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xarope

1,442 karma · joined February 6, 2014

email: xarope425 at gmail dot com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/phing; my proof: https://keybase.io/phing/sigs/A9vBGkxFpuJoKe5x5mJCYTJpb6wodoyO-MehJSRnjUc ]

CIO/CTO for the last 20+ years (databases and ecommerce, software development, cyber security and production deployments). Open to remote work opportunities where collaboration is required between UTC+4 to UTC-+12

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xarope··on F-Droid 2.0
Absolutely. I'll search for a GOOGLE app to install on a new phone, and it's 3rd on the list, with two completely unrelated apps showing up at the top, waiting to be accidentally clicked and installed, and probably then start popping up ads and other malware.
xarope··on Steam Frame starts at $1059
Pistol whip, beat saber and audio trip are in my rotation. Also I expect you to die I/II/III or whatever the numbering is.
xarope··on Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
wasn't it thoreau who said "Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short"

personally, I think there's a time and place for short versus long, just like there's a time and place for a 45mins TV episode versus a 2 hour marathon movie.

xarope··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
and when future LLMs are trained on this style, the prose (if I can call it that) becomes even worse?
xarope··on ArXiv has almost 600 submissions today and most are AI slop
Academic writing uses words with meaning in very domain specific ways; those in the domain understand it, and those outside find it confusing.

If an AI just randomly throws out domain specific words without that domain's specific meaning, it becomes very painful for everybody to read, and worse still adds a level of ambiguity that defeats the whole purpose of that academic writing in the first place.

xarope··on AI Meets Cryptography 1: What AI Found in Cloudflare's Circl
Yes, this was a bit of a surprise to read when dealing with crypto: "This one lives in CIRCL's threshold RSA implementation... float64 has a 53-bit mantissa... the result is silently rounded before it is ever cast back to an integer. "

this is numerical methods 101, i.e. why 1+1 != 2

I'm a bit surprised that this is from cloudflare. Anybody from CF care to comment? Is this like prototype/super skunkworks code that somehow made it through?

xarope··on Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
are you allowed to video them to see whether they can actually do a good job?
xarope··on Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
-Phone notification- Your chinchilla rug had finished the wash cycle

I don't have a rug... oh wait...

xarope··on Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
I feel like this is the sort of thing William Gibson should write...
xarope··on Many Let's Encrypt renewals had errors today
That would a Microsoft'ese, "Some regions are encountering issues" => "The entire world is down, but our status page is working"
xarope··on Starfish by Peter Watts (1999)
I've read blindsight and echopraxia, but not starfish, so thanks for the reminder.

If starfish is even despairing than blindsight and echopraxia, then this should be "fun"!

xarope··on Building from zero after addiction, prison, and a felony
part of this I understand is survival. And I understand why you do this.

The other part of this is why it's so frustrating for me to find the right person. Everybody's resume looks perfect for the role, and I have to waste 30-45 mins digging into their actual experience. You have done yourself a great disservice by wasting that time sitting in an interview you were not qualified for, and worse still I always feel there are other, more qualified people, who I have missed/passed over their resume since it wasn't AI tuned.

Sincerely, I don't know how t make this better.

xarope··on The Eternal Sloptember
that's a very dangerous analogy, because you would be considered the domain expert and you are just asking for synonyms for something you already know but may not remember off-hand.

now, what if you asked for the synonym for "provides" in a language that has gender differences (e.g. spanish/portuguese) as well as societal nuances (e.g. japanese) and it gives you "confers", how would you now know that's correct?

ah, so you say you tell it to take into consideration gender differences, as well as societal nuances. What are those, if you were not already familiar with the language?

xarope··on Migrating from Go to Rust
if you are hitting pauses due to GC issues, you should into putting appropriate data structures into a memory arena, here's a reasonable read:

https://uptrace.dev/blog/golang-memory-arena

These are all tools. Java used to have this all the time, and we (ex-java programmer) had ways around this until the JVM improved.

xarope··on Voice AI Systems Are Vulnerable to Hidden Audio Attacks
something about the current trend of AI vulnerabilities reminds me of the old Asimov Robot series and the three laws of robotics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

xarope··on OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors
In healthcare, HIPAA/GDPR equivalent would block this. Let's be realistic in our discussion; this is not the same as google buying up a library worth of books, scanning and destroying them
xarope··on Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race
the consensus seems to be that the foam itself is the spring (hence the successful adidas evo sl and dynafish xiaonian), and the carbon plate/rod/whatever is more to control/manage that "spring".
xarope··on Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now
I can see the dichotomy forming in the "post AI" world;

1) massive companies spending millions of tokens to write+secure their software

2) in the shadows, "elite" software contractors writing bespoke software to fulfill needs for those who can't afford the millions, or fix cracks in (1)

(Oh wait, I think this is what is happening now, anyway, minus the millions of tokens)

xarope··on DIY Soft Drinks
can't several small hometown grocers get together to be able to make that volume/quantity? Surely that would be better than just buying from costco?
xarope··on A perfectable programming language
interesting the ones they chose to name; I would have probably started with 6502/68000/68020/z80 assembly, fortran, cobol, basic, c, ada, simula 67, sh, zsh, bash, napier 88, tcl, perl, rexx, before hitting the next generation of python, c++, etc.
xarope··on Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
somehow mixed grip makes me twist slightly which caused me back problems; after a few tweaks to the lower back, I decided that mixed wasn't worth it (I don't compete anymore). Yes, you are right, I do use the hook grip, since I also do some weightlifting.
xarope··on Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
my clothes haven't changed in size, but I fill them out better, is probably best to describe it!
xarope··on Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
ditto. I don't have great numbers, my bench is terrible, not even 1.5x BW, but I did manage to get my DL to ~2.5x in a competition, then tweaked my back and now only double overhand, which means my grip tends to go when I get to ~2x BW (my gym doesn't allow chalk, and I don't use straps, so it is what it is).
xarope··on Peptides: where to begin?
It's interesting you mention this (anhedonia), since the guardian just published this article: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/06/is-retatruti...

How did you actually feel? Disinterested in stuff, ennui, or other?

xarope··on Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz
wasn't one of the controversies, that the simulation didn't account for the fact that Red's boats couldn't actually/launch carry the cruise missiles that were used to sink these ships?

be that as it may, the lesson still stands

xarope··on The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode
Absolutely. Let's say I have a problem with gRPC and traced it to code generated using the gRPC compiler. I can reproduce it, highlight it and I'm pretty sure the gRPC team would address the issue.

Replace gRPC compiler with LLM. Can you reproduce? (probably not 100%). Can anybody fix it short of throwing more english phrases like "DO NOT", "NEVER", "Under No Circumstances"?

Probably not.

xarope··on How the Turner twins are mythbusting modern technical apparel
I've done a lot of long hikes (200+km in the sahara, 6000+m mountains in kazakstan), and 2kg extra means a lot, like the difference between carrying extra fuel/food versus just clothing.

Anyway, you can try it yourself, wear a 2kg wax cotton jacket versus a 500gm technical jacket and see how you feel after a day's hiking.

xarope··on Document poisoning in RAG systems: How attackers corrupt AI's sources
keen eye. 4 days old account, verbose comments.

Sigh.

As far as I know, the problem is still how to segment data flow from control plane for LLMs. Isn't that why we still can prompt inject/jail break these things?

xarope··on “Design me a highly resilient database”
I have previous CTO experience in the POS space, you would be right on both counts.

(till this day, I can walk into a shop, look at the POS screen and identify if its one of those visual basic/PHP/windows XP compatibility mode required stuff).

xarope··on Runners who churn butter on their runs
TIL - next time I go to the dolomites, I might seriously try this; ice cream after 6-8 hours of hiking and via ferrata sounds wonderful.
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