Last week, Debian announced that in September 2006 they accidentally broke the OpenSSL pseudo-random number generator while trying to silence a Valgrind warning. One effect this had is that the ssh-keygen program installed on recent Debian systems (and Debian-derived systems like Ubuntu) could only generate 32,767…
One piece of slang that has long embodied the short attention span Internet age is TL;DR, short for “too long; didn’t read.” With the explosion of generative AI tools, we’re rapidly entering the age of TL;DW: “too long, didn’t write.” A January survey from Fishbowl found that 40% of nearly 12,000 workers have used…
Maintained Compatibility List for International Banking Apps This list includes banking apps that have been tested, submitted, reviewed, and verified as compatible. LIST | SUBMIT | UPDATE | POSSIBLE WORKAROUND SOLUTIONS Introduction Welcome to the crowd-sourced dataset for GrapheneOS users on currently supported…
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
[LinkedIn discussion, Twitter thread]
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
This was posted to USENET by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather), on May 21, 1983.
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
F-Droid is a popular alternative app repository for Android, especially known for its main repository dedicated to free and open-source software. F-Droid is often recommended among security and privacy enthusiasts, but how does it stack up against Play Store in practice? This write-up will attempt to emphasize major…
Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code
This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. In 2021, we and a team o…
My writings about Ghostty, the terminal emulator I work on.
A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.
On GPT-3: meta-learning, scaling, implications, and deep theory. The scaling hypothesis: neural nets absorb data & compute, generalizing and becoming more Bayesian as problems get harder, manifesting new abilities even at trivial-by-global-standards-scale. The deep learning revolution has begun as foretold.
