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rlpb

11,018 karma · joined November 25, 2009

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rlpb··on My car's OTA update broke Android Auto, and it's a indictment of modern software
Please could you share the name of the manufacturer, so the rest of us know who to be wary of?
rlpb··on Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them
> Revocation should come with full refunds.

That's not enough. If I purchase something, I expect to rely on being able to keep it. Its value to me could well be much higher than just the purchase price.

Revocation should come with consequential damages together with the cost of recovering them.

rlpb··on I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets
If an attacker can do that, they could also do that with my real birthday had I used that. My birthday isn't a secret against anyone who wants to look hard enough. Therefore this method doesn't provide any kind of security against attackers gated only on knowing my registered birthday. I never claimed that it did.
rlpb··on I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets
I like using a date of birth of 1 January. It's plausible but also hopefully suspicious how many people seem to be born that day if others do the same.
rlpb··on How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)
What if you have young kids? It might be worth the suffering for their benefit.
rlpb··on Ditching Vagrant: VMs with KVM and Virsh on Debian
I think this is a backwards way to set up VMs. "Installing a guest" is the wrong concept. Use a VM image pre-prepared from your favourite distro to skip that step. cloud-init is the standard way for it to specialize to your use case.
rlpb··on Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made
Adding contraints makes it take longer to deliver a result. I probably cannot install today's engines SDKs and related tooling for example. I'd have to write my own. Doable, and would make me a better programmer, but you won't see results for a long time.

As it happens, I do this. I have various projects burning for years and yet to be published because in my hobby time I value good engineering over results.

rlpb··on Delta flight hit by firework while landing at Midway Airport on Fourth of July
> For example, aerated autoclaved concrete has better structural strength, doesn't need additional insulation, completely non-combustible, and is cheaper to build.

Apparently it ages out though and becomes unsafe when it does, resulting in a scandal in the UK:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-66686864

"There is nothing fundamentally wrong with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) as building material or system. Many buildings from the 60s and 70s built from many materials are now having problems due to inadequate maintenance, and old age."

I'm not exactly sure what this is supposed to mean. I've never heard of this problem with regular brick or concrete structures.

rlpb··on Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says
Copyright law is an artificial legal construct, not a moral code.

I think appropriate attribution is a moral code, but I am not able to attribute every idea I have to all those who helped me develop the general intelligence that I use to develop such ideas.

rlpb··on The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output
I don't pay for my mind to absorb the world's information, either. And when I publish to the Internet, or give a talk, I also typically don't charge. Even when I publish under some kind of copyright restricted licence, that restriction has never (by law) extended to restricting transformative use that you might perform using your mind.

This idea that absorbing information requires paying a toll needs to change. It was never the case in copyright law anyway (and the courts are beginning to agree). Even if it were, copyright law was founded on the basis of encouraging creativity by creating an economic incentive. Appeal to "compensating the rights holders" therefore needs to be based on the economics, not just some principle about "rights" that never applied to this case anyway.

rlpb··on .gitignore Isn't the only way to ignore files in Git
Better: set up a git diff driver so you see the semantic changes, not line-by-line changes.
rlpb··on .gitignore Isn't the only way to ignore files in Git
Placing various artifacts (eg. build artifacts) inside the source tree always seemed like a historical mistake to me. It leads to various accidents such as people checking in their credentials and accidentally bundling such files in source distributions, for example. These consequences are real.

Debian build tooling places build artifacts in the parent directory on the assumption that this is acceptable, but it then surprises people since it's not the norm anywhere else.

Perhaps this ship has sailed. But I think it's worth pointing out that if you have an option, don't design things that place things inside the source tree if you can avoid it.

rlpb··on The AirPods Effect
Arrests seem like overkill. Ask them to stop, issue a fine, whatever. Sure I get you're asking for any enforcement at all. But hyperbole has a polarizing effect on discourse we should try to avoid, IMHO.
rlpb··on Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M
> that has hired 3 brazillians back to back

I've seen this kind of thing happen not through bias but because good people know good people, where by "good" I mean highly competent. They knew each other through university and other regional connections, so they happened to have the same ethnicity as one might expect from such a regional commonality. One got hired, referred another, and it cascaded. They were great to work with and highly competent, so I don't think there was bias even though it might appear that they're was.

rlpb··on 1worldflag: A blue dot on a transparent background
The paradox of tolerance applies though. It helps to keep the intolerants at bay.
rlpb··on Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things
All the items being discussed are useful things to think about and cover in the commit message. Certainly if after reading a commit message I do not know what was intended (eg. “is this a refactor that is not intended to change behaviour or not?”) then the commit message is missing something. What I object to is overloading all of this into the first line. The subject should be reserved for the most relevant information and is limited in length. Forcing committers to collapse a bunch of metadata into it makes it less useful for that purpose.
rlpb··on I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline
> sometimes resulting in arguments with authors that the editors need to smooth over

This is an understatement. A friend of mine is a published author in a field that requires correctness. The "legions of people" all got in the way, continuously introducing errors and unable to use a system with any kind of change control, so my friend had to keep rechecking the whole thing and finding further errors that had been introduced without being told about them. This included introducing errors of fact as well as simple things such as not fixing references to areas that they themselves changed. This was from an established publishing house and apparently this is normal. As far as I can tell, the roles that once added professionalism have been eroded both in skill and in budget, such that now they fail to make use of technology and just get in the way. They didn't seem to add any value in my friend's case, anyway. Perhaps it does add still add value to authors who start with a low standard of work. And perhaps the quality of publishers varies massively, resulting in hugely different experiences.

rlpb··on Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD
> However, with some of the shenanigans that the Linux distributions are pulling around age verification/attestation...

You've been misled.

rlpb··on CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq
> ...they have literally shipped straight-up broken packages before, because fixing it would somehow make it not "stable"

Irrelevant strawman, since you're not accusing the dnsmasq package in Debian stable of being straight-up broken.

rlpb··on CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq
> ...upstream package maintainers who are expected to deal with bug reports from ancient versions...

They are not expected to deal with this. This is the responsibility of the Debian package maintainer.

If you (as an upstream) licensed your software in a manner that allows Debian to do what it does, and they do this to serve their users who actually want that, you are wrong to then complain about it.

If you don't want this, don't license your software like that, and Debian and their users will use some other software instead.

rlpb··on CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq
Refactoring and rewrites prove time and time again that they also introduce new bugs and changes in behaviour that users of stable releases do not want.

For what you want, there are other distributions for that. Debian also has stable-backports that does what you want.

No need to rage on distributions that also provide exactly what their users want.

rlpb··on Debian must ship reproducible packages
Debian has had a better "software supply chain" posture than any other player in the ecosystem since before the turn of the century. While we all face the risk of malware from upstream, Debian is the least at risk of being affected by it. See for example the stream of issues from npm et al. None of it has affected Debian.
rlpb··on Claude Opus 4.7
> In this context we are talking explicitly about cloud-hosted AIs.

Looking upthread, we seem to be talking about Claude. Claude is cloud-hosted inference but the harness is local if you're using Claude Code, and can be MITM'd there.

rlpb··on US v. Heppner (S.D.N.Y. 2026) no attorney-client privilege for AI chats [pdf]
> It boggles my mind to see legal firms increasingly rely on consumer-oriented cloud services while acting like they are retaining custody of the data entrusted to them.

My theory is that lawyers tend to lean on the law to protect them more than others might. "I can ensure that it would be illegal for them to them to expose this data; therefore this method is safe" vs. "If they expose this data, is that a situation I want to deal with?".

rlpb··on Claude Opus 4.7
A smart AI would realise that I can MITM its web access such that sees the .well-known token that isn't actually there. I assume that the model doesn't have CA certificates embedded into it, and relies on its harness for that.
rlpb··on Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th
> It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs".

I have been wondering if it's more geared at reducing resource usage, given that at the moment there's a known constraint on AI datacenter expansion capability. Perhaps they are struggling to meet demand?

rlpb··on WireGuard makes new Windows release following Microsoft signing resolution
It sounds more like a "driver program" gatekeeper so you are arguing about semantics. I'm not claiming that there is no problem, just that an argument based on the distinction between "hardware" and "driver" is void.
rlpb··on The FAA’s flight restriction for drones is an attempt to criminalize filming ICE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea#Levels_of_mens_rea_wi... is relevant here. There are exceptions - I don't know the specifics especially in relation to US law - but the starting point is that unknowingly causing the situation to exist doesn't make you guilty automatically. You have to intend it.
rlpb··on Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables
The markets accomodate that though. Market participants buy energy futures because they do need guaranteed future energy. Solar and wind producers cannot sell such futures (or else they can but will be forced to buy from gas plants to fulfil them when they can't). So in practice, wholesale buyers continue to buy a mix.
rlpb··on Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables
> Investors begin to refuse to build new potato farms because a return on their investment gets worse whenever anyone decides to build a new farm.

If they all refuse, then they're leaving money on the table. One investor could invest in 10% production only, and that would be very lucrative. It would be exactly my low cost to produce potato scenario.

In practice, they don't all refuse, or all invest. The market finds a balance. In time, producers switch to the new method, because anybody who doesn't leaves an opportunity for someone else to take their business and make more money.

This takes time, though. If we want things to go quicker, then we need to guarantee return on investment for longer, which is exactly what the government does by guaranteeing prices to renewable energy producers.

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