zwkrt (u/zwkrt) - Readit News

zwkrt commented on Scientists finally figure out why the water bear is nearly indestructible (2017) bigthink.com/surprising-s... · Posted by u/AiaAidan

zwkrt · 3 years ago

> If you take those genes and put them into organisms like bacteria and yeast, which normally do not have these proteins, they actually become much more desiccation-tolerant

Well I have a newfound fear of humans creating a bacteria as hard to kill as a tardigrade…

zwkrt commented on We updated our RSA SSH host key github.blog/2023-03-23-we... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

lrvick · 3 years ago

End users do not pay attention but their clients pin the key after first use. Also everyone is using gitops these days and almost no one is using dns-over-tls.

Imagine you control the right router on a company wifi, or any home wifi a production engineer works from and suddenly you can cause them to clone the wrong git submodule, the wrong go package, or the wrong terraform config.

If you knew a CI/CD system blindly clones and deploys git repos to prod without signature checks, and that prod is a top 10 crypto exchange with 1b of liquidity in hot wallets, then suddenly a BGP attack to redirect DNS is a good investment. Myetherwallet got taken over for 15 minutes with a BGP so this is not hypothetical.

Should that be the case? Of course not. But the reality is I find this in almost all of the security audits I do for fintech companies. Blind trust in Github host keys is industry standard all the way to prod.

zwkrt · 3 years ago

Crypto never fails to impress me with how many problems it creates for itself.

zwkrt commented on Engineers Need to Write developing.dev/p/why-engi... · Posted by u/ryanlpeterman

123pie123 · 3 years ago

I'm sure all the people with dyslexia / ADHD would not agree

zwkrt · 3 years ago

(This is coming from someone with ADHD but not dyslexia)

It's harsh, but it isn't wrong, right? The reason that these states of being are considered 'disorders' is because they interfere with daily life and with tasks that other people consider to be easy.

I need to take a lot of time to edit my writing and to re-evaluate the content that I write because it is easy for me to slip into a multi-paragraph tangent. Fundamentally that happens because my thinking is not sharp/focused.

On the other hand, when I am done writing I get a feeling of great accomplishment. Like I was able to swim through the deep waters of my mind and harpoon all the good ideas. Being smart isn't worth much if you can't communicate your ideas!

zwkrt commented on The model for coins in Super Mario Odyssey is simpler than in Super Mario Galaxy twitter.com/mariobrothblo... · Posted by u/danso

dragontamer · 3 years ago

For more information, see this GIF from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mapping#/media/File:Ren...

The left polygons are "truly" a polygon. The right 4 shapes is this "fake" technique of normal-mapping.

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

In particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mapping#/media/File:Nor...

This png makes it more obvious how to "Bake" a proper mesh into a normal map.

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Normal mapping looks pretty good, but its obviously not as good as a proper mesh. Still though, normal-mapping is far, far, far cheaper to calculate. In most cases, normal-mapping is "good enough".

zwkrt · 3 years ago

TIL about Normal Mapping, which to my layman eyes kind of looks like computing a hologram on the flat surface of an object. In the coin example in TFA, even though I now 'know' that the coin is a cylinder, the normal map gives it very convincing coin shape. Cool!

zwkrt commented on Rupert Murdoch Lies at the Heart of Democracy's Destruction Worldwide commondreams.org/opinion/... · Posted by u/_dp9d

Dig1t · 3 years ago

>Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine

I would call CNN, MSNBC, ABC, etc lie machines as well. They tell just as many, equally egregious lies.

zwkrt · 3 years ago

I very infrequently watch the news. it is obvious to me that major news outlets, at least in the US where I am familar, are definitely attempting to push political agendas and shape public opinion and manufacture consent.

However, Fox news is consistenly the only news source that I see which is explicitly trying to fearmonger, to use identity politics to pit people against each other, and is the only news source that allows airing people that advocate for the reduction or freedoms and rights of certain classes of people.

I can count on the rest of the news sources to be vaguely pro-police, pro-capital, pro-land-owner, pro-status-quo. There are negatives to having news be so favoring to the ruling elite. But on the topics of who gets to live with decency in the US, at least the other major news outlets agree that the answer is 'anyone with money'. The American dream. On fox news though there are 1000 ways to be the wrong kind of person who needs to be shamed and harmed and removed from society.

zwkrt commented on Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies? old.reddit.com/r/MachineL... · Posted by u/georgehill

csa · 3 years ago

> I think a lot of our current sociological problems, problems associated with wealth inequality, etc.,

I see where you’re coming from, but is this really the main source of the inequality?

Based on numbers relating to workers’ diminishing share of profits, it seems to be that the capital class has been able to take a bigger piece of the profit pie without sharing. In the past, companies have shared profits more widely due to benevolence (it happens), government edict (e.g., ww2 era), or social/political pressure (e.g., post-war boom).

Fwiw, I think that the mid-20th century build up of the middle class was an anomaly (sadly), and perhaps we are just reverting to the norm in terms of capital class and worker class extremes.

I see tons of super skilled folks still getting financially fucked by the capital class simply because there is no real option other than to try to attempt to become part of the capital class.

zwkrt · 3 years ago

IMO the "main source of inequality" is that tech allows a small number of people to use technological and fiscal leverage to make an outsized impact on society as a whole. Anyone who has a job that produces value in a 1:1 way is positioned to be 'disrupted'. NLP, etc, just provides more tools for companies to increase their leverage in the market. My bet is that GPT-4 is probably better at being a paralegal than at least some small number of paralegals. GPT-5 will be better at that job than a larger percentage.

Anyone who only has the skills to affect the lives and/or environments of the people in their immediate surrounding are going to find themselves on the 'have nots' end of the spectrum in the coming decades.

zwkrt commented on Tim Cook bets on Apple’s mixed-reality headset to secure his legacy ft.com/content/86b99549-0... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

zwkrt · 3 years ago

Another tech CEO realizing that the only way to sustain growth is to reject reality.

zwkrt commented on Startups that use Silicon Valley Bank are freaking out over payroll businessinsider.com/start... · Posted by u/DocFeind

spaceman_2020 · 3 years ago

> because tech startups usually lose money at the beginning of their lives

Oh what a 2010 thing to say!

2023 startups lose money for all their lives. SVB was running a bad business banking almost exclusively to startups that have never had positive cash flow.

zwkrt · 3 years ago

Right, and this is why they fundamentally failed. If their main depositors were traditional businesses and individual accounts they wouldn’t be an issue today. They invested their money as if they had low-risk depositors but a start-up is a high risk depositor——they don’t have a proven business model so it is hard to forecast their behavior.

To me this is classic SV echo chamber thinking. There’s a reason traditional banks are more wary of lending to start-ups and it isn’t because they hate money.

zwkrt commented on Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see developing.dev/p/3-mistak... · Posted by u/ryanlpeterman

vanjajaja1 · 3 years ago

Investing in 'hiring well' is worth it for the skill, sticking around in 'hiring' is probably not unless you're using it to swing some cool free international trips. There's a lot of value in knowing exactly how you'll be judged at your next job interview.

zwkrt · 3 years ago

I think of the hiring loops that I am a part of as paid interview practice.