wladimir

5 ms·

1.
by wladimir 13y ago
Cells certainly have a kind of independent existence (consciousness is a different matter...). But our body needs its cells. It's not simulating cells in another substrate. The 'cells' in the case of the hypothetical technolo
2.
by wladimir 13y ago
I've always thought of mind uploading as a comforting lie. Like what you tell a small child about what happened to the old dog. "He's in a better place now". The idea of the singularity implies that the complexity of tec
3.
by wladimir 13y ago
Fighting any wars against ourselves seems silly. But the problem is that companies aren't that willing to share information, or it is only available for a large price and/or with restrictive NDAs. Also, finding out how things wo
4.
by wladimir 13y ago
How could there have been any doubts that the heavily obfuscated Python could be reverse engineered? Me, and some others, did it quite a while ago. It wasn't a lot of work to find the opcode mapping using frequency analysis and a bit o
5.
by wladimir 13y ago
The major difference with GCC's and other IRs is that LLVM and clang made it easy to use and embed the APIs in other software (due to the license as well as exporting a library). This made it much more convenient to make compilers, as
6.
by wladimir 13y ago
That sounds pretty useful. Arguably, that's what text-based browsers such as lynx and links already do but in another way. Those are still what I use when I want to read some article without distractions, ads, and funny layout and imag
7.
by wladimir 13y ago
Eek. That sounds like something straight out of Kafka's The Castle. I feel for him. Likely, he should try to escalate it higher up so that he gets moved to another project. But I understand his reluctance too, as they could decide he s
8.
by wladimir 13y ago
Right, that is true by definition, to think physics is complete is as naive today as it was around 1900. Although humanity may bump into a law of decreasing returns at some point, as more and more energy is needed to probe even smaller deta
9.
by wladimir 13y ago
Reply to eeky (you're hellbanned): no, this does not make transactions anonymous, these are still pseudonymous. The difference is that you won't reveal your IP this way while using the client. Using the regular Bitcoin-Qt client w
10.
by wladimir 13y ago
Yes. You can actually use OpenCL on the i.mx6. It's pretty cool. That said, there is still quite some room for improvement in the drivers (see my other post above). It is also more limited than desktop-class GPUs (CL embedded profile),
11.
by wladimir 13y ago
Alas, the Vivante GC2000 cannot do bitcoin mining (not that you'd want to, anyway). The GPU can indeed do do OpenCL, but the maximum kernel size is limited whereas double-SHA1 requires quite a lot of operations. It's more aimed at
12.
by wladimir 13y ago
Most GSM modems are part of SoCs. Indeed for USB dongles for your PC or laptop it's different, but that's not the "baseband processor" I was talking about. It would be somewhat harder to exploit the parent system through
13.
by wladimir 13y ago
I'm not sure about CPUs. They don't have direct connections to the outside world. If you want to distrust any hardware, it makes sense to focus on communication peripherals such as network cards, wifi/gsm modems etc. For exam
14.
by wladimir 13y ago
Agree about the sucking part. But IMO the problem is not that everyone will know everything about everyone. That would be weird (utopian?) but kind of fair. The fear is about the rich and privileged knowing everything about the poor and und
15.
by wladimir 13y ago
What scares me most is that now that storage is so cheap, everything can be stored for later. So even though no one may be watching now (likely), they keep a dossier with all your calls, mails, visited sites, google searches, for any time i
16.
by wladimir 13y ago
We have the same problem with Bitcoin. On one hand we'd love a system that automatically collects a stack trace, memory dump, information about the environment on a crash and sends it to us (like Google Breakpad does). On the other han
17.
by wladimir 13y ago
Heh. It's hard for me to not be cynic on tech news now, knowing how it will be used against us. Denser storage, the "internet of things", advances in machine learning suddenly seem like just more ways in which the infrastruct
18.
by wladimir 13y ago
Uncertainly, as usual, is my guess. For one thing (more paranoid) people are worried that the fallout from PRISM, the realization how easily everything is monitored, will cause a loss of trust in the internet, resulting in laws that damage
19.
by wladimir 13y ago
Yes, I can't wait to apply for virtual visas to visit foreign internet sites, which I guess we'll need after a full scale balkanization of the internet. On a more serious note, I hope the internet stays together, but that the pend
20.
by wladimir 13y ago
I'm not saying HN is bad specifically (otherwise I wouldn't be here). There are obviously links to excellent articles posted here, and interesting projects. So this is not an issue with the quality, but more the quantity. Call it "informati
21.
by wladimir 13y ago
Reading books has been a good way for me personally to pull myself away from online pursuits that break up attention into 15-second spans such as browsing HN and news sites. That tends to be the real addiction for me (...wait, someone is wr
22.
by wladimir 13y ago
Yet another Paypal PR disaster, they're good at spinning everything in the worst possible way. What are they trying to do, get some award for world's least popular company?
23.
by wladimir 13y ago
I immediately had to think of Kurt Vonneguts "Player Piano" published in 1952, with similar a theme of automation of all production (by "taping" actions) and the impact of that on society. It also briefly mentions a "third industrial revolu
24.
by wladimir 13y ago
Heresy! Graphics programmers have gotten used to all kinds of cushy abstractions such as the OpenGL pipeline and high-level shading languages, and you're proposing to throw it all overboard and compute the color value per pixel on the fly u
25.
by wladimir 13y ago
This is the final straw, I'm switching to KDE/Kubuntu in next release. Even if a transparent terminal is a weird thing to like, I like it, and have always used it. Taking it away just because you think it's useless is not acceptable to me.
26.
by wladimir 13y ago
My main use case for Twitter is to find out whether other people are experiencing/noticing something too (and if so, what's the scope). For example, a site outage, or something that is happening locally such as a power outage.
27.
by wladimir 13y ago
Indeed. I use both, but for quite different purposes. Twitter to get sense of what is going on right now and RSS to keep tabs on my favorite blogs, some of which may post very rarely. Twitter just has too much noise to be suitable for the
28.
by wladimir 13y ago
It is impossible to predict the cost and/or gains from now to an undefined time in the future. But the good thing is that this will help non-cryptocurrency security as well.
29.
by wladimir 13y ago
It looks like cryptocurrency brings an incentive to finally take computer security seriously for consumer grade software and hardware. It is the first time something is really at stake apart for intangible qualities such as "privacy" and "i
30.
by wladimir 13y ago
It looks like the kernelnewbies.org page is getting stampeded and is unreachable. Too bad, they usually have a nice high-level overview of the new kernel features and changes.

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