I enjoyed this little exchange :)
114 karma · joined July 7, 2019
Security teams are expensive and deal with huge streams of data and events on the blue side: seems like human-in-the-loop AI systems are going to be much more effective, especially with the reasoning advances we've seen over the past year or so.
P.S. if you're a hardware nerd, you might like https://dma.space/ (just had their grand opening this weekend) over in Capitol Hill.
If I may share a memory: I still remember visiting Jungfrau Park with my parents on a vacation to Switzerland back in 2005; as a scifi-leaning kid even back then (4th/5th grade), I had a ton of fun in all the different exhibits. IIRC, different wings of the park were dedicated to different mysteries/monuments, so you'd have the Aztec and Egyptian pyramids, Peruvian (Nazca, and my favorite one) desert drawings, ancient Indian flying chariots, etc. A great time, and I'm honestly quite surprised (in retrospect) that my dad chose to go there, given our time-limited schedule. It was also my first time trying Weisswurst in the JP cafetaria (being a Hindu kid growing up in the UAE, I seized every opportunity to try beef and pork when I could lol) -- I'm sure it was fairly mid, but I thought it was fantastic!
If nothing else, it helped me establish some pop cultural 'throughlines' in that I was able to digest (so to speak) other "aliens were here first and they taught us a bunch of things" trope that cropped up later in my life (like Aliens vs. Predators, Prometheus). I can't say for sure, but it might have been my earliest encounter with the Big Question: "Why are we here? Is there a plan?" -- even though I discounted the alien theory pretty young, it was still an exciting way to get started on the subject (and is still fun to me to this day). I suppose a portion of credit for ongoing interest in science fiction is directly attributable to my time at Jungfrau Park :)
Weirdly enough, I was just in Switzerland a couple of months back and we happened to drive by Jungfrau on our way to Lauterbrunnen -- JP is still there, which stirred up the ^ memory, but I learned on the trip that it had been shut down sadly.
Thanks for being a part of such a surreal memory Mr. Daniken.
On a side note, I have an HTTP200 license plate and I want to get some nice Indian truck style lettering saying HORN <HTTP200> PLEASE around it :)
Went down a bit of a rabbit hole on the original author, Kir Bulychev, and saw that he wrote many short stories set in Veliky Guslar (which explained the name Greater Bard). The overall tone is very very similar to R.K. Narayan's Malgudi Days (albeit without the fantastical elements of talking goldfish), which is a favorite of mine. If anyone wants to get into reading some easily approachable Indian English literature, I always point them to Narayan and Adiga (who wrote The White Tiger).
On that note, does anyone else have any recommendations on authors who make use of this device (small/mid-sized city which serves as a backdrop for an anthology of short stories from a variety of characters' perspectives)?
Takes me back to my high school days when I would have to choke down my laughter as I surreptitiously read Cracked.com articles in class
I moved up here 6 months ago, and it's been a great group of people to hang out with. The conversations are tech/tech-adjacent for the most part, but I've also spent hours chatting about Magic The Gathering, Seattle Public Transit, and Neal Stephenson. I got my HushCon invite just from showing up regularly enough that people recognized me.
I actually found out about this because of another meetup on Thursdays: Black Lodge Research up in Redmond has an open night from 7:00 pm onwards. Great little makerspace, and a welcoming community. But it's definitely a schlep up there, especially after a workday so I haven't been back in a couple of months.
I'm not a big drinker, but it's nice to have a constant event on Thursday evenings that I can look forward to having a beer or two at (I actually have a custom drink that I came up with Will called "Pondwater" -- building up some lore like that is fun and is a sign of setting down some roots). I'd say Harry's is my "local bar" since I live about a 15 minute walk away. On the note of social drinking, there's a few sober people who come as well, and there's no compulsion at all to drink alcohol to be a part of the in-group. Hope I see you there sometime and I'd be happy to introduce you to the crowd; look for the Indian guy :)
Example: "Hey uncle ping00, can I use your iPad real quick to watch something?" "Sure nephew, <switches profile to Guest ,and hands it over> go nuts"
Incidentally, I work in pentesting, and one of my colleagues has Type 1 Diabetes; your overview of it and its resultant complexities really made me empathize with what challenges he has to surmount daily while still being one of the nicest, most approachable people in our team.
This may be a really broad question, but would you mind touching on why you developed this in Rust? Is that the reason why this application feels snappier than Burp (JVM), or is it just less taxing on system resources? Please feel free to tl;dr it if that's easier :)
Also, the coolest looking feature is the AI assistant undoubtedly -- is there any chance that customers can BYOT in the future and supply a personal OpenAI API token for example?
One UX point: I may have missed this, but when I start an injection attack, it would be nice to see a real-time table of the output so that I can see which injections have been tried (kind of like how you can see it in Burp Suite with Logger++ or the sub-window that opens up when you start an Intruder attack). Totally respect a conscious choice to not go down this (potentially) resource-intensive 'view', but curious if that's on the roadmap. Right now I just get a spinning animation after I hit Run, and I don't see any output in the sidebar where it says "Scans will be shown here once they have started".
In all honesty, I probably will stick with Burp Suite for my bread-and-butter web app testing flow (also helps that my org pays for a Pro license), but I want to thank you for the effort put into this and the courage to explore a new modality (web app testing without a resource-heavy proxy tool like Burp).
But the broader issue of spaced out information, wasted space, and a lack of *density* is what really drives me nuts. Cyberpunk promised me pic related (https://i.redd.it/dqipakmui3161.jpg) but we got tiling into preset (aka rigidly defined) configs instead. Note that I'm talking about the by-default experience.
I first watched it when it came out and I was in the fourth grade, so I definitely have a lot of nostalgic value attached to it. I try and watch it at least once a year!
As an example of what I mean, this was a pretty good blog post that touches on the semiotic standards aboard the Nostromo: https://crewsproject.wordpress.com/2017/05/12/aliens-standar...
The audience never directly interacts with this standard in any way, but it adds so much depth to the world and makes for a much richer experience.
Following the other comment re: power being king, what if we used a hub-and-spoke model where small drones with cameras (for sensing) and simple arms w/ clampers (for manipulating) perform 'bursts' of energy intensive activity and aggregate their sensory inputs into one composite report on the health of the plants? They do their thing (maybe for 10 - 15 mins or however long their battery lasts) and then fly back to the hub to charge. The hub itself could rely on a hybrid combo of guaranteed external power and solar panels.
Ofc, it'd be cool to see a cost analysis of how expensive this solution is (from both technical and financial standpoints) versus simpler, more energy-efficient human inputs (aka walk around your garden and prune trees that need it and pick berries that are ripe).