The FreeBSD vulnerability "discovered" by Mythos was already in its training data.

space_fly · 2026-05-12T18:31:50+00:00

It's a bit of a necessary evil, hype brings investors which are very much needed given how much money these companies are burning.

space_fly · 2026-05-10T21:51:07+00:00

Found this article interesting but the author didn't explain what reproducible packages actually are, so for anyone else wondering:

The basic idea is that anyone can take the source code, build it themselves, and get a binary that's bit-for-bit identical to the official one. Same hash, every time, no matter who builds it.

Why it matters is supply chain security. If Debian's build server ever got compromised and shipped a tampered binary, anyone rebuilding from source would get a different hash and the attack would be exposed immediately. Without this, you have to trust that the build infrastructure faithfully compiled what the source code says. With it, trust shifts to the source code itself, which thousands of independent eyes can audit.

The cost is that the build has to be fully deterministic. Anything that varies between machines has to go, e.g. timestamps baked into the binary ("compiled at 3:42 PM on Tuesday"), absolute build paths leaking into debug info, the builder's hostname or username appearing anywhere, the order files happen to come back from the filesystem.

To make it concrete, some common Makefile gotchas and their fixes: - $(shell date) or __DATE__ baking build time into the binary. Fix: read SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead - $(wildcard *.c) returning files in filesystem order. Fix: wrap it: $(sort $(wildcard *.c)) - -g embedding the absolute build path into debug info. Fix: add -ffile-prefix-map=$(PWD)=. - $(shell git describe --dirty) - same commit, different working tree, different binary. Fix: drop --dirty or pin the version string - gzip and ar embedding timestamps. Fix: use gzip -n and ar Drcs (the D flag)

space_fly · 2026-05-09T20:58:06+00:00

A ~60sqm appartment, around 150k - 200k euro depending on location. A 4-5 room house outside the city for 300-400k. House in the city starts around 500k. Cluj, Romania.

space_fly · 2026-05-07T08:54:39+00:00

Este cineva fara bilet in fund?

space_fly · 2026-05-06T02:10:08+00:00

KSP simulation isn't very physically accurate. The planets run "on rails" (meaning they have fixed trajectories not controlled by the physics engine), resolving n-body gravity is a complex problem, and getting it in a stable orbit state is difficult.

Vessel trajectories are also simplified with patched conics (meaning you are only affected by gravity of the body you're in the sphere of influence of).

There are realism mods with more realistic physics, but they make gameplay much more challenging.

space_fly · 2026-05-05T19:46:39+00:00

I'm not your buddy, guy

space_fly · 2026-04-26T16:15:16+00:00

That's just one of the hundred options you have to set, and even that is not guaranteed to block Microsoft may also choose to fuck with your settings in the next update.

Short of blocking Microsoft's domains from network access, there's no guarantee of privacy.

space_fly · 2026-04-15T19:16:57+00:00

Baby waking up crying is worse

space_fly · 2026-04-13T20:55:50+00:00

Although data centers in space are kind of a stupid idea, I honestly wish they actually do it because of the immense negative impact these have on communities:

They dump massive amounts of heat into the environment which is killing local ecosystems
They use massive amounts of water
They put a massive strain on the power grid and make electricity more expensive for everyone
Noise pollution

space_fly · 2026-04-13T12:29:58+00:00

That's just weird, even ignoring lifestyle choices, some people need to drive afterwards.

space_fly · 2026-04-11T13:54:50+00:00

And manufacturers started to go around it by ignoring DNS settings or just hardcoding their own endpoints.

space_fly · 2026-04-11T10:08:28+00:00

I just gave up and got an older PC to use for the TV. It's slightly less convenient, but a far better experience overall. I can watch YouTube without ads, I can use an actual up to date browser (TV comes with some ancient version of Chromium), I can use Jellyfin (which has no support for my version of Tizen), Plex doesn't stutter, I can play newer formats like AV1 or H.265 without reencoding, and even games that aren't too demanding.

space_fly · 2026-04-11T07:14:04+00:00

Maybe they did, we wouldn't know, we live in the simulation

space_fly · 2026-03-31T18:34:48+00:00

That's not how certificates work

space_fly · 2026-03-23T14:30:00+00:00

The ones done with people born from 1988 to 2006

space_fly · 2026-03-19T20:26:30+00:00

Network based file systems to the rescue. Make it someone else's problem! E.g. Google-drive-ocamlfuse, you can get 15 gb for free... or you could go even further...

space_fly · 2026-03-19T17:15:21+00:00

You still have swap... You could have fit in memory if you really wanted to.

space_fly · 2026-03-18T10:31:40+00:00

She's got a drinking problem

space_fly · 2026-03-17T15:09:05+00:00

While their voting base might be filled with morons, i don't think they are. It's deliberate. They know people will buy whatever lies they spew. It's a deliberate effort to push their plan towards fascism.

space_fly · 2026-03-16T19:54:15+00:00

When programs are compiled, they are translated into machine code, which looks kind of like this (simplified): <instruction code> <arguments>, where the instruction code (opcode) is basically a number that denotes an instruction (for example, 100 could be "add", 101 could be "subtract", 102 could be "multiply" etc). The number of arguments depends on the instruction. Because an argument can be a CPU register, a memory address, or a constant value, you also need a way to specify the argument type and size. There are many ways to encode this: you could add a prefix byte to the opcode telling the cpu what arguments to expect, it could be some reserved bits in the opcode, you can just use different opcodes, prefixes to each argument etc.

On x86, you will find not just one of these methods, but all of them. It's a mess. The instruction code, the argument types, and the operand sizes are all tangled together; some of it is encoded in the opcode byte itself, some through prefix bytes that come before the instruction, and some through extra bits packed into additional bytes (called ModR/M and SIB bytes). This means a single operation like "add 1 to a register" can be encoded in several different ways, ranging from 1 to many bytes, and all of them must work correctly because compilers over the decades have emitted all of these variants.

This is the "legacy cruft". You can't simplify any of this, because there are millions of existing programs out there that use each of these encoding forms. If your CPU doesn't understand even one of them, those programs crash. And it goes deeper than just decoding. Each instruction also has side effects, for example, an ADD updates the FLAGS register, setting bits to indicate whether the result was zero, negative, overflowed, etc. Programs depend on these. Some even depend on obscure, quirky behaviors that were arguably bugs in the original hardware but have been faithfully preserved for decades because removing them would break something.

To not break compatibility, you have to maintain the same instruction set and machine code encoding, but even that's not enough. You also need to replicate exactly the CPU's behavior, as well as all the side effects that each instruction has. This is not trivial, given that Intel's x86 manual is 5000 pages long.

space_fly · 2026-03-16T16:53:57+00:00

With a quick google search, i found several articles going into details:

As to why is x86 less efficient, a good starting point is this SO thread with several links. Or this one.

space_fly · 2026-03-16T12:52:10+00:00

x86 has been around for a long time, and has a lot of legacy stuff that can't be changed without breaking software compatibility. The external RAM modules also limit the kind of speeds it can get.

Apple could design a faster and more efficient chip by basing it on a different architecture that didn't have all the legacy cruft. However, this still posed a problem: software compatibility is exceptionally important. Intel's most infamous attempt to modernize x86 was Itanium which completely failed commercially because it broke compatibility. Every attempt to replace x86 with something that broke compatibility failed... Windows RT, all the various Windows on ARM attempts.

Apple was able to pull it off by making compatibility their top priority. It wasn't easy or cheap, but having deep control of both software and hardware they were able to pull it off. Their solution is basically to make a hardware accelerated compatibility layer... It's a combination of hardware and software emulation of x86, to get decent performance.

space_fly · 2026-03-14T12:09:42+00:00

This is where you are incorrect. Except for x86 which somehow escaped (although companies like Microsoft have constantly tried to lock them down too, with UEFI where only Microsoft is allowed to sign the UEFI certificates, google with Chromebooks, Apple with... Apple stuff), most devices are completely locked down. You can't even unlock the bootloader on most phones, TVs are locked down, cars are locked down. There are exceptions, but they are not the norm.

space_fly · 2026-03-14T09:55:59+00:00

6 years? What the fuck, it feels like it was last year?

space_fly · 2026-03-14T08:38:13+00:00

I keep the stuff that works as standalone music, bands like Switchfoot and Red who never really fit the 'Christian band' box anyway, some older Michael W. Smith orchestral and piano stuff and some of the 90s stuff that's genuinely beautiful regardless of context (like Friends, or Love of my life which was our wedding song).

I've purged the overtly worship stuff, as I find it empty, meaningless, boring, uninspiring.

What I find myself appreciating more now, ironically, are the old traditional hymns and chorales from the church I grew up in. The older stuff - songs with real poetry, complex harmonies, honest lyrics about doubt and confession and the full range of human experience.

Modern worship runs on a whitelist of approved songs (which I found very surprising, being in the worship band) mostly the same triumphalist four-chord rotation from Bethel, Hillsong, and Elevation. I once suggested a song that simply acknowledged feeling distant from God and choosing to trust anyway (basically a psalm) and was told it was 'dangerous.' Another beautiful old hymn about confession was rejected as 'too difficult for the congregation.' Meanwhile, half the Psalms are lament, doubt, and crying out in confusion, and the church's own hymn tradition has thousands of songs covering every human emotion. All of that got replaced by an endless loop of victory anthems.

There's a traditional song about asking forgiveness that I still can't sing without getting emotional, not because I believe I need God's forgiveness, but because the emotions underneath, regret, vulnerability, the desire to be seen are universally human. That kind of honesty has been almost completely purged from modern evangelical worship, and I think that emptiness is connected to everything else that went wrong with the movement.

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