I haven't seen it in any dev or home environments, but it wouldn't surprise me if some compliance-focused IT departments in the government enforce it.

<Note the duplicated entries for two of the diacritics that are used in Polish.> - did the author conflate ż with ź? A rookie mistake! :)

I'm running the 'pl' layout on my Linux box. The Alt(Gr) layer outputs the following: ≠²³¢€½§·«»–śðæŋ’ə…łźć„”ńµ≤≥. Some are expected (diacritics, €), but the presence of characters like ¢, ð, æ, ŋ, and ə is somewhat baffling, I wonder what's the history here.

The idea here is that in Polish it's 'herbata' - which is 'herba' 'thea'

Both come from PIE "wódr" for water. Romance languages descended ftom a synonym "ekeh" which resulted in aqua/agua/eau/... and the word itself meant "a body of water" like a lake or a river iirc.

English is increasingly using the singular 'they' as a workaround, since alternative options like 've,' 'ze,' 'zhe,' and 'xer' didn't gain traction. This comes with its own set of issues—initially, it was a bit disorienting for me, and even now it often requires a mental pause to parse what the speaker is referring to.

I'd welcome a more authoritarian approach here: globally adopt a new pronoun, go through a transitional period, and then we're all on the same page. Some sci-fi novels have toyed with this concept.

IMO gendered pronouns don't add much value in many languages (with exceptions - poetry etc.). In Slavic languages, it's relatively straightforward to deduce gender from the pronoun, but in Germanic and Romance languages, it's more obfuscated.

The Radio-Stop was not exactly a secret - I remember talking about it with an amateur radio operator ca. 2002.

He was back then saying that the railways will start operating GSM-R in the near future, and the problem of the unauthenticated Radio-Stop will go away :)

Hamming distance (and popcnt) is also used in gradient descent scenarios.

Eg. here's part of fuzzing engine code, where it tries to produce an input which matches some form of variable check inside the fuzzed code:

https://github.com/google/honggfuzz/blob/1f09e3bfb0785d9b311...

  register uint8_t v = ((sizeof(Arg1) * 8) - __builtin_popcount(Arg1 ^ Arg2));
  uint8_t prev = ATOMIC_GET(globalCovFeedback->bbMapCmp[pos]);
    if (prev < v) {
    ...