ajb (u/ajb) - Readit News

ajb commented on Matchlock – Secures AI agent workloads with a Linux-based sandbox github.com/jingkaihe/matc... · Posted by u/jingkai_he

ajb · 2 days ago

We definitely need a vendor-independent tool like this. Have been reviewing the Claude setup and, despite initially being hopeful since it uses bubblewrap, it's quite problematic:

* The definitions of security config in the documentation of settings.json are unclear. Since it's not open source, you can't check the ground truth.

* The built in constructs are insufficient to do fully whitelist based access control (It might be possible with a custom hook).

* Security related issues go unanswered in the repo, and are automatically closed.

Haven't looked into copilot as much but didn't look great either. Seems like the vendors don't have the incentives to do this properly.

So I'm on the lookout for a better way, and matchlock seems like a contender.

ajb commented on Google staff call for firm to cut ties with ICE bbc.com/news/articles/cvg... · Posted by u/tartoran

ajb · 3 days ago

The "hide" button is on every article. Most articles don't have political discussion.

When the political environment becomes unstable, people need to reach out to communities that they trust. For some people, here is where they are comfortable, and where they meet people whose character is legible enough to them that they can place trust. By saying "no politics here" you're denying the people who find this their safe space the ability to share their fears about the situation.

IMO the main difference between the current US administration and those usually considered authoritarian, is that it does not yet use violence to discipline it's own side. But if it remains, that is an unavoidable step on the roadmap. It's supporters are acting like democracy and the rule of law can be denied to some people, while they retain them; that is not a sustainable state of affairs. "Business as usual" is short-sighted.

ajb commented on What Is Ruliology? writings.stephenwolfram.c... · Posted by u/helloplanets

libertine · 3 days ago

That seems quite a bold eulogy, no?

Isn't he well accomplished, and prolific throughout his life?

ajb · 3 days ago

He is. But he's also convinced that cellular automata will replace the standard model as the foundation of physics, and that he will therefore be known to history as the third founder of physics after Newton and Einstein.

/s

ajb commented on Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself jesperordrup.github.io/vo... · Posted by u/jesperordrup

SwiftyBug · 3 days ago

Singing is one of the few things that I suspect may not be just learned. Sure, you can improve a little, but not go from complete trash to someone you would actually tolerate hearing sing. I think our anatomies constrain us much more than for other things. How come some people can naturally sing and others produce a horrible screech? What I've been trying to find is a style that best suits my voice that will make it seem like I'm not horrible. Don't know what that is yet. Finding that is not so easy when you don't have a large vocal range nor a particularly interesting voice.

ajb · 3 days ago

Some vocal techniques - like belting and the classical voices - require the actual development of musculature, both to hold a shape (for high pitches) and to be able to stabilise shapes. That's not going to happen overnight, so you have to spend sometime sounding horrible before you can do those well. That doesn't mean it's impossible - it's like lifting weights, anyone can improve it.

However, that's not the techniques used in the majority of popular singing. You absolutely can sound drastically different very quickly. This is simply because most people don't use most of the degrees of freedom that the voice has. If you look at the Estill method reference material, which concentrates on how the vocal system features actually operate to produce different vocal effects, they identify around 14 degrees of freedom.Some discrete, but a lot of them continuous. It is very common for someone who thinks that they have a terrible voice to take a few lessons and find that they can sound much better. It's just that, as another commenter pointed out, you can't see inside your own mouth and throat. You can't see that you're always holding them in a certain way.

For example, some women habitually sound shrill, usually because they have had to develop a penetrating voice. This is often true of teachers, who have to be able to make themselves heard over a bunch of shrill children (and aren't able to use the option of a deep bass). This is a vocal technique (twang) but it can also become habitual,to the point where they don't think they can do anything else.

ajb commented on Programming Patterns: The Story of the Jacquard Loom (2019) scienceandindustrymuseum.... · Posted by u/andsoitis

112233 · 4 days ago

Here is a 1746 machine loom that used perforated tape, half a century before Jacquard:

https://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee/metier-tisser-les-etof...

Nor is it first such device. Here is the nice image of barrel with pins that controls the 14th century machine organ:

https://www.pianola.org/history/history_mechanical.cfm

Again, while impact of Jacquard's loom was indisputably huge, ascribing origin of computers to it seems like calling Ford model T the origin of personal transportation.

ajb · 4 days ago

Wikipedia suggests that the Jacquard loom introduced Babbage to punched cards, which would be why it, rather than the others, is associated with the origin of computers.

ajb commented on Programming Patterns: The Story of the Jacquard Loom (2019) scienceandindustrymuseum.... · Posted by u/andsoitis

112233 · 5 days ago

Punchcards are also mechanically configured, not symbolically programmed. If you see huge semantical difference between a card with holes and a cylinder with pins or a cam with groves, please explain that difference. Or is the "arbitrary length" the main difference?

I'd imagine something that changes operation based purely on state (position of a dial, presence of a peg in a slot etc) conceptually being "symbolic". Punchcards are not it.

ajb · 5 days ago

I used to have colleagues who literally learned to program on punched card machines. As in they wrote a program on paper in symbolic assembler, manually converted it to machine code, punched the machine code onto a card,and then carried the cards to the nearby university so that they could run their school homework program.

They would be amused by the idea that this wasn't computing.

Punched cards store bits. Bits can store symbols.

ajb commented on Broken Proofs and Broken Provers lawrencecpaulson.github.i... · Posted by u/RebelPotato

zozbot234 · 6 days ago

> LCF-style provers have a much smaller trusted computing base than Curry/Howard based provers like Coq, Agda and Lean.

I'm not sure that this is correct. The TCB in a CH based prover is just the implementation of the actual kernel. In LCF, you also have to trust that any tactics are implemented in a programming language that doesn't allow you to perform unsound operations. That's a vast expansion in your TCB. (You can implement LCF-like "tactics" in a CH-based prover via so-called reflection that delegates the proof to a runtime computation, but you do have to prove that your computation yields a correct decision for the problem.)

ajb · 6 days ago

My understanding is that tactics output piece of proof, but that this isn't trusted by the TCB of an LCF prover. This is very far from my area of expertise, but seems to be confirmed by https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-39.html

ajb commented on Building Your Own Efficient uint128 in C++ solidean.com/blog/2026/bu... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

jfyi · 8 days ago

In highschool, age 14, I was taking a turbo pascal class.

The teacher had assigned us to pick a project to work on for 2 weeks.

I had picked replicating some basic dos application. I legitimately just wanted to know how it worked and get down to a lower level and reimplement it.

The teacher kept asserting "it already exists, pick something else". I was young and didn't really know how to explain it to her at the time and kept insisting on that project.

It turned into some big hoopla, dragging my parents into the principal where we sat and discussed options. They had no idea of what was going on. The teacher kept pushing implementing a card game, I think it was poker. I being completely unreasonable immediately latched onto, "why does it have to be gambling? Why not something useful?"

Neither I, nor my parents had anything against a poker game morally, but that really changed the tone of the conversation and we ultimately landed on a big int implementation.

She had legitimately thought it was some gotcha and was noticeably angry when I demoed it 2 weeks later. It was of course the most naive implementation imaginable but worked well beyond the expectations assigned.

I never told her I finished it in a couple hours.

Whenever I think about it, it just kills me how disfunctional that school was on so many levels. I suppose I was lucky though to have computer science classes at that age in the 90's.

ajb · 8 days ago

Wow. Glad it worked out. There were at least some good high school CS teachers in the 90s. Ours knew that a lot of kids joined the class who were burned out on school, and insisted on going beyond the curriculum to the point where those guys would have a chance at a coding job right out of school - if they put in the work. We also had to implement binary arithmetic from scratch (booleans) although I think that was in the curriculum.

ajb commented on Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down idiallo.com/blog/teaching... · Posted by u/firefoxd

davej · 8 days ago

I had a housemate in college who used to party until all hours, bring people back at 3AM and put on loud music. Even during exam season. I tried talking to her a couple of times but she would roll her eyes and say "sure". Never stopped though.

One evening my girlfriend was using a hair straightener in my bedroom, it tripped the central fuse and turned off the electricity. I told my GF that I would buy her a new hair straightener because this one isn't safe.

Now every time my housemate started blaring music at 3AM then I just needed to plug in the hair straightener. It only took 3 or 4 attempts for me to Pavlov my housemate into not playing loud music at 3am. :-)

ajb · 8 days ago

I had the same problem when I was in uni. Funnily enough, the RCD switches for each block were behind a panel in the common toilets, which did not have a real lock; just a hole for a "cabinet key" (a square rod).

ajb commented on Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down idiallo.com/blog/teaching... · Posted by u/firefoxd

unglaublich · 8 days ago

My, that sums up apartment living quite well. I'm all for densifying popular urban areas, but man, add some fucking sound isolation cheap landlords.

ajb · 8 days ago

Right, so the problem here, apart from people not giving a shit, is that no-one has designed a 'spirit level for soundproofing' - a tool that can be used during the job by the builder and by the supervisor to check on it. What you have is equipment that can be used after "second fix", at which point no-one wants to rip the plaster off to fix anything, so it becomes a box ticking exercise.

There are two kinds of issue: a solid transmission path that shouldn't exist ('bridge'), and a gap or void that shouldn't exist. What we need is something like a time domain reflectometer but for sound conduction, so you can detect gaps and bridges after screwing on the drywall but before skimming over it, and before the doors have been put in - ie, while there's still a massive audio path a few meters away. Ideally, even if the next panel hasn't been screwed on. If you had that, then if it detects something then all you have to do is unscrew a panel to fix it, which is something that people might actually do.

Anyone who has enough audio engineering skills, feel free to build this!