robryk @robryk@qoto.org
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
When you don't realize that you've bought disks with quite high vibrations at seek time:
(The doohickeys are from https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1774380. All in all works surprisingly well; apparently ~all the audible seek noise was coming via the case due to impedance matching.)
@lauren Why do most (all?) your posts include an all-white image?
robryk
boosted
Playing with GCP's Confidential Compute stuff, and I feel like the advice in the docs to verify that the VM has confidential compute enabled by (checks notes) asking the metadata service whether the instance has confidential compute enabled is maybe missing the point a little
robryk
boosted
@kwf So what can you do? Well, optical fibers happen to be excellent electrical isolators. Electric currents and magnetic fields go hand in hand. So instead of winding an electrical conductor around the transmission line, you wind some length of Faraday active optical fiber around, send polarized light through it and measure the amount of polarization rotation on the other end: That's an optical current transformer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_current_sensor
robryk
boosted
When I held my notorious/legendary "Jay Ward Film Festival" at UCLA in the early 80s (attended by Bill Scott, June Foray, and more!), Bill (the voice of Bullwinkle and so many more familiar voices) told a story of would-be "censorship" on "Rocky and His Friends" (1959-1964).
Seems that they had done a sequence where Rocky and Bullwinkle are in a pot being cooked by natives. The sponsor went nuts. "You can't have cannibalism on a kids' show!" the sponsor proclaimed.
The reply: "Is it really cannibalism to cook a moose and a squirrel?"
The bit stayed in.
I have an audio recording of the entire proceeding, including a live performance and amazingly prescient Q&A session. I really need to get it back online.
robryk
boosted
has anyone seen a really good guide to writing good code reviews? someone just asked me and I couldn't think of anything
Would you mind adding links to comments (i.e. to the post on the instance the post is from) on your blog's rendering of fediverse comments? That would make it easier to respond to them.
People in Switzerland who want to estimate anything around #covid risks might wish to be aware of https://ibz-shiny.ethz.ch/wastewaterRe/
Writing a description of oneself for one's fedi profile reminds me of the standard responses to "who are you" and the whole discussion on (a) why those reponses are typical (b) what does this question even mean.
robryk
boosted
OKAY so this this the Square Panda spelling thing. The idea is that this interfaces with tablet apps for little kids to spell words, and it can detect what they spelled on it. I'm gonna tear it down.
I'm gonna try adjusting the visibility for this thread after this so you should only see this one post.
chatgpt, --
The faults it has make it a very depressing development for me. It's able to produce very human-sounding prose and is unable not to inject false statements into ~anything it outputs.
First, this is very depressing for people who actually read what they see and remember small tidbits that were mentioned. This makes it way more likely that they're garbage.
Secondly and more importantly, this is asymmetric tool of disinformation creation. It can be used to generate plausibly-sounding wrong statements much more easily than it could be used to generate correct statements. There are people/organisations who wish to do former. Thus, this will remove many of the factchecking heuristics that work today. (This is a fundamental inescapable problem for factchecking of news, and still a bad problem for factchecking of statements about empirically available knowledge.)
I expect us to get way more hard-to-filter spam and not get much in return. I expect Sybil problem to start appearing in places where hardness of simulating a human prevented it from appearing.
robryk
boosted
Just tried ChatGPT. I asked it a series of specific Qs about areas I've studied in detail.
On all Qs, it gave answers that are plausible sounding but wrong. Not obviously wrong: wrong in subtle ways that need deep domain knowledge to grasp.
The ways humans will be practically misled by this kind of tech if trusted with, say, doling out medical, legal or business advice is horrific.
Letting this tech loose on the world will further destroy search engines that are already riddled with SEO BS.
Testing unlisted post
robryk
boosted
@robryk@qoto.org Removed bounding wires are pretty common in these photographs. It's often difficult to extract the chip without touching the wires.
Also another fun fact, LTZ1000's technology came from another legendary LT chip - LT1088 RMS-to-DC converter, this is where the unused heaters were used from. LT1088 measures True RMS voltage by AC-DC thermal conversion. The input AC power is dissipated into an on-chip resistor, and you heat another on-chip resistor using DC power until both reach the same temperature, this is the very definition of RMS voltage. It's still the holy grail in metrology labs, and also standard for RF/microwave power measurements. But as far as I know, the LT1088 was the only attempt to do this in an off-the-shelf chip. Too bad it was never a commercial success and went out of production.
robryk
boosted
Do you know of anyone trying to make any kind of a MastodonAPI-to-{NNTP,Maildir} bridge?
robryk
boosted
This is really quite fascinating. There is exactly one ISP that is blocking mail from the mail server I run, which is used to deliver mail for infosec.exchange - t-online.de. It annoys me to no end that I see people try to subscribe to infosec.exchange and the confirmation emails are rejected. So, I contacted their postmaster, and to their credit, they got back to me very quickly, but they are basically saying "yeah, you need to use one of the big mail providers if you want to send mail to t-online subscribers".... Ok then. My apologies to any t-online subscribers (who probably can't see this anyhow), but you'll apparently need to use a different email account to register.
robryk
boosted
So, don't tell anybody, but we're going to announce Palm Pilot emulation in the browser at Internet Archive in the next week or so. I've still got to get descriptions in for the hundreds of apps that are uploaded, and add a few more classics. But if you want to help with that, or just let me know how it's going, ping me here.
But don't tell anybody! It's a secret!
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
