Hacker News: pixel8account

New comment by pixel8account in "Polish trains lock up when serviced in third-party workshops"

pixel8account — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 19:21:10 +0000

There are update logs of the train software. Because of them it is known that workers of the company literally snuck into waiting trains and updated the software without the owners knowing. So really, but far from that.

New comment by pixel8account in "Polish trains lock up when serviced in third-party workshops"

pixel8account — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 19:18:26 +0000

This is a reason why it was detected a year later - the train service was delayed and it spent late November and whole December in service. So the "expiration" intended for 2021 only manifested in 2022.

New comment by pixel8account in "Polish trains lock up when serviced in third-party workshops"

pixel8account — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 19:16:58 +0000

Very charitable. The "expiry date" was set to the next servicing date and there was no way for competition to fix this hardcoded date and this was not documented in the official documents. Clearly a way to force buyers to use the "official" service.

New comment by pixel8account in "Polish trains lock up when serviced in third-party workshops"

pixel8account — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 18:50:40 +0000

It is also investigated by the Agency of Internal Security and I really doubt they don't have huge problems out of this. This is taken extremely seriously internally.

There's a ton of evidence to prove what happened and they have no chance to somehow wiggle out of this. They're trying... by saying they were hacked. Yeah, the hackers somehow flashed firmware of trains services by competition, to brick the trains. GPS coordinates of competition rail segments were literally hardcoded.

New comment by pixel8account in "Where do non-primitive recursive functions come up naturally?"

pixel8account — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 15:04:47 +0000

Ironically this one may actually be better represented by a for loop, because after 20 times or so you might want to reconsider your situation.

New comment by pixel8account in "Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect"

pixel8account — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 07:50:33 +0000

You already face the same threat then. Many, if not most, nontrivial programs have at least one way to escalate to arbitrary code execution from config. For example sway has exec, basically any useful editor has "on save actions", etc. No need for a Turing complete language when you can just shell out.

New comment by pixel8account in "Wayland Isn't Going to Save the Linux Desktop (2022)"

pixel8account — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 18:32:09 +0000

It's also a saying I'm Polish, and I also didn't realize it's not in English.

New comment by pixel8account in "Wayland Isn't Going to Save the Linux Desktop (2022)"

pixel8account — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 18:23:20 +0000

But this is what hobbyist developers care about, which is what ultimately matters.

New comment by pixel8account in "The first results from the biggest basic income experiment"

pixel8account — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 17:35:32 +0000

Can you link to some study that confirms it? This sounds far too simplistic to be true, especially for something as complex and unpredictable as the economy.

New comment by pixel8account in "GPT-4 Can Almost Perfectly Handle Unnatural Scrambled Text"

pixel8account — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 17:09:04 +0000

Saying it's an urban legend implies it's false, but that's a bit nitpicky IMO. Most people can read most such "scrambled" sentences without a lot of effort, so that part is certainly true (and non-obvious). The original - fact checked in your sources - made don't strong assumptions like "Cambridge researchers", "can be a total mess (...) read without a problem" etc. But overall I still think that's a neat fact.

New comment by pixel8account in "Generative AI is killing our sense of awe"

pixel8account — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 20:02:55 +0000

As someone who watched all the "original" marvel movies, up to a infinity war I think, I don't think anyone expected any depth from them . I wanted to watch a classical sorry full of non-subverted tropes about a hero fighting an adversary, going through a classical hero journey, and eventually prevailing (possibly sacrificing something in a process). This is a tale as old as time and I don't think there's anything wrong with it.

Of course marvel movies are devoid of any greater meaning and don't really prompt the viewer to think about anything deeper, but for me it's a feature, not a bug - when I want to think I open a technical book or start a side project.

New comment by pixel8account in "Generative AI is killing our sense of awe"

pixel8account — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 19:53:10 +0000

What about "Gimp generated imagery" for computer graphic, and "brush generated imagery" for oil paintings?

New comment by pixel8account in "Why I always hit the crosswalk button (2015)"

pixel8account — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 11:20:42 +0000

As a pedestrian and car hater I don't mind that too much. Pedestrians always have priority on the walk signal, and there is a special separate light to allow/disallow cars to turn. In practice they are used where it's safe to implement.

But I may be wrong - statistics seem to agree with you.

New comment by pixel8account in "Let's Not Flip Sides on IP Maximalism Because of AI"

pixel8account — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 13:19:22 +0000

I don't want to halt AI training, I want corporations to fuck off from using my (A)GPL code to train their proprietary models which they then sell to people writing more proprietary code. I would be ok if the derived code is properly GPL licenced too.

I suspect many people feel in a similar way too (for example, artists whose art is used to train image generators without compensation).

New comment by pixel8account in "$10M AI Mathematical Olympiad Prize"

pixel8account — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 08:10:29 +0000

One: anonymous[1] method of payment online. Maybe this is not a problem you like, but your statement is trivially false.

[1] pseudonymous (in case of BTC) if we're being pedantic.

New comment by pixel8account in "The `hanging-punctuation property` in CSS"

pixel8account — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 06:43:14 +0000

>slightly handicapping people who become accustomed to it and then read text without it.

Or maybe slightly boosting when reading double spaced? (I didn't read the article yet, my plane is just starting).

New comment by pixel8account in "PipeWire 1.0.0"

pixel8account — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 20:50:21 +0000

>pooperings

Just a side note, but it's hard to take you seriously when you resort to such childish name calling. I think your chance of convicting traders (me included) would be much higher if you used some technical arguments instead.

New comment by pixel8account in "Escaping Duopoly: Best 5 Linux Smartphones Without Performance Security Excuses"

pixel8account — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 18:48:43 +0000

Can you share some examples of the outdated information and the lack of understanding by the authors, so we may all learn? From a quick skim I noticed the article mentions CopperheadOS, even though it was renamed to GrapheneOS in 2019, so I'm inclined to believe there are more outdated pieces of information. But again, highlighting the misleading fragments would be an even more valuable comment.

New comment by pixel8account in "Sqids – Generate short unique IDs from numbers"

pixel8account — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 11:25:42 +0000

>The idea is that the secret key material is never compromised as it is assumed in all security cases.

That's not true, we have (perfect) forward secrecy, backwards secrecy and key rotation mechanisms because we often care what happened after the key is inevitably compromised. In this case the problem makes it hard to "rotate" the keys in a meaningful way, but I'm yet to see a proof it's impossible.

New comment by pixel8account in "Sqids – Generate short unique IDs from numbers"

pixel8account — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 11:09:20 +0000

Even with n=1 you can get something useful. IIRC "on average" if you have ID x than the best population estimation is 2*x. Of course the error margin is immense, but it's still better than nothing.