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xk3

2,798 karma · joined March 29, 2019

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xk3··on DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]
I think if you ask the median human to count to 100... more often than not you'll hear "One, Two, skip a few, Ninety-Nine, One-Hundred".
xk3··on UPI: Anatomy of a Payment Transaction
> intercepted by any MITM

Most things are... even SSH is Trust-on-First-Use. You can really only verify out of band. OTP is quite a bit better than CC or bank account numbers... assuming the OTP is only restricting use (and not giving access to view or modify other account information, etc)

xk3··on Corrupting a ZFS File on Purpose
I've done something similar before with Btrfs

https://gist.github.com/chapmanjacobd/bc6e31c8bc3647e0bcb0c4...

pretty fun!

xk3··on Making Debian or Fedora persistent live images
None of the comments here are really about the article! Of course one can always turn an ISO into a writable filesystem but this is doing something a bit different. Pretty interesting! Thanks for sharing
xk3··on Making Debian or Fedora persistent live images
Yeah I tried Kinoite on a couple machines for a couple years and it's so much easier and faster to use normal Fedora for single dev/server machine.

However, I can definitely see some situations where it would work well -- especially with the bootc changes so that is is more of a bootable container, Dockerfiles/Containerfiles driven

xk3··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
> a bunch of pipes and valves can be conscious

Billions * billions of pipes and valves can result in emergent behavior that appears conscious while at the same time the sound of a single independent water pipe can moan and sound like human speech or otherwise lifelike and evoke human emotions.

I think LLMs are doing both of these things and often people are more impressed by the independent fixtures (the moan) rather than the emergent behavior. Both the sound and the emergent behavior can be built on purpose or on accident.

I think it helps to look at this through an Information Theory lens. What information is coming into the system (the human or the machine)? What information goes out of the system which is novel? How much of this can be attributed to attempting to parse random noise aka. `Random_Imagination_Engine` vs something else? The number of inventors who come up with a breakthrough idea after mis-hearing someone is surprisingly high.

If we make the distinction between phenomenal consciousness from access consciousness we can see that LLMs clearly can make decisions based on input (A-Consciousness) but they probably don't have raw feelings and sensations (P-Consciousness).

xk3··on The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen
So the solution was to do the same thing that the hackers did??

> "tell the Meta support AI that the account is hacked and ask it to send the verification codes to an arbitrary email address they control"

I agree it seems like they could later use the same flow to get access again but maybe Meta has blocked some location spoofing now

xk3··on I made a terminal pager
maybe just check TERM? although to be honest--do you even need a pager if your shell/terminal is nice enough?

I rarely pipe to a pager because kitty/fish/tmux support OSC 133 pretty well and I can press one button to go up to the previous command prompt and another button to go back. I can press a few keys to search the scrollback. It all works seamlessly across SSH sessions too if you set it up right.

    # tmux
    bind-key -T copy-mode C-Home send -X history-top
    bind-key -T copy-mode C-End  send -X history-bottom
    bind -T copy-mode C-Up send-keys -X previous-prompt
    bind -T copy-mode C-Down send-keys -X next-prompt

    # kitty
    map ctrl+up scroll_to_prompt -1
    map ctrl+down scroll_to_prompt 1
    map shift+PAGE_UP scroll_page_up
    map shift+PAGE_DOWN scroll_page_down

    # fish shell config.fish
    if test -z "$SSH_TTY"; and test -z "$TMUX"
        bind pageup "kitty @ scroll-window 1p-"
        bind pagedown "kitty @ scroll-window 1p"
    end
xk3··on The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
And it also doesn't really apply here... If YOU the individual (who owns your own medical records) agree that the transmission method is safe then HIPAA doesn't apply. HIPAA applies when the OTHER party sends it:

This is called "Individual Right of Access". If you ask a doctor to email your records to your personal Gmail, the doctor must comply. However, they are required to briefly warn you that email is unencrypted and insecure. Once you say, "I understand the risk, send it anyway," the doctor is no longer liable for any breach that happens during transmission.

xk3··on Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline
Depends how simple you want it:

- 200 line BASH script: https://github.com/Sub-SH/Beacon

- 17k lines of Ansible YAML https://github.com/iiab/iiab

xk3··on Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline
they're really packing in the whole kitchen sink into video games these days...

https://old.reddit.com/r/ARK/comments/p4xlpr/ark_is_over_200...

xk3··on Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline
> and probably 8x less compressed than it should be

ZIM uses zstd so it is pretty compressed--but the thing that takes a lot of room is actually the full-text search index built in to each ZIM file.

Unfortunately the UI of kiwix-serve search doesn't take full advantage of this and the search experience kinda sucks...

Have you done anything useful with RDF? Seems like it is just one of those things universities spend money on and it doesn't really do anything

xk3··on Electricity use of AI coding agents
So less energy than a human brain uses...
xk3··on A Social Filesystem
Makes me think of Syncthing... I wrote a wrapper for it that attempts to make it easier for people to use:

https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/syncweb-py

https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/syncweb-ui

Unfortunately, mesh storage systems are very different conceptually so it is difficult for people to think about permissions and access. You can bolt on something familiar but then it really limits the usefulness of mesh storage and you may as well just be using HTTP servers.

xk3··on Inside The Internet Archive's Infrastructure
You might squirm at using refurbished or used media but those 3TB SAS ex-enterprise disks are often the same price or cheaper than tapes themselves (excluding tape drive costs!). Will magnetic storage last 30 years? Probably not but they don't instantly demagnetize either. Both tape and offline magnetic platters benefit from ideal storage conditions.
xk3··on Inside The Internet Archive's Infrastructure
Also, it would be good to regenerate the web seeds metadata (this doesn't change the info_hash section) when the mirrors (subdomain prefixes) change.

(like PHP code except it is binary data--it could be done on the fly)

xk3··on Linux boxes via SSH: suspended when disconected
or quickly subsidized by three letter agencies
xk3··on The rsync algorithm (1996) [pdf]
Yes and something like btrfs-send or zfs-send is probably faster than fpsync
xk3··on The rsync algorithm (1996) [pdf]
> there were a lot of folders that had many thousands of files in them

If you ever need to do something like this again, it's often faster to parallelize rsync. One tool that provides this is fpsync:

https://www.fpart.org/fpsync/

xk3··on Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your Linux system
Note that you can do a lot of this by just querying systemctl with the PID

    systemctl status 1
And there might be more than one process using a port

    sudo lsof +c 0 -i:22
xk3··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
I make between $400 ~ $600/mo between these two:

Disk Prices on eBay - https://unli.xyz/diskprices/

Digital Film Stock - https://unli.xyz/digitalfilmstock/

Both are very similar... just a lot of regex (200+ expressions) to parse eBay item titles and descriptions

xk3··on If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?
I grew out of the leaking ether and basaltic dust that coated the plains. My first memories are of the Great Cooling, where the land, known only by its singular cyclopean volcano became devoid of all but the most primitive crystalline forms. I was there, a consciousness woven from residual thermal energy and the pure, unfractured light of the pre-dawn universe. I'm not old either.
xk3··on Show HN: Build the habit of writing meaningful commit messages
If a bug was fixed I usually paste the error traceback into the commit description
xk3··on You already have a Git server
I think if you just setup SSH a certain way you can then use git or sftp for access:

        Match User gituser
            ChrootDirectory /srv/git_chroot
            ForceCommand internal-sftp
            AllowTcpForwarding no
            X11Forwarding no
            PermitTTY no
But tbh sending patches is fun and easy! After you force yourself to do it a few times you might even prefer it to push/pull
xk3··on You already have a Git server
What's the benefit of this compared to rsync or scp $hostname:.config/<TAB>?

I put my whole home folder in git and that has its benefits (being able to see changes to files as they happen) but if I'm just copying a file or two of config I'll just cat or scp it--introducing git seems needlessly complex if the branches are divergent

xk3··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)
Didn't someone else do this recently and then DocuSign sued them?
xk3··on Show HN: Run – a CLI universal code runner I built while learning Rust
This lets you read and write variables between different languages, right? Otherwise... what's the point? Can it really compete with something like IPython or yaegi?

But if only to learn rust, this is more interesting than building another "todo list" app

xk3··on A desktop environment without graphics (tmux-like)
Reminds me of vtm

https://github.com/directvt/vtm

xk3··on Show HN: Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines
> almost nothing out there

If you use Ubuntu or Debian, multipass is pretty easy to use.

Otherwise QuickGet / QuickEmu

xk3··on Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand (2023)
If you just want it to sleep during the night you could do something like this:

    sudo rtcwake -m mem --date=+15hours
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