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pas

8,466 karma · joined January 22, 2011

pas@zomg.hu
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pas··on Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election
how come the UK bailout was an expense? the US one paid for itself.
pas··on Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
LLM does not work on encrypted tokens. It happens at the API gateway.
pas··on Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
or add some metadata and don't allow downgrading.
pas··on Shopify replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations–and it scaled
assuming their "reserve item" function is just "update the table set N rows to reserved=true where reserved==false"

more transactions can commit at the same time, but with one counter they would conflict (as it did in the Redis case)

they should use CRDT (and trying to model that with this 1000 row workspace, no?)

still, eventually at some point they need to do the math

pas··on As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program
in the age of containers, overlay filesystems, a decade of UX work regarding sharing data/files/content between applications on phones, it should.
pas··on After Losses, Retail Investors Flock to 3x Leverage as 2x Product Are Restricted
biology uses a lot of gradients and culling. the brain starts with more neurons than it needs, and those that don't form connections get recycled.

no need to start futile fights when you are in the (ideological) minority.

pas··on Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy
> What is the correct procedure for this?

in general to work on something that will get "into the rust compiler" it needs at least an RFC and then a Major Change Proposal [0]

in practice it starts with asking on zulip [1]

[0] https://forge.rust-lang.org/compiler/proposals-and-stabiliza...

[1] https://forge.rust-lang.org/how-to-start-contributing.html

pas··on After Losses, Retail Investors Flock to 3x Leverage as 2x Product Are Restricted
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4B_movement
pas··on SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?
oh, it could be worse!

spending time on fake CVEs while people are exploiting real 0days against your system.

pas··on Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
I have complicated feelings regarding academia, and in general IMHO it's way past due to start focusing on quality instead of hype.

who was first to some kind of novelty? who cares. someone did something but no one can replicate it? intentionally wasting public money. fraud by any other name.

"science" wouldn't move slower if we would build more robust data generating processes.

of course, since usually it's hard to judge quality academia uses proxies. not to mention that the people who could usually are also live inside fancy glassware. and it would be a shame to rock the boat.

... but math is doubly special, because we accepted that it doesn't matter (until it does, but then it's called cryptography and logistics network optimization and high frequency trading, and machine learning), and how long a problem stays unsolved was quite a good proxy.

still, if AI solves the easy ones we can finally have fun with the hard ones!

pas··on Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
ehh, it's Python, it's mostly vibe-based.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/32802486

though there's sandbox: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/sandbox/

it simply predates the "sanitize by default" mindset/convention that nowadays React (dangerouslySetInnerHTML) and Angular has.

pas··on Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
... what is understanding of mathematics anyway? if some AI result helps a mathematician to solve more problems I would say then that it gave them some understanding, but just as there are proofs that span hundreds of pages it's likely that soon proofs will be long Lean programs and studying them will be part of mathematics, just as studying Go played by AI.

(see the open (Lean) label for Erdos problems https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/116987866420438091)

pas··on Scriptc by Vercel: TypeScript-to-Native compiler, no JavaScript engine in binary
that doesn't mean much. it has a lot of tests, the architect seems sane, it fits a niche (for example scripts baked into container images don't need full (Node + tsx + esbuild) or Bun/Deno)
pas··on “We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”
how would they detect?
pas··on Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain
the same is true of passwords. some sites provide password reset some don't. how is that not clear?
pas··on Never Enough
natural selection rather quickly fixes this, don't worry
pas··on Never Enough
sure, and there are obvious pitfalls, but IMHO it's much better than going to a 100+ dates and not reflecting on what went wrong/well after any of them.

(tangentially related recommended reading https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ )

pas··on Never Enough
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-dating-men-in-t...
pas··on Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain
use an open source password manager that supports them.

as others mentioned, there's BitWarden (cross-platform, self-hostable), but if you want something simple there's KeePassXC (and you can put the store file on a dropbox shared folder)

pas··on Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain
password managers do the backup for you based on how you set them up (eg. to your google drive, or to a simple SFTP/FTPS/S3 URI)

those that don't have this built-in (eg. KeePassXC) recommend using Dropbox or some external sync mechanism

but the keys are stored in a file, which you can back up.

> all the security vanishes if you put usable recovery mechanisms for the passkey or the second factor

no, not at all. it still gives you better UX, because when you use the passkey you know it's the site you want to log in to. (because there's mutual authentication.)

pas··on Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain
it depends on which password manager you are using. if you use Google's then it gets backed up to your Google account.

BitWarden, KeePassXC, and probably a bunch of other password managers have very thorough support for import-export, automatic/periodic backup, sync/merge, etc.

pas··on Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain
use an app where you can backup the 2FA DB.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.liberty.android.freeotpp...

pas··on Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain
> there's no a clear explanation

there's. it depends on how the site implemented passkeys.

I'm using multiple devices and passkeys via keepassXC. I haven't lost access or even got locked out of any accounts.

but it's like 2FA, and almost all sites have a clean fallback (backup codes) for 2FA.

pas··on Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of
still, eventually there's a need to support on one platform different ld.so/glibc pairs (even if they are API/ABI compatible)

it seems nixos could set up a wrapper that invokes the right ld.so based on the executable. though at this point they could probably edit the ELF binaries and patch the fixed path to ld.so when nix is installing the program.

yeah, it seems strange that this needs kernel support. but more eBFP extension points are usually welcome, so sure, why not?

pas··on AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence
sure, they have strong bay area aura, but an ad hominem is not very useful criticism of the actual arguments for AI safety (and longtermism, and against x-risks in general).
pas··on AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence
sorry, could you explain what Calvinism is for someone who (is a programmer and heard about EA and) grew up in a post-Soviet atheist metallurgy town? thanks!
pas··on The war on terror primed America for autocracy
9/11 was just a bloody blip compared to the decades of spiraling indoctrination with varying focal points.

the same way that now "progressive leftists" are completely working themselves into an anticapitalist frenzy, and before them the (performative) woke and the reactive antiwoke mania spread like wildfire, before that it was the homophobia and islamophobia (triggered by 9/11), and before that the red scare, and the reefer madness, and whatnot.

https://www.npr.org/2004/12/15/4229442/from-direct-mail-to-a...

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con (2012 by Rick Perlstein)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_the_Un... (Richard Hofstadter, 1964)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-682x.... (Three Kinds of Anti-Intellectualism: Rethinking Hofstadter, 1991 by Daniel Rigney)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2018.1... (Anti-intellectualism is a virus, 2018 by Michael A. Peters)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teqkK0RLNkI (Conspiracy, 2025 by ContraPoints)

pas··on The war on terror primed America for autocracy
people flag things that are obvious and boring, or that are very incendiary, technically dense, and not easily argued (and thus it's not the place and time to discuss it) topics. eg. migration politics and economics (and crime and so on)

and some of those comments are just incorrect (like the last one about Loomer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National... )

pas··on The war on terror primed America for autocracy
incompetence is everpresent in large hierarchical power structures.

just as the UK the US is also full of career politicians sitting in very powerful (sub)committees

pas··on Hospitals and universities repurposing drugs at lower cost
we don't know.

https://lorienpsych.com/2021/11/02/ketamine/#11_How_does_ket...

the opiate receptor interaction might be important, but it seems that the antidepressant effect persists even if the opiate pathway is blocked (via naltrexone)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6439824/ (though it's an open-label super small study ... n=4)

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