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er4hn commented on Go Proposal: Secret Mode   antonz.org/accepted/runti... · Posted by u/enz
maxloh · 7 days ago
> The new runtime/secret package lets you run a function in secret mode. After the function finishes, it immediately erases (zeroes out) the registers and stack it used.

I don't understand. Why do you need it in a garbage-collected language?

My impression was that you are not able to access any register in these language. It is handled by the compiler instead.

er4hn · 7 days ago
In theory it prevents failures of the allocator that would allow reading uninitialized memory, which isn't really a thing in Go.

In practice it provides a straightforward path to complying with government crypto certification requirements like FIPS 140 that were written with languages in mind where this is an issue.

er4hn commented on As many as 2M Cisco devices affected by actively exploited 0-day   arstechnica.com/security/... · Posted by u/duxup
bell-cot · 3 months ago
1/4 of "yes", for this particular article. The regular "brands X, Y and Z are better" part would get more traction in the C-suites. And hopefully on Wall Street.
er4hn · 3 months ago
Speaking (unofficially) as someone who works at one of the "other brands" that reeks of journalists having a bias.
er4hn commented on Tinycolor supply chain attack post-mortem   sigh.dev/posts/ctrl-tinyc... · Posted by u/STRiDEX
cyberax · 3 months ago
> exfiltrated a npm token with broad publish rights

I freaking HATE tokens. I hate them.

There should be a better way to do authentication than a glorified static password.

An example of how to do it correctly: Github as a token provider for AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/use-iam-roles-to-conne... But this is an exception, rather than a rule.

er4hn · 3 months ago
Well the idea behind tokens is that they should be time and authZ limited. In most cases they are not so they degrade to a glorified static password.

Solutions like generating them live with a short lifetime, using solutions like oauth w/ proper scopes, biscuits that limit what they can do in detail, etc, all exist and are rarely used.

er4hn commented on A computer upgrade shut down BART   bart.gov/news/articles/20... · Posted by u/ksajadi
CartwheelLinux · 4 months ago
Also surprised they don't have the ability to rollback
er4hn · 4 months ago
Not having redundant rails in case of breakdowns is something BART is well known for
er4hn commented on Obsidian Bases   help.obsidian.md/bases... · Posted by u/twapi
TechPlasma · 4 months ago
This is my main complaint for Bases. It forces you to split your data into many many small files.

I don't need entire files for each individual book/movie/task I want to manage.

They'll have maybe 4-5 properties at most with not much content in them.

File system, and syncing operations will take a massive hit if I have to manage that many files.

er4hn · 4 months ago
How many files do you have? At what scale did you see this being a problem?

I'm a fan of Obsidian, not affiliated with them, but my experience with basic file syncing like syncthing or git is that you should be able to easily get up into the ten's of thousands of files without an issue.

er4hn commented on Bullfrog in the Dungeon   filfre.net/2025/08/bullfr... · Posted by u/doppp
AdmiralAsshat · 4 months ago
> Personally, though, I’ll take the second game’s refinement over any such nebulous quality. If I was coming to Dungeon Keeper cold today, this is definitely where I would start.

This was my feeling, too, having no prior history with Dungeon Keeper and buying both titles on sale on GOG in the past year. DKII is definitely easier for the modern gamer to jump into. It also had some gameplay ideas that were novel and not terribly well-developed, but just fun--like being able to possess an individual grunt and suddenly have the isometric real-time strategy shift to a first-person perspective.

er4hn · 4 months ago
Wandering around my dungeon, doing things, in the first person was such a fun experience as well. It felt like such a novel way to explore what I was doing and look at my creatures "in the face" so to say. In some ways it feels like a precursor to things like minecraft, where you could do some tasks as an imp in the dungeon.
er4hn commented on NautilusTrader: Open-source algorithmic trading platform   nautilustrader.io/... · Posted by u/Lwrless
augment_me · 4 months ago
Have exactly the same experience as you.

Had a period in my college days where I had a neural network running that could successfully trade on patterns of periodicity of non-chaotic windows of the asset. But as soon as the system would go back to being chaotic, and there was no way to identify WHEN the system was chaotic and when it wasn't, the trades would go to shit and I would lose all gains. I was up about 400-450% at an end of a successful cycle, which was 2-4 months, and then it could be a year of decline with gains being eaten up by the option issuers.

Now I only do long-term funds/stocks and have:

a) much less anxiety about losses b) more money.

er4hn · 4 months ago
Is this the financial version of the 3-body problem?
er4hn commented on DrawAFish.com Postmortem   aldenhallak.com/blog/post... · Posted by u/hallak
bobson381 · 5 months ago
this was awesome. people are surprising
er4hn · 5 months ago
There's a long history of this. A defense against the Morris worm made use of this as well.
er4hn commented on Fintech dystopia   fintechdystopia.com/... · Posted by u/LasEspuelas
didibus · 5 months ago
It helped me to start from the problem it tries to solve.

Fundamentally, we've been making digital versions of everything. We have digital phone calls, television, bookkeeping, document writing, drawing, etc.

One thing we didn't have digitally was a currency.

Why would we want a digital currency? For similar reasons to all the other stuff above. It's more convenient. When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc.

This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.

Now we have an idea of why we might want to make a digital currency. The biggest issue with making one is how do you solve the "double spend problem". That is, if I have 1 unit of a currency and I give it to you, how do we guarantee I no longer have that unit after it was given to you? In a physical world, I'm giving you the actual unit of currency, but in the digital world I'm giving you a copy of it, it would be easy for me to keep my copy as well and have an infinite money glitch.

The solution to that is simple, you have a source of truth that processes the transaction. That source of truth records that I had 10$ and you had 10$, I gave you 1$, and now I have 9$ and you have 11$.

That's easy enough. Here comes the second problem, who would trust owning that source of truth? Would you trust me keeping the official source of truth log of how much money everyone has? I could easily add myself a few 0s to my account, or remove some from yours.

Would you trust the government of your country? Of another country? A big corporation? A US charity?

This is where crypto comes in. Crypto says, nobody would ever trust a single entity, but what if everyone could join a network of nodes that together form the source of truth? Not owned by any single person, but the union of everyone who wants to join the network, and you could join the network, I could join it, anyone is free to join it, and we can all validate and check each other's work to make sure no one else on the network is fudging the numbers.

And now a lot of complex cryptographic math comes in to from this network.

er4hn · 5 months ago
> Why would we want a digital currency? For similar reasons to all the other stuff above. It's more convenient. When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc.

>

> This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.

That's absolutely not how this works though. Banks perform electronic transfers and most of the money is accounted for in databases. The problems are slow, antiquated, technology, which is made worse by the amount of regulation surrounding it that makes it hard for new contenders to enter and drive down prices via competition.

Cryptocurrency is trustless, but there is an interesting tangent about if you _do not_ want a government to control monetary policy.

er4hn commented on EU commissioner shocked by dangers of some goods sold by Shein and Temu   theguardian.com/business/... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11
er4hn · 5 months ago
No, it's so much worse than anyone could have imagined. For example: "kids’ shorts with drawstrings longer than regulation length, which cause a trip hazard."

u/er4hn

KarmaCake day2040November 6, 2020
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