WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

nucatus's comments

nucatus | 1 month ago | on: Something Big Is Happening

I can’t stand all this hype anymore. They’re pushing it so hard that I’m starting to develop an AI phobia. If it were really that good, they’d already be making big money off it. But it’s not — it just needs your data (codebase?), supposedly to make it better. The fact is, at least they’ve gotten halfway there, which from their perspective, is sweet. All the AI labs are actually losing a ton of $$$ to this AI race, but the data, ohh yeah! Let's go, baby!

I am strictly talking about the coding capabilities of the LLM, and not their core LLM capabilities, which they genuinely excel at.

nucatus | 2 years ago | on: Reversing 'France Identité': The New French Digital ID

I think this is not true in most of the cases. The (security) technology behind the debit/credit cards using the SmartCard chip (IC) is pretty ubiquitous. It is the same as the security technology guarding the SIM cards in your phone and even your eSIM. Basically the protocols and the interface specifications are the same. In the end, they are just smart cards. Imagine this technology not being strong enough, because I remember the days when the security of the pre-paid public phone cards was quite rabish and any kid with some skills and knowledge could forge a card with unlimited credit.

It very happens that the father of the smart card technology to be a french guy [1] and the current biggest provider of this technology is the french aero-space/defense/security company Thales Group[2] followed by another frech company called IDEMIA.

There is a very nice biography of the technology [3].

[1] https://artsandculture.google.com/story/roland-moreno-s-ubiq...

[2] https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/markets/digital-identity-and-...

[3] https://computer.rip/2023-09-03-plastic-money.html

nucatus | 2 years ago | on: Swing VPN app is a DDoS botnet

I use ProtonVPN and I guess they aren't that stupid to mess up the future of their company by abusing the customers of the service that started the company in the first place. I guess other VPN services offered by prestigious companies, like BitDefender are quite safe from this standpoint. Yes, the free VPN services have always a large risk associated with.

nucatus | 3 years ago | on: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

I see this is the first and only post you have on HN. Since you shared with us the problem you have with Stripe, would you be so kind to share the address of your webstore so that we can make an idea about the stuff you are selling.

It is becoming hilariously unpolite to see all these complains revealing only half of the story.

nucatus | 3 years ago | on: Education as civilization-building

This is rather a simplistic view with the wrong conclusion of what the education means to our society and culture. The scientific progress has always been carried out by a small percent of population, and not a mass process. Its only recent when the education was made available to the masses.

I also suspect the author mistakes the term education for kwoledge. And yes, some knowledge is lost, but that is due the technological progress. It's always been that way.

nucatus | 3 years ago | on: EU Passes Law to Switch iPhone to USB-C by End of 2024

The core of the law is to have the same standard across the entire consumer products. Which basically it is already, only Apple having the power to ask you more money for unnecessary accessories whilst contributing to more e-waste, even if they talk against it - hypocricy detected.

nucatus | 3 years ago | on: macOS leaves users vulnerable, and unaware of their vulnerability

I guess it will be in the detrimental of the users to have Apple publicly disclose all the security risks they are exposed to. Although the current state is not perfect, it is the optimal choice. There is no way of making these risks publicly available only to "power users". How would you disciminate the good actors from the bad actors in this category?

nucatus | 4 years ago | on: Cloud Infrastructure as SQL

While there is a point in representing the state of the infrastructure as SQL to enforce type safety and other constraints, I still don’t understand what are the _real_ advantages over the current tooling. All the key advantages listed there, including type safety and cloud providers defined constraints, are already well covered by the actual battle-tested tools and frameworks.

Here are some areas where I identified some red flags regarding the present approach. These are key aspects of the everyday life of an infrastructure engineer.

Usability. The SQL abstractions simply don't scale to make the human<->machine mapping work. You would need another layer of abstraction to map that infrastructure into a state that is easily readable and understandable for our brain. On the other hand, the more consecrated tools use building blocks that both map well to be translated in infrastructure state _and_ are easily understood by our brain. Add some stored procedures to the party and you’re lost in the weeds.

Versioning. What would be the easiest way to extract from the SQL storage the difference between two versions of the infrastructure? With the traditional tools, that is an easy diff which reveals changes in a matter of several keystrokes with no extra layering.

Reusability. How easy is to port infrastructure code to other cloud providers? How easy is to define resource templates?

nucatus | 5 years ago | on: Gordon Hall has died

Then you must take some rest. Get a good recharge of your batteries and get back on the field only when you got stronger. Enjoy life, eat well and move around a lot.

nucatus | 5 years ago | on: Soyuz spacecraft digital clock teardown

If you follow the youtube video posted at the end of the article, you will see that there are another two separate youtube videos as followup of the first one where some of technical details are discussed.

nucatus | 5 years ago | on: The Problem with Gradle

all you need to know about gradle is that there are two phases: configuration and execution. Everything else are details :)

nucatus | 5 years ago | on: Graphics Programming Black Book (1997)

Use Calibre to transfer the book to a kindle - this worked for me. However, the code is hard to read on the e-reader. I recommend to use a large display to read the book.
page 1
more