JanisErdmanis (u/JanisErdmanis)

JanisErdmanis commented on Petition to stop Google from restricting sideloading and FOSS apps · Posted by u/nativeforks

These online petitions are worse than useless. They don’t do anything because they fail to communicate either conviction to a cause or the relevance of the signers. And they may take someone who would otherwise do something useful, like call their elected or participate in public comment, and make them complacent.

An open letter from the lead developers and decision makers of top-rated apps in the Play Store would be useful. But that takes work, unlike an online petition.

JanisErdmanis · 3 days ago

Such petiotions also fail to communicate legitimacy in a sense that authentic members have signed the petitition. Hence it can also be used adversely to steer the public opinion (although unlikely for the given situation).

JanisErdmanis commented on Claim: GPT-5-pro can prove new interesting mathematics twitter.com/SebastienBube... · Posted by u/marcuschong

martin-t · 6 days ago

1) They absolutely do sometimes repeat training data verbatim.[0]

2) That's not even the point. The point is being trained on stolen data without permission, pretending that the resulting model of the training data is not a derived work of the training data and that the output of the model plus a prompt is not derived work of the training data.

Point 1 is just an extreme edge case which is a symptom of point 2 and yet people still have trouble accepting it.

GPL was about user freedom and now if derived work no longer applies as long as you run code through a sufficiently complex plagiarism automator, plagiarism is unprovable and GPL is broken. Great, we lost another freedom.

[0]: I recall a study or court document with 100 examples of plagiarising multiple whole paragraphs from the New York Times, don't have time to look for it now

JanisErdmanis · 6 days ago

> trained on stolen data without permission

My sympathies to academic publishers ;)

JanisErdmanis commented on I run a full Linux desktop in Docker just because I can howtogeek.com/i-run-a-ful... · Posted by u/redbell

jchw · 8 days ago

I absolutely love the direction KDE Plasma Wayland session is headed; I think it looks great, it definitely runs great, and it really is just packed with features. I do have some personal KDE gripes I'd like to work on, mainly just improving the KIO fuse integration more, but wow have things progressed fast.

Still, I caution people to not just jump to Linux. The actual very first problem is not software. It's hardware. Firstly, running cutting edge motherboards and GPUs requires a more bleeding edge setup than typical LTS distros give you; you'll be missing audio codec drivers and the GPU drivers will be missing important updates, if things even boot. Secondly, NVIDIA GPUs are currently in a weird place, leaving users with trade-offs no matter what choices they make, making it hard to recommend Linux to the vast majority of users with NVIDIA GPUs. Thirdly, and this one is extremely important, nobody, Nobody, should EVER recommend people run Linux on random Windows laptops. This is cruel and unusual punishment, and it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea even if Arch wiki says it works pretty good. It's a bad idea even if a similar SKU works well, or hell, even if a similar SKU ships with Linux out of the box. It's just a bad idea. The only two big vendors that even really do a good job here are System76 and Framework, and they still have to use a bunch of components from vendors that DGAF about desktop Linux. It is impressive that you can more or less run whatever desktop hardware and things usually work OK, but this logic doesn't apply to laptops. This point can't be stressed enough. I have extensive experience with people trying to switch from Windows to Linux and it's genuinely a challenge to explain to people how this doesn't work, they don't have the frame of reference to understand just how bad of an idea it is and learning the hard way will make them hate Linux for no reason.

Still, even with good hardware, there's plenty of software woes. You'll be missing VSTs. You might have to switch to Davinci Resolve to edit video, Krita to do digital painting, and Blender to do... Well, a lot of stuff. All good software, but a very non-trivial switch.

I'm really glad to see a lot more people interested in running Linux and I hope they have a good experience, but it's worse if they have inflated expectations of what they can do and still have a good experience with. Being misleading about how well Linux or WINE will work for a given task has never really helped the cause, and probably hurt it a lot.

I won't argue about Proton/Steam, though, that shit's miraculous. But honestly, a lot of people like playing competitive multiplayer games, and those anti-cheat vendors don't give a damn about your Linux, they're thrilled to start integrating Secure Boot with TPM attestation as it lets them try to milk more time out of the "maybe we can just secure the client" mindset. (I personally think it's going to die soon, in a world where ML has advanced to the point where we can probably do realtime aimbots that require absolutely no tampering with the client or the computer it runs on, but we'll see I guess.) But for me who doesn't care, yep, it's pretty good stuff. Whenever there's a hot new thing out chances are it already works on Proton; been playing a lot of Peak which was somewhat popular in the last couple months.

JanisErdmanis · 8 days ago

What issues have you seen recently in the wild where Linux just does not work on a laptop? I have pretty good experiences just putting Ubuntu on old laptops for people who asks me to fix their computer.

JanisErdmanis commented on "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit pluralistic.net/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/Refreeze5224

JanisErdmanis · 17 days ago

How would setting up a primary credential with an identity provider differ from the process of registering to vote for USA citizens? All the discrimination opportunities and accountability issues seem to apply equally there.

JanisErdmanis commented on Monitor your security cameras with locally processed AI frigate.video/... · Posted by u/zakki

aitchnyu · a month ago

What your "stack" of open source cameras and dvr?

JanisErdmanis · a month ago

I have a cheap 25 euro PoE cameras from aliexpress that gives decent video quality. The night vision though is lacking in comparison to one Brillcam that I have. The cameras are connected to a cheap 20 euro PoE switches that advertise being able to put out 60W of power.

For NVR I am using raspberry pi5 4gb model with a dedicated 2.5 inch hard drive that is only used for recording where micro SD card is used for everything else. All the pieces fit in a dedicated case:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007391354252.html?spm=a2...

I also plan to install Corall M.2 card within the unused M.2 SSD card slot.

JanisErdmanis commented on A Treatise for One Network – Anonymous National Deliberation [pdf] simurgh-beau.github.io/... · Posted by u/simurgh_beau

JanisErdmanis · a month ago

I agree that a system that enables anonymous deliberation is desirable, however, the power of vendor to surveil and deceive participants can be a lucrative opportunity for selling out democracy to the highest bidder. Hence to have a solution like that one first need to solve the remote electronic voting problem.

JanisErdmanis commented on How to prove false statements: Practical attacks on Fiat-Shamir quantamagazine.org/comput... · Posted by u/nsoonhui

sesm · 2 months ago

There is a famous "4 theories of truth" classification: Correspondence, Coherence, Consensus and Pragmatic.

In this case they are talking about mathematical truth, which is a case of Coherence truth.

JanisErdmanis · 2 months ago

Can you recommend a book that expands on this classification?

JanisErdmanis commented on Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology blog.google/technology/sa... · Posted by u/doomroot13

bobbiechen · 2 months ago

Anyone have a good explanation on the intuition of non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs? For example, I thought the "paint-mixing" analogy for Diffie-Hellman key exchange (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie–Hellman_key_exchange#Ge...) really helped me handwave the math into "mixing easy, unmixing hard".

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/11/27/zero-kno... was a good intro for interactive ZK proofs but I haven't been able to find something for non-interactive ones.

This blog post comparing ZK-STARKs to erasure coding is in the right flavor but didn't quite stick to my brain either: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2017/11/09/starks_part_1.ht...

JanisErdmanis · 2 months ago

An intuitive explanation is that of proving you can find Waldo in a picture without revealing his exact location. Digital wallets can be interpreted as fancy signature schemes that operate on third-party issued commitments C instead of public keys that directly link users to their identities.

A simple signature scheme is based on proof of knowledge PoK{x : pk = g^x}, which is transformed into a noninteractive variant via the Fiat-Shamir transformation, where the message is appended to the hash. Range proofs work similarly, with the simplest form being for a single bit: PoK{(b,r) : C = g^b * h^r & b(b−1)=0}. This proves that commitment C contains a bit b in {0,1} without revealing which value it is.

Arbitrary ranges can then be constructed using the homomorphic properties of commitments. For an n-bit range, this requires n individual bit proofs. Bulletproofs optimize this to O(log n) proof size, enabling practical applications.

The commitment C can be issued by a trusted third party that signs it, and the user can then prove certain properties to a service provider, such as age ranges or location zones (constructed from latitude and longitude bounds).

A key challenge is that reusing the same commitment C creates a tracking identifier, potentially compromising user privacy.

JanisErdmanis commented on Quantum Computation Lecture Notes (2022) math.mit.edu/~shor/435-LN... · Posted by u/ibobev

rvz · 3 months ago

Well right now I am very skeptical, but I think we have somewhat given quantum computing plenty of time (we have given it decades) unless someone can convince me that it is not a scam.

Right now it hasn't amounted to anything useful, other than Shor's and 'experiments' and promises and applications that are no better done on a GPU rack right now.

JanisErdmanis · 3 months ago

A scam is a strong word, giving the impression that there are malicious interests in selling it without working towards making returns to the investors. But a dead horse, for sure, it now looks like.

The next big challenge will be mounting the controlling hardware, currently connected via coaxial cables, onto the chip while preventing the introduction of new sources of interference so that error correction can run. That will take a miracle.

Of course, an alternative is a million coaxial cables connected to a chip cooled close to mK temperatures.

JanisErdmanis commented on DiffX – Next-Generation Extensible Diff Format diffx.org/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

signa11 · 3 months ago

difftastic: https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/ uses tree-sitter for better diff-info, and is, imho, superior to this.

JanisErdmanis · 3 months ago

This looks great. The diff is quite inefficient for patching with the C preprocessor branches.

Since it patches the code, looking at its tree structure, is the diff human readable, and can it be edited directly? This is a major contributor to why I opt for sed for patching.