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rdtsc

45,403 karma · joined June 29, 2009

Software developer. Likes distributed systems, databases, consensus protocols and some realtime stuff.

Contact me at my username at protonmail

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rdtsc··on Automatic Transmission – a data-privacy study of connected vehicles
I already like Honda and own models before they were connected to the cell network. But they are still not 100% there for current models:

> Amplitude received from HondaLink: VIN, Location. Cross-context tracking: Amplitude received the VIN plus Location from HondaLink — an unresettable identifier tied directly to other personal data.

They are so close they should say "fuck it, we're going to be different, we'll disable all the crap" and then market the heck out of it.

rdtsc··on Cops Can Bypass iPhone's Automatic Reboot to Get into Locked Phones
If the search warrant and seizure wasn't a thing I'd agree with you. But I can easily see opening a phone interpreted not that differently than opening a safe or your reinforced front door.

> But it's sufficient for demonstrating that these dynamics all depend on willing participants which is partially why these laws are designed the way they are.

What happens if during serving a search warrant the door is impossible to open or they find a super reinforced safe. Owner can even say "I don't remember the combination"?

rdtsc··on Cops Can Bypass iPhone's Automatic Reboot to Get into Locked Phones
Can't they just hand it to you say "you enter your passphrase, but don't divulge it to us and then hand us the phone". In other words hinging the passphrase divulging to the 5th can backfire in that respect. It like saying we have a search warrant, you open the safe for us, it's fine if you keep the combination to yourself, we just need to get inside.
rdtsc··on Gemini 4 Argon
Google has the internet data and user information. However the more they wait, the more the internet will fill with AI generated crap. That’s why there is a race to buy books and scan them (destroying them in the process). To get more data that’s not just barfed out AI slop. So they can win and be the ones spewing slop for others to ingest (human and robot alike)
rdtsc··on Gemini 4 Argon
I am not rooting for them, I don’t own stock from either just that like GP I was sure by now Google would have eaten others’ lunch. I was expecting a Gemini 4 before Mythos/Fable and Astra just from what GP pointed out: a cash hose, data centers, good engineers. But I underestimated the investment others would keeping absorbing so started to lose confidence in my Google prediction. Let’s see how Gemini 4 holds up. Are we going to see a flurry of scientific and mathematical breakthroughs from it?
rdtsc··on Gemini 4 Argon
What do we use for the “model made stuff up and claimed it as facts”? I can see hallucinations somehow anthropomorphizing LLM even more. I don’t like that we’re doing that to begin with but it’s a losing battle. I prefer “it’s broken” and “IT produced shit results” personally.
rdtsc··on Gemini 4 Argon
Yup. I don’t plan to do anything sneaky but one wrong question or query that looks like “cyber”, say me fixing a buffer overflow in library I maintain, and all of the sudden my gmail is blocked. Yeah, not worth the risk. I feel like even with a different account they’ll figure out it’s me because well, as ad sellers that’s their business to find out who is who and I will still be banned.
rdtsc··on Gemini 4 Argon
> Gemini is the model that is routinely borderline psychotic. It scares me

I'd call it the most sneaky out of the bunch. When I asked to explain something it will eagerly make things up and then claim it as facts. A lot of it likely because I don't pay for it, so it is reluctant for security reason or to save tokens to actually open a source and get the results. It just sort of guesses what the URL might contain, and confidently answers with some made up crap. When pressed it fessed up that it made it up. From my perspective it would be a lot better if it just said "you've reached the limit of whatever and I can't do these things because x, y, z".

rdtsc··on Surprisingly complex waves reveal the brain's inner workings
> Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain's Inner Workings

From my ignorant point of view I can't quite make sense of the title. Brain is probably the last organ one would be surprised to find complexity in. I can see "surprisingly complex wave reveal spleen inner workings" being a good title, like "wow, we though it was a dumb blood filter, but look what we found!" kind of a thing. But for the brain isn't the default assumption that has it complexity we haven't figure out yet?

rdtsc··on I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records
> {"alg":"none","typ":"JWT"}

I don't know how this ever became a thing that was allowed into the spec and then picked from the spec and implemented in various implementations.

rdtsc··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
> You should also recognize that there’s a difference between the people who visit, and the people who completely restructure their lives to immigrate. And there’s a difference between immigrants who do their best to learn and integrate into the culture, and immigrants who try to impose their culture on the host nation.

Oh definitely. When it comes to rules and laws there is always some cutoff or some threshold. It's like the driving age. The laws to generalize by necessity. There is only so much of a chance there to encode "level at which a visitor learned cultural norms", a "culture quiz" etc. Those are things for a citizenship but not visitors usually. In some cases it's easy to point to a legal proceeding or complaint and say "look this person is banned, he did X,Y,Z". But then there is stuff that not documented. Like maybe someone not taking their shoes off, or speaking too loudly, or reclining their seat without asking.

> > Are the Japanese really terrified of foreigners or just annoyed at misbehavior

> The “phobia” part of the word is probably confusing you, in actual usage, xenophobia encompasses dislike, “fear” is not necessary. Similar to homophobia or Islamophobia, the term includes fear _or_ dislike/hatred.

I know, I was being pedantic on purpose to show that the words used matter. The way it's presented is as a moral transgression, Japanese not wanting foreigners to visit sort of sound the same as homophobes or islamophobes. I think it's unfair. Any country, especially one with a democratically elected government should be able to say who can come and who can't to their country.

rdtsc··on Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?
> and then what? they become adults that live large on food stamps and medicaid.

And if they stay, they become adults who live large on food stamps and medicaid, and on top of that seriously hurt or permanently disable teachers, staff, or other students. It's as if letting them pummel teachers in the face will somehow result in them becoming upstanding citizens.

rdtsc··on Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?
> A frustrated high-school emotional support student

What does that mean. Is it a diagnosis or a term schools use for some students but not others? Don't all students need emotional support?

rdtsc··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
Yeah out of all my acquaintances it's the most "nerdy" ones I guess who learned Japanese and wanted to either visit or visit and then live there.
rdtsc··on Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI
> OpenAI Feared “Optics,” Not the Law – “Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s then-Research Director, responded that ‘as a training set [LibGen is] a bit sketchier.’ [OpenAI researcher Sam] McCandlish explained: ‘I was just worried about optics – i.e. ‘openai uses copyrighted data from sketchy russian website’ showing up on [Hacker News] would be unfortunate.”

Now it is on Hacker News. So what? Are the Chinese models any more wholesome? Are people going to cancel their Anthropic or OpenAI subscriptions and contracts?

rdtsc··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
> turned their incredibly safe country into the gun and bomb capital of Europe.

I learned it here some years ago. I don’t follow Swedish news. Someone or the article title mentioned “grenade attacks in Sweden”. I thought it was parody at first but it’s a thing somehow. Do they think immigration is what contributes? Someone said it was simply the city in question was at the border with other country that’s why grenades are a thing there…

rdtsc··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
> Japan can maybe afford to be cruel because their cultural exports keep the top of their “talent attraction” funnel large

I am fascinated by others being fascinated with Japan (meta fascination?). It’s like this mythical land of milk and honey for some. I don’t get? It’s just another country amongst hundred others.

rdtsc··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
> I don’t support xenophobia […] I came away with more empathy for Japanese xenophobic sentiment

What more does supporting it entail than being sympathetic to the sentiment? You’re not Japanese, it sounds like, so being xenophobic towards non-Japanese doesn’t work in this context. Only a Japanese person could experience it.

Would it also be xenophobia, or more xenoannoyance? Are the Japanese really terrified of foreigners or just annoyed at misbehavior?

rdtsc··on The Copilot+ PC brand is dead
> the purpose for Copilot+ PCs was to be able to deliver [NPU] experiences

Maybe for developers. Not sure ordinary consumers looking for a new tablet or laptop will be asking for “NPU experiences”

rdtsc··on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?
Often people confuse latency vs throughput/bandwidth. With streaming and batching USB4 will shuffle a lot data through on average per second. But it will never hit reliable microsecond level or even submicrosecond latencies.

At the same time ISA card will never reach 40Gbps throughout with CPU clocking at tens of MHz only or often less.

rdtsc··on Classified estimates show the NSA is paying billions to test AI models
"These projects seem load bearing. And here is the clincher — the public doesn't know about them. That's inconsistent with the principles of the agency and country I am working for..."
rdtsc··on Classified estimates show the NSA is paying billions to test AI models
I guess I would be more surprised if the headline said "turns out NSA dropped the ball on AI and haven't even fired up a single LLM instance yet".

It's mostly about "testing" and "billions". But I am sure "testing" here is in quotes just like I wrote it. They are not going to get an itemized list unless it's coming from Snowden 2.0

- We "tested AI" on this Russian nuclear silo command and control center. It worked out pretty ok.

rdtsc··on Back and shoulder surgery is often worse than useless
Yeah is it legal to finance MRI machines as a business then and sell fast imaging? If it’s that bad near a big city could have a batch running constantly. Of course until the government healthcare system finds a bunch of money in a suitcase somewhere and decides to finally buy more machines, which would kill this business.
rdtsc··on Back and shoulder surgery is often worse than useless
> MRI's are expensive and difficult to amortize for poorer countries or ones that don't have a great healthcare system

Canada is towards the bottom. I see what you did there. I guess I never considered Canada a poor country or one with a bad healthcare system. But at the same time I was only there a few times to a major city and never interacted with their healthcare system.

rdtsc··on Porsche puts wireless EV charging into production
Heh. I didn't mean it in a gruesome way :-) just saw that someone mentioned it has a sensor to shut it off. So assuming it works as designed a cat might like the nice warm pad to hang out on in the winter. Owner parks hoping to charge their car by morning, the pad charges for 10 min, stray cat notices car is back and hides in there for warmth, charger stop charging immediately, cat moves on, and next day the car is not charged and the owner can't leave for work. It's just not a failure mode a cable has to worry about.
rdtsc··on Montreal adopts bylaw banning insults against police, municipal employees
> For example, when going through airport security in the UK and US you will see signs warning that insulting security officers is a criminal offense

I had never seen one in US. How is it framed, specifically "insulting", or framed as "non-compliant" or some other way?

rdtsc··on Porsche puts wireless EV charging into production
Well at least doesn’t have to worry about “suspension does not lower” and “charger covered in dirt “ or “cat hides under there for warmth” problems. Those are on top of the existing charging losses.
rdtsc··on Delta: Highly available, strongly consistent storage using chain replication (2022)
> We built out a control plane service (CPS) responsible for automating Delta’s fleet management. Each instance of the CPS gets configured to monitor a list of Delta buckets. Its primary function includes repairing

How does the configuration spread consistently across the nodes? How does each node know if each link to the next node is still the most up-to-date, based on the configuration system. This part usually is waved away but it’s one of the trickier bits. Usually there is some paxos/raft/zookeeper system involved here.

rdtsc··on US criticises Australia's proposed algorithm opt-out laws as 'censorship'
Thanks. Reading it at first seemed like “the people” here is you know, end users, people toggle some settings on their devices, not a government employee deciding. It turns out a government employee doing it. Yeah, just because US government is goofy doesn’t somehow make others sane or good.
rdtsc··on 'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees
Yup, stealing from the FBI is pretty bold, probably a state sponsored group. Or script kids who got lucky up to that point.
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