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meltynesson Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry

Concentrate and re-read difficult materials, you can do it!

meltynesson Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry

> Trump is a malicious actor. He literally tried to overthrow democracy on January 6!

> Congratulations on empathizing with an authoritarian.

It speaks to the strength of different agency administrators if they can walk into the next oval office, grab the duly elected President by the arm, and say "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself" over and over again. Putting a stop to that wouldn't be so controversial, I think.

> Stop being so gullible.

You are disregarding the election angle and instead misdirecting, the system of validating votes (according to Krebs' own assessment) is dependent on a system with publicly-known flaws.

I understand that the aim can be to enfranchise and enable more voters, but to that aim my statements are agnostic, except for revealing more facts about the case.

meltynesson Toothpaste widely contaminated with lead and other metals, US research finds

You're right! I am a sheeple, and now I've woken up!

meltynesson Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry

https://web.archive.org/web/20250130231413/https://www.cisa....

Here's an article supposedly of Krebs provenance, which implicitly lumps Trump himself in as a "malicious actor".

> can lead to uncertainty in the minds of voters; uncertainty that can be exploited by malicious actors

Maybe not something I would want said or repeated by my administration either, disregarding the veracity.

There's no date or byline either, so according to the authoritative FAQ, if this were to stand, it would be an admission of acting in bad faith.

Given federal government communications sprawl, it's quite a needle, pretty good performance in my opinion to root this out, disregarding sowing doubt about a federated election and who's will specifically it should / will service.

Voter inclusion (who should / may vote) is itself at issue, but even in the assessment here given DOGE findings unveils possible oversights, FWAB in the FAQ is cited to depend in part on SSNs and in light of the DOGE findings regarding 150+ year olds collecting social security, the security assessment itself does not describe a system that is definitively air-tight, or even terribly reassuring, if there's doubt in your mind about who voted, and how.

meltynesson Toothpaste widely contaminated with lead and other metals, US research finds

Ok so diving in, The Guardian is reblogging a blog "lead safe mama".

"lead safe mama" is an activist and filmmaker, who does not appear to have a scientific background, and who may primarily be motivated by taking on legal cases. [0]

Furthermore, in the toothpaste (informal, blogger-led) study it appears that the testing was performed by "Purity Laboratories" using "ICP-MS" instrumentation. [1]

According to "Purity's" own marketing it's admitted the "ICP-MS" may cause interferences, though they aren't specifically quantified. [2] Other laboratories primarily market the technique specifically for testing raw for contamination[3] and discusses "dynamic range", rather than what I speculate is "a complex matrix" though I myself am not technical enough to recognize the meaning there.

According to an instrument vendor, Agilent, there are other considerable number of other constraints and variables where the laboratory process itself could introduce issues[4] and alarmingly, I'm unable to locate any details regarding specificity or FPRs, and there's some evidence of targeted advocate edits on Wikipedia regarding the viability of this application of this technique. Furthermore these advocate edits specify a different methodology for health-related detection, rather testing wastes for result of contamination than testing products themselves. Even furthermore Agilent, one vendor that has strategically been selected for my review of technical details about the technique specifies "ICP-MS is an elemental analysis technique, meaning it is used to measure elements, rather than the molecules" but it's difficult to determine whether the technique can avoid creating FPs with molecules. The process itself seems like it is not fool-proof, it would take some expertise in plasma chemistry to understand and predict completely which I cannot provide, or probably some pretty intricate calibration details which are not available for this study.

It's conceivable that testing products represents a misuse of the technique, it at least differs in scope from the use-case described throughout the Wikipedia article. There's a section on Wikipedia regarding use of the technique for Pharmaceuticals but it is vague, speculative, and drifts substantially from the actual topic at hand into usage for forensics.

[0] https://tamararubin.com/2023/07/lead-safe-mama-llc-rates-for...

[1] https://tamararubin.com/2025/04/orajel-kids-anti-cavity-toot...

[2] https://www.puritylabsinc.com/heavy-metals-testing

[3] https://www.eag.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/High-Purity-R...

[4] https://www.agilent.com/en/product/atomic-spectroscopy/induc...

meltynesson BitNet b1.58 2B4T Technical Report

I'm more interested in how users are taking 95-99% to 99.99% for generation-assisted tasks. I haven't seen a review or study of techniques, even though on the ground it's pretty trivial to think of some candidates.

meltynesson Two Years of Rust

Functions, in the sense that there are global variables, is strongly discouraged by the language. It's usually much easier to define a type so there is a clear delineation.

That is, from Mongo, you use Serde and wind up with only valid records operated upon, of a table of such values.

meltynesson Two Years of Rust

Definitely with my time in the language, my head chatter takes `&` operator to literally just mean "borrow" and then you're inheriting 1x indirection operations.

meltynesson Two Years of Rust

Nice to have when you still refuse to make learn

meltynesson Two Years of Rust

Gripes about the borrow checker I think would be cured with the following surprising fact, and interesting "problem solving" approach to the language's design:

In Rust there's at least 5 types of everything, in order of strength:

- Value / unqualified / "owned"

  - Generically, T

  - Optionally mutable

- Mutable Reference

  - &mut T

  - you can only have one of these for a given value

- Reference / Shared reference

  - &T

  - you can have arbitrarily many for a given value

- Raw constant pointer

  - *const T

  - you can have arbitrarily many, and they're not liveness checked

- Raw mutable pointer

  - *mut T

  - you can have arbitrarily many, and they're not liveness checked

Now I say at least because things get appreciably more complicated when you find yourself dealing with lifetimes which apply to "References", those are indeed themselves types, but ultimately represent a compiler-executed calculus regarding liveness relative to some Value.

They also can 'fan out' like a multiple-dereference pointer, but the tricky part is how the APIs for Types conform to these, for example;

Since there are 3 different types of things in a collection, then there are 3 different ways to iterate over them `iter()`, `iter_mut()`, `into_iter()` in increasing order of strength. Most of the breadth or early complexity arises from the urge to treat these as a distraction, rather than a fundamental aspect of systems code.

Crates / modules are a bit of a meme: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/ujry0b/media_how_to_c...

Bevy has done some work investigating build performance: https://bevyengine.org/learn/quick-start/getting-started/set...

meltynesson Functional Programming Lessons Conclusion

Would you consider TLA+ functional? It sounds like the tension you're describing might be how most distributed consensus protocols are implemented as imperative code, and part of the Raft excursion involved writing a TLA+ proof of the protocol.

https://github.com/ongardie/raft.tla

meltynesson Ask HN: Has your YouTube homepage gotten suddenly generic and bad?

Seen some rendering issues in the recommended feed. Channel recommendations unable to display the full name of the channel.

meltynesson How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs

I was aware of this, I think a talk about a performance regression on the BSD variant these appliances run was up here recently.

I mean I guess a similar argument holds for colocating with telecoms that would have recently been cable or IPTV providers.

It'd be pretty tough to design around though if any of their caching infrastructure reveals viewership, or engagement data to intermediaries.

meltynesson How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs

I wonder how much of Netflix infra is on AWS. Feels like building a castle on someone else's kingdom at that scale; in light of the Prime Video investment, and I guess twitch too.

meltynesson Gutsy Traders Make $1.5B Triple-Leveraged Bet on Nasdaq 100

These are only exposed intra day, don't be dumb, reader.

meltynesson California now has more EV charging ports than gas nozzles

I feel like someone really smart who wasn't lazy could get up and figure out an expected load factor weather-adjusted range using an Erlang distribution and apply your charging time hypothesis to see if parity is over or under stasis for the current proportion of EVs.

meltynesson A Study of Undefined Behavior Across Foreign Function Boundaries in Rust Libs

Very interesting work.

Flate2 is an odd crate so I'm not too surprised to hear there's issues with it.

It seems unusual to rely on an FFI for something that isn't extremely intricate, broad, or brittle like syscalls / drivers / runtimes, I'd think that one zlib implementation would be as good as another, but maybe I'm naive.

Thankfully crates makes it pretty plain who would see fit to build on top of that.

meltynesson Sports supplement creatine makes no difference to muscle gains, trial finds

> Participants completed a 3-day food log for the 3 days prior to each assessment (baseline, post seven-day wash-in phase, and post 12-week RT intervention) to provide an estimate of their typical total kilocalorie (kcal/day) and macronutrient (g/day of carbohydrate, fat, and protein) intake

That's a lot of extrapolation, Marmite-flavored protein powder, no doubt?

> that comprising 3 full-body sessions a week for 12 weeks (Supplementary Materials, Table S1) [Table S1 describes 3 different bro-splits, comprised of 45 different assistance exercises and no planned progression in intensity, excepting "To failure"]

Ah yes, I see they've confused resistance exercise with resistance training, indeed a mistake.

Granted, it does seem like a fine time to avoid "fitness powders" in light of "The Rhisotope Project" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40819617

meltynesson LLM providers on the cusp of an 'extinction' phase as capex realities bite

It sounds like you probably mean OPEX, I mean unless you explicitly are talking about loan payments.

meltynesson How to Secure Existing C and C++ Software Without Memory Safety [pdf]

I sense OP's referring to raw pointer operations permitted by the unsafe dialect of the language.

meltynesson Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

I'm building a lock-free deque in Rust. I'm not sure what you might need it for, or that it will even pan out to be functional, but, it's a start.

https://github.com/meltyness/joque

meltynesson Things Are Bad at Tesla. They're About to Get Much Worse

I definitely have heard a frazzled shift in tone from the fine folks at donation-centered talk-oriented journalism folks which I have listened to obsessively for years.

I think it's OK, if there's a lion hollering you might need some gravity and momentum to hear it and they are certainly trying to find the new polarity.

meltynesson Advent of No-AI

I sense that it can make things hard to learn, and abolished it from my practice on Leetcode. It's not permitted for contests, and the magic or subtly wrong answers don't facilitate learning as well, and obscure the leaps you can make by iterating (more slowly) on your own inferior solutions. Pain is an OK teacher.

I've been doing Leetcode in Rust which, statistically, is a poor choice. When I have asked, it writes solutions that look like python or C, unable to identify when iterators are the appropriate tool.

It's not authoritative reference material, which my background in IT trained me to strongly, strongly prefer to, even my own intuition in situations I've seen before.

meltynesson You Need Subtyping

As I revisit, this also comes up more explicitly when dealing with lifetimes as a type, and stacked borrows.

[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/subtyping.html

meltynesson You Need Subtyping

Yeah I think this is "Deref coercion" in Rust.[0]

For example since Vec can Deref to Slice, you can syntactically run Slice methods on a Vec; meaning Vec is a subtype of Slice.

[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ops/trait.Deref.html#deref-coe...

meltynesson A language for building concurrent software with confidence

Looks like the runtime depends on rustix, and in turn, libc. Presumably building in cygwin/msys isn't out of the question. Other dependencies peppered around but this one seems like the least mutable.

meltynesson Whose code am I running in GitHub Actions?

Network enabled compute is definitely an unusual free lunch, but I suppose the trade off is handing out free source code.

meltynesson Japanese scientists use stem cell treatment to restore movement in spinal injury

Usually indicates that you already have, you can check your history in your profile.

meltynesson VMware turns its back on small businesses: 72-core license policy backlash

This looks pretty anemic compared to what I've seen from XCP-ng or proxmox:

https://cockpit-project.org/guide/195/feature-virtualmachine...

Thanks for the tip, though.

meltynesson Scallop – A Language for Neurosymbolic Programming

The SCC example is interesting, I wonder what behavior that gens to. Reminds me of Lean, have to suspect it may make the processor quite spicy, like Lean. Also don't see clear indication that this benefits from heterogeneous compute resources.

Oh, boy, it's written in Rust!