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sgjohnson

2,644 karma · joined August 8, 2018

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sgjohnson··on Intellectuals Are Fucking Idiots
> Or consider the fact that over 91% of hedge fund managers can’t beat the market, despite the fact that the entire purpose of hedge funds is to explicitly create better returns than the market.

This isn't strictly speaking true. While some hedge funds have the goal of beating the market, most of them have different investment philosophy. Not that long ago most of them were meant for what the name implies - hedging. The idea being that hedge funds optimized for consistency, not higher returns. Market up 20%? Your hedge fund might yield something like a 10% return. Market down 20%? Your hedge fund might be down only like 5%.

sgjohnson··on Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy
> and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)

It's perfectly figured out. Just entomb it in concrete and store it on site. All spent nuclear fuel to date combined would quite comfortably fit in an average Walmart parking lot. It's a complete non-issue. And if we'd get really desperate, the spent fuel could be re-enriched.

sgjohnson··on Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy
"as low as reasonably possible" is a massive overkill.

US killing the linear no-threshold model is a good thing. LNT model assumes that absolutely no amount of radioactivity is safe, which is provably wrong.

It has nothing to do with safety if the model that required "as low as reasonably possible" is bullshit per se.

The maximum allowed annual radiation dose for US radiation workers is 50mSv/year. It's just 16x the global average background radiation. And that's the average. In reality it's more like 5x - 25x.

For cancer specifically we're seeing marginally increased risk at 100 mSv/year, but it doesn't really become worrying enough until we're at 300-500 mSv/year.

sgjohnson··on Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
This is awesome. I take it your plans for the next weekend include actually cleanrooming the driver so you can skip running it in a linux container? =P
sgjohnson··on Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot
"humans can read"

lol. Barely.

sgjohnson··on Unicode's transliteration rules are Turing-complete
reminded me of the PowerPoint Turing Machine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8

sgjohnson··on How to Survive 3 Years in North Korea as a Foreigner
>I was fascinated to learn while visiting they consider themselves ‘at war’

fun fact, Japan and Russia are technically in a state of war too. The World War II hasn't ended. They have never signed a treaty over the Kuril Islands, and they both claim them.

sgjohnson··on Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach
Yes. I'm an avid Dota 2 player. I used to play the remastered CoD MWs too, and had a Counter-Strike phase as well.

Cheaters using external tools in Dota are rare. Smurfs are a much bigger problem than scripters/maphackers.

In my experience, MW and CS aren't that bad. I see a cheater only about once in 20 games.

I also play online chess. No kernel level anticheat is going to help you there.

sgjohnson··on Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach
I’m actually surprised how a lot of commenters here are defending kernel-level anticheat.
sgjohnson··on The Boeing 747 begins its final descent
> the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful

Concorde?

sgjohnson··on TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
Someone did a Minecraft server in pure bash.

https://sdomi.pl/weblog/15-witchcraft-minecraft-server-in-ba...

sgjohnson··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
Evidently, at some point money just stops being real. Also, it's not even $60b. It's a 100% stock deal.

The markets have quite literally given Elon a carte blanche. Can it last forever? I doubt it.

sgjohnson··on AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
> Then I imagined the real-but-unknowable chance it was all set up by some kid just getting into computers, just seeing what’s possible

if this is the case, then I'd say that the best-case scenario happened. They had an expensive learning exercise. They won't forget these $2k.

sgjohnson··on The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography
>For me a number station needs sends a message to be a number station, not a key.

We don't know that it's a key that's being sent. For all we know, it could be just random data. Obviously it's most likely not random data, but ciphertext. Either way, we have no idea what the message is.

sgjohnson··on The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography
> GPS was always a dual use system

It wasn't. It was going to be a military-only system, until KAL007 presented the obvious life-saving civilian case.

But yes, the title of this article might as well read "Satellite system developed for military use is being used for a military purpose."

sgjohnson··on Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux
>Sequential throughput: ~1.3 GB/s

sounds VERY low, also, wouldn't random read/write speed be MUCH more relevant here?

sgjohnson··on It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12
> Rosetta 2's retirement announcement was when I realized I won't buy another Mac, I'm not interested in a computer that is preoccupied with stopping me from running software.

This is the 3rd time this has happened in roughly 2 decades by the way.

ppc/ppc64 -> x86_64 x86_64 -> x64 only x64 -> arm64

I much prefer Apple just forcing the developers to update their apps. Perhaps it’s just me though.

sgjohnson··on GitHub bans security researcher who posted zero-day Windows exploits
Microsoft hasn’t particuarly cared about consumers pirating Windows for more than a decade. I’m pretty sure they make close to 0 money off Windows licensing to consumers.
sgjohnson··on GitHub bans security researcher who posted zero-day Windows exploits
> If this researcher actually had a vendetta, I'd expect them to just sell the remaining zero-days to the highest bidder.

selling to the highest bidder doesn’t generate headlines though.

sgjohnson··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
> you need to communicate your bank account number

in Latvia we need to do this for domestic payments anyway. We use IBAN even for domestic payments..

> and likely your legal name.

not mandatory. If provided, the bank tells you whether the recipient name matches the account, but if not, you can proceed with the payment anyway.

sgjohnson··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
> then explicitly authorize the receiver. Oh, and explicitly authorise the country

I've never had to do any of this, and I quire frequently send SEPA payments from Latvia.

sgjohnson··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
> > A Frenchman using Wero will be able to transfer money to a Spanish friend on Bizum, with the same simplicity as a domestic payment.

SEPA Instant Payments also solves that.

sgjohnson··on For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions
Which just reinforces my point. The patch was available, therefore, where the exploit lies was also available.

Linux kernel is one of the most audited open-source projects ever. I guarantee you that someone did reverse the patch.

> but forgot to tell the distros

Probably an oversight, but irrelevant. The bug was in the linux kernel. It's insane to suggest that they should have notified everyone shipping the linux kernel.

sgjohnson··on For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions
Not true, if there’s any evidence of the exploit being used in the wild, it’s much more responsible to release immediately.

Considering that the patches have been available for a while, someone surely reversed what they were for and was actually exploiting this in the wild.

In the age of AI, I’d argue that “responsible disclosure” is dead. Arguably even in closed source projects. Just ask Claude to do a diff between the previous version and to see whether anything fixed in there could have had security implications.

We’re not there yet, but very soon the only way to responsibly disclose a vulnerability will be immediately.

sgjohnson··on USB Cheat Sheet (2022)
> I think USB 4 is finally going to the right direction.

USB 4 is actually going into an even worse direction. USB 4 = Thunderbolt 4, except everything is optional. e.g. USB 4 might not even support DP Alt mode. Thunderbolt 4 always will.

sgjohnson··on USB Cheat Sheet
> and power of up to 240 watt

Except active optical cables. None exist yet that I'm aware of though.

sgjohnson··on Every GPU That Mattered
It was just unjustifiably popular.
sgjohnson··on RFC 9849. TLS Encrypted Client Hello
https://bgp.tools/as/6939#prefixes

They are everywhere. It's a global carrier. Carriers also know no geographic boundaries.

sgjohnson··on MacBook Neo
It's not the first Mac that has an iPhone/iPad chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Transition_Kit

And yes, absolutely. All you need is a bootchain exploit. However unlike in the old jailbreaking days when people found and publicized them for fun, these days they are worth millions. Apple will pay you $500k for sandbox escape into the kernel. If you nail the bootchain, it'll be in the millions. From Apple. And god knows how much such a thing would go for in the black market.

sgjohnson··on MacBook Neo
I think the M2 was the last one they made with 8 gigs of memory.
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