jcims

Visited Japan for the first time in December. I stayed at Airbnb's in Tokyo and Kyoto.

There were no $4 lunch bowls nearby, but I didn't need that to appreciate that I could walk to six restaurants, two wine shops and three cafes in less than three minutes. It was wonderful.

One way to find out!

Yeah the days before journaling filesystems, a moment to consider your actions as fsck did its best to clean up the mess you made.

I have it on a tshirt. Pretty sure most people think it's just an emotional rant in emoji form.

Reminds me of my rather memorable introduction to special characters invoking functions, seeing this dastardly little quip in the email signature of someone in a mailing list (circa '95 or so).

    :(){:|:&};:

My curiosity piqued, I pasted it into the shell on my terminal in a pure example of FAFO. The poor little Sparc 5 I was using ground to a halt over the course of about ten seconds. The reboot was as hard as the lesson. xD

Still with pretty low latency (25-35ms) as well (similar to the Standby (aka pause) state you can put the account into for $5/mo)

Nice! Thank you!

I just did an experiment yesterday with Opus 4.5 just operating in agent mode in vscode copilot. Handed it a live STS session for AWS to see if it could help us troubleshoot an issue. It was pretty remarkable seeing it chop down the problem space and arrive at an accurate answer in just a few mins.

I'll definitely check out the video later. Thanks!

Mind if I ask what models you’re using for CTF? I got out of the game about ten years ago and have been recently thinking about doing my toes back in.

As multi-step reasoning and tool use expand, they effectively become distinct actors in the threat model. We have no idea how many different ways the alignment of models can be influenced by the context (the anthropic paper on subliminal learning [1] was a bit eye opening in this regard) and subsequently have no deterministic way to protect it.

1 - https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/

Most of this physical infrastructure is trivially identifiable in Google Maps.

Whether or not we work at the same place, we work at the same place.

Nice! Thanks!

LLMs have allowed me to start using jq for more than pretty printing JSON.

It feels like there are several conversations happening that sound the same but are actually quite different.

One of them is whether or not large models are useful and/or becoming more useful over time. (To me, clearly the answer is yes)

The other is whether or not they live up to the hype. (To me, clearly the answer is no)

There are other skirmishes around capability for novelty, their role in the economy, their impact on human cognition, if/when AGI might happen and the overall impact to the largely tech-oriented community on HN.

My thinking as well.

How could something so remarkably stable and functionally indistinguishable among its peers also be so complex?

I had the same thoughts reading this. I think there’s an optimal blend of blurters and thinkers, one isn’t better than the other. I find that I do both, it just kind of depends on my comfort with the subject matter.

What use is extrapolating what I said to its extreme end? In 1999 I quit my full time secure job to start a company. My wife was a stay at home mom, we had a new baby and a new mortgage for a house that was still being built. Yes it's possible, but counterexamples don't mean it's not a factor.

This is one of those areas where family starts to influence decisions. My wife and I had kids between 24 and 28. From that point forward, 'supporting the family' took priority over personal fulfillment.

Now that our kids are grown and self-supporting, it's wild how much simpler the risk calculation is. But at 52 with engineering manager being the dominant role in my CV, not particularly appealing to the small companies making big moves that I'm interested in.

Honestly I bet you would have at least a reasonable intuition about it if you were among them. It's pretty remarkable how much our distractions and 'being indoors' all the time dulls our senses to nature.

I started doing astrophotography about three years ago. I'd always been interested in 'space' but never really spent hours upon hours out at night over the course of months actually just studying the night sky. I remember wondering as a kid how people even thought about planets or came up with these wild stories with the constellations...to me it just kind of looked like a bright field of randomly twinkling lights.

Well, when you're out every night from 10pm to 2am looking up, it all just kind of comes alive. You see everything. The motion of the planets, the elliptic upon which they travel, the gradual shift of the entire field as the seasons change, the undulations of the moon and it's varied trajectory across the sky. The shifting of the sun's set and rise and the ebb and flow of day vs night. Everything. Your mind just starts to harmonize with the rhythm of it all. It's pretty wonderful.

I've been in an engineering manager role on and off for the past 7 years at two different companies. Both of which are highly regulated and incur a ton of audits, attestations and this impenetrable knot of distributed dependencies for segregation of duty and other 'stuff'. As a result I'm in meetings 75% of my working hours and rarely get involved with anything close to the actual technology my team delivers.

In the past two months I've been on two 4-6 hour incident management calls due to failures in our service providers and it's been quite some time since I felt that good about a day's work. No meetings, no planning, no bullshit...just raw collaboration and tactical problem solving. Even got to flex some of the skills that have been dormant for far too long.

Feelsgoodman.

>Putting together an exhaustive list of all the ways code interacts with the outside world is hard.

Maintaining it over time is even harder.

I did a bunch of work with Verisign as a contractor back in the early 2000s and got to see some of the systems and infrastructure issuing a good portion of the world's certificates at that time. 15 years later I was at Google when they let an intermediate certificate in their SMTP certs expire and had a major GMail outage. At work last week we had a major outage related to certificate issues. Of course there are thousands upon thousands of stories like that in between.

The chains of trust you can build with PKI have been incredibly useful and instrumental to securing code, data and traffic, but the fact that it's still subject to such brittle failure modes is bemusing.

It's wild. It's basically just straight up theft wrapped in layers of disclaimers and circumstances.

I was in Dusseldorf headed to Budapest and I spent two hours with ticket agents, call center folks and Amex travel and couldn’t get any motion.

They said the complicating factor was that the flight out of DUS was still available. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> Lufthansa

I had to walk away from a $600 ticket that I booked at the last minute b/c in the 30 seconds between the time I paid for the ticket and the time the booking returned, the connecting flight filled up and I had to wait a day I didn't have for the next one. Couldn't get a single consideration from anyone, they said they couldn't cancel the ticket b/c the first leg was still available. Just had to walk away from the money and find another airline.

I'm sure it happens on every airline but man I was pissed. They go to the bottom of the list until the next tomfoolery occurs.

I used to be knee deep in PKI stuff, now I hardly pay attention.

Two quick questions:

1 - Are there any TLS libraries that enable warnings when certs are nearing expiration?

2 - Are there any extensions in the works (or previous failed attempts) for TLS to have the client validate the next planned certificate and signal both ends when that fails?

Eden would be a great name for a sterile yet fertile planet waiting for a visitor.

Is this similar to what Extropic is doing?

Nice. This was a detail I wasn't picking up on for some reason.

>It's kind of why I think sentient life is incredibly rare.

Agreed. The universe is big, but combinatorics are bigger.

I'd be disappointed but ultimately unsurprised if an all-knowing oracle said it has only happened once in the history of the universe. My follow up question, of course, would be whether or not it happened on Earth.