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mvandermeulen

21 karma · joined March 15, 2023

Engineering. Sydney.

GitHub username is the same as HN.

mark [at] vdm.id.au

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mvandermeulen··on What we lost the last time code got cheap
That’s a cricket ball
mvandermeulen··on Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation
Ever != recent years
mvandermeulen··on Apple Platform Security (Jan 2026) [pdf]
You wouldn’t happen to work in North Norfolk would you?
mvandermeulen··on Claude Code daily benchmarks for degradation tracking
You’re lucky they have even admitted a problem instead of remaining silent and quietly fixing it. Do not expect ethical behaviour from this company.
mvandermeulen··on So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?
I would rather parenting be the responsibility of parents and I resent the selfish individuals who wilfully burden others with the various costs associated with their demands for safety from their own choices over taking responsibility for themselves. No impact to others is too great for those who insist anything they don’t wish to be exposed to is dealt with at the societal level.

If an at risk child’s parent is unwilling to do what they believe is the right thing by their child then they have failed the child and need to get a grip - confiscate the device or change the wifi password or sleep with the router under your pillow if you have to it’s really not that hard.

mvandermeulen··on Claude Cowork exfiltrates files
I have noticed an abundance of Claude config/skills/plugins/agents related repositories on GitHub which purport to contain some generic implementation of whatever is on offer but also contain malware inside a zip file.

They all make use of the GitHub topic feature to be found. The most recent commit will usually be a trivial update to README.md which is done simply to maintain visibility for anyone browsing topics by recently updated. The readme will typically instruct installation by downloading the zip file rather than cloning the repo.

I assume the payload steals Claude credentials or something similar. The sheer number of repos would suggest plenty of downloads which is quite disheartening.

It would take a GitHub engineer barely minutes to implement a policy which would eradicate these repos but they don’t seem to care. I have also been unable to use the search function on GitHub for over 6 months now which is irrelevant to this discussion but it seems paying customers cannot count on Github to do even the bare minimum by them.

mvandermeulen··on SHARP, an approach to photorealistic view synthesis from a single image
I thought this was going to be the Super Troopers version
mvandermeulen··on Cloudflare was down
What was the AI slop part?
mvandermeulen··on DNS Provider Quad9 Sees Piracy Blocking Orders as "Existential Threat"
What is always the governments fault?
mvandermeulen··on Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks
Thank you Europe?
mvandermeulen··on Claude Code on the web
Unfortunately Anthropic have completely lost my trust. It’s very unlikely that I will ever return to purchasing from a company that behaves in the manner in which they do.
mvandermeulen··on Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer
This is extremely concerning. I was reading this thread thinking thank god this could only happen in the US.

My concern is around the sequence of events that needed to take place for this to happen to you. Also as a former network operator I want to know how laws like the data retention act, identify and disrupt, etc play a role in these situations - ie who triggered what. I think I’ll review your comment history.

Sounds like you have handled it in about as healthy manner as one could hope. I saw that as a compliment.

mvandermeulen··on CVE program faces swift end after DHS fails to renew contract
Sir Humphrey ran that meeting if I recall correctly
mvandermeulen··on Breaking into apartment buildings in five minutes on my phone
This is pretty much all it takes in any western country. Some areas might require a little more effort but nothing substantial.

In fairness, the blame for this kind of enabling attitude is mostly attributable to me locking myself out of the building and having to buzz my long suffering neighbours at all kinds of ungodly hours. Proud moments.

mvandermeulen··on Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says
How close do we need to be for you to help a brother out? Feeling seriously unsupp0rted right now
mvandermeulen··on WordPress Is in Trouble
Russia does all of the things you’re alluding to at arguably a much greater scale.

Also as you’ve outlined, plenty of the misinformation is targeted at Israeli citizens themselves and banning those people from the opportunity to engage outside of their bubble makes no logical or moral sense

mvandermeulen··on Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
It’s possible I will never read a worse written article so completely devoid of any actual information. I wonder why they bothered writing it
mvandermeulen··on Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
Was this necessary? The comment was on a tech forum about the tech issues, do we really need to reprosecute the argument that it wasn’t real boxing here too? There are plenty of other places for those so painfully inclined to do so
mvandermeulen··on StabilityAI releases Stable Diffusion 3.5
Yes, please continue. What else did your friend tell you?
mvandermeulen··on UK rail minister got engineer sacked for raising safety concerns
Basically this happened in NSW Australia too. For anyone interested, it was Rod Staples who was fired and you can easily get a sense for the kind of guy he is in the documentary series “Sydney’s Super Tunnel”.
mvandermeulen··on Disney seeks dismissal of wrongful death lawsuit citing waiver in Disney+ terms
Surely this is an “only in the US” moment. Or are there other countries where this could be legally valid too?
mvandermeulen··on SAPwned: SAP AI vulnerabilities expose customers' cloud environments and privat
Excellent write up. This wasn’t a sophisticated attack. Seems like there is very little discipline at Salesforce when it comes to deploying production systems.
mvandermeulen··on I am using AI to drop hats outside my window onto New Yorkers
Just use a weight on the string with a configured go fast length and go slow length for your motor to observe
mvandermeulen··on Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models
Do they have exclusive rights?
mvandermeulen··on Space secrets leak disclosure
> Just two days ago I flipped through a slide deck from a security conference where the author, Jossef Harush Kadouri, found that using a model from a place like Huggingface means the author of the model can execute any code on your machine.

Proceeds to link to pdf of unknown origins

mvandermeulen··on Run VSCode and terminal on any iOS device
Well said. Blink Shell is one of the few apps that justifies its price point and they have actively worked hard to bring more features to it over the years. Even so, since its release it’s been the best shell app on iOS bar none.
mvandermeulen··on Leaked OpenAI Docs Show Sam Altman Clearly Aware of Silencing Former Employees
I got 99 problems but Altman ain’t one
mvandermeulen··on [dead]
Starts well
mvandermeulen··on Why strive? Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave's letter on the threat of AI [video]
How are they being screwed?
mvandermeulen··on The return of None-aware operators for Python
I mostly find myself dealing with None purely as a result of handling optional args in a function. This is largely a product of accomodating Pythons unusual handling of function arguments and their default values.

Interested in hearing of there is anything obvious I’ve missed or am yet to learn that I could use to avoid these situations or handle better.

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