honestjohn

5 ms·

1.
by honestjohn 2y ago
Many software engineering adjacent courses, starting with AP Computer Science A, are heavy on the Java-style OOP. And you're never designing an actually complex system, just using all the tools to "properly" abstract things i
2.
by honestjohn 2y ago
It's about as secure as any other non-E2EE chat or other kind of service, except it also has E2EE mode, which is limited to 1:1 chats for fair reasons. Plenty of other services advertise themselves as "secure," which doesn&#x
3.
by honestjohn 2y ago
I know newer reactor designs are much safer than Chernobyl at least, but they haven't solved the problem of some people having inflated egos.
4.
by honestjohn 2y ago
The human element is just as much part of the engineering and design. The plants are designed for humans to operate.
5.
by honestjohn 2y ago
This was a response to the comment about nuclear weapons proliferation being a cat out of the bag. It's not out of the bag yet. Iran has been "nearly there" for several years already, and that's only wrt the enriched ura
6.
by honestjohn 2y ago
Yeah, it seems nuts. Nuclear submarines have proven our ability to operate a small reactor a km underwater, but under land is much harder.
7.
by honestjohn 2y ago
Are you talking about me or the article?
8.
by honestjohn 2y ago
There aren't very many nuclear-weaponized countries in the world right now. Otherwise, the whole Iran Nuclear Deal issue would've been moot. Even Russia won't hand over nukes to Iran.
9.
by honestjohn 2y ago
Positive feedback loop isn't the only risk of nuclear power. Fukushima had a negative void coefficient too, right? Rather than pretending there's negligible risk, I'd rather say it's there but the alternatives are worse.
10.
by honestjohn 2y ago
"A mile underground" and "cheap" don't seem to go together.
11.
by honestjohn 2y ago
Separate from our other convo, I just found this spicy note in Telegram's manual: "Multi-device End-to-end encrypted chats are a mess[...] Most of our competitors (notably, Whatsapp and iMessage) solve these problems in ways that
12.
by honestjohn 2y ago
Telegram's e2ee mode is only usable for 1:1 chats, so I wouldn't be surprised if some government(s) could gain access to any group chat they want.
13.
by honestjohn 2y ago
Where? Their website says "a new era of messaging." I see at the bottom that it's "heavily encrypted," but that doesn't mean e2e.
14.
by honestjohn 2y ago
The worst thing for me was that app versions expire pretty frequently with no warning, then you just stop getting notifications. Which is extra annoying cause I'm only on it for some bar trivia group that totally doesn't need e2ee
15.
by honestjohn 2y ago
Maybe it's similar to adding a new chat participant, except your client says "btw this is also me." I used that way when designing a toy e2ee app a while back. Or maybe there is a central repo of each user's per-device p
16.
by honestjohn 2y ago
Someone else here probably knows more than me. I don't want to speculate too much about what it actually does, I just know that the original device takes part in authorizing a new one, so it seems like they can't do it on their ow
17.
by honestjohn 2y ago
Multi-device mode is new enough that I might be wrong about this, but afaik the web client still needs to get the priv key from your phone, so they can't authorize a new client unilaterally. Or it'd be a really silly hole if they
18.
by honestjohn 2y ago
I'm not sure if they can add a participant to an existing conversation, and if they did, your client would at least know. Also don't remember if the client will send message history, but I think Signal doesn't. The simple bad
19.
by honestjohn 2y ago
No, your client asks Signal's server for the other end's public key. There's fundamentally no way for Signal's server to prove to your client that the pubkey you're encrypting for is indeed the one owned by the phon
20.
by honestjohn 2y ago
It's delusional to think a modern technology is more secure than an old Motorola radio used by local law enforcement?
21.
by honestjohn 2y ago
You mean you didn't install the Yahoo! translation extension to your kernel?
22.
by honestjohn 2y ago
This is a good instinct. Even if you're using a good E2EE messaging app like Signal, you still trust them not to mitm unless you check the other person's public key out-of-band. I suspect most people don't do that. Also, ther
23.
by honestjohn 2y ago
Stanford researchers said that ChatGPT passes the Turing Test. Honestly I don't understand how, since it's pretty easy to tell that you're talking to it, but yeah I don't think it really matters. Far more useful than sim
24.
by honestjohn 2y ago
Some of these are just text matchers with hardcoded options, no ML involved. Essentially phone trees, except worse because they don't tell you your options. There are some more advanced ones using ChatGPT now. I'm guessing they si
25.
by honestjohn 2y ago
This isn't what the other comment you're replying to was talking about.
26.
by honestjohn 2y ago
Yeah, ChatGPT itself is amazing. What I don't understand is, why are other companies paying so much for training hardware now? Trying to make more specialized LLMs now that ChatGPT has proven the technology?
27.
by honestjohn 2y ago
I don't think so, people have been wanting a general chatbot for a long time. It's useful for plenty of things, just not useful when embedded in random places.