a Software Should Work lecture from Richard Hipp, lead developer for the SQLite project, talking about the history of the project and why your test suite really should aim for 100% code path coverage, among other topics
AI coding agents, or as I've started calling them: tech debt as a service.
@futzle ... "and with that, he slammed the door and furiously rode into the night on his ergatorote" ...
Once in their lifetime, every trans person who is physically and financially able is expected to make a pilgrimage to IKEA. This is known as the Blå Hajj.
saw this on BlueSky and instantly thought @futzle would be interested ... some fascinating Oddnesses in here, mostly that kilo and milli are both a 1000 measure, but we don't use them that way now ...
Richard Scarry already summarized everything there is to know about cyber security, about 50 years ago.
I updated my total eclipse webcam viewer for today's eclipse!
Once totality begins you'll see a live-updating umbra, so you can race to the next webcam and see the eclipse happen over and over again.
folks gonna be so honest, i have no clue who to follow on here or how to use it. I am new to this fediverse thingy. I want to find other game devs, artists, photograpers and silly people to follow. if you are one of these people please say hi
i love seeing creative qr code designs, so i made this guide explaining what tricks you can (and can't!) do with qr codes while still keeping them very much readable
have fun and make cool stuff!!
I saw this elsewhere and thought I’d repost here. One lab’s policy on AI use in academic writing.
“The only reason you’ll ever need to not write with AI”
https://www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/the-only-reason-youll-ever-need-not-to-write-with-ai
Hackers, 2000: DMA allows arbitrary memory access!
Vendors: Isn't that great? Kernel debugging is so convenient!
Hackers, 2010: FBI and NSA can use ExpressCard and IEEE 1394 DMA to access memory at will and steal full-disk encryption keys from participants in movements like "Occupy Wall Street"!
Vendors: How many dissidents across the US are actually going to get targeted by the FBI like that?
Hackers, 2020: USB 4 allows arbitrary memory access via DMA, any standard USB device can be used to steal data!
Vendors: Physical security isn't our responsibility - you can just seal off the USB ports.
Hackers, 2025: PCIe DMA enables online game cheats that the system can't detect!
Vendors: Right now! Immediately! Enable IOMMU! Anyone who doesn't enable it gets their account banned!
to catch a train you have to think like a train
move slow and make things
ooh ... the quake 30th anniversary release on Steam includes 12 single player campaigns that look really tasty ... more on the way apparently ...
This story should terrify any open source project or company that allows LLM-generated code into their project.
Someone created a new app, using Claude. Only it wasn’t a new app, it was clearly plagiarised because it happened that there was an example in the training set that exactly matched the requirements. The similarity was well within the range that courts have previously used to determine a derived work.
When you have this level of similarity, the requirement comes to you to prove that there was no way that the original work could have flowed to your project. Companies that have this concern usually do it by ensuring that no one on the team has been exposed to the original and that the code for the original never goes near their systems. But when one of the systems that you use is a language model trained on, among other things, all of the open-source code that it could scrape (and which does not disclose its training set), being able to prove that there was no path from some other codebase to yours is impossible.
Just because the US copyright office has ruled that you, as the person promoting an LLM, cannot assert copyright on the output, does not mean that someone else can’t. If you take a DVD and transcode it to H.264, there is no creative step and so the new copy is not something subject to independent copyright, but it is a derived work of the DVD (itself a lower-quality derived work of the original masters) and so subject to the same copyright.
Importantly in this story, the person prompting Claude had no idea that the original app existed. To safely use the code, they would need to search everything in the training data and discard outputs that would meet the bar of being substantially similar. And that’s something that requires human judgement.
Have you noticed how often "disruptive tech" turns out to be exploitative tech?
Important Meech update.
very interesting overview of how we got here in the SSL/TLS space and how everything has changed since most of us learned the basics in 2000-mumble.
Todd Gardner is the head of a group working to solve the last-mile part of the problem, but he doesn't talk about their bit much at all, so it's still very useful as a background piece - I am definitely in the position where we're looking peevishly at our internal deployment solution so a well-presented explanation on the why is very timely ...
I somehow completely missed that the Joybubbles documentary is being shown this year at MIFF - for anyone a fan or even curious to understand how phone freaking used to work on the old analogue telephone network[1] then I'd recommend watching this film. I came at the phreaking scene from reading Phil Lapsley's excellent Exploding The Phone which does an even greater dive into it, but this film focuses on the life of Joe Engressia who took the name Joybubbles
https://miff.com.au/program/film/joybubbles#top
[1] US-centric, but most techniques were universal or required minimal modification