Notices by lcamtuf :verified: :verified: :verified: (lcamtuf@infosec.exchange)

We misunderstood the concept of afterlife. What the religious texts meant to say is that the essence of your online life will be preserved as the weights of an LLM that handles airline customer support and prescribes Viagra in a telehealth app.

Re: the DOJ / Chrome story - it's bad news.

Browsers are massive and very costly to develop. Underdogs like Brave are the wrong benchmark: they tap into Google's work. For ChromeCo, we're probably talking $500M to $1B a year.

And there's nothing that ChromeCo can sell to pay its bills that wouldn't hurt users worse than the ad dollars they're relying on today.

I keep coming back to this, but *hug your content creator today*.

The internet has a bystander problem. We discover insightful content on the web, we assume the author already received the spoils - and we move on.

To offer a personal anecdote, I'm the author of afl-fuzz. It's been used by tens of thousands of folks - for hobby, for work, to elevate academic careers. I fielded hundreds of bug reports and feature requests - and perhaps two or three personal "thank you" notes.

Today, I'm running lcamtuf.substack.com. Some articles get 50k+ views. It works the same: there are far more folks keen to point out errors or post contrarian takes on HN.

I'm not fishing for compliments for myself. It's just that, the next time you come across a useful OSS project or an interesting blog, drop the author a note. No one else does.

Scooby Doo meets Yogi Bear

There is this genre of videos where people climb a ladder to prune some high branch, the branch inevitably starts swinging toward the trunk before they finish the cut, then breaks free once it exceeds some critical angle, and takes out them or the ladder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzd8WtVJVfc

This is rivaled only by videos of people trying to fell trees using cars

Most of life's wisdom can be found in chainsaw manuals

@feld @lattera Battery chainsaws have relatively little torque, because there's not much room for a beefy motor once you accommodate the battery. But they spin the chain fast and have very narrow chains to make up for less power, though. I guess this might make it easier to chew through protective gear.

But they also stop on a dime, while gas engines have a fair amount of momentum, so on balance, I think they're safer...

Six habits of successful entrepreneurs:

1) Rich parents

2)

Ah yes, I remember buying that textbook

The mysteries of life, a story in two parts

Trust but verify

What's your favorite conspiracy theory? Give me the good stuff, not the lame stuff for the masses.

@aris Steam-powered PC?

There is this story about NYC planning to "wipe out $2B in medical debt":

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-eric-adams-medical-debt/

They're doing this by purchasing this debt for $18M (less than 1% of nominal value). But this means they're not buying *good* debt for people who are making payments - or were ever likely to.

Much like John Oliver's stunt a while back, they're buying junk debt and essentially throwing away money. The only winner is a bottom-feeding collections agency who gets to offload some worthless leads.

The thing is, unpaid debt is a big deal for a while, but if the debtor can't be forced to pay for several years, it becomes nearly worthless. The statute of limitations for legal enforcement is around 3-6 years in most states. After that, the records get passed around from one ephemeral, bottom-feeding collections agency to another. The agencies occasionally send junk mail or try to make phone calls, hoping to find a sucker who'd make it worth their time. After a while, they give up.

So yes, you can buy that debt, but you're not making the world a whole lot better. You're spending more than the collection agencies were ever expecting to see.

Life, the universe, and accidental Sokoban: https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/life-the-universe-and-accidental

Transformative ideas always appear obvious in retrospect

This is a pretty good quote from Matt Levine:

"I used to write a lot about crypto. The reason I liked writing about crypto is that it seemed to be rediscovering all of regular finance from first principles, quickly, in public. It was a fabulous laboratory for understanding financial structures. If you wanted a public demonstration of why, I don’t know, infinitely leveraged shadow banks were bad, you could wait 20 minutes and crypto would give you one."

I made the same point before: the most interesting part of the phenomenon wasn't that it's necessarily good or bad, that it's energy-hungry or not - but that you're getting an empirical validation of many of the crusty old principles of "classical" finance. Funnily, delivered to you by the folks who rejected all that dogma in the first place.

If you or your loved one tried to use the ffmpeg command line, you might be entitled to compensation

I can't believe my neighbor already had his truck delivered