Blogs are old news, right? Well, here's one for nonsensical rants and manic musings -- lordinateur.xyz ; You're not likely to find anything remotely interesting or logically sound. But perhaps it'll serve as a reminder that with enough boredom, you too can post random crap to the interwebs.
So if you're like me and you enjoyed TIS-100... but also you're interested in QIS... there's a quantum circuit simulator in the form of a visually-creative puzzle game on Steam called Quantum Odyssey... it's fairly decent and it goes through gate basics for new folks. #quantum #qis #steam #puzzles
I quit smoking a week ago (woo) but I've since been crotchety and I was thinking, other than yelling at kids on my lawn, what else do old people do these days? So I spun up a shitty blog so that you too can skim it, get pissed at some guy on the web, and morph into a curmudgeon >:V lordinateur.xyz
Today I messed around a bit in #OpenSCAD and made a battery dispenser for D batteries. I'm not very good at CAD, but the code-first approach seems fairly intuitive to me. Though I had to dust off the trig skillset for proper wall thickness on the little ramp. Printing now, wish me luck.
Scalable storage, add an NVMe disk when you run out. Do that at least once more for redundancy. You'll save a crap ton of cash in the long run. (10/10)
If you're actually serious about saving money in the LONG run (for some up-front investment), consider actually building out a private cloud. Go rent a cabinet, shove some high density storage in there, and boom. (9/10)
a single-threaded non-parallelizable agent on an HPC cluster because you think it'll "go faster"--it's a waste of your time.)
In the SHORT term, your best bet is to go with a bare metal solution, OVH or something. But keep in mind that they don't scale either! They're just dirt cheap. (8/10)
Containerize your binaries, fine--library and upgrade management is an entirely different discussion--but don't pretend your k8s cluster is going to magically make your nodes scalable or your data easily transferrable. That's like trying to shove (7/10)
"oh, but AWS is a BIG NAME and that makes them TRUSTWORTHY" -- my tip to the blockchain CEOs out there: those folks, immediately fire them. They know nothing. (These are the same folks that insist that shoving blockchain nodes in k8s clusters are worthwhile... NO. (6/10)
I've known companies burn tens of thousands of dollars a month on simple blockchain setups. Really dumb. Those companies, they either don't exist anymore or they've gone through some really big reboots. Most of time time when you advise against it they go (5/10)
to sell you their overly-expensive EBS (or otherwise) to host it, and don't get me started on your ingress/egress costs. Validation is, in most cases, not a viable long-term financial solution in isolation... so be smarter with your cash. (4/10)
in which case, yeah, you've possibly undermined the point of the blockchain in general, philosophically speaking...) you're going to be loading up tons of immutable data with nowhere to put it. And the Big 3 are all-too-happy (3/10)
horizontal scaling at the blockchain level is NOT what I'm annoyed with here. I'm talking about the actual nodes physically running on the machines.) Unless you're cheating at validation (e.g. running fully-pruned nodes without regard to the block history... (2/10)
Here's your reminder that in general, using the public cloud to host blockchain nodes is a waste of money. Blockchain nodes are NOT designed to scale. (And here, I'm not talking about dApps on the blockchain, or the distributed OS itself... (1/10) #blockchain #scaling
Things to ask for when choosing a text-based comms proto:
- is it encrypted? (e2e?) which cipher suites?
- is it open source? (and are the repos active?)
- is it decentralized?
- who runs it? who is it backed by?
- how are groups/channels organized?
Remember to assume breach :)
when leaving college and having the tendency to use ChatGPT just like they do when copypasta'ing from StackOverflow, but I'll maybe punt that for now.) (7/7)
ought to avoid using it for entire workflows at this point in time, just trusting that our prompts are going to yield a fully-functional codebase without any amount of understanding on our side. (There's also a rant here somewhere regarding students generally being unprepared for the workforce (6/7)
automatic brakes, things like that? Fantastic! And I think that's the line to draw here... should AI be used to replace the creative work that folks do? No. But should it be used to assist, e.g. code review, inspiration? Absolutely. AI can be great for small, discrete work. But ethically we (5/7)
That cannot be piloted manually, say with some of those taxi services that are available in some cities, do we really want to pit large companies against the little man in terms of claims when wrecks occur? No way! But, using vehicle automation for driver assistance e.g. automated parking or (4/7)
I kind of think of it like I do autonomous vehicles. And that is, I'm not very comfortable with fully-autonomous driving. The operator is expected to be attentive but that's not very effective for keeping folks' attention at the wheel. And in the event that we gain fully-autonomous vehicles... (3/7)
the nature of what I do but I'd be hard pressed to fly by the seat of ChatGPT's pants. But maybe I'm old. I won't deny that having a script automatically written for inspiration, or for debugging purposes, has been very helpful at times. So what's the limit as we continue the march toward GAI? (2/7)
What role should GPTs and other LLMs take in software engineering? Had a friend chuck a ton of untested code from ChatGPT into his production workflow, only to have the gall to look dismayed when it broke his env on a first-run. I'm kind of required to fly by the seat of my pants due to... (1/7)
...instead of relying only on those factors that rely on the end user (your MOST vulnerable asset in any company, practically always, even with training) to keep your infra safe. Always assume your folks are compromised. Hence, my love for Swiss cheese. (4/4)
...and vendor diversity is critical. I mean, even in this case we're talking MFA-- which has diversity built into the concept. So MS failed to account for ratelimiting in their TOTP slippage? Cool, maybe combat that as the end org by implementing "where you are" and "how you behave" factors... (3/4)
Okay. So that's a technical control that failed or something. But seems like risk introduced by inclusion of Big Vendor is increasing by the day. Botched MS updates, CrowdStrike snafu, Cloudflare misconfigurations, blah blah blah point is, paying serious attention to defense in depth... (2/4)
What's an infosec engineer's favorite dairy? Swiss cheese!
No but for real, gotta remember that all implemented controls have scopes that they fail to adequately cover, use cases that aren't accounted for, and control risk tossed into the mix.
A few days ago #AuthQuake is released by #Oasis. (1/1)
I had the absolute pleasure of showing the Dark Crystal to a friend who had never seen it before. I can only describe his expression throughout as "befuddled." Perhaps I failed previously in my duties as friend (eh? rotten!) but today the ancestors smile upon my house.
Dear certain enterprise ISPs:
If your status page hasn't updated itself hours after our NOCs tell us that someone dug into one of your rainbow roots, it's probably time for some self-reflection.
Sincerely,
Tired engineers everywhere who were likely going to be up late but like to complain anyhow.
It's a good reminder that anyone in Web3 tech should be utilizing best practices, because contrary to what the cryptovangelists would have you believe, blockchain is not HA and should be used when integrity is paramount... certainly not when prioritizing availability or confidentiality. (8/8)
...that ultimate framework being the "push to prod and crying 'oops' when something breaks" method. Except in this case, failures require global collaboration for a chain reboot. (7/8)
