Everything you never wanted to know about file locking (2010)

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20101213

#HackerNews #filelocking #technology #2010 #cybersecurity #hackernews #apenwarr

Everything you never wanted to know about file locking

(Foreshadowing: I found a bug in MacOS X 10.6's fcntl(F_SETLK) locking that could cause corruption of sqlite databases. To see if your syst...

"if you’re really good at debating — the thing they teach you to be, in debate club or whatever — then you learn how to 'win' debates without uncovering actual truth." #apenwarr https://apenwarr.ca/log/20231006
Interesting

A few conversations last week made me realize I use the word “interesting” in an unusual way. I rely heavily on mental models. Of course, e...

Interesting blog post by #apenwarr, where he argues that LLM outputs are actually magical if we define magic as something we know is there, but we can't explain. We cannot explain how the model generates those outputs (e.g. good, insightful summaries of text), even though we can explain the mechanisms that were used to produce them.

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20230415

Systems design 2: What we hope we know

Someone asked if I could write about the rise of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) and what I think that means for the future of people, t...

Articolo (tecnico, non politico) molto interessante su #profiling, targeted #ads, #ML e altre cose che non funzionano davvero. #apenwarr

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201

Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway

I don't mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get something useful in exchange. But that's not what happens. A forme...