Viewing profile — cperciva

A counterexample of the form "X cycles to X after N steps" is easy to check. A counterexample of the form "starting with X we keep going up forever" is hard to check in finite time…

I'm guessing you want https://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly/ then?

... how did that happen? Yes thanks.

You're right, I was remembering the peak and duration of the railway boom but of course it wasn't at the peak for the entire duration.

Yes. In inflation adjusted dollars spending on AI dwarfs previous "megaprojects". But as a fraction of GDP it's fairly modest -- comparable to the Apollo Project. It's a sign of ho…

the oxide to pure aluminum ratio is high For some definition of high? Standard foil is around 20 um thick while the oxide layer only goes about 10 nm deep.

I've seen plenty of people saying "Mythos isn't all that exceptional, lots of LLMs can find security vulnerabilities" -- and indeed there is some evidence for that; it sounds like …

This is hardly news? We've known for months that a flood of AI-assisted vulnerabilities was coming; I posted on Twitter in March calling 2026 the year of a million CVEs: https://x.…

This was CVE-2005-0109.

Frankly, there's no way any arch venue at the time would have done anything beyond rejecting it with "caches make RSA fast, what's the problem?" Security wasn't something CPU desig…

They publish lots of papers about side channel attacks, including very hardware based ones like power consumption analysis. It just happened that "leak information into microarchit…

My paper demonstrating a side channel attack on RSA via hyperthreading was rejected from the crypto preprint archive on the basis that it was "not cryptography". (Reviewers at J.Cr…

FreeBSD 15.1! Scheduled to be announced 2026-06-16 00:00 UTC; just need to get some release documentation polished now.

Square root of the population is because that's what it takes to normalize large vs small countries. Imagine slicing a country into quarters; each slice has a quarter of the popula…

It would be interesting to see a map which was not minimizing [distance to capital] but instead minimized [distance to capital]/sqrt([national population]). The latter would be mor…

arguably the whole scheme should be replaced by finer-grained feature detection. This seems like a strange thing to say. Fine grained feature detection was around long before "micr…

True. The amount of free float increasing dramatically will probably also depress the share price.

Now with this incredible deal, SpaceX is now GAAP profitable under the existing rules, and they get to join the index next year without a rule change. Didn't they also run up again…

That information should still be in the commit messages. "No functional change intended." appears widely in FreeBSD commit logs when code is being refactored (or, rarely, restyled)…

I've done this with code review. "Another LLM reviewed the attached code and produced the attached report. What do you think?" Lots of "the other LLM clearly hallucinated this part…

Is that true for every type and format Yes, OTC for everything. I've heard that some pharmacists ask more questions about types which are commonly abused by body builders but that'…

One issue here which is obvious to me is that access to insulin should not be gated on paperwork . I can walk into any pharmacy in Canada and say "I'm diabetic and need insulin" an…

There's a wide gap between "ignored" and "received the attention they deserved".