HN user

lillesvin

678 karma

Linguist, security guy, developer and such.

Posts1
Comments245
View on HN
Deno Desktop 1 month ago

As much as I like cross-platform stuff, I also really like native UIs that follow native UX patterns, etc.

There have been millions of trivially exploitable vulnerabilities out there for decades — many of which could be easily discovered by using simple scanning tools or manual probing. This is hardly a new situation and LLMs really aren't that impressive at pentesting — even with these simple exploits. Maybe they are if you're not a pentester, but then ZAP, Burp, Nessus, SQLMap, etc. are likely also impressive if you put a little effort into learning how to use them, but many AI-advocates aren't interested in learning skills themselves.

It's the same situation as with vibe coding. Everyone and their grandma can have an LLM spit out a web application without any programming experience, but if you're a programmer, you'll likely quickly see some issues with maintainability and further development of the code base.

The difficult part of language is the fact we can build entirely novel meanings out of a relatively small finite set of words.

So are you saying that we've got e.g. neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition and typology down? Or do you simply mean "interesting to you" when you say "difficult"? Because in my experience, pretty much every subject in linguistics (and most other sciences) is easy if you don't understand it and surprisingly difficult once you start to get a grasp of it.

Bouba kiki has no bearing on the way words are composed.

It literally shows a preference best described by sound-symbolism so it most certainly has a bearing on how words are composed. Just because the relation between sound and meaning _can_ be arbitrary, showing that in some cases it's not entirely so is extremely valuable for evolutionary linguistics.

I obviously don't know your background but out of the linguists that I know and have met while doing my degrees in linguistics, I don't know of anyone who would say that the kiki-bouba effect is not important — anything, in fact, that challenges the notion that sound-meaning relations are completely arbitrary is interesting because it might give us clues about the origins of language, not to mention that it lends support to other, related hypotheses about sound-symbolism.

I'm not sure what you mean by "not necessary parts of language", but I would love to hear what you think the necessary parts of language are. Not to mention, what is "the difficult part of language" then?

Aristophanes was such a troll. I can only recommend reading some of his plays, like The Assemblywomen (where this word is from), The Wasps, and The Clouds. They're almost 2500 years old but they've aged incredibly well both thanks to the many amazing translators that have worked on them and because the source material is also solid satire that in many cases is still relevant today.

Plato argued that The Clouds (which is sharp satire of Socrates and his school) was in part what got Socrates convicted and killed. This is obviously debatable but Aristophanes certainly didn't self-censor or mince words.

Searchable snapshots in Elasticsearch can be backed by S3 and they perform very well. No need to store the data on hot nodes any longer than it takes for the index to do a rollover, and from then it's all S3.

What kind of storage do you have backing your Elasticsearch? And how have you configured sharding and phase rollover in your indices?

I work with a cluster that holds 500+ TB logs (where most are stored for a year and some for 5 years because of regulations) in searchable snapshots backed by a locally hosted S3 solution. I can do filtering across most of the data in less than 10 seconds.

Some especially gnarly searches may take around 60-90 seconds on the first run as the searchable snapshots are mounted and cached, but subsequent searches in the cached dataset are obviously as fast as any other search in hot data.

Obviously Elasticsearch isn't without its quirks and drawbacks, but I have yet to come across anything that performs better and is more flexible for logs — especially in terms of architectural freedom and bang-for-the-buck.

Charles Proxy 7 months ago

Just to mention an alternative option, ZAP (aka. Zed Attack Proxy) covers much of the same ground as Burp and is entirely free and Open Source.

But the returned signed string will be an HMAC-SHA256 hash, won't it? Then there's not going to be any '\n' or '\\n's in there. Only thing you'll be able to tell is if it matches your hash or not, in which case 'OK' or 'not OK' will work just as well.

Or am I misunderstanding you?

I know it's kinda besides the point and I don't know what language this was being done in, but I don't personally know any language where

    String signature = "POST" + "\n" + "/api/v1/..."
and
    String signature = "POST\n/api/v1/..."
don't result in identical variables, so I'm a bit puzzled why that would result in an error.

However, there's a quoting error in the failing example where the double quotes in the JSON body aren't properly escaped:

    String signature = "POST" + "\n" + "/api/v1/query" + "\n" + token + "\n" + timestamp + "\n" + "{"body":"content"}"
It may just be the example that's not correctly formatted, but the other (working) example does in fact escape the double quotes in the JSON. I guess, depending on how forgiving the used language is with quoting, that could also be the source of the error?

Sure, in competent hands. Problem is that most people don't seem to realize that in order to use AI for something, you have to be pretty good at that thing already.

I've always seen AI as Brandolini's Law as a Service. I'm spending an unreasonable amount of time debunking false claims and crap research from colleagues who aren't experts in my field but suddenly feel like they need to give all those good ideas and solutions, that ChatGPT and friends gave them, to management. Then I suddenly have 2-4 people that demand to know why X, Y and Z are bad ideas and won't make our team more efficient or our security better.

It's very much like that article from Daniel Stenberg (curl developer): The I in LLM Stands for Intelligence: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-f...

Obviously, to each their own, but to me, this is an overwhelming amount of commands to remember on top of all the ones they are composed of that you will likely need to know anyway — regardless if all the custom ones exist.

Like, I'd have to remember both `prettypath` and `sed`, and given that there's hardly any chance I'll not need `sed` in other situations, I now need to remember two commands instead of one.

On top of that `prettypath` only does s/:/\\n/ on my path, not on other strings, making its use extremely narrow. But generally doing search and replace in a string is incredibly useful, so I'd personally rather just use `sed` directly and become more comfortable with it. (Or `perl`, but the point is the same.)

As I said, that's obviously just my opinion, if loads of custom scripts/commands works for you, all the more power to you!