(date: 2024-06-07 11:29:04)
date: 2024-06-07, from: Om Malik blog
I was recently invited to participate in the Trends with Friends podcast, co-hosted by long time friend Howard Lindzon. The podcast primarily focuses on “markets” and less on “technology,” as I understand it. Howie and his co-hosts were eager to discuss Apple, AI, and the significant changes sweeping our industry. My overarching message for them …
https://om.co/2024/06/07/techs-end-of-easy-growth/
date: 2024-06-07, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-6-2024-ecd
date: 2024-06-07, from: Jeff Geerling blog
Newer versions of Ansible don’t work with RHEL 8
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is supported until 2029, and that distribution includes Python 3.6 for system python. Ansible's long been stuck between a rock and a hard place supporting certain modules (especially packaging modules like <code>dnf</code>/<code>yum</code> on RHEL and its derivatives, because the Python bindings for the packaging modules are stuck supporting system Python.</p>
Users are getting errors like:
/bin/sh: /usr/bin/python3: No such file or directory
The module failed to execute correctly, you probably need to set the interpreter.\nSee stdout/stderr for the exact error.
...or...
SyntaxError: future feature annotations is not defined
As ansible-core
evolves, they don’t want to support old
insecure versions of Python
forever—Python 3.6 was out of
security support back in 2021!.
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/newer-versions-ansible-dont-work-rhel-8
date: 2024-06-07, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
Visiting the Swiss Alps inorder to meet family tomorrow.
Looking towards Sion from the bus from Leuk to Leukerbad.
Sadly, it rains.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-06-07-leukerbad
date: 2024-06-07, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
The next step in online social media will be group blogs that support the APIs needed to integrate with not only the Fediverse, but other non-AP services that have their own APIs. Each one will have a theme, a voice, not all writers in agreement of course, but sharing a similar perspective, context, point of view.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/07/133218.html?title=anInternetForWriters
date: 2024-06-07, from: Robert Reich’s blog
But the Fed should reduce interest rates nonetheless
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-job-machine-keeps-churning
date: 2024-06-07, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
I was talking with @akkartik and @TodePond about programming.
@TodePond got me thinking about communities around programming when they wrote:
the problem i see is that no one is talking to each other. everyone is trying to build their solutions in isolation - as island communities. in my opinion we shouldnt build anything new, we should try to make compatible the mindsets and tools that we already have. its an extreme viewpoint but i see no one else taking it, so im taking it.
I can definitely see many people writing their own software and many more people using existing software and never adapting it. I do it, too!
To put a really hurtful spin onto it: we rarely sit next to a newbie using our software. I never do. Never. We should listen to them muttering to themselves for the first four hours. The bugs they attribute to their own incompetence; the confusing usability issues they never report… and now imagine sitting next to a newbie looking at our code, trying to find their way. No comments. No helpful guides. The code is the best documentation, some people say. I guess they haven’t seen my code. All those readability refactors I didn’t do. All these questions nobody ever asked me. People look at the code and don’t come back.
Those are my free software nightmares when I look at all the things I’ve written with a community of one. 😳
Anyway, I guess what I want to say: if you feel like you write free software for others but nobody joins your community, you are not alone. We are all together in this, alone. 😥
I think the reason for this has to do with how hard it is to understand code by just reading it instead of writing. It’s super hard to get into another code base. And it is hard to write code such that it is a welcoming ramp up. I’d say Emacs is one of the examples where it worked but we don’t actually know whether the approach is “good”. I certainly used Emacs for a year or two before writing my own init file way back when.
I’m not sure which parts enable it and I’m not sure if having more of the same would result in more programmers modifying the code and sharing their modifications.
Nearly every function is documented, nearly every global variable is documented, the concepts are documented in the manual, the language is documented in the manual – it’s a gigantic group effort to build that ramp.
I think this is how you get started modifying Emacs: with an init file that customizes some part of it.
That reminds me of the post by Peter Seibel (2014) that I recently saw linked in my feed:
It was sometime after that presentation that I finally realized the obvious: code is not literature. We don’t read code, we decode it. We examine it. A piece of code is not literature; it is a specimen. Knuth said something that should have pointed me down this track when I asked him about his own code reading: … He’s not describing reading literature; he’s describing a scientific investigation.” – Code is not literature
I feel this is how I approach new code: find a tiny task and see whether I can make that change. Usually this requires building the code, searching the best location, learning about the code style, investigating the libraries used, and so on. There are many strings attached.
I don’t know how else to do it.
The same is true at the office. Our code base is about four million lines of code. Newbies get assigned small issues to fix and need to ask a gazillion questions and that’s how they learn.
If only there were a better way. If there is, I don’t know it.
@akkartik linked a guest post on their blog (2018):
We all read code already; it’s just that we usually read when we want to edit. And the comprehension that questions about reading are really concerned with—it comes from both reading and writing, interleaved in complex ways. That hacking produces better comprehension than passive, linear reading fits with what we know about learning. – Nobody’s just reading your code, by Stephen Malina
@akkartik summary of our little interchange gives me pause:
We live in a world where everybody is illiterate, unable to read computer programs. Everybody. A tiny minority can write programs, but even they can’t read programs written by others without 1000x effort. They/we oppress the rest.
Indeed, how not to be part of this, I wonder.
2024-06-07. @Sandra says:
I think “programming for the household” is actually awesome. Automating our own lives, autonomously, not squeezing our lives into someone else’s automation. – There’s no shame in programming for yourself
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-06-06-programming
date: 2024-06-07, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Bruce Schneier blog
The US Justice Department has dismantled an enormous botnet:
According to an indictment unsealed on May 24, from 2014 through July 2022, Wang and others are alleged to have created and disseminated malware to compromise and amass a network of millions of residential Windows computers worldwide. These devices were associated with more than 19 million unique IP addresses, including 613,841 IP addresses located in the United States. Wang then generated millions of dollars by offering cybercriminals access to these infected IP addresses for a fee…
date: 2024-06-07, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Bunk! The choice is not government or free market, because government creates the market.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/debunking-myth-2-government-obstructs
date: 2024-06-07, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had good news for the American people when he gave his twenty-ninth Fireside Chat on June 5, 1944. The day before, on June 4, Rome had fallen to Allied troops. “The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands,” Roosevelt said.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-6-2024
date: 2024-06-07, updated: 2024-06-07, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-06-07, updated: 2024-06-07, from: Daring Fireball
https://spyglass.org/nvidia-3-trillion/
date: 2024-06-07, updated: 2024-06-07, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/apple-ai-siri-development-behind-9ea65ee8
date: 2024-06-07, updated: 2024-06-07, from: Daring Fireball
https://techhub.social/@mitchchn@mastodon.social/112554203735136007
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/every-kind-of-bridge-explained-in-15-minutes
date: 2024-06-06, from: John Naughton’s online diary
No parking Quote of the Day ”An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.” Albert Camus Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Sweet Home Chicago | Blues Harmonica Link It’s clear that I’ve been underestimating the harmonica for a … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/friday-7-june-2024/39519/
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044762-the-trailer-for-when-we
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/a-shaded-relief-map-of-manhattan
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-07, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/technology/humane-ai-pin.html
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-06-06, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
On this 80th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy
https://steady.substack.com/p/thank-you-from-a-grateful-nation
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044761-a-uk-research-team-has
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-06, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
More bad financial advice: “Give money to Trump! He needs your help! They’re out to get him! You’re next!”
http://scripting.com/2024/06/06.html#a211011
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Daring Fireball
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ipad-pro-using-m4.2424153/
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044764-new-album-from-jamie-xx
date: 2024-06-06, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
At some point during 2003, my friend Bjørn Reese (from Dancer) and I were discussing back and forth and planning to maybe create our own asynchronous DNS/name resolver library. We felt that the synchronous APIs provided by gethostname() and getaddrinfo() were too limiting in for example curl. We could really use something that would not … Continue reading bye bye hosting c-ares web
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/06/06/bye-bye-hosting-c-ares-web/
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/download-free-coloring-books-from-museums-and-libraries
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044740-every-conversation-betwee
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Bruce Schneier blog
The US is using a World War II law that bans aircraft photography of military installations to charge someone with doing the same thing with a drone.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/espionage-with-a-drone.html
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044733-starring-the-computer-a-c
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-06, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Question: “Worst financial advice for someone in their 20s?” Answer.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/06.html#a151035
date: 2024-06-06, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
http://scripting.com/2024/06/06/150015.html?title=aNewUseForChatgpt
date: 2024-06-06, from: David Rosenthal’s blog
The Department of Justice indicted two brothers for exploiting mechanisms supporting Ethereum’s “Maximal Extractable Value” (MEV). Ashley Berlanger’s MIT students stole $25M in seconds by exploiting ETH blockchain bug, DOJ says explains:Anton, 24, and James Peraire-Bueno, 28, were arrested Tuesday, charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Each brother faces “a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each count,” the DOJ said.Below the fold I look into the details of the exploit as alleged in the indictment, and what it suggests about the evolution of Ethereum.
The alleged scheme was launched in December 2022 by the brothers, who studied at MIT, after months of planning, the indictment said. The pair seemingly relied on their “specialized skills” and expertise in crypto trading to fraudulently gain access to “pending private transactions” on the blockchain, then “used that access to alter certain transactions and obtain their victims’ cryptocurrency,” the DOJ said
Front running, also known as tailgating, is the prohibited practice of entering into an equity (stock) trade, option, futures contract, derivative, or security-based swap to capitalize on advance, nonpublic knowledge of a large (“block”) pending transaction that will influence the price of the underlying security. … A front running firm either buys for its own account before filling customer buy orders that drive up the price, or sells for its own account before filling customer sell orders that drive down the price. Front running is prohibited since the front-runner profits from nonpublic information, at the expense of its own customers, the block trade, or the public market.Note that the reason it is illegal in these markets is that, at the time the front-runner enters their order, the customer’s order is known only to them. It is thus “material non-public information”. Arguably, high-frequency traders front-run by placing their computers so close to the market’s computers that the information about orders on which they trade has not in practice had time to “become public”.
In order to be truly decentralized, each miner must choose for itself which transactions to include in the next block. So there has to be a pool of pending transactions visible to all miners, and thus to the public. It is called the mempool. How do miners choose transactions to include? Each transaction in the pool contains a fee, payable to the miner who includes it. Miners are coin-operated, they choose the transactions with the highest fees. The mempool concept is essential to the goal of a decentralized, trustless cryptocurrency.
Source |
When conventional “lit” markets became overrun with HFT bots, investment banks offered large investors “dark pools” where they could trade with each other without the risk of being front-run by algos. But Barclays allowed HFT bots into its dark pool, where they happily front-run unsuspecting investors who thought they were safe. Eventually Barclays was caught and forced to drain its dark pool. In 2016, it was fined $70 million for fraud. It was not the only large bank that accepted money from large investors to protect them from HFT bots and money from HFT traders to allow them access to the investors it was supposed to be protecting.The Order Flow was in large part sparked by two accounts of attempts to avoid being front-run:
In the Ethereum mempool, these apex predators take the form of “arbitrage bots.” Arbitrage bots monitor pending transactions and attempt to exploit profitable opportunities created by them. No white hat knows more about these bots than Phil Daian, the smart contract researcher who, along with his colleagues, wrote the Flash Boys 2.0 paper and coined the term “miner extractable value” (MEV).Their attempt to rescue about $12K failed because they didn’t know a miner and thus couldn’t avoid the dark forest in the mempool, where a front-runner bot found it.
Phil once told me about a cosmic horror that he called a “generalized frontrunner.” Arbitrage bots typically look for specific types of transactions in the mempool (such a DEX trade or an oracle update) and try to frontrun them according to a predetermined algorithm. Generalized frontrunners look for any transaction that they could profitably frontrun by copying it and replacing addresses with their own.
On September 15, 2020, a small group of people worked through the night to rescue over 9.6MM USD from a vulnerable smart contract.The key point of Samczsun’s story is that, after the group spotted the vulnerability and built a transaction to rescue the funds, they could not put the rescue transaction in the mempool because it would have been front-run by a bot. They had to find a miner who would put the transaction in a block without it appearing in the mempool. In other words, their transaction needed a dark pool. And they had to trust the cooperative miner not to front-run it.
In this work, we explain that DEX [decentralized exchanges] design flaws threaten underlying blockchain security. We study a community of arbitrage bots that has arisen to exploit DEX flaws. We show that these bots exhibit many similar market-exploiting behaviors— frontrunning, aggressive latency optimization, etc.—common on Wall Street, as revealed in the popular Michael Lewis expose´ Flash Boys. We explore the DEX design flaws that spawned arbitrage bots, measure and model these bots’ behavior, and illuminate systemic smart-contract ecosystem risks implied by our observations.Daian and co-authors describe five pathologies: Pure revenue opportunities, Priority gas auctions (PGAs), Miner-extractable value (MEV), Fee-based forking attacks, and Time-bandit attacks. Their results find two surprises:
First, they identify a concrete difference between the consensus-layer security model required for blockchain protocols securing simple payments and those securing smart contracts. In a payment system such as Bitcoin, all independent transactions in a block can be seen as executing atomically, making ordering generally unprofitable to manipulate. Our work shows that analyses of Bitcoin miner economics fail to extend to smart contract systems like Ethereum, and may even require modification once second-layer smart contract systems that depend on Bitcoin miners go live.Because it promised profits, MEV became the topic of a lot of research. By 2022, in Miners’ Extractable Value I was able to review 10 papers about it.
Second, our analysis of PGA games underscores that protocol details (such as miner selection criteria, P2P network composition, and more) can directly impact application-layer security and the fairness properties that smart contracts offer users. Smart contract security is often studied purely at the application layer, abstracting away low-level details like miner selection and P2P relayers’ behavior in order to make analysis tractable … Our work shows that serious blind spots result. Low-level protocol behaviors pose fundamental challenges to developing robust smart contracts that protect users against exploitation by profit-maximizing miners and P2P relayers that may game contracts to subsidize attacks
How does the blockchain decide which transactions to record, and in what order? In Ethereum, the answer is: with money. People who want to do transactions on the Ethereum network pay fees to execute the transactions; there is a flat base fee, but people can also bid more — a “priority fee” or “tip” — to get their transactions executed quickly. Every 12 seconds, some computer on the Ethereum network is selected to record the transactions in a block. This computer used to be called a “miner,” but in current proof-of-stake Ethereum blocks are recorded by computers called “validators.” Each block is compiled by one validator, selected more or less at random, called a “proposer”; the other validators vote to accept the block. The validators share the transaction fees, with the block proposer getting more than the other validators.Levine then gets into the details:
The block proposer will naturally prioritize the transactions that pay more fees, because then it will get more money. And, again, the validators are all computers; they will be programmed to select the transactions that pay them the most money. And in fact there is a division of labor in modern Ethereum, where a computer called a “block builder” puts together a list of transactions that will pay the most money to the validators, and then the block proposer proposes a block with that list so it can get paid.
I am giving a simplistic and somewhat old-fashioned description of MEV, and modern Ethereum has a whole, like, institutional structure around it. There are private mempools, where you can hide transactions from bots. There is Flashbots, “a research and development organization formed to mitigate the negative externalities posed by Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) to stateful blockchains, starting with Ethereum,” which has things like MEV-Boost, which creates “a competitive block-building market” where validators can “maximize their staking reward by selling their blockspace to an open market,” and MEV-Share, “an open-source protocol for users, wallets, and applications to internalize the MEV that their transactions create,” letting them “selectively share data about their transactions with searchers who bid to include the transactions in bundles” and get paid.
Note the importance of the relay maintaining the privacy of the transactions in the proposed block.
- “MEV-Boost” is an open-source software designed to optimize the block-building process for Ethereum validators by establishing protocols for how transactions are organized into blocks. Approximately 90% of Ethereum validators use MEV-Boost.
- Using MEV-Boost, Ethereum validators outsource the block-building process to a network of “searchers,” “builders,” and “relays.” These participants operate pursuant to privacy and commitment protocols designed to ensure that each network participant—the searcher, the builder, and the validator—interacts in an ordered manner that maximizes value and network efficiency.
- A searcher is effectively a trader who scans the public mempool for profitable arbitrage opportunities using automated bots (“MEV Bots”). After identifying a profitable opportunity (that would, for example, increase the price of a given cryptocurrency), the searcher sends the builder a proposed “bundle” of transactions. following transactions in a precise order: The bundle typically consists of the (a) the searcher’s “frontrun” transaction, in which the searcher purchases some amount of cryptocurrency whose value the searcher expects to increase; (b) the pending transaction in the mempool that the MEV Bot identified would increase the price of that cryptocurrency; and (c) the searcher’s sell transaction, in which the searcher sells the cryptocurrency at a higher price than what the searcher initially paid in order to extract a trading profit. A builder receives bundles from various searchers and compiles them into a proposed block that maximizes MEV for the validator. The builder then sends the proposed block to a “relay.” A relay receives the proposed block from the builder and initially only submits the “blockheader” to the validator, which contains information about, among other things, the payment the validator will receive for validating the proposed block as structured by the builder. It is only after the validator makes this commitment through a digital signature that the relay releases the full content of the proposed block (i.e. — the complete ordered transaction list) to the validator.
- In this process, a relay acts in a manner similar to an escrow account, which temporarily maintains the otherwise private transaction data of the proposed block until the validator commits to publishing the block to the blockchain exactly as ordered. The relay will not release the transactions within the proposed block to the validator until the validator has confirmed through a digital signature that it will publish the proposed block as structured by the builder to the blockchain. Until the transactions within the proposed block are released to the validator, they remain private and are not publicly visible.
The indictment adds:
- ANTON PERAIRE-BUENO and JAMES PERAIRE-BUENO took the following steps, among others, to plan and execute the Exploit: (a) establishing a series of Ethereum validators in a manner that concealed their identities through the use of shell companies, intermediary cryptocurrency addresses, foreign exchanges, and a privacy layer network; (b) deploying a series of test transactions or “bait transactions” designed to identify particular variables most likely to attract MEV Bots that would become the victims of the Exploit (collectively the “Victim Traders”); (c) identifying and exploiting a vulnerability in the MEV-Boost relay code that caused the relay to prematurely release the full content of a proposed block; (d) re-ordering the proposed block to the defendants’ advantage; and (e) publishing the re-ordered block to the Ethereum blockchain, which resulted in the theft of approximately $25 million in cryptocurrency from the Victim Traders.
This statement has attracted attention. Why should the DoJ care about “the stability and integrity of the Ethereum blockchain”? Note that the brothers are not charged with this, the indictment has three counts:
- Tampering with these established MEV-Boost protocols, which are relied upon by the vast majority of Ethereum users, threatens the stability and integrity of the Ethereum blockchain for all network participants.
mev-boost works through a commit and reveal scheme where proposers commit to blocks created by builders without seeing their contents, by signing block headers. Only after a block header is signed are the block body and corresponding transactions revealed. A trusted third party called a relay facilitates this process. mev-boost is designed to allow block builders to send blocks that contain valuable MEV to validators without having to trust them. Removing the need for builders to trust validators ensures that every validator has equal access to MEV regardless of their size and is critical for ensuring the validator set of Ethereum remains decentralized.Notice the traditional cryptocurrency gaslighting about “trustlessness” and “decentralization” in that paragraph:
ETH
5/21/24 |
A year ago the top 5 staking pools controlled 58.4%, now they control 44.7% of the stakes. But it is still true that block production is heavily centralized, with one producer claiming 57.9% of the rewards.But a Nakamoto coefficient of 6 isn’t very decentralized. Further, this misses the point revealed by the brothers’ exploit. With about 55% of execution clients running Geth and around 90% of validators trusting MEV-Boost’s relaying, just to take two examples, the software stack is extremely vulnerable to bugs and supply chain attacks.
The attack on April 3rd, 2023 was possible because the exploited relay revealed block bodies to the proposer so long as the proposer correctly signed a block header. However, the relay did not check if the block header that was signed was valid. In the case that the block header was signed but invalid, the relay would attempt to publish the block to the beacon chain, where beacon nodes would reject it. Crucially, regardless of whether the block was rejected by beacon nodes or not, the relay would still reveal the body to the proposer.Then they explain the mitigation:
Having access to the block body allowed the malicious proposer to extract transactions from the stolen block and use them in their own block where it could exploit those transactions. In particular, the malicious proposer constructed their own block that broke the sandwich bots’ sandwiches up and effectively stole their money.
Usually, proposers publishing a modified block would not only equivocate but their new block would have to race the relay block - which has a head start - to acquire attestations for the fork choice rule. However, in this case, the relay was not able to publish a block because the proposer returned an invalid block header. Therefore, the malicious proposer’s new block was uncontested and they won the race automatically. This has been addressed by requiring the relay to successfully publish a block, thereby not sharing invalid blocks with proposers. The mitigations section covers this and future looking details at more length.By “equivocate” they mean proposing more than one block in a time slot. Validators responsibilities are:
The validator is expected to maintain sufficient hardware and connectivity to participate in block validation and proposal. In return, the validator is paid in ETH (their staked balance increases). On the other hand, participating as a validator also opens new avenues for users to attack the network for personal gain or sabotage. To prevent this, validators miss out on ETH rewards if they fail to participate when called upon, and their existing stake can be destroyed if they behave dishonestly. Two primary behaviors can be considered dishonest: proposing multiple blocks in a single slot (equivocating) and submitting contradictory attestations.
There is a sort of cool purity to this. In stock markets, some people are faster than others, and can make money by trading ahead of a big order, and people get mad about this and think it is unfair and propose solutions. And when money changes hands for speed advantages — “payment for order flow,” “colocation” — people complain about corruption. In crypto it’s like “let’s create an efficient market in trading ahead of big orders.” I once wrote: “Rather than solve this concern about traditional markets, crypto made it explicit.” That feels almost like a general philosophy of crypto: Take the problems of traditional finance and make them, worse, sure, but more transparent and visible and explicit and subject to unbridled free markets.And then casting the brothers’ actions as front-running:
Ethereum and its decentralized exchanges have a market structure that is like “bots can look at your transactions and front-run them if that’s profitable.” And these guys, allegedly, front-ran the front-runners; they turned the market structure around so that they could get an early look at the front-running bots’ front-running transactions and front-run them instead. By hacking, sure, sure, it’s bad. But it leaves the Justice Department in the odd position of saying that the integrity of crypto front-running is important and must be defended.I think Levine is wrong here. Just as with high-frequency trading, “crypto front-running” is legal because it uses public information. The brothers were not indicted for front-running. What is illegal, and what the DoJ is alleging, is trading on “material non-public informatiion”, which they obtained by wire fraud (a fraudulent signature). The indictment says:
this False Signature was designed to, and did, trick the Relay to prematurely release the full content of the proposed block to the defendants, including the private transaction information.The DoJ is not defending the “integrity of crypto front-running”, it is prosecuting activity that is illegal in all markets.
First, though I described the exploit as “front-running the front-runners,” I do want to be clear that it was not just that. This is not a pure case of (1) submitting spoofy orders to bait front-running bots, (2) having them take the bait and (3) finding some trade to make them lose money. (There are prior examples of that, using oddly structured tokens to make the front-runners lose money.) Here, though, the brothers are accused of something closer to hacking, exploiting a weakness in software code to be able to see (and reorder) a series of transactions that was supposed to be kept confidential from them. That is worse; it’s sort of like the difference between (1) putting in spoof orders on the stock exchange to try to trick a high-frequency trading firm and (2) hacking into the stock exchange’s computer system to reverse the HFT firm’s trades. Even if you think that the front-running bots are bad, you might — as the Justice Department does — object to this approach to punishing them.Exactly. Levine’s second clarification was:
Second, I said that “they exploited a bug in Ethereum” to do this, but that’s not quite right. They exploited a bug in Flashbots’ MEV-Boost, open-source block-building software that “approximately 90% of Ethereum validators use” but that is not part of the core Ethereum system itself. (Here is Flashbots’ explanation.) They exploited a bug in how blocks are normally built and proposed on Ethereum. From the names “Flashbots” and “MEV-Boost,” though, you might get some sense of why the case is controversial. The way that blocks are normally built and proposed on Ethereum involves “maximal extractable value” (MEV), where arbitrage traders bid to pay validators for priority to make the most profitable trades. These brothers hacked that system, but not everyone likes that system, because it involves predatory traders front-running more naive traders.Part of Satoshi Nakamoto’s genius in designing Bitcoin was that he observed KISS, the important software mantra Keep It Simple, Stupid. The Bitcoin blockchain does only one thing, maintain a ledger of transactions. So it the Bitcoin ecosystem has evolved very slowly, and has been remarkably free of vulnerabilities over the last decade and a half. Ethereum, on the other hand, is a Turing-complete environment that does whatever the users want it to. So over the last less than a decade the Ethereum ecosystem has evolved much faster, accreting complexity and thus vulnerabilities.
This is also important because, as one reader commented: “A a crucial distinguishing factor here is that James and Anton did not re-order committed transactions; they instead picked an ordering of pending transactions that were favorable to them. Under this lens, the integrity of the blockchain is not compromised; the network explicitly ‘allows’ validators to pick whatever arbitrary ordering of transactions they like; it’s just that generally it’s economically favorable for validators to prioritize transactions which pay them the most first.”
“They used a flaw in MEV boost to push invalid signatures to preview bundles. That gives an unfair advantage via an exploit,” former employee of the Ethereum Foundation and Flashbots Hudson Jameson told CoinDesk in an interview. Jameson added that the Peraire-Bueno brothers were also running their own validator while extracting MEV, which violates something of a gentleman’s agreement in MEV circles.The “gentleman’s agreement” is important, because what the brothers were doing creates a conflict of interest, the kind that the SEC frowns upon.
“No one else in the MEV ecosystem was doing both of those things at once that we know of,” he added. “They did more than just play by both the codified and pinky promise rules of MEV extraction.”
“All of the defendants’ preparation for the attack and their completely ham-fisted attempts to cover their tracks afterwards, including extensive incriminating google searches, just helps the government prove they intended to steal. All that evidence will look very bad to a jury. I suspect they plead guilty at some point,”He also discusses a different reaction in the cryptosphere:
MEV, which itself is controversial, can be a highly lucrative game dominated by automated bots that often comes at blockchain users’ expense, which is partially why so many in the crypto community have rushed to denounce the DOJ’s complaint.Kuhn quotes Hudson Jameson:
…
Still, others remain convinced that exploiting MEV bots designed to reorder transactions is fair game. “It’s a little hard to sympathize with MEV bots and block builders getting fcked over by block proposers, in the exact same way they are fcking over end users,” the anonymous researcher said.
Jameson, for his part, said the MEV is something the Ethereum community should work to minimize on Ethereum, but that it’s a difficult problem to solve. For now, the process is “inevitable.”
“Until it can be eliminated, let’s study it. Let’s illuminate it. Let’s minimize it. And since it does exist, let’s make it as open as possible for anyone to participate with the same rules,” he said.
Jameson is wrong in suggesting that MEV could be eliminated. It is a
consequence of the goal of decentralizing the system. Even the mechanism
in place for “anyone to participate with the same rules” requires a
trusted third party.
https://blog.dshr.org/2024/06/the-great-mev-heist.html
date: 2024-06-06, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-5-2024-e04
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044759-duck-amuck-is-one-of
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-06, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I used the ChatGPT “upload an image” feature today while debugging some software. I could show it what wasn’t working with a screen shot. Amazingly it understood and made the connection to the software we were working on, and suggested a modification that made it work properly. This was an important missing bit of functionality, previously you had to explain in words what wasn’t working visually. That worked too, but was cumbersome. Much easier to just show it was wrong. And the UI couldn’t be simpler. Take the screen shot at paste it into the box where you normally type. It starts analyzing before you press Enter.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/06.html#a142526
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044752-genderswapdotfm-is-a-cata
date: 2024-06-06, from: Om Malik blog
If you’re wondering why this is a topic of interest, let me elaborate — whether it involves selling in-game upgrades, pursuing growth at all costs on Facebook, or engaging in sports betting, I believe these practices are fundamentally wrong and not right way to use technology for the greater good. The weaponization of betting in …
https://om.co/2024/06/06/baseballs-gambling-hypocrisy/
date: 2024-06-06, from: mrusme blog
Would you like to have ChatGPT summarize YouTube videos for you, but without OpenAI knowing the lewd content that you’re watching, or paying them an arm and a leg for it? You can, and it’s actually fairly straightforward.
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/run-your-privacy-respecting-ai-on-gentoo-linux/
date: 2024-06-06, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
On the balcony …
Hängepolster-Glockenblume
Campanula poscharskyana
Dalmatiner Glockenblume
Campanula portenschlagiana
Garten-Löwenmaul
Antirrhinum majus
Muskatellersalbei
Salvia sclarea
The cemetery has a bunch of rectangular, brutalist ponds. It‘s not easy for animals to get down to the water. These bees found a corner where moss or algae suck up some water from below and so the bees can drink from the wet plant material. I think. 😍
Wiesen-Pippau
Crepis biennis
Looks much taller and slimmer than the lion‘s tooth, dent-de-lion, dandelion.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-06-03-flowers
date: 2024-06-06, from: Robert Reich’s blog
In the 2024 presidential election, the larger of two evils is truly evil
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-unvarnished-truth-about-no-labels
date: 2024-06-06, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
Interesting framing. I’m curious how much posting frequency is like pacing in physical activity. When I ran, it seemed like I had tiers of exertion — gears rather than a smooth radio dial. Picking it up to the next level and settling into that pace felt easier than trying to incrementally, marginally increase my speed. […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/06/06/posting-frequency-as-the-heartbeat-of-a-blog/
date: 2024-06-06, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Today the S&P 500, which tracks the stock performance of 500 of the biggest companies on U.S. stock exchanges, closed at a new record high of 5,354. The Nasdaq Composite, which is weighted toward the information technology sector, also closed at a record high of 17,187. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was also up, but not to a new record. It closed at 38,807.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-5-2024
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/5/24172377/humane-ai-pin-battery-case-issue-warning
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/05/ebay-to-drop-american-express-over-fees.html
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/a-long-surfing-life
date: 2024-06-05, from: Jeff Geerling blog
55 TOPS Raspberry Pi AI PC - 4 TPUs, 2 NPUs
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>I'm in full-on procrastination mode with <a href="https://opensauce.com">Open Sauce</a> coming up in 10 days and a project I haven't started on for it, so I decided to try building the stable AI PC with all the AI accelerator chips I own:</p>
After my first faltering attempt in my testing of Raspberry Pi’s new AI Kit, I decided to try building it again, but with a more ‘proper’ PCIe setup, with external 12V power to the PCIe devices, courtesy of an uPCIty Lite PCIe HAT for the Pi 5.
I’m… not sure it’s that much less janky, but at least I had one board with a bunch of M.2 cards instead of many precariously stacked on top of each other!
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/55-tops-raspberry-pi-ai-pc-4-tpus-2-npus
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044735-david-robson-on-what-scie
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/the-trailer-for-black-barbie
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044758-in-the-last-10-years
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/intermezzo-by-sally-rooney
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044757-this-is-excellent-the-mus
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044754-whispers-quietly-im-not-e
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044751-how-do-you-study-mind-alt
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044753-great-rec-from-youngna-pa
date: 2024-06-05, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-4-2024-0b1
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.businessinsider.com/justin-long-promotes-huawei-android-phones-2017-1
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/the-25-photos-that-defined-the-modern-age
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-05, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
We could bridge RSS and ActivityPub and get more interop.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/05.html#a151856
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-05, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Jon Stewart from this Monday is good to watch as a reminder of what the press could be doing beyond what Jay Rosen recommends (which is on the right track). They could be playing the same role that the 12 jurors in NYC did. I’d love to see a requirement that every moderator of a major news show in the US do jury duty for a couple of weeks a year, to keep them aware of the standard that should also apply to news, not just justice. (Update: Jay is on it.)
http://scripting.com/2024/06/05.html#a151218
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-05, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
It’s amazing how well Comey’s rep has been laundered, but I’ll never forget that his CYA move re Hillary’s emails at the very end of the 2016 campaign, knocked Hillary off her feet, she never recovered and we had four years of Trump and maybe more as a result. He is not an authority on democracy, he’s one of the early pariahs. There has been no apology, or regret expressed. As bad as Alito. I wonder if CNN has bothered to check how people feel about him.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/05.html#a151023
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044744-how-the-invention-of-dyna
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion was that Microsoft was spying on its AI users, looking for harmful hackers at work.
Some pushed back at characterizing Microsoft’s actions as “spying.” Of course cloud service providers monitor what users are doing. And because we expect Microsoft to be doing something like this, it’s not fair to call it spying…
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/online-privacy-and-overfishing.html
date: 2024-06-05, from: Ayjay blog
If the defining axes of Genesis 1–11 were making/naming and commanding/disobeying, those of the Patriarchal narratives are fertility/barrenness and pastoral/urban. Over and over again the LORD promises fertility to the barren, and to the childless a multitude of descendants. The primary sign of the LORD’s covenant with the children of Abraham is circumcision, the marking […]
https://blog.ayjay.org/genesis-fertility/
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-07, from: Charlie’s Diary
The breaking tech news this year has been the pervasive spread of “AI” (or rather, statistical modeling based on hidden layer neural networks) into everything. It’s the latest hype bubble now that Cryptocurrencies are no longer the freshest sucker-bait in…
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/06/is-microsoft-trying-to-commit-.html
date: 2024-06-05, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Why do so many Americans support these super bullies?
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-trump-musk-thugocracy
date: 2024-06-05, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And what can be done about it?
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/office-hours-why-is-the-world-drifting
date: 2024-06-05, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
This should apply to problems, too. For some reason, the wealthy seem to believe they can protect themselves from the impacts of climate change — but no one can buy nicer weather. Even jetting from location to location, following decent weather, doesn’t really save you because then you waste a bunch of your life flying and […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/06/04/equal-systems-mean-better-systems/
date: 2024-06-05, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
The Gettysburg Address it wasn’t. Seventy-seven years ago, on June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who had been a five-star general in World War II, gave a commencement speech at Harvard University. Rather than stirring, the speech was bland. Its long sentences were hard to follow. It was vague. And yet, in just under eleven minutes on a sunny afternoon, Marshall laid out a plan that would shape the modern world.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-4-2024
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Daring Fireball
The core genius at the heart of the original “Get a Mac” campaign is that while Long’s Mac character was likable, John Hodgman’s PC — ostensibly the foil — was lovable.
https://daringfireball.net/2024/06/now_qualcomm_went_long
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-06-04, from: John Naughton’s online diary
First rose of Summer? Quote of the Day ”The New York Times now generates more time on-site and profit from word games than they do from news. You wouldn’t know that from their staffing or the conversations they have.” Seth … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/wednesday-5-june-2024/39512/
date: 2024-06-04, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
Good advice for young voters feeling election anxiety
https://steady.substack.com/p/jon-stewart-would-like-a-word
date: 2024-06-04, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
I was thinking about writing a simple editor again. The Small and Nearly Silent web app by @eli_oat is beautiful because it mixes text and line drawings. I often feel that I’d like a simple path-based SVG-like drawing ability, like lines, by @akkartik. Some lines, some control points, some curves, filling stuff with patterns… I don’t know whether I’d actually use it, but it’s alluring.
The whole uxn ecosystem with many different small tools is also quite alluring. Unfortunately, it’s also a bit hard to get into an existing ecosystem like that. I still feel that if spent a while writing something myself, it’d feel more like it was “mine”. I’d just understand it better. I just don’t know if I’m ready to spend that much time on it, or if I’d even be able to pull it off. So that’s why I wavering at the same time that I’m fascinated.
Given all that, I was thinking about Gforth and found
SDL2
Bindings for Gforth, and I found the example
Yellow
Snow game using this library, I tried to compile it and Gforth
complained about the missing headers. No problem, I thought to myself. I
know what to do: sudo apt install libsdl2-ttf-dev
libsdl2-image-dev libsdl2-mixer-dev
– but the mixer results in
SuperCollider getting deinstalled.
Oh no!
So now I’m once again thinking about the thing I actually want to do. Do
I want to build an Emacs light? A simple line-based text editor like
ed
but with more features? An editor that only runs inside
a terminal, like kilo
or mini
? See
2018-03-12 Writing an Editor
for more. Or would it be an editor with a GUI? Would it work only with
X11? Or would it be based on SDL?
I feel like an editor with a minimal GUI would be nice. I don’t think I need a menu, but I think I’d like a way to scale font size up and down, UTF-8 support to write German and Portuguese, basically render Markdown and some simple variant of SVG, inline. I feel like that’s why I need to start with graphics and font support. Otherwise I’ll end up with something like grid: a cool ACME-inspired text editor, but it would only really works for English.
2024-06-04. Thinking about Go and the mini editor. It runs in a terminal. So what would it take to turn it into a graphical editor with fonts, ligatures, bidirectional text, font-sizes, and all of that?
go-text/typesetting is a library that’s used by Fyne, Gio, and Ebitengine. So perhaps one of these frameworks?
Fyne has a Notes example application. It looks like a nice, simple app. When I built it, however, it didn’t work. Is it because I’m on Wayland? I don’t know.
Gio is used by Anvil, an ACME-like editor with many features. In fact, it already looks like it has too many features for me to start building something. I wonder. Perhaps those are the right features? I just can’t warm up to using the mouse all that much.
Ebitengine has a Font example. It just shows how one loads a font for a number of code-points and that’s that. An interesting way to load a font, for sure.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-06-01-editor
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/apple-musics-100-best-albums
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044749-virologist-dr-rick-bright
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044743-at-some-point-you-have
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044741-world-first-tooth-regrowi
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/tintin-inspired-kits-for-the-belgian-national-football-team
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-06-04, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Keith Olbermann makes a good point in today’s podcast.
Instead of “Donald Trump” we should always say “Convicted felon Donald Trump.”
It’s branding and it works. He’s right.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/04/170341.html?title=convictedFelonDonaldTrump
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044745-things-the-guys-who-stole
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044747-the-best-podcasts-of-2024
date: 2024-06-04, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-3-2024-580
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044748-what-cars-would-the-found
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/bubble-wrap-impressionist-paintings
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044746-its-interesting-but-unsur
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044734-til-that-the-theme-song
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-04, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
The test for whether it’s a podcast or not is if they say you can get it “Wherever you get your podcasts.” If they can say that, it’s a podcast. If you have to get it from Apple or YouTube or whoever, it’s not a podcast. That’s the rule.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/04.html#a120730
date: 2024-06-04, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of an interviewer hallucinating during a news show with several distinguished panelists discussing an important issue.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/04/120356.html?title=ondemandHallucination
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-04, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
In other words the designers of CSS and JavaScript and probably every other technology everyone uses had no idea what actual developers were doing with their committee-designed creation. They made mistakes and piled them on each other, fixing old mistakes with new mistakes. After 30 years of evolving in this convoluted way, if you want to create useful software, you have to either master all of it (and no one has) or pay $20 a month to OpenAI so you can use it to navigate the awful hairball that the web platform has become. Where we only have a sliver of knowledge as humans, the machine knows all of it. And that’s just programming. I’m just guessing that everything is that way. You know the part in The Matrix Reloaded where we’re told no one knows how the technology works. That’s where we are now. Spend your whole life using the stuff and you still only know a tiny fraction of what you need to make good software. We needed what ChatGPT does, but we didn’t know we needed it. That’s where we are now, and the journos are sitting on the sidelines hurling spitballs at it.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/04.html#a114721
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-04, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
What got me spinning was listening to Rachel Maddow advertise her podcast at the beginning of her show last night. You can get the podcast for free, she says, or if you want no ads, you can pay some money and get it from Apple. What Apple is selling there, and Maddow is going along with, is not a freaking podcast and by calling it one they undermine a great medium. I understand why Maddow might not care, she makes millions from a medium that doesn’t give users much choice (ie MSNBC) so why should she care about podcasting, which does.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/04.html#a113715
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-04, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
If podcasting had a marketing team behind it, we’d run a campaign that says “It’s not podcasting if you don’t have choice.” If you have to use Apple, Audible, Spotify or Google to listen to something, that’s nice, hope it’s good for you, but folks that is not a podcast. Podcasts give you the listener all the power. If you give it up it’ll all be Disneyfied before too long. It pisses me off that Amazon Music sends me messages about all the new “podcasts” they have. I mutter under my breath when I hear this, some expletive I’d rather not repeat. Amazon, the users know that podcasting == user choice, and they hate you just a little every time you lie about it. Find another term you like and use that. You have the money to do the marketing. Come on, just once play fair. You’ll be surprised how good it feels, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the users reward you for it.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/04.html#a113149
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-04, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
It’s too bad when I post something positive about ChatGPT, which I do because journalists are dumping on it based on not using it but asking it gotcha questions, which seems to be all they know how to do, the trolls show up, asking if we’ve read this or that journalism article. On Facebook, I delete the comments and change the permissions to only allow friends to comment. The journalists are wrong about ChatGPT. I solve problems with it. It guides me through difficult programming situations, esp around convoluted designs like CSS and JavaScript. It knows all of it. The only times it hallucinates (and I know it’s doing it btw, I’m not stupid) is when there is not enough info on the web to give an answer. It would be nice if it just said “I don’t know” but it’s early, and they haven’t figured out how to do that yet. The journalists have no sense of wonder I guess, or they never thought to use it in their jobs. I can’t wait for the first aha! from a journalist – who will say this: “Aha! Now I see what this is for and it’s freaking lovely.” But they’ve decided it sucks and that’s that. Too bad, we’re going on without them. And thanks to the good moderation tools we can keep the turd-droppers from totally screwing it up.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/04.html#a112534
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-05, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Interesting story of breaking the security of the RoboForm password manager in order to recover a cryptocurrency wallet password.
Grand and Bruno spent months reverse engineering the version of the RoboForm program that they thought Michael had used in 2013 and found that the pseudo-random number generator used to generate passwords in that version—and subsequent versions until 2015—did indeed have a significant flaw that made the random number generator not so random. The RoboForm program unwisely tied the random passwords it generated to the date and time on the user’s computer—it determined the computer’s date and time, and then generated passwords that were predictable. If you knew the date and time and other parameters, you could compute any password that would have been generated on a certain date and time in the past…
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/breaking-a-password-manager.html
date: 2024-06-04, from: Enlightenment Economics blog
I’m on my way to a workshop at The New Institute in Hamburg, where I will talk about the scope for a public option in (especially) digital markets. As preparation, I’ve read a recent short (and moderately technical) book surveying … Continue reading
http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2024/06/the-public-option/
date: 2024-06-04, from: Robert Reich’s blog
At a time when America faces existential crises, Trump Republicans are busily manufacturing non-crises
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-party-of-nothingburger-issues
date: 2024-06-04, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
This is the first time somebody is dying in my close family where I am old enough to be an adult about it.
One of my sisters died when I was about twenty. I was living in Switzerland with my dad, and it was terrible to hear my mom crying at the phone, practically unable to tell me what had happened, to then see my father confused, shocked. I booked a flight for him but didn’t go myself. My mom was living in Portugal with my two sisters. I wasn’t there for my sister’s burial. People had to be buried within 48 hours, back then. I don’t know how things are now. There was school and stuff and I had not lived with my sisters for a few years. I didn’t feel very close. It just felt weird. I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean.
Now, thirty years later, my stepfather is dying. His kidneys are failing, his liver is failing, his lungs are filling up with water, his heart is failing; they can’t give him his heart medication because the kidneys are at their limits, can’t have him move around because he’s weak, and so he’s breaking down. I mean, he’s calm, he knows what’s happening, and he’s very, very tired. He’s ready to go.
I think that in my heart, I know that this is how it works. We have to go one day. I don’t want to spend the last hours hooked up to machines. I’ll be very, very tired. I’ll just want to go home. I also won’t want anybody around me to be sad. Hopefully, I’ll feel that I lived a good life, that I had a good time, that the people I spend my time with were decent people, worthy of the short time I was given. I hope that I will be able to let go and be at peace. It’s what I hear about my stepfather.
But when I sit in that family video call, with siblings in Portugal and Germany and my mother, and one after another people start crying, choking up, it’s hard. It’s that invisible choker, grabbing us, one after another.
I need to remember the good times, the conversations we had, the laughter we shared. I need to book a flight and see the rest of our family. All that independence and all that living abroad is coming back to haunt us, now.
To go and support each other.
Go and hug your loved ones.
2024-05-27. I arrived today. He didn’t look good at all. In fact, he seemed to be barely holding on to life. Sleeping, mostly. Occasionally, gasping for air, staring, maybe recognizing us, saying a word or two. It was heartbreaking. He died the same day. The doctor and the nurse came, two very friendly people. Removed the tubes, stopped the Morphium machine, made his death official.
There were so many tears. A step brother, a half-brother, a half-sister, my sister, my half-brother’s wife, their kid, my mom… the kid was the only one that seemed unperturbed. “Don’t be sad, grandma!”
Later the funerary services came to pick up the body. Again, both of them super nice. We’ll see how things go, tomorrow. My mother is not feeling well. I seem to be doing OK. I can be strong when it’s not my partner that has died.
I’m happy we were all there for him, singing songs, bringing him his birthday cake (he died on his 78th birthday). I’m happy we were all there for each other.
2024-05-28. Cremation today. The sun is out. People on the radio.
2024-05-30. On the way home. It was good to see the family again. I gave a little speech in Portuguese, explaining how the language continues to remain important to us, even if we live a abroad, and how hard it was for a family where people live in different countries, alone – but also how our parents divorcing and marrying had led to an ever growing family. There are more parents, more siblings, and I love it and it helps. We can all help each other. And my deceased stepfather was certainly an enrichment for our family, bringing anarchy and lawlessness and laughter into a family that was rigid and regimented and dour, and how we all grew with that and how it was important to remember the good times we had and the lessons we all drew from his presence. Truly, a great influence for all of us.
I still remember how I met him years before my mother met him. He lived across the river alone with his son, wild and free and I was so jealous. I wished to live like that! And then my parents divorced, my dad went back to Switzerland and a year later I followed him and got to live wild and free like them, it was amazing. And one day I came back and there were rumours that our mother had found a boyfriend. Imagine my surprise when it was him, the wild and free guitar playing dude from across the river! And eventually my friend from school turned into my stepbrother, moved in with my mom, lived in my room. It was mysterious and magical and then to see him and his father struggle with my mom, the changes they brought about, it was a miracle.
So, my man, wherever you are, here’s to you and your last trip, to your guitars and flutes, your love of music and freedom, your spirit of independence and love of people and aliens. Cheers! I hope to see you again.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-05-23-death
date: 2024-06-04, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
The fallout from the New York jury’s conviction of Donald Trump on 34 felony counts last Thursday, May 30, continues. Trump’s team continues to insist that the guilty verdict will help him, but that’s nonsensical on its face: if guilty verdicts are so helpful, why has he moved heaven and earth to keep the many other cases against him from going to trial? And why are he and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) calling for the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions?
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-3-2024
date: 2024-06-04, from: Jeff Geerling blog
Testing Raspberry Pi’s AI Kit - 13 TOPS for $70
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>Raspberry Pi today launched the <a href="https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-ai-kit-available-now-at-70/">AI Kit</a>, a $70 addon which straps a Hailo-8L on top of a Raspberry Pi 5, using the recently-launched M.2 HAT (the Hailo-8L is of the M.2 M-key variety, and comes preinstalled).</p>
The Hailo-8L’s claim to fame is 3-4 TOPS/W efficiency, which, along with the Pi’s 3-4W idle power consumption, puts it alongside Nvidia’s edge devices like the Jetson Orin in terms of TOPS/$ and TOPS/W for price and efficiency.
Google’s Coral TPU has been a popular choice for a machine learning/AI accelerator for the Pi for years now, but Google seems to have left the project on life support, after the Coral hardware was scalped for a couple years about as badly as the Raspberry Pi itself!
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/testing-raspberry-pis-ai-kit-13-tops-70
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Daring Fireball
https://ti.to/daringfireball/the-talk-show-live-from-wwdc-2024
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: Daring Fireball
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/03/instagram-confirms-test-of-unskippable-ads/
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044738-should-employees-be-paid-
date: 2024-06-03, from: Chris Heilmann’s blog
As some of you may know, I started out as a radio journalist. And when I discovered the web in around 1996, I knew that, to me, radio and TV were not the dominant news media any longer. Nowhere but on the web was it possible to research and cross-reference from dozens or resources with […]
https://christianheilmann.com/2024/06/03/witnessing-the-death-of-the-web-as-a-news-medium/
date: 2024-06-03, from: Om Malik blog
Fable Studio, a San Francisco-based startup that gained fame for demonstrating the ability to create an episode of South Park with a brief prompt, is making headlines again. The company is launching Showrunner, a streaming platform that will enable users to create their own AI-prompted episodes of various shows. “The vision is to be the Netflix of AI,” says chief executive Edward Saatchi. “Maybe you finish all of the …
https://om.co/2024/06/03/why-i-want-my-ai-tv/
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/our-unpleasant-privatized-reality
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044729-its-not-your-imagination-
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044737-one-of-the-great-modern
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044727-theres-now-a-bechdel-test
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044731-announcing-the-tiny-award
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Daring Fireball
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-03, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
If you make a podcast client, I’d like to have an OPML list of all the feeds I’m subscribed to in my client so I can follow it in my feed reader. I’d really like it to go the other way, actually, so I could maintain the list on my desktop computer, and have it automatically reflected in the mobile podcast client. It’s very important that it use OPML, that’s the standard for this stuff. I couldn’t possibly get excited by another format. Podcasting thrives on these standards. The client I use is Pocket Casts which is part of Automattic. BTW, you can use Drummer to edit a subscription list. Its native format is OPML.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/03.html#a180154
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-03, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
It’s been almost nine years since I did the podcast about podcasting. Today I was asked how I feel about podcasting now. Here’s what I said. It’s still working – people expect to have choice in where they listen to their podcasts, and as long as that’s true they will imho continue to have choice. But even if Google took it over tomorrow, I’d be happy with the outcome. It’s been over 20 years since we rolled it out, and it’s still delivering huge value to lots of people, and isn’t controlled by anyone, as far as I can tell there are no gatekeepers. If only we had been able to keep blogging free of that kind of control, but I have hope there too.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/03.html#a175249
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/brats-a-documentary-film-about-the-80s-hollywood-brat-pack
date: 2024-06-03, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-2-2024-df1
date: 2024-06-03, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog
My father, Allen H. Searls, was an archivist. Not a formal one, but good in the vernacular, at least when it came to one of the most consequential things he did in his life: helping build the George Washington Bridge. He did this by photographing his work and fellow workers. He shot with a Kodak […]
https://doc.searls.com/2024/06/03/archiving-a-way/
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044726-a-list-of-the-highest
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044728-amazing-thousands-of-pati
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-03, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
One of the flaws in the design of Teslas is they are really difficult to operate safely for people who are farsighted, such as myself. A lot of the status messages are too small for me to read without reading glasses, and in the time it takes to put them on the message is gone. Esp frustrating for the messages that tell you to do this or that to keep using FSD. And when I’m flipping the glasses down, my eyes are not on the road Mr or Ms Tesla. This is a design problem. Maybe you should use voice prompts for this kind of stuff. Or use a camera to see if my hands are on the wheel.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/03.html#a152049
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/the-colorful-fire-hydrant-directory
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-03, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I keep coming back to this – ChatGPT is a vast library that comes with its own librarian. And the librarian has read and digested all of it, and can give you useful and usually exactly right summaries (despite what the critics say) in an instant. I’ve been using libraries my whole life, going back to when I was a child. I worked with card catalogs and non-virtual book collections. Archives of news on film. View ChatGPT on that timeline and you’ll see its significance. You didn’t write it, I didn’t. Each of us may have contributed a little, and isn’t that what we want? To help build the base of human knowledge? It gives our lives meaning. Sometimes I wonder how much value people place on themselves and so little on progress. I think we all want our lives to have meaning. Well here you go, it doesn’t get more meaningful than this.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/03.html#a144113
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044723-a-first-in-the-nation
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-03, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Another great application for ChatGPT. Try to find a blog post or article about the design of a language that gets to what you want to know without wading through a lot of stuff you don’t care about. I got it to explain Swift, Go and Rust quickly. Okay now I know what they’re doing. It would have taken me days to assemble this, and I never have that kind of time for such execursions.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/03.html#a143532
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-03, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
We should apply mathematics to language design. The goal of the language should be maximum simplicity for the human developer. As much of the complexity as possible should be handled by software, either at compile-time or runtime. It should strive to read like pseudocode. We started out writing code by toggling switches on the front panel of the computer, and for a few decades we were factoring and making it simpler with every iteration, but then we turned around in the other direction. I am from the church of factoring. I do it in my designs of products at all levels, and I treat languages with the same care. It turns out all the rules of working on open systems also apply to language design. I plan to write more about this.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/03.html#a143127
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/06/0044722-always-worth-checking-out
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-05-30, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Technology was once simply a tool—and a small one at that—used to amplify human intent and capacity. That was the story of the industrial revolution: we could control nature and build large, complex human societies, and the more we employed and mastered technology, the better things got. We don’t live in that world anymore. Not only has technology become entangled with the structure of society, but we also can no longer see the world around us without it. The separation is gone, and the control we thought we once had has revealed itself as a mirage. We’re in a transitional period of history right now…
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/seeing-like-a-data-structure.html
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-01, from: Bruce Schneier blog
A piece I coauthored with Fredrik Heiding and Arun Vishwanath in the Harvard Business Review:
Summary. Gen AI tools are rapidly making these emails more advanced, harder to spot, and significantly more dangerous. Recent research showed that 60% of participants fell victim to artificial intelligence (AI)-automated phishing, which is comparable to the success rates of non-AI-phishing messages created by human experts. Companies need to: 1) understand the asymmetrical capabilities of AI-enhanced phishing, 2) determine the company or division’s phishing threat severity level, and 3) confirm their current phishing awareness routines…
date: 2024-06-03, from: Ayjay blog
The story begins with creation, and creation is largely a matter of dividing: dividing the region of order from the region of chaos (tohu wabohu), then light from darkness, then the waters above from the waters below, then the waters below from the dry land, then “the lights in the vault of the heavens to […]
https://blog.ayjay.org/genesis-orientation/
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Julia Evans blog
https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/04/25/new-zine--how-git-works-/
date: 2024-06-03, from: Chris Heilmann’s blog
OpenAI playing nice, Google giving terrible advice, Microsoft’s spyware and lots to learn from excellent books and tutorials.News and ArticlesThe Doge meme dog died and we wonder what this does to the crypto market.ICQ shuts down, and all the numbers in pirated Blink182 MP3s don’t make any sense any longer.OpenAI tries to play nice and […]
https://christianheilmann.com/2024/06/03/dev-digest-118-not-a-total-recall/
date: 2024-06-03, from: Enlightenment Economics blog
I’m at the tail end of finalising the draft of my next book, with an end-June deadline, so my reading recently has mainly been fiction, to rest the brain. I enjoyed the international Booker winner Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, and … Continue reading
http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2024/06/homo-numericus/
date: 2024-06-03, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Next time you see a consumer survey, watch your wallet
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-consumers
date: 2024-06-03, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
The name is great. In German we call slow worms Blindschleiche, a blind sneak. Saw one today on the forest road as I was jogging after the rain.
It was a small one, but unafraid!
The sandals you see in the picture above are my running sandals. See a review by Benjamin Baugh from nearly 10 years ago.
I was running through the forest on the hill behind us:
This map from 1925 shows all the land between the river and the forest that used to be agriculture and now it’s mostly just the city…
(Source)
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-06-02-slow-worm
date: 2024-06-03, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act, which declared that “all non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided,
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-2-2024
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-03, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
To people who say you get wrong answers from ChatGPT, if I wanted my car to kill me I could drive into oncoming traffic. If I wanted my calculator to give me incorrect results I could press the wrong keys. In other words, ChatGPT is a very new tool. It can be hard to control, you have to check what it says, and try different questions. But the result, if you pay attention and don’t drive it under the wheels of a bus, is that you can do things you never could do before.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/02.html#a023044
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: Daring Fireball
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/take-and-edit-photos-or-videos-iph3d039f23/17.0/ios/17.0
date: 2024-06-02, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Airport, interior Faro, Thursday afternoon. Quote of the Day “We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.” Marshall McLuhan Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Amanda Ventura | The Way (Harmonica Blues Solo) Link … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/monday-3-june-2024/39508/
date: 2024-06-02, from: Jeff Geerling blog
Saying a lot while saying nothing at all about Ansible AWX
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>A few days ago, the post <a href="https://www.ansible.com/blog/upcoming-changes-to-the-awx-project/">Upcoming Changes to the AWX Project</a> came across my feed. An innocuous title, but sometimes community-impacting changes are buried in posts like this. So, as an interested Ansible user, I read through the post.</p>
In 1,610 words, almost nothing of substance was written.
A lot about how it’s not 2014 anymore, so 2014-era architecture doesn’t suit AWX. Then a big bold disclaimer at the bottom:
Before we conclude, we should be clear about what will not happen.
- We are not changing the Ansible project
- We are not adjusting our OSS license structure
Ultimately, we need to make some changes to the way our systems work and our projects are structured. Not a rewrite but a refactoring and restructuring of how some of the core components connect and communicate with each other.
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/saying-lot-while-saying-nothing-all-about-ansible-awx
date: 2024-06-02, from: Robert Reich’s blog
The politics of martyrdom.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-will-trumps-conviction-mean
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-02, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Walt Mossberg shows why ChatGPT is such a conversation-starter, and thus is incredible art. He asked it to draw a picture of himself with Kara Swisher. Of course everyone did that, and posted the result to the thread. The variety of responses is amazing, revealing of what I’m not sure. Here’s the one it came up with for me.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/02.html#a191813
date: 2024-06-02, from: Om Malik blog
Apple, really stepped into it, when it made an iPad advertisement that essentially showed all creativity (and creative effort) being crushed and compacted into a thin piece of glass. It was a tone-deaf move from a company, that has always relied on (and portrayed itself as an ally of creatives. Last week, Daniel Ek, chief …
https://om.co/2024/06/02/creativity-has-no-shelf-life/
date: 2024-06-02, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-1-2024-b3c
date: 2024-06-02, updated: 2024-06-02, from: Daring Fireball
https://developer.apple.com/design/awards/
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-02, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I bet you could do a beautifully readable blog by just dynamically rendering its RSS feed. Why bother statically rendering the home page, month page, day page or pages for each individual post. Dynamic servers are so cheap these days.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/02.html#a151808
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-02, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
There’s a lot of stuff in Friday’s piece. Ken Smith pointed out the story in the very last postscript. Before that, I hadn’t put it together that podcasting worked because for a while Adam did my job, and for a while I did his. That guaranteed two things – that the technology would be maximally simple, and that anyone with a computer could do the whole recording and production job without help from an expensive studio. In both cases the result was nowhere near commercial standards, but that didn’t matter, in fact it helped that there were so many glitches in my early podcasts, that said that hey if this guy can do it, so can I.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/02.html#a143642
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-06-02, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
The worst part about having a felon in the White House is that he’s probably committing felonies while he’s in the freaking White House.
http://scripting.com/2024/06/02.html#a143128
date: 2024-06-02, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
A Reason To Smile
https://steady.substack.com/p/luckenbach-texas
date: 2024-06-02, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And last week’s winner
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-caption-contest-the-falls
date: 2024-06-02, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Today, as MAGA Republicans attack the rule of law and promise to prosecute their political enemies if they get back into power, it’s easy to forget that once upon a time, certain Republican politicians championed reason and compromise and took a stand against MAGAs’ predecessors. On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, stood up against Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and his supporters, who were undermining American democracy in a crusade against “communism.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-1-2024
date: 2024-06-02, updated: 2024-06-02, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.pcmag.com/news/icq-one-of-the-oldest-instant-messengers-is-shutting-down
date: 2024-06-02, updated: 2024-06-02, from: Daring Fireball