yayachiken

My favorite anecdote for an astroturfing suspicion I had was in German subreddits.

Whenever somebody was talking about rolled oats, without fail, somebody would chime in that Kölln brand rolled outs were strictly superior and they would gladly pay the 4x markup for them.

It is hilarious because rolled outs are probably one of the most fungible goods out there. Also the comments eventually just... stopped.

Human perception is weird like that so even identical oats may taste better if the packaging is different, and also it might have been a memetic thing, but I am still somewhat convinced that it was a marketing campaign.

Not really something you can control, but RC always feels "unauthentic" whenever people write about it.

It is often portrayed like an old-school hackerspace or makerspace but it's definitely not. It has an explicit corporate background, and it always feels like that is somehow hidden. In these comments there is a comment that claims that RC is not for business builders and networking, then immediately gets disproven by a quote from its very website. This shows that you have an actual image/brand problem.

It is similar to how the term "hackathon" evolved. In the old times it was people coming together who worked on shared goals (like a FLOSS project) but only communicated via mailing lists and probably would never met in person otherwise. A hackathon was often an emotional thing, involving poor people travelling to the other side of the planet to meet their online friends to drink beer and finally have a whiteboard to communicate some complex ideas. Then corporations came and organized soulless "hackathons" and turned it into an idea farm and talent recruitment. The term "hackathon" is pretty much burnt completely nowadays.

So anything that feels like it gets subtly used by corporatism just naturally gives techies the ick. It is not the first time this bait-and-switch happens, so people are fair to assume intent.

I say you cannot control it, as obviously the public image comes from those blog posts of RC "Alumni" (Another great example: that term alone gives me the creeps). And those people have the right to feel excited about a nice experience that it probably was for them.

But Recurse Center should probably be proud of the corporate background and actively counteract the impression of being a hobbyist makerspace that just has better inventory and manpower.

At the very least, AI can review all the code you have written. You can still reject every suggestion, but in the worst it will just slow you down. No citation needed for that. If an AI were to truly confuse you sufficiently to accept a wrong suggestion based on phony logic, then it just shows you didn't grok the logic deeply in the first place. (Which is a helpful finding for the second iteration.)

You didn't say if you did, but just in case if you truly never had a serious look at LLM tools, you really need to step up. Never even trying something like Claude Code borders on negligence nowadays.

AI is still a bubble, but pretty much every software developer having a hard-dependency on these companies nowadays, is was sustains it. It sucks, but currently there is no realistic way around it.

Exceptions apply for data protection reasons, obviously don't upload all your personal data and business-critical intellectual property into some 3rd-party AI tool.

Not sure if it's the same in Canada, but where I am from the problem is the oil (lubricant and fuel) from the car and at car washes the runoff gets treated by letting it go through an oil trap.

The trapped oil gets disposed of separately, the treated oil-free water goes to the sewer.

It's actually hilarious sometimes. The business models that generate most scorn and incredulity on HN are the straightforward ones. They convert labor pretty much directly to a very basic product with a clear demand by society, that can't possibly be profitable, are we sure it's not actually a front for Real Estate or AI or Tax Evasion?

You cannot treat light as particles in that scenario. The primary wave gets absolutely and completely delayed, with no part getting ahead. It's not some photons doing something with a certain probability and then causing a macroscopic effect once the probability goes towards 1 once you passed sufficient matter.

What Feynman does (where this confusion comes from) is that you can look at discrete wave packets (i.e. photons) and the math comes out the right way for the primary wave if you assume that only some of these wave packets get phase-shifted, and add all elementary waves together afterwards.

But still, it's photons as "wave packets" that influence the whole system, not photons as independent particles that either bounce on something or don't.

I always find it interesting to read takes like this. I get it, I also bounced multiple times off Elite Dangerous due to boredom.

But in the end it was always intended to be Euro Truck Simulator in Space.

The main problem was that (just like ETS2 interestingly) there was no real satisfying end-game money sink.

For me the colonialisation update fixed that. But I also find interesting that it seems to be very personal. For me it is motivating that eventually you will have one or multiple systems that you made "your own" (I loved playing X2 and X3 back in the day for the same reason). But lots of people played Elite for years and just hauling cargo and honking systems for the heck of it, and just watching the credit balance go up was motivating enough seemingly?

People often say that but does the cost for handling cash really scale (even approximately) proportionally with the number of transactions or revenue?

Or is it more binary that you have to decide, you either handle any cash and have the cost associated with it, or you refuse to take cash at all? If the latter is the case, then avoiding cash altogether seems somewhat unrealistic where I am from. And if it doesn't scale then it makes a lot of sense cost-wise to try to do as many of your transactions with cash as possible.

If you actually read how GUIX (what they talk about in section 7.3) is calling a "full source bootstrap", they have brought down the compiler seed to less than 200 bytes, but also they rely on an execution environment that still has 25 Megabytes of unaudited(-able) binary.

GUIX is unconfortable about that, but as they name the current process "full source bootstrap" implicitly consider this unaudited execution environment out-of-scope and more of an academic blemish, rather than a real problem: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...

After all you rebuild it together with the world immediately after compiler bootstrap is done. And the utilities in your execution environment do not process the compiler source, so this dependency cannot be a problem, right?

The paper precisely addresses this. You cannot handwave away your shell or ELF utilities. They can sustain an attack just like the compiler.

> "[For demonstration purposes], I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode."

This is precisely the problem that most people dealing with OPSEC have.

If you get "paranoid enough", your threat model always collapses into an unactionable mess where everything is just toast and your only solution is to quit computing and start doing woodwork or something.

If everything is potentially compromised then of course the results from the paper become obvious. If your environment is compromised, don't trust its output, duh!

If you want to quantify though, under which assumptions, "how much" your environment can be broken without compromising its output, the paper has value. And it seems like real attempts of bootstrapping binaries actually missed a spot.

The paper is not about implementing a general attack that works on all trusting-trust mitigations.

It is precisely about showing that you can still propagate backdoored code if the compromised binary in your seed is NOT the compiler.

But to be fair, at least paper disposal is truly free because paper recycling generally turns a profit for the municipalities.

Note that the fork()/execve() semantics of Linux pretty much depend on memory overcommit. You may get weird OOM crashes when there is seemingly no memory pressure, if you turn overcommit off.

In the short time between fork() and execve(), the new process duplicates the entire virtual memory of the old one. None of this is physically allocated due to copy-on-write, but still all counts as virtual memory.

Read up on the Koch method. To be exact: Koch method with Farnsworth timing. You'll have to keep the letters in a certain speed so your brain does not have enough time to decode dots and dashes. So only the length between the letters is extended to lower the difficulty. The idea is that the lowest unit of comprehension are letters. After training you'll hear a -.- and don't even think of it as dots and dashes, it's just a K obviously.

You start just distinguishing two letters (usually K and M). I would recommend using a trainer app that gives you a string of letters by sound, and to write them down on paper. Then you can check how many you got correct. Do not try to replay letters multiple times, just skip it and move on. If your result is better than 95% or so you can continue and introduce a third letter, and so on.

There is a certain order of letters considered more or less canonical for use in the Koch method which you can look up.

Edit: Back then I learnt it with https://lcwo.net/, it's distraction-free and quite nice.

HAM was a nice rabbit hole to fall into, but unfortunately I couldn't muster enough interest to actually get good enough to go "on air".

Some other things that surprised me and may be interesting for other people:

Learning Morse code is like learning a new language. The unit of understanding is not dots and dashes but rather every letter is a unit that one (in modern training) learns to recognize intuitively as such before doing anything else.

On top of that, telegraphy has these three letter Q-Codes where one would assume that these abbreviations are for line efficiency, but also it's because three letters is a nice length that still decodes intuitively as a "word". (Also Q was probably chosen because it so seldomly comes up in "normal" words, so it's like a little attention signal? But that is my speculation.)

One can see in conversation that these three-letter codes often only have to be transmitted once, whereas free text (e.g. proper names) are often sent with redundancy so it's easier to transcribe them as you have to fall back to decoding individual letters. (My ears still sometimes perk up suddenly when hearing Morse code from movies because suddenly I pick up something like CQ without even paying attention.)

People therefore use terms like "musicality" (at least in my language, not sure if that translates to English) to refer to the quality of one's transmission. There is a certain art to it.

One funny exception to the three letter codes that gets used in Germany. If somebody signs off for a lunch break, they'll key ESSEN (translates to "eating"/"food") which would be considered "too long" to decode intuitively but it has a nice drumroll to it so it still works :)

The normalization of the age variable still looks problematic, as it requires that there is a linear dependency between age and incidence.

Both the scatter plot and also the probability graph seem to be curving upwards w.r.t age, i.e. the incidence of dementia cases seems to accelerate with age. Which at least makes a lot of intuitive sense, and would forbid just plotting in a regression line.

Having a more or less circumstantial point to arbitrarily cut your regression line in half also just begs for introducing Simpson's Paradox.

I think when thinking about progress as a society, people need to internalize better that we all without exception are on this world for the first time.

We may have collectively filled libraries full of books, and created yottabytes of digital data, but in the end to create something novel somebody has to read and understand all of this stuff. Obviously this is not possible. Read one book per day from birth to death and you still only get to consume like 80*365=29200 books in the best case, from the millions upon millions of books that have been written.

So these "few tricks" are the accumulation of a lifetime of mathematical training, the culmination of the slice of knowledge that the respective mathematician immersed themselves into. To discover new math and become famous you need both the talent and skill to apply your knowledge in novel ways, but also be lucky that you picked a field of math that has novel things with interesting applications to discover plus you picked up the right tools and right mental model that allows you to discover these things.

This does not go for math only, but also for pretty much all other non-trivial fields. There is a reason why history repeats.

And it's actually a compelling argument why AI is still a big deal even though it's at its core a parrot. It's a parrot yes, but compared to a human, it actually was able to ingest the entirety of human knowledge.

Yes, that is plausible indeed, but the problem is that there are many explanations which are plausible, but there doesn't seem to be a smoking gun.

Strange about that explanation for example is that the time correlation is backwards. First the solar generation started to drop out and only then central generator stations tripped. Also the on-going frequency oscillations had already stabilized. If it was related to frequency issues, the solar inverters would either have shut down 15 minutes earlier (while the frequency oscillations were at the peak) OR 1-2 minutes later (when power stations tripped and frequency would have dipped)

Yes, I think it's wrong, or at least way over-exaggerated.

You can run a grid to supply approximately 80% renewables (long-term average) without significant technical changes.

Only if you want to get the last 20% to renewables, you get technical challenges, e.g. related to synchronization and load-matching. But that is also not unsolvable problems, e.g. instead of relying on the inertia of steam turbines you can "just" build specific-purpose fly-wheels to do the same thing. It's just less elegant.

Source: Volker Quaschning "Understanding Renewable Energy Systems", too lazy right now to look up the exact page.

This is also consistent with the section they quoted. Generally, the load matching in grids is done by the system itself. If you add more wind and solar, which depends on the weather and location, you have to more large-scale intervention, e.g. allow generation re-dispatch. But that doesn't immediately imply that this is a dangerous process.

> crap like that report

> Only those working closely in that profession have any knowledge of the underlying causes.

This report is literally from the ENTSO-E which is the main regulatory body for the grid in Europe.

> Crap quote from the report "but no significant oscillations with amplitudes above 20 mHz".

What is the "crap" about that? An amplitude can still be measured in Hz, if you are looking at oscillating frequency deviations, if that is what you mean.

That being said, I was apparently also under the impression of outdated or just plain wrong information.

While the report I listed mentions the sudden loss of decentralized generation as starting point of the blackout, and also specifically mentions small-scale rooftop PV, it says that the cause for that sudden synchronized drop-off is actually unknown.

> It's not that easy, and the 2025 blackout good evidence of that. Renewables need a grid that's engineered for them and that require significative investments.

The outage in spain had multiple complex causes.

While the grid had a rather routine instability/oscillation on-going during time of the incident, the actual point-of-no-return was completely non-technical: Prices crossed into the negatives, which caused generation to drop by hundreds of megawatts and load to increase likewise within a minute (!) because the price acted as a non-technical synchronized drop-off signal for the grid.

In grids where the price action is not forwarded directly to the generators and consumers there would be no incentive to suddenly drop off decentralized generation. So for example in Germany a black-out would not happen like this.

You can download the full ENTSO-E report here: https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/blackout/28-april-2025-ib... (See page 10 for a broad incident timeline)

Unfortunately, to have an informed opinion, you pretty much have to read all these pages, because the situation is just so complex. Otherwise, you just fall for agenda pushing from all sides.

Then we are just talking about two different things.

On ISP level, routing tables are built via BGP. BGP needs Autonomous Systems (AS) as organization unit to work. If you are not an AS you are never a peer as you are not on equal footing.

As a rule of thumb, if your edge router has a default route set, we are very likely talking about different scales.

> This also describes transit and describes getting internet service at home.

Well no. Transit means that you use another AS (usually by a larger ISP) to get connectivity to a certain AS. And as for your internet service at home, unless you announce an AS, you are not peering with anyone.

Well, there is always a regulatory measure that would be a lot easier to implement: Lawmakers could just disallow Tier 1 carriers to provide consumer Internet access. (This forced separation of business domain already has precedent in other sectors, e.g. energy companies having to separate network upkeep from energy trading or banks having to split their investment branch from the credit branch)

And I have a feeling that as soon as that is seriously discussed, the current exploitation of market power will stop rather quickly, without any need for actual regulation.

Peering just means that two AS physically connect to each other directly. Whether this peering is paid or not is independent from the technical implementation.

Just nearly everybody except Telekom is doing this on a liberal and informal not-even-handshake basis. On ISP scale, you either invest in infrastructure, or pay rent for network ports or cross-links, and you generally want your traffic usage to be smooth without spikes, and also go to the destination without going through your expensive ports more than once. So general connectivity is more important than any kind of traffic metering.

DTAG are also a consumer ISP. A consumer ISP should be considered a utility, and utilities can also be forced to provide certain services. In addition, Internet Exchanges have become so critical for the Internet architecture that they should also have some privileged status.

Legislation could focus on the following general rules, without favoring some providers over the others:

* If you participate on an IX node, there is no reasonable technical or financial reason not to peer with the other participants at that node. Of course this would also mean that participants have to be protected against price-gouging of IXs when they need to scale up their uplink for that reason.

* Alternatively, you could conditionally allow paid peering, but in that case require certain availability guarantees on your general transit connection.

* If you do not want to do business with a certain party, it should be all or nothing. Blacklist them organization-wide. No misleading to consumers that a content provider just appears slow, announce that you do not want to play with e.g. Netflix anymore and if your customers do not like it, they will switch.

* If you want to opt out of all of this regulation, you are free to run fiber yourself and just directly connect with everybody you are interested in. That is expensive? Too bad.

Regulating peering within the EU would already be a win.

The providers are then free to either move out of the EU market, or let their non-EU traffic flow via the (then likely larger) unrestricted pipes at DECIX and AMSIX. If they think that routing everything via EU is cheaper instead of just peering better in the other parts of the world to deliver traffic locally, then be it, that is their own economic freedom to decide so.

But they will realistically not do that. Also, SDNs will likely never go back to serving content in Europe from e.g. the US. Good connectivity is just generally the economically better option.

That being said, T1 companies like Deutsche Telekom who also serve a large consumer base via broadband and mobile and not just other large business networks are probably more vulnerable to such legislation than an exclusive transit provider.

Small tangent, but I feel like it is a good time to drop the term "net neutrality", which covers way too much ground. In the past in political discussions, the term "violation of net neutrality" was used to protest multiple different issues:

* Traffic shaping (e.g. slowing down Bittorrent traffic)

* Traffic fast lanes (pay for priority access to some content providers)

* Selective zero-rating (exclude some providers from counting towards a traffic limit)

* Artificial peering restriction (what Telekom is doing, usually via forcing content providers into paid peering agreements)

I think people should start using more specific terms that are understandable for non-technical people, because otherwise the discussion becomes confused, which helps the providers.

Lots of semi-technical people think that "violating net neutrality" refers to traffic fast lanes, because the last time this discussion entered the public was when the US social media was in uproar about FCC rules 10 years ago.

What Telekom is doing looks similar to the outside (some content providers are fast, some are not), but they can just deflect by saying that they do not intentionally throttle traffic, which is pretty much true, as they hit their physical bottlenecks. If you are knowledgable enough as a lawmaker to press them on the peering issue, they could argue that forcing peering would force them to pay rent at Internet Exchanges, just so other providers have good access. Where they also kind of have a point.

And even lots of technical people have no clue about peering, transit etc. and treat their uplink as a blackbox, a cloud in their network chart where the Internet comes out.

For the Telekom case, we would need a different legislation, for example make paid peering agreements between providers illegal or at least regulated, which would then be an incentive to be generally well-connected (free mutual peering is usually considered a win-win scenario unless you are Deutsche Telekom and can use your market power to bully other market participants into another form of rent extraction). And that means that lawmakers and the public need to understand first the specific problem we are fighting.

I think you are reading too much into it indeed. I just paraphrased what the author called "My teenage daughter went mad."

I explicitly do not want to make a statement about the normality of the described behaviour, as it is impossible to do something like that on a third-person account, even if you were a "professional". And I would like to point out that you are doing the same.

What I criticize indeed is the simplistic view of mental disorders put forward in this article, especially personality disorders. Differential diagnosis is very difficult in psychology as many disorders are disruptions of similar underlying cognitive processes, and comorbidities are common. Their view of schizoid personality disorder is not accurate. For example the part where the author dismissed the psychologist who reminded them that those disorders are only diagnosed in adults. This is what struck me as very odd, which is why I mentioned the age of the daughter. This shows a severe deficiency of knowledge what personality disorders actually are. While there is genetic disposition for developing a PD, they are generally considered to be acquired during childhood and adolescent personality development. In addition, the author seems to get confused by the similarity in name of schizoid PD and schizophrenia (confusingly even though they seem to be aware that the illnesses are different) by assuming a prospensity to having a psychotic world-view.

An outdated view considered it actually to be impossible to get rid of a manifested PD in adulthood, while modern views fortunately see more neuroplasticity in adults. Diagnosing a PD in early adolescence does not make sense, rather one would identify stressors in the environment nurturing dysfunctional patterns and try to resolve those before the behavioural patterns are embedded too deeply.

But it is difficult to tell what the author actually means, as they are somewhat contradictory in their thoughts and seem generally ill-informed about basics.

Also, browsing through the rest of the blog, the author seems to be deep in the "incel" social darwinism rabbit hole, which explains why they have so much difficulty to shoe-horn everything into their world view to the point of contradicting themselves within the same sentence. The entire article (or entire blog even) could be used as a case study of severe cognitive dissonance due being trapped by one's own dogmatic ideology.