ablob (u/ablob) - Readit News

ablob commented on Start all of your commands with a comma (2009) rhodesmill.org/brandon/20... · Posted by u/theblazehen

nh2 · 18 hours ago

Worth pointing out that with Nix/NixOS this problem doesn't exist.

The problem in other distros is that if you prefix PATH so that it contains your executable "foo", and then run a program that invokes "foo" from PATH and expects it to do something else, the program breaks.

With Nix, this problem does not exist because all installed programs invoke all other programs not via PATH but via full absolute paths starting with /nix/store/HASH...

ablob · 17 hours ago

So if I want to use grep in a small script, do I have to write:

/nix/store/grep-hash -flags files | /nix/store/head-hash

instead of: "grep -flags files | head"?

ablob commented on Spinning around: Please don’t – Common problems with spin locks siliceum.com/en/blog/post... · Posted by u/bdash

pizlonator · 10 days ago

> No it isn't, it has a fixed number of yields, which has a very different duration on various CPUs

You say this with zero data.

I know that yielding 40 times is optimal for WebKit because I measured it. In fact it was re-measured many times because folks like you would doubt that it could’ve optimal, suggest something different, and then again the 40 yields would be shown to be optimal.

> And no if you read the code, they do spin. Worse, they actually yield the thread before properly parking.

Threads wait if the lock is not available immediately-ish.

Yes, they spin by yielding. Spinning by pausing or doing anything else results in worse performance. We measured this countless times.

I think the mistake you’re making is that you’re imagining how locks work. Whereas what I am doing is running rigorous experiments that involved putting WebKit through larger scale tests

ablob · 2 days ago

>> No it isn't, it has a fixed number of yields, which has a very different duration on various CPUs

> You say this with zero data.

Wouldn't the null hypothesis be that the same program behaves differently on different CPUs? Is "different people require different amounts of time to run 100m" a statement that requires data?

ablob commented on It's 2026, Just Use Postgres tigerdata.com/blog/its-20... · Posted by u/turtles3

ablob · 2 days ago

I really wonder how "It's year X" could establish itself as an argument this popular.

ablob commented on 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes? waspdev.com/articles/2026... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

tombert · 5 days ago

All words are made up. They weren’t handed down from a deity, they were made up by humans to communicate ideas to other humans.

“Kilo” can mean what we want in different contexts and it’s really no more or less correct as long as both parties understand and are consistent in their usage to each other.

ablob · 5 days ago

I find it concerning that kilo can mean both 10^3 and 2^10 depending on context. And that the context is not if you're speaking about computery stuff, but which program you use has almost certainly lead to avoidable bugs.

ablob commented on Valanza – my Unix way for weight tracking and anlysis github.com/paolomarrone/v... · Posted by u/lallero317

criticas · 6 days ago

Nice idea, but "small composable programs" includes R scripts? That's great if you're already using R, a bit much to install if you're not.

You could simplify things by cribbing from the Hacker's Diet (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/) and using an exponentially weighted moving average as your filter. 10% of today's weight + 90% yesterday's EWMA. That's almost a one-liner in awk or perl, or a simple function in bash.

Copilot suggests: awk 'BEGIN{alpha=0.1} NF>=2 { date=$1; w=$2; if (NR==1) ewma=w; else ewma=alpha*w + (1-alpha)*ewma; printf "%s\t%g\t%.6f\n", date, w, ewma }' input.txt

ablob · 6 days ago

For the giggles:

nice idea, but "small composable programs" includes perl scripts? That's great if you're already using perl, a bit much to install if you're not.

There shouldn't be any burden of portability for the one writing small tools like these. You're free to rewrite it, of course, but expecting someone to go out of their way to stay within the unix/posix/whatever environment seems a bit much given the context of an unpaid endeavor.

ablob commented on Giving up upstream-ing my patches and feel free to pick them up mail.openjdk.org/pipermai... · Posted by u/csmantle

dwroberts · 8 days ago

The PRs they link mostly seem like noise? “Remove the d prefix from this number because the C++ standard doesn’t require it”. Yeah great.

ablob · 8 days ago

The correct quote is: "Remove invalid 'd' suffix for double literals".

ablob commented on Microsoft 365 now tracks you in real time? ztechtalk.com/microsoft-t... · Posted by u/imalerba

semiquaver · 9 days ago

  > what building you're in at the office

This makes no sense. Every multi-building campus I’ve ever seen uses the same SSID for all APs across buildings.

ablob · 9 days ago

For meshed networks there is a secondary ID (with a name I do not know) that is used to distinguish between APs, since your device should only talk to at most one AP at a time. It wouldn't be surprising if they used that for finding the location, but marketing sells it as SSID matching as the people they want to sell it to are most likely not experts in networking.

ablob commented on The lost art of XML marcosmagueta.com/blog/th... · Posted by u/Curiositry

wvenable · 16 days ago

I think XML for documents lost to markdown.

Between markdown and HTML, there is no need for XML in that domain anymore either.

ablob · 16 days ago

There's also HTML, LaTeX and Typst for documents. I don't think that there is a clear winner here.

ablob commented on Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code jamf.com/blog/threat-acto... · Posted by u/vinnyglennon

Tyriar · 17 days ago

Some JIT notification to enable it and/or a status bar/banner was considered, but ultimately this was chosen to improve the user experience. Instead of opening a folder, having it restricted and editing code being broken until you click some item in the status bar, it's asked up front.

It was a long time ago this was added (maybe 5 years?), but I think the reasoning there was that since our code competency is editing code, opening it should make that work well. The expectation is that most users should trust almost all their windows, it's an edge case for most developers to open and browse unfamiliar codebases that could contain such attacks. It also affects not just code editing but things like workspace settings so the editor could work radically different when you trust it.

You make a good point about the cookie banner reflex, but you don't need to use accept all on those either.

ablob · 17 days ago

So why not allow for enabling this behavior as a configuration option? A big fat banner for most users (i.e. by default) and the few edge cases get the status bar entry after they asked for it.

ablob commented on IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT johnmaguire.me/blog/ipv6-... · Posted by u/johnmaguire

ghshephard · 18 days ago

This is the first thing that as a Network Engineer I was taught - and every formal security class I've taken (typically from Cisco - they have awesome course) - repeats the same thing.

I believe the common knowledge is somewhat more nuanced than people would have you believe

I present to you two separate high-value targets whose IP address has leaked:

  IPv4 Target: 192.168.0.1
  IPv6 Target: 2001:1868:209:FFFD:0013:50FF:FE12:3456

Target #1 has an additional level of security in that you need to figure out how to route to that IP address, and heck - who it even belongs to.

Target #2 gives aways 90% of the game at attacking it (we even leak some device specific information, so you know precisely where it's weak points are)

Also - while IPv6 lacks NAT, it certainly has a very effective Prefix-translation mechanism which is the best of both worlds:

Here is a real world target:

  FDC2:1045:3216:0001:0013:50FF:FE12:3456

You are going to have a tough time routing to it - but it can transparently access anything on the internet - either natively or through a Prefix-translation target should you wish to go that direction.

ablob · 18 days ago

If the IP address was leaked, wouldn't it be the address of the unit doing the NAT translation instead of the standard-gateway?