pavon (u/pavon) - Readit News

pavon commented on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis... · Posted by u/taviso

jsnell · 5 days ago

No, the economics will never work out for a Proof of Work-based counter-abuse challenge. CPU is just too cheap in comparison to the cost of human latency. An hour of a server CPU costs $0.01. How much is an hour of your time worth?

That's all the asymmetry you need to make it unviable. Even if the attacker is no better at solving the challenge than your browser is, there's no way to tune the monetary cost to be even in the ballpark to the cost imposed to the legitimate users. So there's no point in theorizing about an attacker solving the challenges cheaper than a real user's computer, and thus no point in trying to design a different proof of work that's more resistant to whatever trick the attackers are using to solve it for cheap. Because there's no trick.

pavon · 4 days ago

But for a scraper to be effective it has to load orders of magnitude more pages than a human browses, so a fixed delay causes a human to take 1.1x as long, but it will slow down scraper by 100x. Requiring 100x more hardware to do the same job is absolutely a significant economic impediment.

pavon commented on OCaml as my primary language xvw.lol/en/articles/why-o... · Posted by u/nukifw

GhosT078 · 11 days ago

Ada has been held back primary by an image problem that traces back to the high cost and poor performance of a lot of early Ada 83 compilers. Ada adoption has never really recovered from that despite its many technical advantages, and despite the low cost and good performance of several current compilers.

The GNAT Ada compiler, always open source and quite good, has been freely available since the 1990's. It has been part of GCC since about 2003.

There are plenty of open source Ada projects on GitHub and other places although not nearly as many as some other languages.

The Ada ecosystem is mature and complete, particularly the GNAT related tools supported by directly or indirectly AdaCore (https://github.com/AdaCore and https://alire.ada.dev/).

The language evolution has been stable and is still on-going. I have worked primarily with Ada for 30 years. I still work on new Ada projects on a mid-sized team. Most of us just don't participate in forums like this.

pavon · 11 days ago

For people who were actually interested in using Ada, the early poor tooling was the main impediment. However, I think the bigger issue is that it was moving directly against the cultural headwinds at the time.

The immediate response I heard anytime Ada was mentioned was that it was a designed-by-committee language[1] that couldn't even be fully implemented due to a theoretically impossible specification[2]. It was made by a bunch of bureaucratic stiffs and was all about constraining the developer with stupid rules and bogging them down with verbosity. It was contrary to the freewheeling nature of the PC developer culture that sprung up in the 70's and continued through the 80's, and then evolved into the dot-com developers of the 90's and 00's.

It took decades of wandering through the deserts of "Real Developers don't write buffer overflows" on one end, and "Performance doesn't matter, and a sufficiently smart compiler will provide it anyway" on the other to get to the point where mainstream developers wanted a language that combined the safety of high-level languages with the control of low-level languages.

[1] This is false, it was selected in a contest with each entry developed independently.

[2] True but overrated

pavon commented on Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated] cnn.com/2025/08/12/busine... · Posted by u/mastry

mvgoogler · 11 days ago

Kodak film products are (confusingly) handled by Kodak-Alaris, which is a separate company that spun out of Eastman Kodak around 2012-ish and shares the Kodak brand with Eastman Kodak. Despite the similar names they are entirely separate companies, AFAIK.

My team did an integration with Kodak-Alaris a few years back and we toured their main office in Rochester.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Alaris

pavon · 11 days ago

The way Wikipedia describes it, Eastman Kodak is still the one manufacturing the film, and Kodak Alaris is just selling it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak#Still_film

pavon commented on Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords blog.danielh.cc/blog/pass... · Posted by u/max__dev

geocar · 18 days ago

> The attack pattern is:

There are lots of attack patterns. That is one. I am not certain I believe it is very likely, because (a) I think "sign-in partner" is obvious bullshit, and (b) I don't understand why I would never enter a code into the wrong website. I believe it can be possible, but...

> Passkeys is the way to go. ... I’d rather granny needs to visit the bank to get access to her account again, than someone phishes her and steals all her money.

... I do not agree your story is justification for passkeys, or for letting banks trust passkeys for authentication purposes. I'd rather she not lose access to banking services in the first place: I don't think banks should be allowed to do that, and I do not think it should be possible for someone to "steal all her money" so quickly -- Right now you should have at least several days to fix such a thing with no serious inconvenience beyond a few hours on the phone. I think it is important to keep that, and for banking consumers to demand that from their bank.

A "granny" friend of mine got beekeeper'd last year[1] and her bank reversed/cancelled the transfers when she was able to call the next say and I (local techdude) helped backup/restore her laptop. I do not think passkeys would helped and perhaps made things much worse.

But I don't just disagree with the idea that passkeys are useful, or even the premise of a decision here between losing all their money and choosing passkeys, I also disagree with your priors: Having to visit a bank branch is a huge inconvenience for me because I have to fly to my nearest. I don't know how many people around here keep the kind of cash they would need on-hand if they suddenly lost access to banking services and needed to fly to recover them.

I think passkeys are largely security-theatre and should not be adopted simply if only so it will be harder for banks to convince people that someone should be able to steal all their money/access with the passkey. This is just nonsense.

[1]: seriously: fake antivirus software invoice and everything, and her and her kid who is my age just saw the movie in theatres in like the previous week. bananas.

pavon · 18 days ago

> I am not certain I believe it is very likely, because (a) I think "sign-in partner" is obvious bullshit, and (b) I don't understand why I would never enter a code into the wrong website. I believe it can be possible, but...

Now replace email a with text message sent from a short-code.

pavon commented on Compaq’s Rod Canion broke IBM's hold on the PC market every.to/feeds/b0e329f304... · Posted by u/vinnyglennon

brian-armstrong · 18 days ago

> By March 1989, however, Hugh Barnes—now Compaq’s vice president of engineering—started to notice that Intel’s best chip people were being reassigned to other teams. Some quiet investigation revealed the cause. Sun Microsystems, one of Intel’s rivals, had announced chips based on a new design approach called reduced-instruction-set computing (RISC). For Intel, this presented a threat to its higher-end, large computer and mainframe markets. It was now shifting to focus on that threat instead.

> At a hotel room in Silicon Valley, in April 1989, Canion and Gates met with Andy Grove and Intel chair Gordon Moore to try to persuade them to stick with 486 development. After considerable back and forth, Intel reversed course. The new chip launched in late 1989.

Could this be the moment that forever saddled us (and Intel) with the cumbersome legacy of x86? It seems like a great cultural win for PCs in the moment, but in hindsight this decision almost feels backwards somehow.

pavon · 18 days ago

It sounds like they are talking about the i860 which was launched and failed in the market. While it is possible that it might have had more success if Intel chose to abandon the x86 line with its launch, I think it is more likely that it would have accelerated AMDs move from a second-source x86 manufacturer to designing its own x86 chips.

pavon commented on Python performance myths and fairy tales lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

Krssst · 19 days ago

Performance is worthless if the code isn't correct. It's easier to write correct code reasonably quickly in Python in simple cases (integers don't overflow like in C, don't wrap around like in C#, no absurd implicit conversions like in other scripting languages).

Also you don't need code to be fast a lot of the time. If you just need some number crunching that is occasionally run by a human, taking a whole second is fine. Pretty good replacement for shell scripting too.

pavon · 19 days ago

But many of the language decisions that make Python so slow don't make code easier to write correctly. Like monkey patching; it is very powerful and can be useful, but it can also create huge maintainability issues, and its existence as a feature hinders making the code faster.

pavon commented on Python performance myths and fairy tales lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

dgan · 19 days ago

"Rewrite the hot path in C/C++" is also a landmine because how inefficient the boundary crossing is. so you really need "dispatch as much as possible at once" instead of continuously calling the native code

pavon · 19 days ago

One use of Python as a "glue language" I've seen that actually avoids the performance problems of those bindings is GNU Radio. That is because its architecture basically uses python as a config language that sets up the computation flow-graph at startup, and then the rest of runtime is entirely in compiled code (generally C++). Obviously that approach isn't applicable to all problems, but it really shaped my opinion of when/how a slow glue language is acceptable.

pavon commented on Objects should shut up dustri.org/b/objects-shou... · Posted by u/gm678

idontwantthis · 21 days ago

My subaru will beep and flash a signal to let me know that it can’t see the lanes well enough to use the lane departure warning.

A safety feature takes my eyes and ears off of the road to let me know that it is not keeping me safe for the moment.

pavon · 20 days ago

I really did like the actual lane-keeping function of my Mom's Subaru when I drove it on narrow two-lane roads, intentionally hugging the outside of the lane when appropriate. The sound it made wasn't annoying or startling, and quickly became another form of situational awareness to let me know that I was indeed near the edge of the road like I wanted to be.

pavon commented on Objects should shut up dustri.org/b/objects-shou... · Posted by u/gm678

teach · 20 days ago

I have bad news for you -- those noise-cancelling headphones are "eliminating" the white noise by bombarding your ears with an equal and opposite white noise

pavon · 20 days ago

There is nothing bad about that. The opposite phased sounds it plays genuinely do cancel out the vibrations from the original noise, decreasing the magnitude of the vibrations hitting your ear drum.

pavon commented on Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade no-crawl directives blog.cloudflare.com/perpl... · Posted by u/rrampage

fxtentacle · 21 days ago

I find this problem quite difficult to solve:

1. If I as a human request a website, then I should be shown the content. Everyone agrees.

2. If I as the human request the software on my computer to modify the content before displaying it, for example by installing an ad-blocker into my user agent, then that's my choice and the website should not be notified about it. Most users agree, some websites try to nag you into modifying the software you run locally.

3. If I now go one step further and use an LLM to summarize content because the authentic presentation is so riddled with ads, JavaScript, and pop-ups, that the content becomes borderline unusable, then why would the LLM accessing the website on my behalf be in a different legal category as my Firefox web browser accessing the website on my behalf?

pavon · 20 days ago

Question from a non-web-developer. In case 3, would it be technically possible for Perplexity's website to fetch the URL in question using javascript in the user's browser, and then send it to the server for LLM processing, rather than have the server fetch it? Or do cross-site restrictions prevent javascript from doing that?