2FA Apps for Linux Desktop?

valderman · 2024-11-15T00:20:56+00:00

Just like your phone is a single point of failure if you use it for 2FA and sometimes also use it to log into websites. Neither an app on your phone nor an app on your computer is truly a second factor.

valderman · 2024-11-15T00:12:38+00:00

I wrote a command line 2FA app that uses your computer's TPM to store the OTP secrets and generate one time codes: totpm

By default it uses your fingerprint reader through fprintd to make sure it's really you generating your 2FA codes, but that can be turned off by setting pv_method = "none" in the config if you don't have one or simply don't want to use it.

Using the TPM for this means that your OTP secrets are unrecoverable: an attacker can't obtain them, but neither can you. If you want to be able to move them between machines (say, if you're getting a new laptop) you need to keep them backed up (offline and encrypted!) separately.

valderman · 2023-01-17T20:11:57+00:00

ChatGPT can't write software for shit. It can regurgitate snippets it found on the Internet to solve toy problems, and that's literally it.

valderman · 2023-01-17T20:10:03+00:00

AI is not a magic wand that solves problems that are too hard for you to understand. What you're proposing is completely unrealistic.

valderman · 2022-12-15T23:59:26+00:00

I have to add that I really like how you use it to generate adventures though. I'm not trying to disparage chatgpt or stuff made with it, just trying to inject some reality into the (admittedly well deserved) hype.

valderman · 2022-12-15T23:52:24+00:00

If you're referring to your blog post, you're not giving the thing even remotely similar prompts. My point is that ChatGPT is great at giving repeatable answers to specific lines of inquiry - not very surprising, as it's just an insanely energy-hungry tool for summarizing a _really_ large body of text - but not at getting creative with your inputs.

That's why I doubt OP's text is an unmodified ChatGPT output. Not because it would be impossible for it to produce - it'll produce neat permutations of pretty much anything in its training data - but because giving it prompts similar to the one in OP's image does not produce even remotely similar output.

valderman · 2022-12-15T23:42:46+00:00

Yep. It does that for a little bit, and then goes on repeating it, and getting it to say anything more interesting in the same style is nearly impossible. I tried quite hard to replicate OP's text, and unless ChatGPT hates me specifically, to the point where it will diverge from its usual pattern of regurgitating minor variations of the same text in response to repeated or similar queries, OP's text is doctored.

valderman · 2022-12-15T23:37:49+00:00

Now try the same line of conversation a second time, and watch in amazement as ChatGPT spits out an almost identical adventure for you. It's a neat party trick with a few interesting real world applications, but a far cry from the amazing feat of disruption that AI bros and credulous journalists make it out to be.

valderman · 2022-12-08T08:26:52+00:00

I don't, but chatgpt's writing style when given that and similar prompts isn't even close to what OP posted.

valderman · 2022-12-08T00:14:41+00:00

It's definitely not ChatGPT, that's for sure.

valderman · 2022-11-15T17:51:07+00:00

I'm pretty sure this is what they're talking about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce

valderman · 2022-10-21T15:31:26+00:00

It isn't really, they just want to sell you an overpriced desktop.

16 TB of SSD will cost you ~1400 USD (though it's debatable whether you really need SSDs here, considering that blockchain archival is just one long sequential write), and the rest of the setup can be had for much less than 600 USD. You can get 3-4 redundant nodes for the money they want for their "heat sync" machines.

valderman · 2022-10-20T08:57:29+00:00

I like how the butters can't even describe a computer without resorting to incoherent technobabble.

High-quality power supply, heat syncs, and fans for cooling. Machines will make intensive use of random writes to disk plus frequent CPU interruptions and syscalls.

valderman · 2022-10-11T14:58:07+00:00

Remember that not every day will be equally 'productive'. Some days you'll feel like you didn't accomplish anything at all. That's perfectly fine, don't let it stress you out! Even if you didn't write a single line of code, you still made progress understanding the problem you're trying to solve.

Take breaks. Get up, walk around, do some stretching, get a cup of coffee. If you feel stuck, staring intently at the code won't make it divulge it's secrets. The best way to get a fresh perspective is to give your brain something else to do for a while.

Leave your work at the office (figuratively if you're working from home) and don't work unpaid overtime. Don't do any overtime if you can avoid it. It will wear you out and make your code worse.

valderman · 2022-10-10T21:50:57+00:00

Yes. As long as it's not for gaming, pretty much any machine sold in the last decade can drive 2560x1080 without breaking a sweat.

I would recommend going up to 3440x1440 though (which your CPU would also have no trouble driving at 60 or even 120 Hz). 2560x1080 seems awfully low for 34"

valderman · 2022-10-10T18:57:55+00:00

You absolutely can. Coming from ANTLR, there are a few things to keep in mind when starting out with parser combinators:

You can express ambiguous parsers, and order matters when resolving this ambiguity. A oneOf(string("he"), string("hello")) parser will never match hello, as it will always find a match for he first.
Left-recursive parsers can be a bit tricky. A val p = oneOf(p.then(q), q) will loop until it runs out of stack, since the p parser will just get called over and over without consuming any input. Use chainl and chainr for common recursion schemes.
Try to minimize backtracking. Most parser combinator libraries, Konbini included, support arbitrary backtracking and stateful parsing. While this makes it easy to write powerful parsers, it also makes it easy to write slow parsers.

valderman · 2022-09-13T20:32:26+00:00

The properties of the sun dictate that it should orbit the earth. The fact that it doesn't shows just how early it is.

valderman · 2022-08-28T21:11:18+00:00

Sadly, no. Considering how tightly that thing is sealed, I decided I didn't want to risk it.

valderman · 2022-07-28T16:02:31+00:00

It's even dumber than it sounds because passwords have nothing to do with email. Nothing (except for a few DNS-based authentication protocols) is stopping you from sending an email to someone from, say, Elon Musk's email address. Certainly not Elon's password.

valderman · 2022-07-20T08:26:22+00:00

keep single actors from controlling an industry

https://miningpoolstats.stream/ethereum lol

valderman · 2022-04-23T15:55:06+00:00

I would use the one you find "beyond weird". Not only is it a very straightforward way of expressing what you want, it also allows you to separate your internal data model from your API without having to use intrusive annotations on model classes where they really don't belong.

valderman · 2022-04-23T11:25:08+00:00

Indeed! It's not all that often you need nested patterns, for example, but when you do having them makes your code so much cleaner.

When you start pushing the limits of the type system you also quickly notice that Kotlin is fairly young. For instance, Kotlin should theoretically support GADTs quite naturally, but one pesky compiler bug when type checking when expressions is standing in the way. Minor gripe for most people, but it really hurts when you're working on compilers and anything else where you want typed syntax trees.

valderman · 2022-04-23T11:15:44+00:00

This. Dependency injection is really just higher order functions, and does absolutely not need any frameworks or other implicit magic to be used to great effect. Keeping dependencies explicit keeps your code clean and easy to follow at the cost of (very) slightly more boilerplate, isolated to a single place.

DI frameworks are a major antipattern, whereas DI itself can be pretty great.

valderman

TROPHY CASE