Hacker News: jessa0

New comment by jessa0 in "US FAA says it will phase out floppy disks from air traffic control by 2028"

jessa0 — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 17:57:36 +0000

Which is why many systems on most airliners are redundant in threes (though under double fault may operate in a degraded mode).

New comment by jessa0 in "Memory-Safe WebP Decoding"

jessa0 — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 16:54:27 +0000

Related is Signal Messenger's webpsan crate, which validates webp container syntax before it is passed to libwebp. It stops just short of decoding actual pixel data, however, as the way webp works requires the entire canvas to be allocated in order to fully decode pixel data, which would have just made webpsan a full-on decoder anyway..

https://docs.rs/webpsan/latest/webpsan/

New comment by jessa0 in "Signal can easily work across multiple Android devices and iPhones now"

jessa0 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:01:16 +0000

This isn't completely true, while linked devices probably can't do everything, they do act as independent message endpoints. Messages fan out sender-side, are encrypted and sent separately to each device of the recipient [1].

[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/9b2c2ed66d8...

New comment by jessa0 in "Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign"

jessa0 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 15:34:59 +0000

It sounds like this is a poisoning attack, which has been shown to be pretty trivially defeated [1]. That said, while poisoning countermeasures in the facial recognition case were shown to easily generalize, we dont know yet how general of a defense could be built for a VLM. Which means holding a 0day poisoning attack on a VLM could cause a lot of trouble / deaths before an update to the model with counter-training could be deployed..

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.14851

New comment by jessa0 in "Consistent Overhead Byte Stuffing (1999) [pdf]"

jessa0 — Sun, 04 Apr 2021 23:36:16 +0000

One feature of this format which made me choose it for a project I worked on is self-synchronization -- if your data is truncated or corrupted in some way, you can recover by stepping forward until the start of the next frame. And since frame lengths are limited to a small number, there's no worry of one corrupt byte causing the parser to skip the rest of a long file.

New comment by jessa0 in "Grids in Rust, Part 2: const generics"

jessa0 — Sun, 04 Apr 2021 02:12:03 +0000

Ok, turns out I was mixing up "flexible array member" with "variable-length array". Slices can be used on the stack like a VLA as well, though, with the unstable "unsized_locals" feature. This feature is controversial, however, because of the risk of unintentional stack blowup..

New comment by jessa0 in "Grids in Rust, Part 2: const generics"

jessa0 — Sat, 03 Apr 2021 20:27:09 +0000

Slices in Rust are actually kinda similar to VLAs in C99, but usable in places other than aggregates, and use an additional word in pointers to them for the length, as a safety mechanism. You can even use slices as the last member of a struct, like VLAs, though they're not very ergonomic currently (you can only obtain references to them, as well as Boxes containing them, using "unsizing" coercion):

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

New comment by jessa0 in "Young female Japanese biker is 50-year-old man using FaceApp"

jessa0 — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 17:41:46 +0000

I'm not going to assume anything about this person's gender, but I think it's worth mentioning that the Japanese government uses violence to erase transgender existence [1], so it may not be a safe place to be non-cisgender.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/9ef16f52e9b94b9a838b17a63c6c1e8d

New comment by jessa0 in "Young female Japanese biker is 50-year-old man using FaceApp"

jessa0 — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 17:30:11 +0000

Exactly. How is this any different than any Instagram filter that many influencers of any gender use to make themselves look younger?

I think this was only a news story in Japan because feminism / LGBTQ rights in Japan have a long way to go before people feel comfortable being themselves in public.