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namkton Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation

He also built the company, not the rockets. In a different thread here on HN, some of the SpaceX guys were commenting how he actually had very little understanding of rockets, understandably. But the credit goes to him regardless.

namkton We found critical vulnerabilities in Hive Social

Is there a 'rick-rolled' meme but with blockchain?

namkton Lastpass Security Incident

This was the immediate and exact same thought I had the moment I read the first sentence of the post. Then I stopped reading. Clearly this was not an engineering decision, and passwords should be trusted to no one but competent engineers and cryptographers.

namkton Lastpass Security Incident

Like on Hacker forums? :)

namkton Dropbox acquires Boxcryptor assets to bring zero-knowledge encryption to storage

Encryption is not for the poor.

namkton Goodbye, data science

Damn, this hits so many nails that it's got to be one of the biggest HN posts in a while.

namkton Charles V of Spain Secret Code Cracked

He does that all the time where he posts a link and quotes one or two paragraphs. It's also meant for the fanbase to comment on the post.

namkton Charles V of Spain Secret Code Cracked

He was Charles I of Spain and V of Germany. Still good ol' Charles but different major version numbers; motherfucker inherited quite a bit of land.

https://dbe.rah.es/biografias/10728/carlos-i-de-espana-y-v-d...

namkton Harvard mandates the bivalent Omicron-specific Covid-19 booster

The government publishes infection rates at the county level. The county's health department may also have guidelines that differ slightly from the general nation-wide ones. If there is an uptick of infections in the local community and the boosters are recommended there (though still not necessarily at the macroscopic level), then that seems pretty clear to me.

But I still concur with OP. I am not an expert, and I don't know how to choose between experts with differing opinions. What I do know is that I trust certain institutions more than others.

namkton Harvard mandates the bivalent Omicron-specific Covid-19 booster

No, "not having evidence" isn't the same as having evidence against.

That is exactly the point that I made above.

And where does it so clearly state in the website that second part? And of course it's ok, but that doesn't make it a recommendation.

namkton Harvard mandates the bivalent Omicron-specific Covid-19 booster

They don't recommend because they don't see clear evidence in outcomes. See my EMA link below. This doesn't make the recommendation any closer than recommending not to.

namkton Harvard mandates the bivalent Omicron-specific Covid-19 booster

This case is simple for me: I'll always follow EU/Canadian healthcare guidelines before US ones by a very long shot, unless there is an immediate problem in my local community where the US guidelines make more sense.

namkton Harvard mandates the bivalent Omicron-specific Covid-19 booster

Because only the US seems to have this guideline. Canada and the EU are not recommending boosters to the general population as pointed out above. It's similar for the flu; afaik, the EU recommends flu shots for ages 60+, not for the general adult population. The US makes a big deal every year on getting flu shots; in corporate media, in shops and outlets, etc.

Edit: I stand corrected on the Canadian front; I had old information.

namkton Harvard mandates the bivalent Omicron-specific Covid-19 booster

ECDC/EMA seem to have similar guidelines:

https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/ecdc-ema-update-recommenda...

e.g. "At the moment, there is no clear evidence to support giving a second booster dose to people below 60 years of age who are not at higher risk of severe disease. Neither is there clear evidence to support giving early second boosters to healthcare workers or those working in long-term care homes unless they are at high risk."

namkton Const vs. constexpr vs. consteval vs. constinit in C++20

Do you use any public libraries for those backend servers, or is it all home-grown? Curious what's at play.

namkton Refurb Weekend: The Sega Dreamcast

How exactly do you make the Dreamcast/PSO connect to one of these servers?

namkton CPU Port of OpenAI's Whisper Speech to Text

Great to see a C/C++ CPU-based implementation that runs on a variety of platforms. Most other ASRs seem to be either abandonware, a whole bunch of Python that only runs on PC, and/or solutions that send all your audio to someone's server.

namkton The Rune Programming Language

My assumption is that it's not just the syntax, but that their compiler does the right thing. Though someone said it's based on LLVM, so who knows how much control they get.

namkton The Rune Programming Language

It's constant time in that it always takes the same amount of time regardless of the extent to which the two strings are equal. It is a different concept than constant time in complexity analysis.

What's even more confusing is that it is also constant time in the complexity analysis sense given that the mac is usually a fixed-size string after choosing a hashing algorithm.

namkton The Rune Programming Language

I know, right? The strongest theoretical crypto is a one-time pad, often presented in its XOR form in the first chapter of every crypto book.

But hey, if Google says math comes first...

namkton The Rune Programming Language

Didn't they originally claim to never show ads in search given that it is in direct opposition to search results quality? Back in the days when Pagerank was hot.

namkton The Rune Programming Language

I think the point behind "constant time" here is that the comparison always takes the same amount of time, and not based on how many characters in the two strings are equal, to prevent a timing attack. "Constant time" isn't very accurate here because given a choice of hashing algorithm, the hash is a fixed-length string and therefore even a trivial string comparison technically "runs in constant time", at least if we allow the typical abuses of language in CS.

namkton The Rune Programming Language

The Destruction of Abel, Jeremiah 27:14.

namkton U.S. bans equipment from Huawei and ZTE, citing national security concerns

At this point you can't trust any 'cloud' camera regardless of who makes it.

namkton U.S. bans equipment from Huawei and ZTE, citing national security concerns

Uber probably isn't the best example given that the company prided itself in being 'fucking illegal', but your point generally stands.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/10/uber-investigation-...

namkton WhatsApp data leak: 500M user records for sale

Signal uses (or used?) SGX for remote attestation, which presumably lets the client verify that the code running on the server is a build of the OSS code and not a modified version. But I don't know the details or if this is reliable.

SGX and remote attestation described here:

https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/

namkton AI Art Panic

I'd really like that one where you give it a ref sheet and out comes a 3D model, or at least a baseline to tinker with in, e.g., Blender. I think NVIDIA was doing text-to-3d recently, but it did so from a single image and I'm not sure as to the accuracy of the model.

namkton I/O is no longer the bottleneck

I would have thought that allocations in managed languages like Go/Python would have been the "fast" part of the processing. Isn't technically the GC that's slowing you down, and not the allocation per se? For one-shot input/output programs like these I guess you could tune the GC to kick in with less frequency.

You also note that reading a file sequentially from disk is very fast, which it is, but there is no guarantee that the file's contents are actually sequential on disk (fragmentation), right? We'd have to see how the file was written, and I guess at worst you'd be reading sequential chunks of a hand-wavy 4KB or something depending on the file system and what not. I'm sure others can fill in the details.

Just nit-picking here.