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tptacek

422,358 karmajoined 19 лет назад
Having said thus much by way of introduction, I commit the following to the candour of the Publick.

Helu! I'm Thomas.

[email protected]

[email protected]

(Don't apologize for contacting me! I'm happy to meet you.)

Daily follow list: 'jcranmer, 'rgovostes, 'pvg, 'rgovostes, 'lisper, 'kentonv, 'DannyBee, 'JumpCrisscross, 'kasey_junk, 'tzs, 'dctoedt, 'idlewords, 'carbocation (many others who don't post often enough to call out like this).

All comments Copyright © 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2023, 2031 Thomas H. Ptacek, All Rights Reserved.

Submissions

CopyFail: From Pod to Host

xint.io
54 points·by tptacek·2 месяца назад·12 comments

Anatomy of an Article

blog.yaelwrites.com
4 points·by tptacek·2 месяца назад·0 comments

Robust and efficient quantum-safe HTTPS

security.googleblog.com
119 points·by tptacek·4 месяца назад·25 comments

Arrested by Phone, a True Story

bloomberg.com
7 points·by tptacek·7 месяцев назад·0 comments

Carbon-steel knives are high-maintenance. And that's the point

theatlantic.com
4 points·by tptacek·7 месяцев назад·8 comments

Twins reared apart do not exist

davidbessis.substack.com
62 points·by tptacek·7 месяцев назад·102 comments

Why Does A.I. Write Like That?

nytimes.com
3 points·by tptacek·7 месяцев назад·0 comments

Making sense of principal component analysis, eigenvectors and eigenvalues

stats.stackexchange.com
4 points·by tptacek·9 месяцев назад·1 comments

Motion to Dismiss for Failure to State a Vulnerability

alexgaynor.net
4 points·by tptacek·9 месяцев назад·0 comments

Wikipedia Volunteers Avert Tragedy by Taking Down Gunman at Conference

nytimes.com
63 points·by tptacek·9 месяцев назад·10 comments

Ukraine's Most Lethal Soldiers

theatlantic.com
25 points·by tptacek·10 месяцев назад·6 comments

Revocation Ain't No Thing

dadrian.io
3 points·by tptacek·10 месяцев назад·0 comments

comments

tptacek
·23 часа назад·discuss
Draper sabotages Ginsburg because he couldn't possibly care less about Ginsburg and is irritated to be saving his feelings by pitching two different campaigns when he knows he has it in the bag. I know the Mad Men wiki says otherwise, but 51% of Mad Men wikipedians are wrong about this: Draper is being honest in the elevator.

Ginsburg's tagline wins Jaguar! (Joan clears an obstacle to them winning it, but they still had to win it). It's the most important account in the history of SCDP. Don doesn't care; he's overjoyed just to have a good tag.

And then, of course, the insecure Draper interpretation makes absolutely no sense here --- there's no conceivable universe where Zig is at the top of Anthropic's mind right now. Which was the only point to bringing up the meme in the first place!
tptacek
·вчера·discuss
My point is that Anthropic does not in fact have a lot of money riding on whether or not they use Zig, or probably really anything else that happens with Bun. In the meme, Anthropic is Don Draper, and the author of this blog post is Ginsburg.
tptacek
·вчера·discuss
No, it didn't. SSH adoption was nearly universal with a year or two of its release. TLS was nearly universal on commercial sites long, long before LetsEncrypt. SSH and TLS are not comparable in adoption to DNSSEC.
tptacek
·вчера·discuss
As you can see, after 30+ years of effort, we are nowhere close to 50%, or even 25%, of deployment on real sites.
tptacek
·вчера·discuss
I don't think it's the case that serious orgs are generally doing DNSSEC. Rather the opposite.

https://dnssecmenot.fly.dev/
tptacek
·вчера·discuss
I don't know what the idiom is in chem, but if I was a chemist and you used idiosyncratic layperson spelling, I would get signal from that.
tptacek
·вчера·discuss
The points in the article aren't great. It opens up personal and stays personal. As people in this thread have pointed out, several of the falsifiable bits turn out to be false.

The big thing though is, you get to the end of it and have to ask: why did this need to be written at all?

"It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article."

He does get that Anthropic is Don Draper in the elevator meme here, right?
tptacek
·вчера·discuss
I agree with you about the Bell Curve stuff, I believe that's where you're coming from, I think where you're coming from is a good place, I don't agree with you (or rather: think you're way overstating) the diminished role of IQ in science and medicine, but we agree on the important things about IQ and how it has mostly a malign role on message boards so we don't have to hash it out too far. I just don't want to concede the IQ frame to race trolls.

My thing is just: there's plenty of room to believe IQ is totally legitimate without giving an inch on what people who refer to "IQ-deniers" when what you always suspect they really mean is "race/IQ-deniers".
tptacek
·позавчера·discuss
This is the problem with populism; it's thought-terminating. Do the math on this. Liquidate a mega-billionaire to cover Chipotle's payroll. What happens next year?
tptacek
·позавчера·discuss
What DNSSEC progress?
tptacek
·позавчера·discuss
I don't think this is a valid argument, and I think the search bar will show my bona fides on the "racism" angle of this. I don't think "proud IQ denier" is a strong rhetorical position.

IQ is, among other things, an important clinical and diagnostic tool, especially in individual settings. In concert with other instruments it diagnoses cognitive deficits and routes people to treatments and supports. It's a useful tool of scientific inquiry as well; for example, it's used in epidemiology, and to evaluate interventions.

The thing to be a proud opponent of is the idea of IQ as a social "sorting hat", or a ranking of cognitive superiors and inferiors. It's clearly abused, so much so that virtually every mention of IQ you'll read on HN (outside of its now ubiquitous and odd use as a metric for LLMs) is pseudoscientific and problematic. The valid uses of IQ are not message-board-interesting, and the message-board-interesting uses of IQ aren't valid. It's easy to see how people fall into the trap of denying it completely.

But when you do that, you're setting yourself for an argument you're probably not going to be able to win.
tptacek
·позавчера·discuss
I don't even know who you're replying to anymore; who are you quoting? You get that you and I are the only people reading this, right? You're not going to convince me; you already opened this conversation up by acknowledging you're totally unfamiliar with the field you're commenting on.
tptacek
·позавчера·discuss
Exercise for the reader (out of genuine interest): find the most important cryptographic paper published in the last 15 years that uses the British spelling.
tptacek
·позавчера·discuss
Which is an SES effect; SES effects are all generally "highly politically relevant".
tptacek
·3 дня назад·discuss
This isn't responsive to anything I just wrote. Are you generating these comments?
tptacek
·3 дня назад·discuss
Nobody is even rhetorically asking you to trust NIST.
tptacek
·3 дня назад·discuss
No, nobody is asking you to trust NIST.
tptacek
·3 дня назад·discuss
Sir, this is a Wendy's. You're giving me a phone book's worth of RFC cites here but not a lot of indication that you spend a lot of time reading RFCs generally. The RFC we're discussing on this thread is an ancillary publication documenting code points for a specific configuration of MLKEM, which is already extensively documented in other RFCs. Ancillary RFCs like these are for obvious reasons brief.
tptacek
·3 дня назад·discuss
You're making my point for me. Nobody in the whole world is asking for you to take NIST's word for anything.

The problem here is that literally the only information you have to work with is Daniel Bernstein, a notorious standards crank. The names of the cryptographers vouching for Kyber don't mean anything to you. Peter Schwabe? Leo Ducas? Chris Peikert? You're not a cryptographer, who could reasonably expect you to know who those people are?

And Bernstein knows it, and plays it to the hilt.

But I already pointed this out. You keep bringing it back to NIST, but I keep telling you: if you simply let a panel of PQC contestants with credible affiliations vote on it, you'd have gotten the same outcome. So we're really just going around in circles here.
tptacek
·3 дня назад·discuss
Again: it's not their cryptosystem. They didn't design it. They had no hand in its design, or in any of the research that led up to it. They proctored a competition in which everyone involved was unsurprised by the outcome. A pretty big chunk of every academic cryptographer in the world participated, and if you had put the whole thing to a vote, 60% chance you'd have still gotten Kyber and like I don't know 35% chance you'd have gotten SABER.

That's what's so crazymaking about this. People who actually pay attention to cryptography know all this, so much so that Bernstein sounds deranged to many of them. But he's counting on you not knowing any of it. Which is to say: he's preying on your ignorance. It's a bad scene.