18 April 2023

34 links · Tuesday

Machine learning models and the market for lemons

The market for lemons is an economic concept in which buyers of a good cannot distinguish between quality products and poor products (the lemons). This lack of knowledge makes it so that people sel…

mjg59 | PSA: upgrade your LUKS key derivation function

Here's an article from a French anarchist describing how his (encrypted) laptop was seized after he was arrested, and material from the encrypted partition has since been entered as evidence against him. His encryption password was supposedly greater than 20 c…

macOS’ Rapid Security Response: Designed into a Corner

With macOS 13.3.1 dropping a few weeks ago, some people have been wondering what happened to Apple’s featured “Rapid Security Response” system they showed off back at WWDC 2022? For some reason, Apple keeps shipping their usual slow, bulky security updates as …

Generalized Macros

I’ve been writing a lot of Janet lately, and I’ve been especially enjoying my time with the macro system. Janet macros are Common Lisp-flavored unhygienic gensym-style macros. They are extremely powerful, and very easy to write, but they can be pretty tricky t…

The Email we sent to Freehour

It is very common in the tech industry for companies to have ‘bug-bounty programmes’, which are schemes where companies encourage people who are interested in cybersecurity (i.e., white-hat hackers) to check for vulnerabilities in their products and inform the…

Range Encoding for Data Compression

Range encoders are a type of entropy encoder used in modern day data compressors. They're an evolution of earlier entropy encoders (most notably Huffman encoding) which were restricted to encoding data as a whole number of bits. Range encoding, by contrast, al…

Nicolás Siplis

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Consent management made easy and clear with Cloudflare Zaraz

Cloudflare Zaraz now can also help you with gathering and managing consent. With this new tool, you can easily collect user’s consent preferences on your website, using a consent modal, and apply your consent policy on third-party tools you load via Cloudflare…

Postel's law for API Robustness

A system should be robust: it should be able to resist change and, well, not generate regressions. Postel’s law helps define a mindset to create robust APIs.

ChatGPT Problems in Coding React Apps

ChatGPT is awesome for helping in programming, but it's not up to the task of being an expert system. It often gives poor programming advice