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mjg59

@[email protected]

Former biologist. Actual PhD in genetics. Security at https://aurora.tech, OS security teaching at https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu. Blog: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org. He/him.

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mjg59 , to Random
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https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2023-December/033317.html really feels like Old Internet (read the entire thread, it's amazing)

mjg59 , to Random
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Thinking about how toasters are generally different shapes depending on what bread in a given country looks like and how if they were invented today they'd all take proprietary bread that you could only buy as a subscription

mjg59 , to Random
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I've been spending about half my time this summer with a 500MBit symmetric link, and the other half at about 20MBit. It's genuinely kind of surprising how little difference this has ended up making.

mjg59 OP ,
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Some of this is that I tend to do a bunch of git pulls before heading into the forest so the amount of extra data I need to grab while I'm out there is somewhat reduced, but it's also that I'm rarely in a situation where I'm blocked on a synchronous download rather than being able to carry on coding while stuff happens in the background

mjg59 OP ,
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This would definitely be a different story if I dealt with more data-heavy workloads, but it turns out that the kind of link I had 15 years ago is still plenty to do my job - the difference between 1MBit and 20MBit is way more than the difference between 20 and 500

mjg59 , to Random
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ML models being trained on information they can scrape from the internet provides a perverse incentive - if knowledge is shared in ways that can't easily be scraped, that knowledge remains outside the scope of what the models can learn from. People working in fields that are currently poorly documented suddenly have a reason to stop writing blog posts, and instead engage in spoken presentations. A new kind of passing down of secrets from generation to generation.

mjg59 OP ,
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Or maybe we keep presenting stuff online, but obfuscated - slide decks that are accurate if you read what's visible, but contain subtle bugs if you try to parse the text out of them. Adversarial inputs intended to prevent the models from invading areas they haven't yet conquered.

mjg59 OP ,
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Implementations of cryptographic algorithms that are all subtly broken if you extract them from PDFs. A new capacitor plague, superficially fine but guaranteed to fail a few years down the road.

mjg59 , to Random
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You: (implements secure boot)
Me: (jams screwdriver into NAND pins, receives u-boot prompt)

mjg59 OP ,
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I don't remember where I first read about shorting pins while u-boot is reading the kernel to force it to drop to a prompt, but I have hacked so many devices with that knowledge, so thank you whoever it was

mjg59 , to Random
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How I skipped 10 releases of Fedora in one go - https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/67126.html

mjg59 , to Random
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rpm -q --provides fakeprovide-rpmlib-CaretInVersions
fakeprovide-rpmlib-CaretInVersions = 20230807115220-1.fc28
rpmlib(CaretInVersions) = 4.15.0-1

and yet

Error: transaction check vs depsolve:
rpmlib(CaretInVersions) <= 4.15.0-1 is needed by (some packages)

help me @willrad you're my only hope

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