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sobchak

@ sobchak @programming.dev

Posts
20
Comments
541
Joined
10 mo. ago

  • Building a private internet together: Tuta & Ente partnership

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  • Idk about ente, but stuff like Google Photos and Immich have photo-specific features, like allowing you to search photos for specific people, semantic keywords, places, etc. Immich and Google Photos use "AI" to create embeddings of the photos (and read EXIF metadata) to allow this. In the case of Google Photos, it's a privacy nightmare.

  • Decompiling Binary Code with Large Language Models

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  • If I understand the results tables on repo correctly, their largest model achieves ~68% re-executability rate on code compiled with the q0 optimization flag. I'm unsure if that just tests if the decompiled code can be recompiled and executed, or if the programs need to produce the same result on some test cases. If the model is used to refine Ghidra outputs (I'm guessing this is some well-known decompilation framework) it can be used to achieve ~80% re-executability rate, which is better than Ghidra's baseline of ~34%.

  • ICE vs Cops

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  • I've never had that experience. Every police department I've had personal experience with has been corrupt. I have noticed that some police chiefs I've seen on TV seem more professional; but those people are appointed by (liberal) politicians and vetted. I assume most of the rank and file police are envious of ICE. I think if the federal government could somehow assume direct control of police, bypassing mayors, chiefs, etc, they wouldn't really have much push-back from the rank and file.

  • Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC and let AI control it

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  • I was curious about an LLM-powered terminal, so downloaded it to check it out. The first thing I did was ask it to do something like "open my resume file," and instead doing something like "ls | grep -i resume" in the current directory, it ran the find command on root and started hitting all my NFS mounts as well.

  • Jesus hates American "Christians"

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  • They often operate on the "just-world fallacy" too. I.e. if people are poor, starving, arrested, deported, raped, it's because they deserve it.

  • Heavily armed paramilitary illegally entered the wrong residence, without a warrant in Portland, OR, terrorized a family with a baby, destroyed a large portion of the house and disappeared all men

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  • Raids are usually done in early morning when people are likely sleeping, and everyone gets in position quietly (people at all possible entrances/exits), then many of the raiders come in and try to secure all rooms before people realize what's going on. They also come in overwhelming force, and most people would rather take their chances of surviving, rather than ensuring the death of themselves and increasing the likelihood of their loved ones being murdered as well.

    I've lived in a place that was raided by police once, and I was awoken by a guy with an AR-15 standing over me yelling (doors were unlocked, so they all just came in quickly, and I guess pretty quietly; but I'm a very heavy sleeper, so IDK).

  • is i2p relevant today?

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  • Unlike Tor, I think the heavy use of p2p file sharing on the network adds "cover traffic," making things like correlation attacks harder.

    I'm curious what the alternatives to i2p are that you use now?

    I wish there were more higher latency anonymous networks (to make correlation attacks harder). katzenpost.network looks interesting, but is just academic right now; all the other stuff in this space is blockchain crap.

  • Are there any good places to torrent music with consistent quality and tagging?

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  • Nicotine+ is an open source client for the Soulseek network. Soulseek/Nicotine+ does not use i2p or do any type of anonymization; it' uses direct connections. Guessing you meant "p2p." The network has a lot of music I can't find through torrents, and I can almost always find the music I'm looking for as FLAC files.

  • Miami-Dade PD just rolled out PUG, a fully autonomous AI-powered police cruiser. Nothing could possibly go wrong with this.

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  • We had to to clean and detail courthouse workers' (judges, DA, etc) personal vehicles for community service as children.

  • forward, but downward...

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  • PATRIOT act and DHS too.

  • Using Constraint Satisfaction to Optimize Item Selection for Bundles in Minecraft

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  • Seems to be more of a tutorial for the optimizer. Would've been more interesting if they delved into the problem and related problems. I think this problem could be reduced into other well known problems with optimized algorithms (seems related to the knapsack problem).

  • Commercials seem to be normalizing an unhealthy work-life balance more.

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  • The first one at least seems to think people want the people who do work for them to not have a life. Indicates they think their customers have no empathy or class solidarity; which is probably mostly true. We use a lot of products that involve slave labor or something close to it.

  • Feeling increasingly nihilistic about the state of tech, privacy, and the strangling of the miracle that is online anonymity. And some thoughts on arousing suspicion by using too many privacy tools.

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  • Yeah, things are getting bad rapidly. I think much of the world is going to be doing stuff like China is doing with respect to the great firewall, surveillance, and whatnot. I'm curious how the Chinese people stay anonymous online or if it's even practical anymore. I've heard China has improved their traffic analysis ability, so circumvention that previously worked, like snowflake, does not.

    Networks like Tor and i2p are really only suitable for avoiding civil lawsuits, not to protect against advanced state actors that may have a large view and control of the network. Mixnets look like they might be a little stronger (has mitigation against correlation attacks), but I think they're mostly academic. As you stated, simply just using things like this could draw attention. I don't think tech can really solve these legal and systemic problems.

    If you don't need the encryption of Meshtastic, perhaps Ham radio (or FRS or GMRS if the distances allow) is a thing where you live which wouldn't raise eyebrows. I think directional WIFI antennas can go pretty far, so you could maybe set up a private wireless LAN. I think some Ham radio people modify wifi access points to create disaster recovery networks covering large geographic areas (encryption is not allowed though).

  • LLM D&D Alignment Check

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  • I think Grok is too, at least an older version. There's also gpt-oss, and Meta has released a lot of "open source" models, but I think they use weird licences. Meta and Deepseek (and Alibaba) researchers publish papers that are actually useful, while the rest just publish marketing material, trying to keep the research itself private.

  • ‘Death to Spotify’: the DIY movement to get artists and fans to quit the music app

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  • I've been downloading FLAC (lossless), and when I transfer to my phone, I encode to Opus, which is supposed to have better sound quality than MP3 at comparable file sizes.

  • Guess I'm sleeping on the couch again

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  • Options and margin day-traders/gamblers. Single day declines like that on index funds are pretty rare (or used to be), so some people may bet against it thinking it's a "sure thing," that they wouldn't lose too much money if it's a more normal 0.5% decline. Some trades could cause people to lose all their money (and more) on such declines.

  • What is your favorite version of FTL in science fiction?

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  • Here's how I remember it, could be wrong, been a long time. The super advanced entity, the Eschaton, descends from humans in the future. Any FTL travel that would break causality within the Eschaton's historical light cone is banned; I.e. anything that could interfere with the Eschaton's development. Human civilizations have causality-safe jump drives that navigate in ways that avoid causality violations within the Eschaton's historical light cone.

  • What is your favorite version of FTL in science fiction?

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  • Yeah, some of it felt a little tongue in cheek though. Like people having their own reputation markets where everyone could buy/sell shares on others reputation.

  • i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too

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