sciencejerk (u/sciencejerk)

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

heavyset_go · 3 days ago

Not good enough, providers and governments want proof of life and proof of identity that matches government IDs.

Without that, anyone can pretend to be their dead grandma/murder victim, or someone whose ID they stole.

sciencejerk · 3 days ago

How about a chip implant signed by the government hospital that attests for your vitality? Looks like this is where things are headed

sciencejerk commented on How we exploited CodeRabbit: From simple PR to RCE and write access on 1M repos research.kudelskisecurity... · Posted by u/spiridow

sciencejerk · 5 days ago

I think that Security fuckups of this disastrous scale should get classified as "breaches" or "incidents" and be required to be publicly disclosed by the news media, in order to protect consumers.

Here is a tool with 7,000+ customers and access to 1 million code repositories which was breached with an exploit a clever 11 year old could created. (edit: 1 million repos, not customers)

When the exploit is so simple, I find it likely that bots or Black Hats or APTs had already found a way in and established persistence before the White Hat researchers reported the issue. If this is the case, patching the issue might prevent NEW bad actors from penetrating CodeRabbit's environment, but it might not evict any bad actors which might now be lurking in their environment.

I know Security is hard, but come on guys

sciencejerk commented on Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context anthropic.com/news/1m-con... · Posted by u/adocomplete

fpauser · 12 days ago

Not to degenerate is really challenging these days. There are the bubbles that simulate multiple realities to us and try to untrain us logic thinking. And there are the llms that try to convice us that self thinking is unproductive. I wonder when this digitalophily suddenly turns into digitalophobia.

sciencejerk · 11 days ago

It's happening, friend, don't let the AI hype fool you. I'm detecting quite a bit of reluctance and lack of 100% buy-in on AI coding tools and trends, even from your typically tech-loving Software Engineers.

sciencejerk commented on Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death energyvanguard.com/blog/t... · Posted by u/almuhalil

tqwhite · 25 days ago

Every time I have read science guys about things that you can do to kill mosquitos there is an analogy to putting a drain in the ocean. You can kill mosquitos at a fantastic rate but, unless you are also killing them in all your neighbor's yards for a mile around, they are just going to keep coming as fast as they die.

sciencejerk · 25 days ago

I've been using a 20 lb CO2 tank to bait mosquitos into an enclosure with a fan which provides gentle suction, with a fair amount of success. This method does reduce numbers from areas that are not under your control, but the "dunks" are probably still the cheapest easiest treatment for local buggers

sciencejerk commented on Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death energyvanguard.com/blog/t... · Posted by u/almuhalil

goda90 · 25 days ago

The UV light traps attract all sorts of insects that aren't female mosquitos looking for a blood meal. They can catch mosquitos too, but probably not super well. A trap focusing on the scents they follow from humans would do more with less collateral damage.

sciencejerk · 25 days ago

CO2 traps (using CO2 tank, yeast, decaying plant matter) are effective at attracting mosquitos but not other bugs (from experience)

sciencejerk commented on Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking dmitriid.com/everything-a... · Posted by u/troupo

farts_mckensy · 2 months ago

And that's what's going to happen now. No amount of complaining about it online is going to stop it. They literally just passed a bill that prevents regulating AI. Rich people and their puppets in congress have some degree of agency. We don't. Sorry.

sciencejerk · 2 months ago

I heard the AI clause didn't make it into the final version of the bill that was passed (?)

sciencejerk commented on Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001) pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/... · Posted by u/tux3

jerf · 5 months ago

One of my Core Memories when it comes to science, science education, and education in general was in my high school physics class, where we had to do an experiment to determine the gravitational acceleration of Earth. This was done via the following mechanism: Roll a ball off of a standard classroom table. Use a 1990s wristwatch's stopwatch mechanism to start the clock when the ball rolls of the table. Stop the stopwatch when the ball hits the floor.

Anyone who has ever had a wristwatch of similar tech should know how hard it is to get anything like precision out of those things. It's a millimeter sized button with a millimeter depth of press and could easily need half a second of jabbing at it to get it to trigger. It's for measuring your mile times in minutes, not fractions of a second fall times.

Naturally, our data was total, utter crap. Any sensible analysis would have error bars that, if you treat the problem linearly, would have put 0 and negative numbers within our error bars. I dutifully crunched the numbers and determined that the gravitational constant was something like 6.8m/s^2 and turned it in.

Naturally, I got a failing grade, because that's not particularly close, and no matter how many times you are solemnly assured otherwise, you are never graded on whether you did your best and honestly report what you observe. From grade school on, you are graded on whether or not the grading authority likes the results you got. You might hope that there comes some point in your career where that stops being the case, but as near as I can tell, it literally never does. Right on up to professorships, this is how science really works.

The lesson is taught early and often. It often sort of baffles me when other people are baffled at how often this happens in science, because it more-or-less always happens. Science proceeds despite this, not because of it.

(But jerf, my teacher... Yes, you had a wonderful teacher who didn't only give you an A for the equivalent but called you out in class for your honesty and I dunno, flunked everyone who claimed they got the supposed "correct" answer to three significant digits because that was impossible. There are a few shining lights in the field and I would never dream of denying that. Now tell me how that idealism worked for you going forward the next several years.)

sciencejerk · 5 months ago

I got a D in a highschool Biology Genetics Lab working with Fruit Flies because our Chi Squared p-value was a little less than the common significance value of 0.05.

Our results were close enough that we could still easily determine the phenotype and genotype of the parent and grandparent Fruit Flies (red/black eyes), but it was kind of a bummer to be punished in a highly error prone experiment (flies dying from too much ether, flies flying away, flies getting stuck in food and dying, etc).

It did teach me to be more careful when running experiments but I probably would have given myself a C, not a D