Author Archives: pappp

The Surveilled Student

Source: Hacker News

Article note: So many thoughts. At least it's making students actively privacy-conscious. There is a real problem with blatant fucking cheating. Mandating spyware on student-owned devices and AI woo is not a valid solution, the tools are bad and side-effect laden enough to not actually solve the problem, tend to have detrimental effects on the good actors while still being easily cheated past, which is not acceptable. Some defensive exam design helps. Vary your exams from semester to semester, pull questions from pools so the students' forms are different, run short assessments on short windows to prevent closing the chegg loop... these things are _some_ work but usually not an enormous amount, though I realize a lot of tenure-track professors understand the whole "As long as the university doesn't lose a court case as a result of my teaching, no one cares" incentive structure and would like to avoid even that minimal work and run the same course for a decade and/or buy course packet from Mcgraw Hill that 8 other schools are using and the whole of is posted on the internet for students to cheat from). ... the classes I work on are planning to revert to paper exams ASAP, it's a much cleaner solution even though grading is more work.
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Utilities should be dumber

Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts

Article note: As much as I don't like agreeing with Hawley, "Battlestar Galactia rules" is really a pretty good model for essential infrastructure.

Utilities should be dumber

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Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Some startup dbags managed to raise $20 in VC money to put a thin proprietary web-frontend veneer over a bunch of open source programming tools and rentseek off of it (which is, frankly, a minor variation on how most of the tech start-up scene seems to work these days). Then one of their former interns built an all-open-source similar veneer in a couple afternoons. Then their CEO threatened him, and made passive aggressive social media posts about 'copycats' and 'innovation.' Looks like even the HN startup-douche circlejerk isn't buying this one.
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Aaron Swartz, Vindicated

Source: Hacker News

Article note: ✊
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FYI: Today’s computer chips are so advanced, they are more ‘mercurial’ than precise – and here’s the proof

Source: The Register

Article note: Written for a friend who asked and got more than they probably wanted: It's the latest in a series of the same observation. DRAM ECC has been getting more common because the statistics of bit-flip errors start to get unfavorable as memories get bigger; DDR5 will have some ECC in all parts. That's basically how all the rowhammer type attacks work. We're two generations in to filesystems that do error correction and integrity checking (first the journaling FSes, then the zfs/btrfs stuff that actually does at-rest integrity verification). And CPUs being incomprehensibly complicated is biting us in the ass everywhere with simple stuff like fdiv bugs in the 90s and now with constant microcode updates to cover up problems (see sandsifter, spectre, etc.) People were worried about it already in the late 70s, several mainframe designs supported processor concensus, and Intel's iAPX 432 parts (what was supposed to take over instead of the 486) were expressly designed to run in lockstep groups and eject outliers, they have a special pin to set that behavior (they also failed _hard_ for other reasons)

Rarely seen miscalculations now crop up frequently at cloud hyperscale

Computer chips have advanced to the point that they're no longer reliable: they've become "mercurial," as Google puts it, and may not perform their calculations in a predictable manner.…

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Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Huh. I wonder if this will have any meaningful effect on the copying-code-from-the-internet industry.
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Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud

Source: Hacker News

Article note: *Chef's kiss.*
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Some Cheap 3D Printer Upgrades

Photo of Anycubic Kossel on top of a concrete paver + upholstery foam isolation platform.
Paver + Foam isolation Platform

I’ve had an Anycubic Linear Kossel for several years now, and have generally been quite pleased with it – if Anycubic were still selling them I’d still be suggesting them as ideal first printers.

It has produced quite a number of useful pieces, a decent assortment of household conveniences, and the usual selection of toys and meme trash for myself and others.

I’ve made a couple recent upgrades that seemed worth documenting.

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Floppinux Fixed for i486 and Up

I got nerdsniped bad.

floppinux, a one-floppy busybox filled initrd based Linux “distribution” that Krzysztof Krystian Jankowski made from modern parts did the rounds the other day, and I was excited to try it on real old hardware.

Yesterday I pulled my ThinkPad 560E out, dd’d a floppinux on to a real floppy, booted it up and… it traps on an invalid opcode as soon as it tries to load init.

A little thinking made me realize that the way they were building their busybox binary was contaminating it with libraries from the system they were building on (which was apparently i686), so despite all their “will work on a 486 or later” option selections, the images they produced only work on i686 or later boxes.

I opened an issue then got obsessed and decided to fix it myself, and … you can read the details in my followup to the issue.

The magic lazy out for this kind of thing now is the pre-built musl based cross toolchains provided by https://musl.cc/

I made a couple other suggestions (about using musl, about configuring the kernel for xz and using it for the initrd, etc.) while I was hacking, because putting together little cross-compiled Linuxes is something I used to know what I was doing with. It did take a couple hours to spin back up, there are always picky cross-environment things to remember, and things have changed, mostly for the easier.

I’ve posted a copy of my generated i486-clean image. (Subsequently swapped out for a rebuild with slightly more useful busybox and kernel options, but only about 450k free)

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Not that I’m a frequent IRC user for the last several years, but since the freenode implosion seems to have settled out as a real thing, I’ve gone ahead and registered myself as pappp on oftc and libera.chat where the … Continue reading

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