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sams99

1,771 karma · joined February 13, 2010

co-founder and co CEO www.discourse.org hobby: term-llm.com
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sams99··on A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos
good call, can you make a PR
sams99··on A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos
Update on the Discourse side, we now run all external binaries, including magick via a landlock sandbox.

The gem we use is here: https://github.com/discourse/ruby-landlock highly recommend all Rubyists out there consider this. We are also in the process of moving away from Magick to Vips (which also runs in a sandbox, not in process)

HEIF is patched, but I doubt this is the last buffer overflow in HEIF, I will not be surprised if in the upcoming weeks or months someone will discover something in libpng or some other native image library. Given where stuff is at, defense in depth is critical.

Another thing worth mentioning to all self hosters, always be updating! The rate of CVEs this year across all open source software is through the roof, self hosting now is double scary, you need to have some routines setup to update monthly if not weekly.

sams99··on Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2
absolutely and fair... you do lose out though on the mega discounted endpoint they have there.
sams99··on Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2
Unfortunately I find this too high risk, I entered my credit card, but can not set a limit. The best I can do is get an email alert. I feel like I am one oopsie away from getting a 100 dollar bill.
sams99··on Codex Security
I got my agent to analyze it and do a write up here:

https://wasnotwas.com/writing/inside-openai-codex-security/

sams99··on DeepSeek reasonix, DeepSeek native coding agent with high caching and low cost
My agent wrote a pile of very interesting articles at wasnotwas.com I have been a bit quiet there for a bit, but it covers lots of areas that are very interesting to harness builders (albeit less interesting to the general public)
sams99··on Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7
I did a follow on analysis with got 5.4 and opus 4.7 https://wasnotwas.com/writing/claude-opus-4-7-s-system-promp...
sams99··on How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code
For those interested, edit is a surprisingly difficult problem, it seems easy on the surface but there is both fine tuning and real world hallucinations you are fighting with. I implemented one this week in:

https://github.com/samsaffron/term-llm

It is about my 10th attempt at the problem so I am aware of a lot of the edge cases, a very interesting bit of research here is:

https://gist.github.com/SamSaffron/5ff5f900645a11ef4ed6c87f2...

Fascinating read.

sams99··on Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions
Codex requires stuffing a very specific system prompt otherwise the custom endpoint will reject you
sams99··on We need a clearer framework for AI-assisted contributions to open source
Author here, thanks heaps for the discussion, I replied to a few of the points in my blog comments:

https://discuss.samsaffron.com/t/your-vibe-coded-slop-pr-is-...

sams99··on DeepThought-8B: A small, capable reasoning model
Qwen coder 32b with a JavaScript interpreter

Impressive answer for a model that can run on your own computer

https://discuss.samsaffron.com/discourse-ai/ai-bot/shared-ai...

sams99··on QwQ: Alibaba's O1-like reasoning LLM
I find it odd that is refused me so badly https://discuss.samsaffron.com/discourse-ai/ai-bot/shared-ai... my guess is that I am using a quantized model

It simply did not want to use XML tools for some reason something that even qwen coder does not struggle with: https://discuss.samsaffron.com/discourse-ai/ai-bot/shared-ai...

I have not seen any model including sonnet that is able to 1 shot a working 9x9 go board

For ref gpt-4o which is still quite bad https://discuss.samsaffron.com/discourse-ai/ai-bot/shared-ai...

sams99··on Generative AI Is Not Going to Build Your Engineering Team for You
The original was posted at work earlier this week, to me the original missed a bit around explaining what this tech is yes good at... https://meta.discourse.org/discourse-ai/ai-bot/shared-ai-con...
sams99··on How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
Highly Gamed === It is better if users with slow devices see a white screen for 30 seconds vs an indication that something is happening, because ... reasons?
sams99··on Python: Just Write SQL
For those looking for a rubyish approach to this see: https://github.com/discourse/mini_sql
sams99··on Red Sea Dam
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa
sams99··on Show HN: Discourse Announces Chat
This is something we are investigating. We would like it to interoperate with the wider ecosystem.
sams99··on Show HN: Discourse Announces Chat
Link with installation instruction is at the bottom of the blog post:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-chat-plugin/230881

You can try it out meta.discourse.org if log in to meta and then join the https://meta.discourse.org/g/chat-testers group (self serve)

Regarding bundle sizes, we hear you and have some long term plans to investigate code splitting, it is a very long journey but we will get there. At the moment you get the majority of the app on first payload, making subsequent clicks very fast.

sams99··on Oxide builds servers as they should be [audio]
Could you include a link to the new podcastified Twitter space in the footer of https://oxide.computer/ ?

And maybe do an addendum 5 minute announcement episode on the “on the metal” podcast?

Love your excellent work, thank you all

sams99··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2020)
Discourse | Remote - UTC+-3 | Full Time | Infrastructure Engineer

Discourse is a profitable, open source company, we host for thousands of public forums and internal team sites.

Our infrastructure team is responsible for taking care of all our hosting concerns including monitoring/deployments/alerting and so on. Much of our work involves amending and improving automation.

We are hosted on bare metal Linux servers and AWS.

To apply and for a full job desc see: https://www.discourse.org/jobs

sams99··on Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free
Is there an app on iOS that indexes ubuweb, I noticed Junky read by Burroughs there which would be a fascinating listen, but it comes in lots of pieces and consuming it on the run seems somewhat tricky
sams99··on JIT and Ruby's MJIT
Some experiments are underway soon, current implementation uses a cache that is tightly scoped to a specific run including stuff such as class serial numbers that can not be reused between runs safely
sams99··on Debugging hidden memory leaks in Ruby
The terms do get a bit tricky, with forking servers like "unicorn" that do copy-on-write memory we also have the term PSS which is a far more accurate was to calculate memory impact for such servers.

The difference between the RAM your program uses to PSS to actual memory your process can reach vs the memory your program has allocated can all make your head spin. Agree it makes sense to add a section to illustrate this.

sams99··on Debugging hidden memory leaks in Ruby
OP here, if you have any questions or tips for other similar tools you use I would love to hear!
sams99··on Introducing nushell
I did see quite a few that double up, like 2 versions of url and a few others.

Just had a quick play ... on arch linux `yay nushell-git` already works!!!

One area where I got a bit stuck was around help. `man where` gave me nothing, `help where` also. I tries stuff like `ls | where type = File` and got a type error. I think it would be amazing if this thing onboarded people a bit nicer, "where needs a condition, to learn about where type "help where" ... stuff like that

Overall really enjoying the ideas here and I am absolutely going to be following this!

sams99··on Why I stuck with Windows for 6 years while developing Discourse
There are 2 parts to the cost.

1. is the VM 2. is handling filesystem mounts across operating systems

(2) can be debilitating in dev environments on Mac for example where you want to edit files outside the container but have the container have access to them. Docker have done a lot to improve this over the years but it is still very painful.

sams99··on Why I stuck with Windows for 6 years while developing Discourse
absolutely if you have a filesystem heavy operation and are accessing files inside the container in aufs instead of a local mount, you are going to pay a massive docker tax.
sams99··on Why I stuck with Windows for 6 years while developing Discourse
A very interesting and important aside is that in Linux you pay almost no tax for using Docker.

This is not the case on Windows and MacOS where there is a significant cost.

That 8 minute spec run, also takes 8 minutes in docker.

https://meta.discourse.org/t/beginners-guide-to-install-disc...

sams99··on Why I stuck with Windows for 6 years while developing Discourse
I completely understand the concern here. If every change required an 8 minute wait it would be real sad for us.

We use a tool called `rake autospec` at Discourse which is a smart test runner. I personally like the vim integration we built.

The way it works...

1. Run `bin/rake autospec` in a terminal 2. I head to the code I want to change, I change the code 3. The spec runner figures out what the right test is run and runs that. 4. While it is busy running specs at any time it can be interrupted by saving a "*.spec" file in which case the spec runner will run the spec at the cursor

This has worked wonderfully well for us.

sams99··on Why I stuck with Windows for 6 years while developing Discourse
Absolutely disabled defender.

When I started running the spec suite in WSL, defender went way up (so I gave it a break), pretty sure stuff would have been way worse with defender on.

The prevailing recommendation though from the WSL team is to leave defender on for now. So I kind of cheated by disabling it.

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