HN user

lcvw

526 karma

liamcvw.com

Posts2
Comments54
View on HN
Remote Attestation 14 days ago

I think consumer devices should have opt-outs for sure. But personally I am much more comfortable with myself and my family having fully locked down apple phones then anything else on the market right now, precisely because of how difficult it is to get persistent malware into that ecosystem.

Remote Attestation 14 days ago

I mean, all tech can be used in different ways. My experience has been much more on the preventing root kits side, rather then vendor lock in.

Yes, there can be exploits, but hardware exploits over a restricted interface (TPM2) are significantly rarer then normal software vulns. Everything is about risk mitigation, there is no perfect security.

I’ve carved out a niche of very low level systems programming and optimization. I think it’ll be awhile before LLMs can do what I do. I also moved to to staff so I think a lot of what I do now will still exist with junior/mid level devs being reduce by AI.

But I am focusing on maximizing my total comp so I can retire in 10-15 years if I need to. I think most devs are underestimating where this is eventually going to go.

I feel like he is missing the boat here. C++ is on a path to dying as a language because of a lack of safety features, and he’s talking about zero cost abstractions. Exceptions cause massive compiler issues and are hardly zero cost anyway, I don’t know how he can compare them at all to std::expected. Also anyone who has worked in an exception heavy codebase can attest to the fact that they do not lead to simpler code.

I have worked with C++ almost every day for a decade now, and I’ll be sad to see it go. This is not what the thought leaders should be focusing on at all. If you’re unhappy with std:: expected just don’t use it? Why can’t we focus on fixing the thousands of security vulnerabilities that cause real harm and money and endless developer time to try to work around.

My understanding is that the theory behind nuclear winter is that all of the nuked cities will ignite, and the massive firestorms will eject ash into the upper atmosphere where it will persist for years. Aka you still need to blow up some cities to cause the winter.

Also nuclear winter is somewhat controversial, I don’t know what the latest model results are.

Is there a way to get your house (currently with hydronic gas heat) retrofitted for heat pumps that doesn’t result in either a ton of demo or ugly lines all over the exterior? I tried to switch over last year only to find the savings were not that great in my climate, and that it would have an unacceptable aesthetic cost.

There is a legal loophole campaigns use where if a text message was sent by a human it’s not considered spam. So of course a program exists that dispatches the message you want to send to a call center and they dial the thousands of numbers you want by hand.

As someone who uses bpf for security monitoring every day, every one of those problems is a has a workaround. And the only real competitor is writing a kernel module which has serious safety issues.

You can write ebpf programs in rust. Bpftrace generates programs from an awk like language, you can make the program however you want. Solana does it with rust, I don’t know what it gains you though given the verifier protecting you from most of the pitfalls of C.

I feel that this proposal defeats the entire purpose of ebpf. The point is to have a bytecode language that can do simple processing in the kernel. This code is frequently generated adhoc, such as with bpftrace. I don’t like all the limitations that currently exist in bpf, but just replacing it with rust and signature verification basically turns this into kernel modules all over again.

It’s worth noting the verifier doesn’t verify C code, it verifies the compiled ebpf bytecode. You can generate that bytecode from rust (the solana cryptocurrency does this) but you still need to verify the actual instructions since someone can just write whatever they want by hand.

1. Using eBPF requires root

2. The verifier checks memory bounds access, guarantees termination in a certain number of instructions, and restricts function calls to a limited number of helper functions provided by the kernel.

3. BPF code runs on a vm, think like the jvm. It’s impossible to express a lot of nasty stuff given the restrictive bytecode language.

There have been bugs in the verifier, but overall it works very well, the biggest issue being that it drastically limits the complexity of your program.

High school has sports and activities though. I know many families that use the sports team as if it were a day care. If they do sports the kids usually get out somewhere between 4:30 and 5:30. Where I live now, a lot of the high schoolers are in school 7:30-5:30. It’s pretty ridiculous, since they also have homework. Many high schools seem to be in the process of transforming themselves into juvenile prisons designed to keep teenagers away from the rest of society.

Intel (and similar fab companies as well) is famous for even treating it’s phds as menial process engineers. When I graduated the only Intel fab jobs I was qualified for were in Indonesia or some other SE Asian country, and descriptions were basically “you are the SEM person, you do SEM all day.”

I know a surprising amount of people who came out of CNSE (without following up with grad school) and are now landscapers, waiters, or similar. The skillset is so specialized as to be almost worthless unless you can find the right role imo. Also the program there CNSE/SUNY Poly is absolute hot garbage, I advise active looking at this field to go into conventional EE, ChemE, or Materials.