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Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

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Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#61
For those unaware, PHK created (amongst other things) the MD5crypt password hashing algorithm ($1$…). It came before bcrypt (1999), scrypt (2009), SHA2crypt (2016), etc, and was committed in 1994:

* https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/lib/libcrypt/crypt.c?re...

* https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commit/3b2b7f71deba2a...

* https://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/md5crypt/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul-Henning_Kamp

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#62
> When Edward Snowden revealed that Somebody Important had been taking an interest after all, the tech bros, who had grown up free of adult supervision, felt betrayed and started a campaign to encrypt everything and anything so that prying eyes could never again look them in the cards.

TIL: Phil Zimmermann was a "tech bro" and had a time machine.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#63
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. There are no kids in my household, and no one else ever uses my devices, so the idea that I need to prove that I'm not a kid for me to be able to pay bills or file taxes on a stock device is ridiculous.

Is anyone proposing age verification to file taxes? I'd hope you already have to provide some sort of stronger proof of identity to file a tax return anyway.

That's exactly my point; websites that already have absolutely no threat from having kids access them are literally unavailable due to the operating system put up a block that isn't necessary due to a hypothetical kid using the device to access an entirely different hypothetical website. The regulation is absurdly overbroad for what it's trying to actual protect against.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#64
post #27

"LLM-assisted code review won't be a huge disruptor" is quite the prediction. Because it already is in a very big way. The take on LLMs seems incredibly out of date and out of touch with reality. (Which of course, has moved/advanced very fast the past months/year)

Did you continue reading? His argument is exactly that, like all the previous model checkers, LLM's are going to give us some bugs for a while. Then that is going to stop. His argument is not that they aren't going to find any bugs, but rather that at some point those bugs will be fixed. At which point we will continue on as usual.

> At which point we will continue on as usual.

This part is the load bearing claim. Why would you continue on as usual? I'm using LLM's everyday on code reviews and they still catch bugs.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#65
post #6

Didn't know ACM was anti-privacy. Glad I haven't paid dues in who knows how long if they're spending them to platform these noxious opinions.

It's not anti-privacy to point out the obvious that privacy-advocacy is sometimes at odds with governments and the will of voters at large. Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale. Just because privacy is a moral good doesn't mean you are morally off the hook for enabling criminals. Governments are so aware of this they're passing sweeping laws against it. This is your new reality -- you can…

> Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale.

Almost all victimization is being done without end to end encryption. This is not a problem caused by privacy.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#66
post #6

Didn't know ACM was anti-privacy. Glad I haven't paid dues in who knows how long if they're spending them to platform these noxious opinions.

Wow, re-read the fine article. He was NOT stating that he wants the outcome you think. He is afraid it is going to happen because the younger generation has no clue or ability to maintain FOSS.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#67

I guess tech has grown too large and fractured and maybe most working software engineers are too young to be familiar with phk and his points of view. He's been a strong privacy and FOSS advocate for decades and has more credibility on both of these topics than nearly anyone on this board. He also has an account and comments frequently. phkamp. I suggest reading some of his comments before making judgment. So many kn…

Sadly, after the 2024 anti-E2E-messaging piece[1] I do in fact think he’s pretty anti-privacy overall. Perhaps calling that pro-regulation is more correct, but my (non-American) experience over the last, say, twenty years does not include literally a single piece of regulation that traded privacy for more government control (however reasonable) and went well, so, same difference. Accomlished hacker holds some wrong-to-downright-harmful political opinions; wouldn’t be the first time.

[1] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3703126

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#68
post #47

> the weights of the model—which you have to sell many million times over before you turn a profit—easily fits on contemporary pocket-sized storage devices. Which model is this author talking about? Which pocket-sized devices? Where can I get them? No one is using Gemma 4 to find cybersecurity issues. Edit: there are a lot of sentences that I can't distinguish from sarcasm in this article. I guess I read it too serio…

He’s talking about storage required for the weights. Not actually running the model. A large model like Kimi 3 should be something like, 1-2TB? That’s a pocket size hard drive

There are even 2 TB USB thumb drives.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#69

There are some incredibly strange equivalences going on in here that make me think the person in question is indeed quite out of date. The people pushing for the destruction of privacy and attested software integrity ARE the tech bros. I'm sure there are people here that will vehemently disagree with me, but we see the biggest tech companies pushing for age verification and we see founders and rich folk gleefully giv…

I was about 50% sure this whole piece is parody when I read through the LLM part, and after I read the whole thing now I'm 99% sure.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#70
post #58
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The author is predicting a decrease in privacy, but would prefer these predictions to be wrong.

Gotcha, thank you.

(just to be clear, my post was just to point out that the article is very difficult to make heads or tails of. it's easy to misinterpret a lot of the points many different ways! kind of like they're being overly implicit with the expectation that everyone'll know what they mean. it's something I do too and my way of cutting through it is to cut my writing in half and focus on clarity over mystique)

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