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kortex

8,442 karma · joined February 1, 2017

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kortex··on Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?
They are using the Hashicorp Vault implementation, and it's been around for years. I think we can safely say they know what they are doing.
kortex··on Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?
Until you get sued by JK Rowling. Unlikely? sure, but I wanted to decouple for other reasons.

That's why i went with PassCrux for mine. Can't argue that it's too close, since "crux" is just latin for cross, as in "crux of the matter" (JK likely invented horcrux as a portmanteau of horror + crux).

https://github.com/xkortex/passcrux

kortex··on Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?
That's why you have a public-ish recovery guide for all the other steps.
kortex··on Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?
You should add a feature where you can select the shares/threshold, with 3/5 being the default.

edit: d'oh! you do, I didn't get that far into using it yet cause I was on mobile.

kortex··on Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?
Glad to see this idea getting traction!

Had the same idea years ago (same hashicorp lib too) but lost motivation to polish it to the point I felt confident enough to Show HN. https://github.com/xkortex/passcrux

But given recent events, I want to restart work on it.

My use-case revolved more around preserving a master password e.g. to a password manager. I also wanted to support self-hosted backup, like hiding shares and giving directions to the parts to trusted friends. The shamir sharing part was straightforward but i really want to add forward error-correction to protect against partial data loss.

kortex··on GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
Hooo boy where do I begin? Dependency deadlocks are the big one - you try to share resource attributes (eg ARN) from one stack to another. You remove the consumer and go to deploy again. The producer sees no more dependency so it prunes the export. But it can't delete the export, cause the consumer still needs it. You can't deploy the consumer, because the producer has to deploy first sequentially. And if you can't delete the consumer (eg your company mandates a CI pipeline deploy for everything) you gotta go bug Ops on slack, wait for someone who has the right perms to delete it, then redeploy.

You can't actually read real values from Parameters/exports (you get a token placeholder) so you can't store JSON then read it back and decode (unless in same stack, which is almost pointless). You can do some hacks with Fn:: though.

Deploying certain resources that have names specified (vs generated) often breaks because it has to create the new resource before destroying the old one, which it can't, because the name conflicts (it's the same name...cause it's the same construct).

It's wildly powerful though, which is great. But we have basically had to create our own internal library to solve what should be non-problems in an IaC system.

Would be hilarious if my coworker stumbled upon this. I know he reads hn and this has been my absolute crusade this quarter.

kortex··on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers
> Anna Grzymala-Busse, a Stanford University international studies professor, said that seizing the means of production is a socialist and communist goal. "The difference is that with communism, there is also one ruling party that brooks no opposition and no pluralist civil society," she said.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/jul/03/seizing-means...

Collectivism and some amount of state controlled means of production are typical of many leftist systems. America already does this in many places: military, power, education, civil works. Communism stands out among other -isms on the left in that it is single-party and incompatible with democracy.

> suspicious gesture with his right hand

It was a Nazi salute. Don't believe me? Go to a crowded street corner and do the "suspicious gesture," and gauge the reaction.

kortex··on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers
> The people that started in 3d printing when they had to assemble the whole machine by hand are now sad to see their hobby replaced by something too easy, it feels like cheating.

I have a 10 year old kit-built prusa I3 sitting next to me. Its brother is in the basement next to a kossel. It's been years since they have seen action, there is a litany of small bits of work they need.

I unboxed an A1 Mini and it's been like an epiphany. I've been printing almost nonstop. It's so much FUN. I just send from my phone and it just works. Everything has been nearly flawless until last night where half a batch of mini utility knife frames started to spaghetti, probably my fault for not fully cleaning the build plate in a bit.

Beats the hell out of glue stick or blue tape, fussing with slicer params, babysitting the first layers, etc etc. Fuck that, gimme the cheat.

kortex··on xAI joins SpaceX
lol WHAT?

AI datacenters are bottlenecked by power, bandwidth, cooling, and maintenance. Ok sure maybe the Sun provides ample power, but if you are in LEO, you still have to deal with Earth's shadow, which means batteries, which means weight. Bandwidth you have via starlink, fine. But cooling in space is not trivial. And maintenance is out, unless they are also planning some kooky docking astromech satellite repair robot ecosystem.

Maybe the Olney's lesions are starting to take their toll.

Weirdest freaking timeline.

kortex··on xAI joins SpaceX
Satellites can adjust attitude so that the panels are always normal to the incident rays for maximum energy capture. And no weather/dust.

You also don't usually use the same exact kind of panels as terrestrial solar farms. Since you are going to space, you spend the extra money to get the highest possible efficiency in terms of W/kg. Terrestrial usually optimizes for W/$ nameplate capacity LCOE, which also includes installation and other costs.

kortex··on ICE protester says her Global Entry was revoked after agent scanned her face
Lol nowhere near the best, unfortunately. By multiple rankings.

https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu

kortex··on We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency
The simplest is drop the longest latency probe, and add a new one in the proximity of the fastest.
kortex··on We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency
I wonder if you could optimize for reducing the total probe count (at the expense of possibly longer total time, though it may be faster in some cases) by using some sort of "gradient descent".

Start by doing the multi-continent probe, say 3x each. Drop the longest time probes, add probes near the shortest time, and probe once. Repeat this pattern of probe, assess, drop and add closer to the target.

You accumulate all data in your orchestrator, so in theory you don't need to deliberately issue multiple probes each round (except for the first) to get statistical power. I would expect this to "chase" the real location continuously instead of 5 discrete phases.

I just watched the Veritasium video on potentials and vector fields - the latency is a scalar potential field of sorts, and you could use it to derive a latency gradient.

kortex··on OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again

    f"{os.urandom(8)}.ai"
kortex··on Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out
How about: maybe some things lie outside of the purview of empiricism and materialism, the belief in which does not radically impact one's behavior so long as they have a decent moral compass otherwise, can be taken on faith, and "proving" it does exist or doesn't exist is a pointless argument, since it exists outside of that ontological system.
kortex··on Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out
I can relate. It's definitely possible, but you have to really want it, and it takes a lot of work.

You need cybernetics (as in the feedback loop, the habit that monitors the process of adding habits). Meditate and/or journal. Therapy is also great. There are tracking apps that may help. Some folks really like habitica/habit rpg.

You also need operant conditioning: you need a stimulus/trigger, and you need a reward. Could be as simple as letting yourself have a piece of candy.

Anything that enhances neuroplasticity helps: exercise, learning, eat/sleep right, novelty, adhd meds if that's something you need, psychedelics can help if used carefully.

I'm hardly any good at it myself but it's been some progress.

kortex··on Proof of Corn
I think we are closer than most folks would like to admit.

in my wild guess opinion:

- 2027: 10%

- 2030s: 50%

- 2040: >90%

- 3000: 100%

Assuming we don't see an existential event before then, i think it's inevitable, and soon.

I think we are gonna be arguing about the definition of "general intelligence" long after these system are already running laps around humans at a wide variety of tasks.

kortex··on Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
It does objectively improve productivity though, beyond offsetting withdrawal.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341...

kortex··on “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”
That's literally AI though. AI has been around formally since 1956.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_workshop

AI != AGI != neural networks != LLMs

But Tao did mention ChatGPT so i believe LLMs were involved at least partially.

kortex··on US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
Going by the graph in the article, that's still ~13% of homes owned by investors with >5 properties. And that's total of what is currently held, it speaks nothing of liquidity. That number likely includes investors who have had that property for a long time, the current property buy-up likely means far greater than 13% of the market right now is going to those sorts of aggregators.

Dropping the price of a house by a few percentage points can be the make-or-break for some families. And small changes in availability can have large impacts on price.

If we banned (or severely penalized) all entities from owning more than 5 residential homes, this would probably reduce cost by a few percentage points across the board. That's thousands of dollars.

Personally, I think unoccupied homes in general ought to be penalized (beyond just tax burden, an actual vacancy tax).

kortex··on Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)
Yes. Sugar (and all of its downstream phenomena - diabetes, insulin resistance, the ease in which sugar adds calories without satiation signals) is well established to contribute to CVD. Long-chain (animal based) sat fat and trans fat is also well established to contribute to CVD. The high calorie density of fatty foods plays a big role, as does the overall palatability and "eatability" of low fiber, high fat, high sugar, delicious foods, making portion control challenging. That should be uncontroversial at this point.

The jury is unclear on:

- How the chain length of sat fats impact things (medium-chain triglycerides seem to be protective, but the boundary between medium and long is fuzzy)

- How the ratio of the various omega-N (3/6/9) unsat fats impacts health, particularly inflammation

- The whole "seed oil" thing is probably MAHA/conspiracy style false signal at the end of the day, but it hasn't been fully debunked and there are almost certainly facets of truth to it (seed oils are a form of ultra-processed food, and all UPFs are problematic)

Confounders, confounders everywhere. This whole field is just extremely challenging and noisy.

kortex··on alpr.watch
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It says nothing directly about privacy, for or against, let alone surveillance dragnets. I would contend it strongly implies in fact laws should protect and also not chill your ability to:

- go to and from a place of worship - go to and from a peaceful assembly - conduct free speech activities - conduct press/journalism - petition the government

If anything, the existing framework of laws implies a gap, that data should not be able to be hoovered up without prior authorization, since the existence of such a dragnet with a government possibly adversarial to certain political positions (e.g. labeling "AntiFa" terrorists) has quite the chilling effect on your movement and activity. US vs Jones (2012) ruled a GPS tracker constitutes a 4th Amendment search. If I have no phone on me, and a system is able to track my location precisely walking through a city, does it matter if the trace emitted by that black box is attached to me physically, or part of a distributed system? It's still outputting a dataframe of (timestamp, gps) over a huge area.

kortex··on alpr.watch
I think you have hit the nail on the head why more police funding, more surveillance tech, more dystopian BS that looks more like PreCrime every single day, is only going to get us so far.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but I think most folks (including criminals) believe crime is, generally speaking, bad. Folks commit crimes to survive, to enrich themselves, out of retribution, out of lapse of judgment, or lack of self control. Almost all some flavor of unmet needs. You put money into tackling those challenges, address why people are stealing, why turf wars break out, why addiction ruins lives and puts people in terrible positions, why poor nutrition and family support and mental health care lead to so many folks slipping through the cracks.

kortex··on alpr.watch
> the costs of implementing a zero-crime world are far greater than the crime.

Exactly, I like this. Thanks for helping me rephrase.

kortex··on alpr.watch
I'm probably not doing a great job of getting my point across, and most of that is on me. Let me try to clarify.

Every aspect of cybernetics (whether it be engineering, society/politics, biology) involves deliberate tradeoffs. In metaphor, we have a big knob with "liberty/crime" on one side and "surveillance/safety" on the other. It's highly nonlinear and there are diminishing returns at both extrema. Everyone (subconsciously) has some ideal point where they think that crime-o-stat should be set.

I'm saying don't turn it up to 11, and it's already set pretty high. It's increasingly technologically possible, and I think it's a bad thing to chase the long tail. I'm pretty happy with where we are at the present, but corporations keep marketing we need more cameras, more detection, more ALPRs, more algos, more predictive policing, more safety, who doesn't want to be more safe? I think it's very precarious.

I reiterate: it's uncomfortable, but I don't want to live in a world with zero crimes because everyone has probably committed crimes without even knowing it. The costs, both fiscal and in terms of civil liberties, of chasing ever-decreasing-crime are far higher than finding some stable setpoint that balances privacy and liberty with measures that justly deter crime. Let us not let the cure become worse than the disease.

kortex··on alpr.watch
Decreasingly so. Particularly if I am going to anything charged (e.g. political rallies). Which is a shame, they are very useful tools and it's a very real chilling effect.
kortex··on alpr.watch
I get it, I used to drive a GTI. I don't mind just loud exhaust by itself, as long as they are tuned well. It's the pops/crackling/backfires that set off all the neighborhood dogs and sound like they split the air that are a scourge around here. These folks also are the ones driving like maniacs in inappropriate contexts.
kortex··on alpr.watch
So we have stats, that's the closest we have to objective, but I guess we can't trust those. You say your anecdote contradicts "the stats", and I genuinely believe you. Sincerely, what's the alternative? Vibes? We gotta steer this ship (society) based on something.

How else do you condense down myriad and often conflicting datapoints of this complex human existence in order to get trends you can make decisions on?

kortex··on alpr.watch
Hilarious! If i didnt already have too many projects and hobbies, this is the kind of thing i'd do.

Maybe not a speed leaderboard, that just seems like a challenge to choon heads. But perhaps a "violation count". Also toss in a dB meter for loud exhaust (again dont make it a contest).

Edge compute with alpr/face/gait/whatever object detection at the camera is basically solved. Genie is out of the bottle. I think the most fruitful line of resistance is to regulate what can be done with that data once it leaves the device.

kortex··on alpr.watch
I dont personally agree but that is a really interesting argument I can kinda get behind. I guess the question is, what if you have footage of a crime being committed, and you would have a great lead if you only had a way to pair a vehicle with a person?
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