epaulson (u/epaulson)

epaulson commented on Things I learnt about passkeys when building passkeybot enzom.dev/b/passkeys/... · Posted by u/emadda

AlotOfReading · 8 days ago

The "standard" answer is that you should either use synced passkeys, or enroll multiple passkeys with the provider. The problem is that some providers (e.g. Paypal, some banks) only support one passkey, and synced passkeys aren't supposed to be trusted for attestation (unless they're synced by Apple/Google/Microsoft).

epaulson · 8 days ago

And every couple of days we see a post or a tweet about "Google/Apple/Microsoft just nuked my account with no notice and no recourse" so trusting them to sync passkeys rightfully makes some people nervous.

epaulson commented on Who Invented Backpropagation? people.idsia.ch/~juergen/... · Posted by u/nothrowaways

dataflow · 4 months ago

Wow, this is the first time I'm hearing such a thing. For clarity:

I pasted the output so a ton of people wouldn't repeat the same question to ChatGPT and burn a ton of CO2 to get the same answer.

I didn't paste the query since I didn't find it interesting.

And I didn't fact check because I didn't have the time. I was walking and had a few seconds to just do this on my phone.

Not sure how this was rude, I certainly didn't intend it to be...

epaulson · 4 months ago

The 'it's rude to show your ai(llm) output' is a reference to this: https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-...

epaulson commented on Amazon Aurora DSQL aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora... · Posted by u/aws_hero

epaulson · a year ago

It's frustrating that there's no pricing information. The tech looks cool and all, but without knowing how much it's going to cost there's no way to really evaluate it.

epaulson commented on Open source AI is the path forward about.fb.com/news/2024/07... · Posted by u/atgctg

JumpCrisscross · a year ago

“The Heavy Press Program was a Cold War-era program of the United States Air Force to build the largest forging presses and extrusion presses in the world.” This ”program began in 1944 and concluded in 1957 after construction of four forging presses and six extruders, at an overall cost of $279 million. Six of them are still in operation today, manufacturing structural parts for military and commercial aircraft” [1].

$279mm in 1957 dollars is about $3.2bn today [2]. A public cluster of GPUs provided for free to American universities, companies and non-profits might not be a bad idea.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program

[2] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=279&year1=1957...

epaulson · a year ago

The National Science Foundation has been doing this for decades, starting with the supercomputing centers in the 80s. Long before anyone talked about cloud credits, NSF has had a bunch of different programs to allocate time on supercomputers to researchers at no cost, these days mostly run out of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastruture. (The office name is from the early 00s) - https://new.nsf.gov/cise/oac

(To connect universities to the different supercomputing centers, the NSF funded the NSFnet network in the 80s, which was basically the backbone of the Internet in the 80s and early 90s. The supercomputing funding has really, really paid off for the USA)

epaulson commented on The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements science.anu.edu.au/news-e... · Posted by u/zsrobinson

epaulson · a year ago

About two weeks I came across this tweet, from a PhD candidate just finishing up:

https://x.com/CharityWoodrum/status/1808313627864440930

"For Woody and Jayson Thomas. From the local universe to the first galaxies, the brightest moments in space and time occurred during our brief epoch together. That light is unquenchable."

She had gone back to school as an adult to study physics, she was just finishing up her undergrad when her husband and child were swept away by a wave while walking on the beach.

She kept on with school and is about to finish her Ph.D. I just can't comprehend how. https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/ua-doctoral-candidate-in...

epaulson commented on Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024 zdnet.com/article/forget-... · Posted by u/drx

epaulson · 2 years ago

Are there APIs to get the iCloud sync into my own app? I'm all for iCloud syncing to my devices I just want a way to also get a backup in a file so if Apple decides to delete my account on a whim, I don't lose everything.

epaulson commented on BlenderBIM – add-on for beautiful, detailed, and data-rich OpenBIM with Blender blenderbim.org/... · Posted by u/Teever

epaulson · 2 years ago

The fun thing about BlenderBIM is that it's IFC-native. (IFC is the 'Industrial Foundation Classes' - a data model/structure for modeling buildings and the components, systems, and intangibles like construction schedules.)

BlenderBIM is internally managing everything with the IfcOpenShell library - all of the data uses the Python interfaces of IfcOpenShell (which internally has a lot of C) to keep the model state. Blender is more a rendering backend and nice UI to manipulate the state of the IFC model with IfcOpenShell - but basically everything you can do with the Blender GUI you can pop open a shell and just type in Python and do the same thing.

This means you'll occasionally see some Blender things that don't do what you expect to the model you're editing - there are ways to have Blender do state modifications that don't all get translated to the IFC data underneath, so sometimes doing things like selections or modifiers are surprising for Blender users. (I think over time the list of things that are like this has gotten a lot smaller, and BlenderBIM is now pretty good about keeping the state of what's displayed in Blender in sync with what the underlying IFC model is storing)

The main commercial player in this space is Autodesk Revit. There is a lot of thinking that perhaps Revit has reached a point as a platform where Autodesk can't keep building on it (i.e. it has so much tech debt that it's getting hopeless) - see https://letters-to-autodesk.com/ Autodesk has a number of other 3D modeling software packages and I sometimes think that for their next generation of Revit they should consider the BlenderBIM approach and maybe build on top of Maya or one of their other offerings.

epaulson commented on Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU macrumors.com/2024/03/12/... · Posted by u/Hamuko

monocularvision · 2 years ago

If you pay the $99, the cert don’t expire for a year. It is only the free account that has the 7-day limitation.

epaulson · 2 years ago

Oh, awesome. I'm glad to discover I was wrong about that!

epaulson commented on Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU macrumors.com/2024/03/12/... · Posted by u/Hamuko

Ballas · 2 years ago

I just want to be able to install my own apps on my own device without paying $99/year (and with a signature that lasts a reasonable amount of time).

Sadly, this doesn't seem to allow for that.

epaulson · 2 years ago

I'd even be willing to pay the $99 a year, I just want the signature to last longer than a week, ideally forever. For years when I don't feel like updating the app, I won't pay the developer membership fee.

epaulson commented on OPML is underrated kmaasrud.com/blog/opml-is... · Posted by u/thunderbong

epaulson · 2 years ago

It's not so much that OPML is the interesting part here, it's that it's a file. A few weeks back Andrej Karpathy had a twitter thread[1] about blogging software and shared this link on 'File vs App' - https://stephango.com/file-over-app - and that really was great for ecosystem interoperability. I can download the file using whatever tool is appropriate, store it however I want, and then upload it somewhere else using whatever tools is appropriate. I have the OPML export I took of my subscriptions from the day Google Reader shut down and there's still a fighting chance that other services could actually import that file.

It's also worth noting that OPML is only the container format here. Agreeing on a container format is obviously important and we won't get very far for interop if we can't even agree on the container format, but OPML is supposed to be a generic tree of 'outline' format, and conveniently RSS subscriptions (and folders) look like a tree.

I sorta expected that there would be a second standard that says "here's how you use this generic OPML container format to represent RSS feed subscriptions" but oddly that's actually included right in the OPML spec[2]. In fact RSS subscriptions are the only application format defined in OPML - there's a 'type' field defined for <outline> element and if type is set to 'rss' then there's also a required xmlUrl of the feed and optional things like the html link for the blog, the version of RSS used. This is the data and part of the spec that makes the actual subscription list exchange work.

But again the only entry for 'type' defined in the OPML spec is 'rss'. If you want to use OPML as a container for something else, like Youtube subscriptions or Twitter followers, you of course can but you gotta find some way to get everyone to agree on how to interpret the 'type' you set for that <outline> element. And as far as I know, no one's done anything like that for any other domain.

So it'd be awesome if more domains defined 'type' fields and set out some specs so I can export my video streaming subscriptions or Amazon wishlist or whatever but without defining more 'type' fields OPML is really not any more interesting than a CSV of URLs.

[1] https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1751379269769695601 [2] http://opml.org/spec2.opml