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dan

@ dan @upvote.au

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1065
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3 yr. ago

Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.Coding since 1998..NET Foundation member. C# fan https://d.sb/Mastodon: @dan@d.sb

  • Frog put Claude in a box

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  • Claude is very good at figuring out how to work around limitations (which is probably one reason why it's also good at finding security issues).

    At work, the monorepo is enormous and files are loaded on-demand as needed. This isn't uncommon with huge repos - Microsoft have VFS for Git (although I hear that's deprecated now), Meta have EdenFS, and Google has some proprietary solution.

    We have a hook that blocks find and grep because they can be extremely slow, and tells it to instead use some significantly faster MCP tools to search the codebase, powered by a search index with local changes overlaid.

    GPT-5.5 has no problem with this. Claude Opus mostly does it, but sometimes it loves to find workarounds rather than following the instructions. Things like: Try alternative commands like egrep. Create a symlink to grep and run that to see if it bypasses the filtering. Run it with a different shell like zsh. Write a Python script that execs grep. Write a Python script to reimplement grep.

    I'm trying Hermes Agent at home, but I have it in its own VM with restricted permissions.

  • Singaporean brothers build modern, unbreakable encryption

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  • The brothers have different surnames due to an error made by their parents when registering Lin’s birth certificate

    I wonder how long it took them to discover the error... And how long it took them to decide to just live with it instead of fixing it. Interesting.

  • Any self-hosted option for real time location sharing?

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  • Does it use http or MQTT?

    Home Assistant uses HTTP for this. Realistically, you won't see much difference between HTTP and MQTT for this use case.

    MQTT is harder to secure than HTTP, and has some limitations (eg it normally only supports username and password auth - no SSO, no 2FA) so I'd avoid it for anything public-facing unless you have a specific reason to use it. Using it via a VPN is fine, but you'd still need to configure a separate MQTT username and password per user.

  • Wireguard easy and third party vpn service.

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  • iptables should still work, but these days it gets converted to nftables so you may as well just learn nftables.

    Having said that, I find it a pain to manually configure iptables or nftables. There might be a better way to do what you want.

  • AI costs spike as subscriptions hit pricing wall — firms turn towards Chinese LLMs, open-source models to extend budget

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  • I assume this is for basic economy only, where you can't select a seat? If I choose a seat when booking, I can't imagine the airline allows someone else to choose the same seat?

  • AI costs spike as subscriptions hit pricing wall — firms turn towards Chinese LLMs, open-source models to extend budget

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  • Residential ISPs usually have a contention ratio somewhere around 30:1 to 50:1. That means that 30 to 50 customers that each have a 1Gbps connection all share 1Gbps of upstream bandwidth.

    Business connections are closer to 10:1, and a leased line (dedicated circuit) is 1:1.

  • AI costs spike as subscriptions hit pricing wall — firms turn towards Chinese LLMs, open-source models to extend budget

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  • An interesting side effect is that the models coming out of China are very efficient. They don't have access to all the high-end hardware the US has, so they have to make do with what they've got.

  • Tesla on Autopilot Smashes Straight Through Garage Door, Driver Says

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  • They no longer sell or include AP

    That's true only in the USA and Canada. You can still get autopilot in most of the world, especially in countries where FSD isn't approved.

  • Wireguard easy and third party vpn service.

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  • The end goal is to have no reliance on tailscale as i am preparing for the eventual enshitification.

    Tailscale is mostly open-source. If they do anything bad then someone could fork the project. The coordination server isn't open-source, but you could self-host Headscale as a replacement.

    If it still doesn't suit your use cases, there's some alternatives.

    I personally wouldn't directly deal with iptables or nftables rules, and instead use some other software to deal with that.

  • Wireguard easy and third party vpn service.

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  • iptables is deprecated... If you really do want to do your own custom thing you should learn nftables.

  • Starlink charges $10 monthly hardware fee in move away from one-time purchases - Ars Technica

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  • $10/mo to use my own modem

    lolwut

    Sounds like a way to hide the full price of the internet plan. Restaurants do this in some big cities like in San Francisco... They add junk fees like "5% employee health care mandate" rather than just increasing the menu prices.

  • Starlink charges $10 monthly hardware fee in move away from one-time purchases - Ars Technica

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  • Rent-to-own isn't that common, even though maybe it should be. With most rentals (of anything) you have to keep paying indefinitely. That's why there's usually a cost/benefit analysis of renting vs owning.

    Renting can sometimes be better for less tech-savvy people, since the company owns the equipment and is familiar with it, and will replace it at any point if it has issues

  • Starlink charges $10 monthly hardware fee in move away from one-time purchases - Ars Technica

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  • The article says you can still buy it at a retail store like Best Buy though.

  • Kittygram v1.1 has released

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  • All the data gathered by Cambridge Analytica was gathered through the public API though, after users had consented to share it (by logging into a quiz app that requested the permissions). That's why the API is very locked down now, and the approval process to get any sort of data access is very strict.

    The main issue was that they gathered data from people whose profiles were set to be visible only to friends. If someone logged into the quiz and granted permissions, their friends' data was also accessible via the API.

  • Kittygram v1.1 has released

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  • aggressively guard

    tbh it's a hard balance for any social media company.

    Guard content too little and you end up with Cambridge Analytica, which was literally because the public APIs allowed too much access (third-party apps could see any data through the API that you could see through your Facebook account, including friends profiles). You also end up with headlines talking about big data leaks which really just end up being compilations of public data (which has happened to both Facebook and LinkedIn).

    Guard content too much and you restrict users' freedom too much.

  • Email ownership, I give up.

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  • It's not too bad if you use an outbound SMTP relay for sending. SMTP2Go is pretty good, and they have a free plan with 1000 emails per month. I use Mailcow and you can configure relays in their web UI, but it works just as well with the sender_dependent_relayhost_maps setting in Postfix.

    Sure, it's not fully self-hosted, but the interesting part to self-host is the storage of your emails, not the sending (which will just relay through other SMTP servers along the way anyways).

  • Nintendo Confirms EU‑Only Switch 2 Revision With User‑Replaceable Batteries

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  • That's probably my fault for not wording it well. I edited my comment to say "they sell plenty of them" instead.

  • Fedora Linux 43 exposes 20-year-old Microsoft Outlook security failure

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  • In my experience, no large business would decide to only accept encrypted inbound SMTP

    For submission (connections coming from users that have an account on the server) or for relay/target (connections coming from other email clients)? All email clients support encryption so I think requiring encryption for submission is reasonable. Server-to-server (port 25) can't have it enforced though, like you said.

    SMTP is one of the worst protocols I have ever seen so widely used

    It's from a era where everyone trusted everyone else. All connections were unencrypted, spam protection and rate limiting weren't needed, and security really wasn't on people's minds. Modern security and spam protection is hacky because it's built on top of protocols that weren't designed for it.

    The other major issue with old protocols is that they're stateful. Modern protocols are mostly stateless since it's generally easier to deal with. They've also had more and more features hacked into them over time, so the specs are enormous.

    There's been one major attempt at modernizing it: JMAP. It's stateless, uses JSON, and intends to replace both IMAP and SMTP. FastMail started the project. https://jmap.io/why-jmap/

    However, they've only looked at the "easier" part to replace: Communication between a user and their email server. They're not looking to replace server-to-server communication at all.

  • Fedora Linux 43 exposes 20-year-old Microsoft Outlook security failure

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  • I've used that on automated systems. No need to worry about email quota and everything incoming is single-use input for other systems so there's no need to store messages on the mail server

    You can do this with IMAP as well, you just need to delete and expunge the emails. Any good email client or library will have an option for this.

    POP is literally just downloading all the emails, then deleting them. That's it.

    You can't have a script that only downloads emails that match a search (for example emails from a particular sender), since POP doesn't support search. A basic use case is to check for bills/invoices from certain companies and import them into an accounting system, while leaving other emails untouched.

    You can't receive emails in real-time and have to instead poll, since POP doesn't support real time notifications. IMAP supports IMAP IDLE.

    If you have rules that filter emails into folders, you can't download them via POP, as it doesn't support folders.

    For automated systems, if you don't want to store the emails, you can configure the email server to pipe the emails directly to a script. That way they're not stored at all, and your script gets them immediately rather than having to poll.

  • Fedora Linux 43 exposes 20-year-old Microsoft Outlook security failure

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  • I used to use POP for some situations, but the protocol is extremely limited. I don't think there's anything POP can do that IMAP can't.