Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in ‘The cat sat on the [BLANK]’). Despite the impressive technical ju-jitsu of transformer models and the billions of parameters they learn, it’s still a…
A group of Chinese researchers have just published a paper claiming that they can—although they have not yet done so—break 2048-bit RSA. This is something to take seriously. It might not be correct, but it’s not obviously wrong. We have long known from Shor’s algorithm that factoring with a quantum computer is easy…
(I did a Twitter thread on this a while back, against my better judgment, and now moving to a proper blog.) The hanging-punctuation property in CSS is almost a no-brainer. The classic example is a …
The story of a tragedy which touched the hearts of the world and forced the industry to ask whether it had done enough to keep planes…
When I was a child, growing up in the 80s, I read pretty much anything I could find about computers. There was not a lot translated to French. I even read the MS-DOS Version 5 Reference Guide. The cover was dry and the content was not very tasty either.
Wolfram expands Notebooks, integrating LLM functionality into the new chat cell and Chat Notebook. Stephen Wolfram explains how chat-enabled and chat-driven versions work.
Early in my research career, I had a chance to work with some of the best system researchers1 in the world on a number of really interesting system designs. One of the enjoyable aspects of research was the particular process used by researchers (particularly in the SOSP/OSDI community) to come up with novel yet…
Julius “Zeekill” Kivimäki, a 25-year-old Finnish man charged with extorting a local online psychotherapy practice and leaking therapy notes for more than 22,000 patients online, was arrested this week in France. A notorious hacker convicted of perpetrating tens of thousands of cybercrimes, Kivimäki had been in hiding…
The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.
In 105 jurisdictions of the Bay Area, anyone can build any residential projected at any height or density so long as 20% of the units are for low income.
The FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations, worrying that the combination power-data port can be used to inject malware onto the devices: Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels, or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce…
Should you be scared of Unix signals?
A brief overview of what money laundering is, what financial institutions do about it, and why.
I’ve been getting a little obsessed with chili oil. A little…lost in the sauce so to speak. Here’s some notes and general thoughts on chili oil.
On a Saturday night, a security engineer at Equifax was updating an SSL certificate on a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). Immediately after, suspicious connections were detected. After a more in-depth investigation, it became evident that the situation was far graver than anticipated. A service had to be…
A deep-dive into machine learning embeddings.
I originally posted this on Reddit so I could get a good sample of opinions from other engineers to see how they compared to mine before…
Sweet merciful Jesus, I woke up this morning and my inbox was flooded with horrific stories about how employers treat people. I knew things were fucked, but this was so much worse than I imagined, and that's not even getting into the comments on Hackernews. I am going to dig into some of those emails, but first...
Little things you'll notice and need to learn when learning Zig
There's more than one way to write an IP address: decimal, hex, octal, overflowed octets and omitted zeroes all resolve to the same host. A fun trick to mess …
Early stage technology decisions must be, uncomfortably, a means to an end.
Base64 is an elegant way to convert binary data to text, making it easy to store and transport. This article covers the basics of Base64 encoding, including what it is, how it works and why it's important. It also shows how to encode and decode Base64 data in various programming languages.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
