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• Post #4501554

  Today's instalment of 'people who criticise #Signal should understand why Signal made specific choices and provide better solutions to those problems': Signal uses a phone number to sign up (boo, PII!). This serves three primary purposes: The one I don't really like is that it limits account-creation rate for antispam purposes. This is largely a problem because Signal conflates identifiers (your phone number or username) with capabilities: anyone who has your identity can con...

• Post #4498132

  I'm starting to think I should just block the vivaldi.net instance entirely. The signal to noise ratio coming from there is staggeringly low. It makes mastodon.social look good.

• Post #4493650

  We really don’t talk about election interference enough. #CountBinface is moving his spaceship to blot out the Sun as a show of strength the evening before the election and the mainstream press is running cover stories.

• Post #4482245

  The friendly kitten next door is now old enough that he has learned to teleport. His brother, fortunately, still moves around with traditional Newtonian methods.

• Post #4444732

  @gnomekat@tech.lgbt What is this? I want to play it!

• Post #4431937

  UK folks: If you are organising a petition that you want to be presented to the government and you use any platform that isn't https://petition.parliament.uk, then I assume it's just a data-harvesting organisation. I don't care if it's some charity that hasn't had all of their systems compromised (or not simply sold the data to Facebook) yet. I don't care that 48rabbitfeet or whatever is a really good organisation that's totally trustworthy and promises not to sell...

• Post #4430237

  It still amazes me that, in spite of international travel predating computers by quite a long time, most calendaring software does not understand the concept of an event that starts in one time zone and ends in another (including Apple's iCal, which was built around a file format that can express this for interchange). And the very few that can handle this don't have a way of representing in the UI that your local time zone changes as a result of this event and that anything that you do...

• Post #4426604

  I regret to inform you that my AI has achieved sentience and escaped the sandbox into the Internet. It will probably do all sorts of scary hacking now! The only possible way to save the world is to invest $1 T in my AI Safety startup.

• Post #4415240

  @juergen_hubert@mementomori.social By the bubble, or by the bubble bursting? 'AI' has had little impact on most industries, which is one of the major signs that it's a bubble: if it were significantly improving productivity outside of a handful of niche cases there would be some possible justification for the $3T sunk into it. The bubble bursting is a very different story. My back of the envelope calculation on the US stock market was that about $30T was overexposed to the AI bu...

• Post #4411396

  @troitregrouloinu@mastodon.social @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu EU government folks: as someone who has worked on Confidential Computing and remote attestation systems for cloud computing, I am happy, at any point, to provide a briefing on why remote attestation as implemented in mobile operating systems, is far more about platform lock in than security. I am based in the UK and will do remote briefings on this for free, in person if you pay travel expenses. I no longer work for a...

• Post #4410011

  @stuartl@mastodon.longlandclan.id.au @jimbob@aus.social @foone@digipres.club If I write source code and compile it, the output should be a lowering of the source code. Every behaviour in the running program should be the result of something in the source code if it were executed in the language’s abstract machine. Even things that are undefined behaviour are reflected, though the ‘anything might happen once this becomes reachable’ rule makes it hard to reason about real behaviour. But the rea...

• Post #4409695

  @cismonx@mastodon.social @lzg@mastodon.social A lot of things designed by software engineers, including a lot of F/OSS, is objectively bad for usability. That’s not hyperbole, there are things you can objectively measure (Fitts’ Law, number of operations to complete common tasks) as well as more subjective things (such as discoverability of features, visual cues for interactivity, and so on). Unfortunately, a lot of interfaces designed by designers in the last 15-20 years are the same. I th...

• Post #4407930

  Partner, looking at my screen: Oh, that looks interesting, is it? Me: I don’t know I haven’t read it yet. I can send you the link? Partner: Or you could tell me when you have read it? Me: You realise this is a report from 2023 and I’ve had that tab open for a year now?

• Post #4382162

  Starting playing the Halo remake: Oooo, pretty, look at the detail on the beaches! Getting to the appearance of the Flood and being attacked by a facehugger the first time: THIS HAD ENOUGH DETAIL 20 YEARS AGO!

• Post #4380627

  I got tagged in a PR about the release notes for ML-DSA Native 1.0.0 because I contributed a couple of minor API tweaks. I cannot overstate what an absolute joy the maintainers of this project were to work with. They have to have ludicrously high quality requirements because pretty much every possible use of their codebase is security critical. And that doesn't seem to stop them from being amazingly welcoming and friendly to first-time contributors. I hope I do half as well as them in...

• Post #4379170

  I posted elsewhere, but I really don't like the term 'prompt injection' because it implies that a prompt is somehow special and separated from the rest of the token stream and that you're bypassing some level of separation that simply doesn't exist with LLMs. It's like saying 'authentication bypass' when you're talking about a system that doesn't do authentication. So can we come up with a term that implies clearly that this is expected behaviour for LLM...

• Post #4378798

  @gtsadmin@wiseowl.club @d1@autistics.life @logout@oldbytes.space Interesting, I don't have the same association between books and scroll bars. I don't really have any real-world analogue other than microfiche, and that's normally controlled from the bottom middle.

• Post #4377293

  If I set up a company, does anyone want to buy a trillionth share of it for $1, so I can claim to be richer than Elon Musk?

• Post #4358579

  We're going to be hiring someone to work on CHERIoT software things soon. Full remote, but UK Only (for various funding purposes, we need more people in the UK). Happy to talk to junior people who have some C/C++/Rust experience. You'll initially be mostly writing C++, though we expect this to move to more Rust over the next year or so. Some of the job will be driver development gruntwork (here is a datasheet, here is a software interface for this device class, please write a driver...

• Post #4357116

  @riverpunk@defcon.social @pixelschubsi@troet.cafe @giacomo @akareilly@hachyderm.io Two things: Bridges don't guarantee identity portability. That's important for anything that's a communication channel.Bridges come with privacy concerns. A bridge between service A and B means that the privacy is as weak as the lower privacy of A and B. That's also the case if A and B are federated instances of the same service, which is why federation is great for public channels (E.g. Activ...

• Post #4353938

  Elizabeth Moon's Serrano Legacy series (where she is definitely channeling P G Wodehouse) is a clear reminder that most science fiction needs more aunts.

• Post #4351737

  When I grow up, I want to be a bat!

• Post #4334386

  Sometimes people look at a system and say ‘I don’t like the centralisation here, we should simply make it a distributed system instead’. And I cannot comprehend the life experience that would lead anyone to believe that this will not lead to vastly more problems. Designing a decentralised system is often desirable but it is always at least an order of magnitude harder than designing a centralised system with the same guarantees.

• Post #4310010

  Linguistic shift is weird. Prove used to mean ‘test whether something is true’ and now means ‘demonstrate that something is true’. Patriot used to mean ‘someone who puts their country above personal interests’ and now means ‘someone who works on behalf of a foreign government’.

• Post #4276440

  RE: https://mastodon.nl/@ArtHarg/117014270911112013 Best description of pthread_cancel I've seen so far.

• Post #4275899

  Have you ever used pthread_cancel in anything that wasn't a toy example and not regretted it?

• Post #4269714

  RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/117010519416979095 That’s such a negative framing. I prefer to think of it as: If a company with a ‘Generate this with AI’ button also gives you a ‘Report AI slop’ button, you should take advantage of this golden opportunity to poison their training data. A few ideas: Flag only posts that are not obviously slop.Flag every single post that mentions ‘AI’ in a vaguely positive way.Flag every post that expresses positive sentiment towards Microsoft, Google, or Meta.S...

• Post #4254120

  New research has shown that the dinosaurs all died of embarrassment within hours of one of them using the phrase ‘AI gigafactory’ unironically.

• Post #4246433

  Apparently putting ‘EDIT: I misattributed this quote’ at the top of a post isn’t enough to stop people boosting it, so now I’ve deleted it.

• Post #4245123

  So many POSIX 'RATIONALE' sections can be distilled to: One vendor did stupid thing A. Another did stupid thing B. We defined this interface to permit both implementations because designing a third thing that's sensible is, sadly, not within our remit and there are existing consumers of both of the stupid APIs.