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• Post #4268274

  Wayland clown shoes: key repeat rate is not handled by the display server, but by each client toolkit independently. Predictably, many of them get it wrong, coupling input handling to display speed / frame rates, meaning large window damage regions on monitors with a lower refresh rate spuriously get key repeat rates drastically lower than smaller damage regions and/or higher refresh rates. No wonder people have started to care about "blazing fast terminals"! It's not that the te...

• Post #3880310

  The mobile internet ecosystem has so much potential for communal benefit. For example, when using Google Maps, you're subtly and pleasantly invited to fill in a quick survey to describe travel conditions on the vehicle you're on. This helps everybody, in principle, and it's a low-cost and fun way to contribute something small to the community. There's power here. So much power from bottom-up semi-gamified contribution like this: people like helping each other, people like being u...

• Post #2560422

  By treating ChatGPT and similar LLMs as being in any way concerned with truth, or by speaking metaphorically as if they make mistakes or suffer “hallucinations” in pursuit of true claims, we risk exactly this acceptance of bullshit, and this squandering of meaning. Such a good paper. M. T. Hicks, J. Humphries, and J. Slater, “ChatGPT is bullshit,” Ethics and Information Technology, vol. 26, no. 2, p. 38, June 2024, doi: 10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5.

• Post #2377563

  You know how ACLs/RBAC don't compose? Whereas object-capabilities do? We see this in-the-small with Unix user/group IDs. Trying to mount virtiofs from host-to-guest, everything is done by uid/gid, not by name, and if there's any mismatch, you get to keep both pieces. Exactly the same problem as trying to reconcile two ACL/RBAC databases across services, only slightly simplified by having at least a compatible schema and logical arrangement.

• Post #1458515

  Any academics I follow interested in moving to Europe? My department here in Maastricht, Netherlands, is hiring: Associate Professor in System and Network Security, open until May 10, 2026 https://vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastricht-Associate-Professor-in-System-and-Network-Security/1357701057/ Assistant Professor in Computer Systems, open until May 10, 2026 https://vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastricht-Assistant-Professor-in-Computer-Systems/1357700157/ Both of these...

• Post #711712

  I'm one of these "in principle, a VM can contain a program" guys by nature so there's a bit of cognitive dissonance wrt the actual-reality "in practice, a VM usually contains a program but VM breaches and bugs are certainly not unheard of and VM escape is a depressing reality"