mitxela

Having a central arbiter of contested resources is literally the reason governments exist.

It's not punishment-oriented. You accept that people get away with it 99% of the time and hope that 1% is enough deterrent. A punishment-oriented society insists you must be punished every time you do the thing.

There is a prefetch instruction but you also don't need to in obvious loops like that because the CPU has hardware to detect sequential access patterns. IIRC one test showed a CPU could prefetch up to 11 interleaved sequential access patterns with different strides.

Reddit's worse than X. At least X lets you read the direct thing you linked to when logged out.

That's when you have at least one bit of each nonce. But if you think about it, the probability of this broken generator giving exactly the same output as the unbroken generator is (2^64-1)÷(2^64) so that's a lower bound on how often you don't get any information from this bias. (Assuming 64-bit generation!)

getting any information at all based on this bias

Example: to get a number between 0-2 (3 values) with a 4-bit RNG (16 values, 0-15) you can split the set 0-14 into 3 groups of 5 (doesn't matter if you use modulus or divide) but if you get 15 you need to re-roll.

Some cryptographic algorithms can be broken by this sort of bias (after 2^20, 2^35, or 2^70 operations), others are completely unaffected. There's certainly no excuse for not knowing, at least.

It's most likely a quick patch for a previous bug where the RNG would fail but misreport it as a success with all 0 bits. The quick patch is to make all 0s a failure.

Even if you use these directly for cryptography, most cryptography is not practically affected by being unable to receive a zero word. For instance you can choose a private or symmetric key from any random distribution you like, as long as it's got enough entropy to be unguessable. The fact that your private key can't have a zero half makes no difference because that was extremely unlikely to happen anyway.

In some protocols that rely on random input when encrypting (like the EC flaw that broke the PS3) it may cause an observable statistical bias after 2^70 encryptions or so.

The code didn't rely on uninitialized memory as an entropy source. The patch was incorrect and cleared the buffer in two places: one with uninitialised memory, and one where it had been filled with seed entropy.

The code you're responsible for is the code that runs on the CPU. Compilers in the day could not optimize this away.

Note that this issue doesn't make rdrand useless for entropy. It's still as useful as always if passing through any whitening or mixing algorithm.

The principle here, for anyone confused, is that a consumer has very weak negotiating power against a business and therefore needs basic rights, but when two businesses negotiate, it's a level playing field and if they wanted those rights they would've been easily able to get them.

i.e. engagement bait

Alternative copy/paste of the tweet/Xcretion:

I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude. There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.

For pure design space exploration that can be a victory, equivalent to sketching a UI on paper being faster than making it in HTML, but is that the work you're actually doing most of the time? Maybe for some people it is.

Array-oriented programming. Add all velocities to all positions, etc

"rideshare" means "taxis" now

Europe isn't the richest place. Some of the western cities surely have nice buses, but there are plenty of old shabby buses there too and people still ride them. Might be that the routing and timing sucks, or the general cultural individualism.

A big one: no need to find parking! Or to go back to your parked car on the reverse trip. You can do a triangle trip A,B,C,A with public transit. With a car it has to be A,B,C,B,A as you left your car at B.

Caveat: the bus can be a little bit slower and still win, because you don't need to drive. Or the car can be a little bit slower and still win, because people are antisocial. When the difference is more than a little, then you're correct.

In aggregate, people go the fastest way - no way to stop this from happening. In places where everyone takes public transit, the transit is fast. To make more people take public transit, you make the transit fast.

Reserving lanes as bus lanes can actually speed up car traffic by making more people switch to bus.

Ugh, turnstiles. Proof-of-payment systems have so much lower friction. You buy a ticket before getting on; there are no barriers between the street and the train; sometimes there's a ticket inspector team on the train who verifies you have a ticket. If you don't have a ticket you're arrested on the spot.

It will never work in a punishment-oriented society because you're very likely to get away with riding for free if you don't do it regularly, and these societies feel that catching the bad guys is more important than working well for the good guys.

It's compatible with a card payment system but then proving criminal intent to free-ride is harder because the system gets complicated for the user. It's great with a paper concession ticket.

Of course it has the incentive. Even in this thread people are getting mad about it costing too much.

Is it just because of an artificial low denominator?

I don't like having more feudalism though. One company owning all the good land - yikes!

They haven't created AGI either, they're just applying the CADT development model to money.

Only two parties who are legally forbidden from sharing have those logs instead of 10 who aren't

It's true of android too, you're just used to it. Even Graphene eliminated the back button, and makes you swipe left from the right side instead, and the app switcher and home buttons, and makes you swipe up-right from the bottom.

Martian packets are those with source addresses like 192.168.1.1 (on the public internet), 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0.

EU has these laws