R. A. Dehi @radehi@qoto.org
I read a lot. Sometimes I learn things. I like making things. I think reading and doing are complementary.
Joined Nov 2022
R. A. Dehi
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R. A. Dehi
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In a new paper, David Smith, Joseph Myers, Chaim Goodman-Strauss and I prove that a polykite that we call "the hat" is an aperiodic monotile, AKA an einstein. We finally got down to 1! https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10798 4/6
R. A. Dehi
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@mattblaze I think that those who haven't experienced it do not understand the sheer sense of joy that understanding how things _work_ is for hackers. It enables you to do things which seem like magic. It's like super powers. It's literally bending the limits of what is possible. It is seeing the beauty of complex systems at several levels at once. I've tried to explain it to people but it's hard to convey that sense to those who don't experience it.
R. A. Dehi
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@shriramk - as you probably know, Khan Academy is testing out GPT4 for online math tutoring. Here's a sample of its "Socratic tutoring mode":
https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/110029376208058880
So, it'll be interesting to see how that goes.
R. A. Dehi
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Automattic, the company behind WordPress is now the official author of the ActivityPub plugin. This is pretty big news, since it allows every WordPress website to be a potential fediverse server.
In this piece I take a look at the potential impact on #fediverse culture, zooming in on how tagging your WordPress posts makes them show up when you search for a specific hashtag here on the fediverse.
How do you think this will change the fediverse?
@fediversenews
Read at: https://fediversereport.com/wordpress-on-the-fediverse/
R. A. Dehi
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"maybe advance AI tech future to improve user freedom" or "definitely advance decentralized networks future to improve user freedom"
I chose the latter
R. A. Dehi
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Not wanting “algorithms” on mastodon’s feed because TWTR uses coersive algorithms is like not wanting to use any math because capitalism uses math.
Stop conflating bad, manipulative use of algorithms w/the general use of (open/visible) algorithms for personal control over data you see.
Chronological display IS AN ALGORITHM.
Mastodon’s feed ISN’T JUST CHRONOLOGY (it has filters, algos re boost freq, etc).
Mastodon’s feed could be a LOT better.
I WANT an algorithmic view I can adjust!
tiny 🧵
R. A. Dehi
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I just gave #chatgpt (the new version) 51 multiple choice questions from my midterm exam in #family #sociology and it got 49 of them right, or 96%. (The two it got wrong are debatable.) We covered historical demographic trends, sociological theories, definitions of race and gender concepts. I'll give some examples after my students take the test. Last year the students averages 80%.
R. A. Dehi
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The main news for today is that Ukraine is set to become the third largest arms importer in the world by 2022, the documentary film by Navalny won the Oscar for Best Documentary, which is a disgrace to the international community, President Lukashenko signed a cooperation agreement with Iran until 2026, the government has decided to submit amendments to the state budget for 2023 to the Verkhovna Rada, with expenditures increased by UAH 537.2 billion, of which 96.5% are allocated to the national security and defense sector, the first Ukrainian crews are completing training on Leopard A4 tanks in Spain this week, the US has extended the program for refugees from Ukraine for a year, and Putin's f*ck, Russia is the bottom.
R. A. Dehi
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It's now officially safer to keep your money in a bank -- no matter how much you have -- than under the mattress. With the Silicon Valley Bank bailout of all depositors, there's no longer a $250,000 limit on the 'insurance" -- and you can bet the crooks are going to take full advantage of this new loophole to loot the rest of us.
Death is preventable. Every day about 150.000 people die, because we do not yet have the technology to prevent their deaths.
Every day that we delay the arrival of that technology kills 150.000 people.
Every two months of delay kills ten million people, the same death toll as the Holocaust or COVID-19.
That's why is urgent to build and use AI, solar energy, Library Genesis, and other such generally applicable technology. Decelerationists are mass murderers.
R. A. Dehi
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As the team behind Anna's Archive pointed out in Twitter: "Much of the current revolution in AI is powered by shadow libraries."
Seems obvious. Yet hardly ever mentioned?
Regardless if one wants to call it a "revolution" or just a fancy autocomplete, the question remains relevant. What would a business like OpenAI be if it wasn't for the years of criminalized work that pirate librarians put into projects like Library Genesis?
R. A. Dehi
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The EU’s “chat control” legislation is the most alarming proposal I’ve ever read. Taken in context, it is essentially a design for the most powerful text and image-based mass surveillance system the free world has ever seen.
R. A. Dehi
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If you are discussing your abortion and you live in a place where abortion is now essentially illegal, please remember to speak only to people you trust and remember to use end-to-end encrypted comms with disappearing messages turned on.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/10/texas-abortion-lawsuit/
R. A. Dehi
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This is just wild: "The P92 app will support ActivityPub, MoneyControl reported."
Then again, Facebook once adopted and promoted OpenID, so I won't hold my breath.
Embrace and extend, baby.
From: @caseynewton
https://mastodon.social/@caseynewton/109997010951846854
R. A. Dehi
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Wait. People are saying Meta's decentralized app will be powered by #ActivityPub, and will interoperate with Mastodon.
On top of it, it will be Instagram-branded.
Surprising. But again, I'll believe it when I see it.
R. A. Dehi
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I'm still looking for a job. Anybody need a programmer in the San Francisco Bay area? I'm a python programmer with experience in C/C++/Java/JS, I've done a bunch of CI/CD/SRE in the recent years, lots of tooling and back end web dev, and I've got a good deal of amateur experience doing reverse engineering and embedded development.
(I've done devops work but I'm trying to move away from that because too often it turns into just "ops", and I am a programmer.)
md5crypt() is from 1995, and although has been deprecated since 2012 because is too fast to be secure nowadays, cracking it takes 1000 times longer than Hive is claiming (or, more specifically, than @Tutanota is claiming by their choice of one of Hive's images.)
Is that what the password data breaches they talk about were using? Or were they really just using single-iteration MD5 like a fresh bootcamp graduate?
https://web.archive.org/web/20180317164935/http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/md5crypt_eol.html
If Hive is willing to assume that your security design is such shit that you're using MD5 without iteration for password hashes, why not just assume you're storing the password in plain text? That's pretty much the same level of incompetence, and it would make all the cells in the table read "Instantly". They actually do have this table further down in the post.
Hive also produced some tables for PBKDFs that have tunable difficulty parameters, such as bcrypt() and PBKDF2, but didn't specify which parameter settings are being used for these tables, or talk about the tradeoff space; also, incorrectly describe bcrypt() as not being "a key derivation function like PBKDF2", when that's exactly what it is.
Oh, reading the page at https://www.hivesystems.io/blog/are-your-passwords-in-the-green, they're assuming your password hashing algorithm is just plain MD5 without any hash iteration, claiming is "2018 cybersecurity practices". @Tutanota, please tell me are not hashing your users' passwords with plain MD5 without any hash iteration? Because Unix has iterated its password hashing function since 7th edition Unix, 25 iterations of modified DES: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_(C)#Traditional_DES-based_scheme. That was in 1979. The password encryption approach Hive is suggesting has been known to be bad practice since 1979. When PHK implemented md5crypt for BSD in the 90s, it used 1000 iterations of MD5. A single iteration is not 2018 practice.
(Some people surely did commit this error in building their systems.)
Aren't actually proposing "a hacker" with a hundred times as much power as the entire Bitcoin network; are proposing to rent eight A100 GPUs from Amazon AWS which they say would get 523 billion hashes per second, the which is 16 million times less compute than the Bitcoin network. At this speed 2^90 hashes would take 75 million years, not the 3 weeks they state, the which is correct for 2^60.
I read a lot. Sometimes I learn things. I like making things. I think reading and doing are complementary.
Joined Nov 2022
