Hacker News: albntomat0

Maintaining Security CTF Skills with Spaced Repetition

albntomat0 — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 19:29:50 +0000

Article URL: https://williamparks.github.io//anki/security/2024/11/16/maintaining-ctf-skills.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42158578

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by albntomat0 in "Playing with BOLT and Postgres"

albntomat0 — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 22:18:21 +0000

I posted this in a comment already, but the results here line up with the original BOLT paper.

“For the GCC and Clang compilers, our evaluation shows that BOLT speeds up their binaries by up to 20.4% on top of FDO and LTO, and up to 52.1% if the binaries are built without FDO and LTO.”

“Up to” though is always hard to evaluate.

New comment by albntomat0 in "Playing with BOLT and Postgres"

albntomat0 — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 22:15:58 +0000

There’s a section of the article at the end about how Postgres doesn’t have LTO enabled by default. I’m assuming they’re not doing PGO/FDO either?

From the Bolt paper: “For the GCC and Clang compilers, our evaluation shows that BOLT speeds up their binaries by up to 20.4% on top of FDO and LTO, and up to 52.1% if the binaries are built without FDO and LTO.”

New comment by albntomat0 in "Michael Lewis's Blind Side"

albntomat0 — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 02:09:05 +0000

A large number of people, less than the “hundred million” that you mention (Wikipedia says FTX had “over one million” customers [0]) lost their highly speculative investment. Yes it’s a crime, and yes it’s serious. All I’m asking for is some nuance.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTX

New comment by albntomat0 in "Michael Lewis's Blind Side"

albntomat0 — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 00:49:39 +0000

My view is that folks lost their life savings on crypto on FTX is only a more extreme version of those who lost their live savings on crypto on some other exchange. The fraud is terrible, but only exasperates the problems of those gambling with limited resources to absorb loses.

New comment by albntomat0 in "Michael Lewis's Blind Side"

albntomat0 — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 00:43:56 +0000

I do not. My comment was in response to the parent comment saying that financial crime “absolutely causes people to die” and “create far more misery than your average mugger”.

New comment by albntomat0 in "Michael Lewis's Blind Side"

albntomat0 — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 21:57:40 +0000

To what degree was the money lost by SBF/etc going to be put towards saving lives, versus the dreams of the average crypto person?

New comment by albntomat0 in "Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards"

albntomat0 — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 17:11:22 +0000

I’ve used their tarballed installer, which is straightforward. The app itself then checks for updates, and displays a reminder when there’s a new version.

Not as nice as having an updated version in apt, but it’s a trivial amount of work for something I personally get so much value out of.

New comment by albntomat0 in "ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire"

albntomat0 — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 22:52:26 +0000

Written, a combination of New York Times, Washington Post, and what Google News aggregates (frequently includes Fox and a mix of websites of local news websites)

New comment by albntomat0 in "ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire"

albntomat0 — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 21:02:58 +0000

> In America, it's wall-to-wall "police say"-like IDF clips and Bill Maher condemnation, dehumanization, and equivocating Palestine supporters with Hamas terrorists. The talking heads cheerfully greet Netanyahu.

As someone who also consumes US news, this does not describe what I’ve seen.

New comment by albntomat0 in "ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire"

albntomat0 — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 20:50:37 +0000

I find it hard to believe there’s correlation between the beginnings of Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas and who the US president is.

If anything, Russia and Hamas are each less likely to spark each conflict (in the specific sense of invading Ukraine and 7 October, not the preconditions) knowing that the US is more likely to provide arms to Ukraine and Israel.

New comment by albntomat0 in "If you make $10M in sales, Apple's cut is $6.2M annually"

albntomat0 — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 18:04:33 +0000

It’s disingenuous because they intentionally chose numbers on the pricing curve that resulted in the most clickbaity results.

There are plenty of valid criticisms, but I felt the author’s post missed sufficient nuance.

New comment by albntomat0 in "If you make $10M in sales, Apple's cut is $6.2M annually"

albntomat0 — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 16:38:35 +0000

I can’t say I’m a fan of the pricing model, but the linked tweet makes specific choices regarding the number of installs, which in turn determines the pricing.

The tweet has 10M installs, where each one makes a $1. 5M installs where each one produces $2 in revenue results in a smaller cut by Apple. 20M installs at $0.50 results in a larger cut.

New comment by albntomat0 in "No new iPhone? No secure iOS: Looking at an unfixed iOS vulnerability"

albntomat0 — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 01:39:34 +0000

I looked it up, and the extended security updates for Google Pixel is only a recent change:

Pixel 8: released in 2023, updates through 2030 Pixel 5: released in 2020, stopped getting updates in October 2023.

https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en

New comment by albntomat0 in "Apple wins bid to pause Apple Watch ban at US appeals court"

albntomat0 — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 18:04:25 +0000

Is there a concrete explanation of what Masimo’s actual innovation was in their patents?

They were posted in a previous thread, and the way they were written made it unclear what was actually covered. Is Apple allegedly infringing on the idea of putting a blood oxygen sensor in a watch, a technical innovation in how to do so effectively, or something else entirely?

New comment by albntomat0 in "Facebook Is Being Overrun with Stolen, AI-Gen Images That People Think Are Real"

albntomat0 — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 16:35:04 +0000

T-Mobile also doesn’t send your texts to millions of people based on the engagement they generate.

New comment by albntomat0 in "If You Bought a Tesla One Year Ago It Has Lost as Much as $40k in Value"

albntomat0 — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 16:42:13 +0000

Summary: Tesla has decreased its prices over the last year, affecting the resale value of existing vehicles. Author makes this out to be entirely bad.

New comment by albntomat0 in "The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools"

albntomat0 — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 14:12:23 +0000

I’ve often wondered if a similar result happened for me. Six year old me got Pokémon Blue, which is pretty much all text based. Coupled with comic books at a friends house, I had great internal motivation to figure those out!

New comment by albntomat0 in "Walmart customers getting hostile at self-checkout – they blame anti-theft tech"

albntomat0 — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 14:10:23 +0000

I got accustomed to pausing whenever the machine was speaking, to avoid the race condition I mentioned above. I went with a friend to a different store, in a new city, and she was very confused by the weird set of behaviors I had learned to keep the original machines happy.

New comment by albntomat0 in "Walmart customers getting hostile at self-checkout – they blame anti-theft tech"

albntomat0 — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 13:21:08 +0000

I’ve had significant issues with some particular models of self-checkout. They have some sort of weight check after scanning an item, to see if I’ve placed it in the basket. I assume they’re matching up the items known weight, with the change in the weight in my bag.

However, it’s implemented poorly, with frequent false positives. Furthermore, there’s a race condition between scanning the item, the machine saying “place it in the bag”, and the actual weight check. If I move too fast, the item is in my bag before the check starts, and I have to wait for assistance.

Maybe folks are frustrated that their theft is being caught, but high frustration seems to be the base case here.