munch117 (u/munch117)

munch117 commented on C# strings silently kill your SQL Server indexes in Dapper consultwithgriff.com/dapp... · Posted by u/PretzelFisch

wvenable · 9 days ago

For a literal/parameter that happens to be ASCII, a person might know it would fit in varchar, but the optimizer has to choose a plan that stays correct in the general case, not just for that one runtime value. By telling SQL server the parameter is a nvarchar value, you're the one telling it that might not be ASCII.

munch117 · 9 days ago

Making a plan that works for the general case, but is also efficient, is rather trivial. Here's pseudocode from spending two minutes on the problem:

    # INPUT: lookfor: unicode
    var lower, upper: ascii
    lower = ascii_lower_bound(lookfor)
    upper = ascii_upper_bound(lookfor)
    for candidate:ascii in index_lookup(lower .. upper):
        if expensive_correct_compare_equal(candidate.field, lookfor):
            yield candidate

The magic is to have functions ascii_lower_bound and ascii_upper_bound, that compute an ASCII string such that all ASCII strings that compare smaller (greater) cannot be equal to the input. Those functions are not hard to write. Although you might have to implement versions for each supported locale-dependent text comparison algorithm, but still, not a big deal.

Worst case, 'lower' and 'upper' span the whole table - could happen if you have some really gnarly string comparison rules to deal with. But then you're no worse off than before. And most of the time you'll have lower==upper and excellent performance.

munch117 commented on IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption fortune.com/2026/02/13/te... · Posted by u/WhatsTheBigIdea

vidarh · a month ago

You'd be surprised how low the bar is. What I'm seeing is down to the level of people not writing complete sentences.

There doesn't need to be any "magic" there. Just clearly state your requirements. And start by asking the model to plan out the changes and write a markdown file with a plan first (I prefer this over e.g. Claude Code's plan mode, because I like to keep that artefact), including planning out tests.

If a colleague of yours not intimately familiar with the project could get the plan without needing to ask followup questions (but able to spend time digging through the code), you've done pretty well.

You can go over-board with agents to assist in reviewing the code, running tests etc. as well, but that's the second 90%. The first 90% is just to write a coherent request for a plan, read the plan, ask for revisions until it makes sense, and tell it to implement it.

munch117 · a month ago

> Just clearly state your requirements.

Nothing new here. Getting users to clearly state their requirements has always been like pulling teeth. Incomplete sentences and all.

If the people you are teaching are developers, they should know better. But I'm not all that surprised if many of them don't. People will be people.

munch117 commented on Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube cordcuttersnews.com/babyl... · Posted by u/walterbell

pupppet · a month ago

For those who have watched both Babylon 5 and Star Trek TNG- which did you like better?

munch117 · a month ago

TNG, by a country mile. B5 has "writer identifies too much with the main character" written all over it. It's the story of how Our Great Leader does the right thing and saves the world, over and over again.

munch117 commented on The Day the Telnet Died labs.greynoise.io/grimoir... · Posted by u/pjf

pwg · a month ago

You passed '-f root' to login (a single long string). telnetd is likely passing '-f' 'root' to login (two arguments instead of one, whether this is because it creates two, or it uses the shell (which then reparses) I don't know).

But '-f' is a valid option to login (man login):

login [-p] [-h host] [-H] [-f username|username]

...

-f Used to skip a login authentication. This option is usually used by the getty(8) autologin feature.

munch117 · a month ago

I was reading https://www.offsec.com/blog/cve-2026-24061/, which implies that precisely that single long string passes through getenv("USER") in the attack. The mystery is how that single long string in telnetd becomes two separate arguments for login. execv or posix_spawn certainly won't do that. So either there's a version of /usr/bin/login that parses arguments in some very sus way, or there's a shell involved somehow.

munch117 commented on The Day the Telnet Died labs.greynoise.io/grimoir... · Posted by u/pjf

munch117 · a month ago

I'm slightly taken aback by the telnetd fix: The solution to the username "-f root" being interpreted as two arguments to /usr/bin/login is to add a "sanitize" function, really? I'm not seeing the sense in that. Surely in any case where the sanitize functions changes something, the login will fail. Better to error out early than to sanitize and try to hobble along.

What I'd like to know is how the arguments get interpreted like that in the first place. If I try giving that kind of argument /usr/bin/login directly, its argument parser chides me:

  $ login '-f root'
  login: illegal option --

What's telnetd doing differently? Is it invoking login via a shell?

munch117 commented on “You should never build a CMS” sanity.io/blog/you-should... · Posted by u/handfuloflight

samdoesnothing · 3 months ago

I don't think people should be obligated to spend time and effort justifying their reasoning on this. Firstly it's highly asymmetrical; you can generate AI content with little effort, whereas composing a detailed analysis requires a lot more work. It's also not easily articulatable.

However there is evidence that writers who have experience using LLMs are highly accurate at detecting AI generated text.

> Our experiments show that annotators who frequently use LLMs for writing tasks excel at detecting AI-generated text, even without any specialized training or feedback. In fact, the majority vote among five such “expert” annotators misclassifies only 1 of 300 articles, significantly outperforming most commercial and open-source detectors we evaluated even in the presence of evasion tactics like paraphrasing and humanization. Qualitative analysis of the experts’ free-form explanations shows that while they rely heavily on specific lexical clues, they also pick up on more complex phenomena within the text that are challenging to assess for automatic detectors. [0]

Like the paper says, it's easy to point to specific clues in ai generated text, like the overuse of em dashes, overuse of inline lists, unusual emoji usage, tile case, frequent use of specific vocab, the rule of three, negative parallelisms, elegant variation, false ranges etc. But harder to articulate and perhaps more important to recognition is overall flow, sentence structure and length, and various stylistic choices that scream AI.

Also worth noting that the author never actually stated that they did not use generative AI for this article. Saying that their hands were on the keyboard or that they reworked sentences and got feedback from coworkers doesn't mean AI wasn't used. That they haven't straight up said "No AI was used to write this article" is another indication.

0: https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v2

munch117 · 3 months ago

> Also worth noting that the author never actually stated that they did not use generative AI for this article.

I expect that they did in some small way, especially considering the source.

But not to an extent where it was anywhere near as relevant as the actual points being made. "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances,", the guidelines say.

I don't mind at all that it's pointed out when an article is nothing more than AI ponderings. Sure, call out AI fluff, and in particular, call out an article that might contain incorrect confabulated information. This just wasn't that.

munch117 commented on “You should never build a CMS” sanity.io/blog/you-should... · Posted by u/handfuloflight

kmelve · 3 months ago

It's strange to see folks here speculate about something you've written.

And if you only knew how much those headings and the structure of this post changed as I wrote it out and got internal feedback on it ^^_

munch117 · 3 months ago

I struggled a bit with what to point to as signs that it's not an LLM conception. Someone else had commented on the headlines as something that was AI-like, and since I could easily imagine a writing process that would lead to headlines like that, that's what I chose. A little too confidently perhaps, sorry.

But actually, I think I shouldn't have needed to identify any signs. It's the people claiming something's the work of an LLM based on little more than gut feelings, that should be asked to provide more substance. The length of sentences? Number of bullet points? That's really thin.

munch117 commented on “You should never build a CMS” sanity.io/blog/you-should... · Posted by u/handfuloflight

samdoesnothing · 3 months ago

There are some obvious tells like the headings ("Markdown is nice for LLMs. That’s not the point", "What Lee actually built (spoiler: a CMS)"), the dramatic full stops ("\nThis works until it doesn't.\n"), etc. It's difficult to describe because it's sort of a gut feeling you have pattern matching what you get from your own LLM usage.

It sort of reminds me of those marketing sites I used to see selling a product, where it's a bunch of short paragraphs and one-liners, again difficult to articulate but those were ubiquitous like 5 years ago and I can see where AI would have learned it from.

It's also tough because if you're a good writer you can spot it easier and you can edit LLM output to hide it, but then you probably aren't leaning on LLM's to write for you anyways. But if you aren't a good writer or your English isn't strong you won't pick up on it, and even if you use the AI to just rework your own writing or generate fragments it still leaks through.

Now that I think about it I'm curious if this phenomenon exists in other languages besides English...

munch117 · 3 months ago

This article is just about as un-AI written as anything I've ever read. The headings are clearly just the outline that he started with. An outline with a clear concept for the story that he's trying to tell.

I'm beginning to wonder how many of the "This was written by AI!" comments are AI-generated.

munch117 commented on Async and Finaliser Deadlocks tratt.net/laurie/blog/202... · Posted by u/emailed

munch117 · 4 months ago

A __del__ that does any kind of real work is asking for trouble. Use it to print a diagnostic reminding you to call .close() or .join() or use a with statement, and nothing else. For example:

    def close(self):
        self._closed = True
        self.do_interesting_finalisation_stuff()
    def __del__(self):
        if not self._closed:
            print("Programming error! Forgot to .close()", self)

If you do anything the slightest bit more interesting than that in your __del__, then you are likely to regret it.

Every time I've written a __del__ that did more, it has been trouble and I've ended up whittling it down to a simple diagnostic. With one notable exception: A __del__ that put a termination notification into a queue.Queue which a different thread was listening to. That one worked great: If the other thread was still alive and listening, then it would get the message. If not, then the message would just get garbage-collected with the Queue, but message would be redundant anyway, so that would be fine.

munch117 commented on John Searle has died nytimes.com/2025/10/12/bo... · Posted by u/sgustard

Zarathruster · 5 months ago

Of all the things I studied at Berkeley, the Philosophy of Mind class he taught is the one I think back on most often. The subject matter has only grown in relevance with time.

In general, I think he's spectacularly misunderstood. For instance: he believed that it was entirely possible to create conscious artificial beings (at least in principle). So why do so many people misunderstand the Chinese Room argument to be saying the opposite? My theory is that most people encounter his ideas from secondary sources that subtly misrepresent his argument.

At the risk of following in their footsteps, I'll try to very succinctly summarize my understanding. He doesn't argue that consciousness can only emerge from biological neurons. His argument is much narrower: consciousness can't be instantiated purely in language. The Chinese Room argument might mislead people into thinking it's an epistemology claim ("knowing" the Chinese language) when it's really an ontology claim (consciousness and its objective, independent mode of existence).

If you think you disagree with him (as I once did), please consider the possibility that you've only been exposed to an ersatz characterization of his argument.

munch117 · 5 months ago

> If you think you disagree with him (as I once did), please consider the possibility that you've only been exposed to an ersatz characterization of his argument.

My first exposure was a video of Searle himself explaining the Chinese room argument.

It came across as a claim that a whole can never be more than its parts. It made as much sense as claiming that a car cannot possibly drive, as it consists of parts that separately cannot drive.