fer (u/fer) - Readit News

fer commented on Git-Annex git-annex.branchable.com/... · Posted by u/keepamovin

alexdme · a day ago

I also used to use git-annex on my photos, ended up getting frustrated with how slow it was and wrote aegis[1] to solve my use case.

I wrote a bit about why in the readme (see archiving vs backup). In my opinion, syncing, snapshots, and backup tools like restic are great but fundamentally solve a different problem from what I want out of an archive tool like aegis, git-annex, or boar[2].

I want my backups to be automatic and transparent, for that restic is a great tool. But for my photos, my important documents and other immutable data, I want to manually accept or reject any change that happens to them, since I might not always notice when something changes. For example if I fat finger an rm, or a bug in a program overrides something and I don't notice.

[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~alexdavid/aegis

[2]: https://github.com/mekberg/boar

fer · 20 hours ago

While I understand why git-annex wouldn't work for you, what gaps did you find in boar?

fer commented on EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google reddit.com/r/degoogle/s/Y... · Posted by u/cft

Aaargh20318 · a month ago

> if this verification wasn’t in place, could I just alter the source code or binary to always return “yes I’m 18” (or whatever) and completely subvert the intent of this tool?

Kinda, yes.

(slightly simplifying the mechanism here)

This seems to be based on the EU Wallet project, which is still work in progress. The EU wallet is based on OpenID (oidc4vci, oidc4vp). The wallet allows for selective disclosure of attributes. These attributes are signed by a issuing party (i.e. the government of a EU country). That way a RP (relying party) can verify that the data in the claim (e.g. this user is 18+) is valid.

However, this alone is not enough, because it could be a copy of that data. You can just query a wallet for that attribute, store it and replay it to some other website. This is obviously not wanted.

So the wallet also has a mechanism to bind the credential to a specific device. When issuing a credential the wallet provides a public key plus a proof of possession of the associated private key (e.g. a signature over an issuer-provided nonce) to the issuer. The issuer then includes that public key in the signed part of the credential. When the RP verifies the credential it also asks the wallet to sign part of the response using the private key associated with that public key. This is supposed to prove that the credential was sent by the device it was issued to.

Now this is where the draconian device requirements come in: the wallet is supposed to securely store the private key associated with the credential. For example in a Secure Enclave on the device. The big flaw here is that none of this binding stuff works if you can somehow get access to the private key, e.g. on a rooted phone if the wallet doesn't use a secure enclave or with a modified wallet app that doesn't use a secure enclave to store the private key. You could ask a friend who is 18+ to request the credential, copy it to your phone and use that to log in.

fer · a month ago

> You can just query a wallet for that attribute, store it and replay it to some other website.

Uh, replay attacks are a solved problem in pretty much any industry standard challenge-response authentication, including OpenID. Am I missing something?

fer commented on PSA: SQLite WAL checksums fail silently and may lose data avi.im/blag/2025/sqlite-w... · Posted by u/avinassh

ryanjshaw · a month ago

> What I want: throw an error when corruption is detected and let the code handle it.

I wonder what that code would look like. My sense is that it’ll look exactly like the code that would run as if the transactions never occurred to begin with, which is why the SQLite design makes sense.

For example, I have a database of todos that sync locally from the cloud. The WAL gets corrupted. The WAL gets truncated the next time the DB is opened. The app logic then checks the last update timestamp in the DB and syncs with the cloud.

I don’t see what the app would do differently if it were notified about the WAL corruption.

fer · a month ago

Exactly. I'd read it as

> I want to correct errors that the DB wizard who implemented SQLite chose not to

When there's a design decision in such a high profile project that you disagree with, it's either

1. You don't understand why it was done like this.

2. You can (and probably will) submit a change that would solve it.

If you find yourself in the situation of understanding, yet not doing anything about it, you're the Schrodinger's developer: you're right and wrong until you collapse the mouth function by putting money on it.

It's very rarely an easy to fix mistake.

fer commented on “Dynamic programming” is not referring to “computer programming” vidarholen.net/contents/b... · Posted by u/r4um

amelius · a month ago

But aren't the programs given access to the problem data _after_ the program has been compiled?

fer · a month ago

Sure, but the input might be bounded/finite, or the operations needed similarly constrained (e.g. trigonometry operations). Then you can offload lots of the computation to the compilation, sometimes all of it.

fer commented on French villages have no more drinking water. The reason? PFAS pollution lemonde.fr/en/environment... · Posted by u/rawgabbit

LtWorf · a month ago

Veritasium had a video about this

fer · a month ago

Video in question, quality content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY

fer commented on Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer prm.ua/en/ukrainian-hacke... · Posted by u/doener

JSteph22 · a month ago

>And even land cost them more in soldiers more than the pre-war population that lived there

This is very easily verified as false. It's hard to take the rest of your comments seriously.

fer · a month ago

Since the last big movements of the front that's absolutely been the case, though you're right it doesn't apply if you account for the early captures. Once you remove them (Mariupol, Melitopol, Berdyansk), that's very easily verifiable.

Avdiivka had 30-32k pre-war population, estimated 40-47k Russian casualties. Bakhmut had 71k pre-war, Russia suffered an estimated 75k casualties from Wagner alone. Pokrovsk 61k pre-war, ongoing, 21k estimated casualties in January alone, and it's been ongoing for a year.

And beyond cities, the daily casualty rates at most obtain tiny settlements of a few dozen pre-war inhabitants. In the worst case you have the North Kharkiv front with 10s of thousands of casualties and basically a stalemate.

>It's hard to take the rest of your comments seriously.

"One thing is debatable so everything is debatable", I didn't expect this level on HN.

fer commented on Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer prm.ua/en/ukrainian-hacke... · Posted by u/doener

v5v3 · a month ago

Russia and all non-usa allies have been the winner.

China etc have seen the strategies used in sanctions. They know how to limit their impact now.

It's also brought Russia/China/Iran/North Korea and wider Brics together.

It's been a disaster for the west. The measure of success was Russia weakened and ideally Putin weakened or gone. And instead Russia have shrugged off the sanctions, and Putin is much stronger.

And the Russian military has gained real battle tested knowledge.

A disaster for the west, aside from their weapons companies/Ukrainian investments. And any NATO spend increases.

fer · a month ago

Russia has been a winner by basically no metric other than land and being a shit neighbor.

And even land cost them more in soldiers more than the pre-war population that lived there; it's literally a special grave digging operation. Soviet stockpiles of armor are basically depleted; now it's the buggy and moped meta. They've completely failed to support their supposed allies (i.e. Assad, Iran, Armenia). A good chunk of their strategic aviation fleet is gone. Car bombings of generals continue all over Russia and occupied territories, which brings the question, will it even stop if they "win"? They've finally been demoted from being an aircraft carrier operating nation. Their frozen assets are literally killing Russian soldiers. National wealth fund has ~20-30% of the prewar assets. Something similar in gold reserves. Interest rates are beyond effed, and recruits are largely joining for the money needed in the terrible economy caused by Putin himself. Who annexed 4 oblasts only to legally deploy the 18 year olds Putin promised not to deploy in Ukraine (as it's no longer Ukraine in Russian law). Non-military industrial output is on a steady decline. Price capping on bread. Fossil fuel output at minimums, and with low prices.

So what is Russia winning at?

fer commented on Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface patternproject.substack.c... · Posted by u/cainxinth

gavinray · a month ago

I've done it a few times. Unlike DMT, you don't have to vaporize it.

It's active intranasally and well as buccally/sublingually.

Effects-wise, it feels roughly identical to DMT but with a longer duration.

fer · a month ago

I found it significantly less visual. As in, about as immersive, but somewhat lacking visual depth/detail to things. But everyone's different anyway.

fer commented on Why LLMs Can't Write Q/Kdb+: Writing Code Right-to-Left medium.com/@gabiteodoru/w... · Posted by u/gabiteodoru

trjordan · 2 months ago

Seems like it could easily be training data set size as well.

I'd love to see some quantification of errors in q/kdb+ (or hebrew) vs. languages of similar size that are left-to-right.

fer · 2 months ago

>Seems like it could easily be training data set size as well.

I'm convinced that's the case. On any major LLM I can carpet bomb Java/Python boilerplate without issue. For Rust, at least last time I checked, it comes up with non-existing traits, more frequent hallucinations and general struggle to use the context effectively. In agent mode it turns into a first fight with the compiler, often ending in credit destroying loops.

And don't get me started when using it for Nix...

So not surprised about something with orders of magnitude smaller public corpus.

fer commented on I extracted the safety filters from Apple Intelligence models github.com/BlueFalconHD/a... · Posted by u/BlueFalconHD

qingcharles · 2 months ago

It's totally performative. There's no way to stay ahead of the new language that people create.

At what point do the new words become the actual words? Are there many instances of people using unalive IRL?

fer · 2 months ago

> There's no way to stay ahead of the new language that people create.

Not even to match the current language. How would you censor LeBron James? It's French slang for jerking off[0].

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFrance/comments/1lpnoj6/is_lebro...