I think I’m noticing a trend with English words:

• “cool” used to mean “a bit cold” but now it mostly means “good”
• “awesome” used to mean “inspiring awe” but now it mostly means “good”
• “fantastic” used to mean “fantastical” but now it mostly means “good”
• “incredible” used to mean “unbelievable” but now it mostly means “good”
• “amazing” used to mean “inspiring amazement” but now it mostly means “good”

RE: https://thepit.social/@peter/116376219055579156

I know a lot of people, in software and otherwise, who are feeling things along these lines.

Hold on, whatever tools you’re using, just hold on to your sense of purpose and meaning. There are a lot of forces at work in this world that want to rob you of that. Your feeling of losing that is not recognition of some new fact of our reality; it is you experiencing a psychological weapon.

DuckDuckGo has a handy feature called "bangs," where you can turn anything you type into your browser's address bar into a search of a specific site just by tacking on a special code associated with that site starting with an exclamation mark. This saves you a lot of clicking around.

You just have to be careful to use the right bang code. !mw, for instance, will pipe your search through the Merriam-Webster dictionary, which is useful all the time. But if your finger slips and you type !me, your search will be piped through the Mass Effect fan wiki

so it cost anthropic $20k to find this openbsd crash bug which amounts to putting a negative integer in a tcp field where a negative integer was not expected by the c code which does some cavalier int cast bullshit, ie. a vuln which is totally fuzzable, and quite certainly would have been found by the fuzzers of the 2010s had anyone cared to burn that much compute on fuzzing openbsd.

The difference today is not that anybody suddenly cares about investing that much in openbsd (is the build server still a donated machine running in Theo's basement?), but that openbsd's reputation for security makes it really good marketing if you can find a bug, any bug, it doesn't matter; and that marketing value is what makes it worth spending $20k on fuzzing.

Python Tip #99 (of 365):

Don't convert pathlib.Path objects to strings

Using a pathlib.Path object in an f-string or a print call is fine and I do this often.

But if you THINK you need to convert a pathlib.Path object to a string to pass it off to some other path-handling utility, you probably don't need to. Most path-handling utilities in Python support pathlib.Path objects just fine.

#Python #DailyPythonTip

Bruce Schneier was on today's edition of The Tech Report, talking about the newest wank out of Anthropic.

He made a claim that he'd seen researchers compare the asserted performance of the new model (in the "system card" etc.) against previously-available models, and they were performing at about the same level (finding the same vulns, it sounded like).

Does anybody know what research he was referring to?

EDIT: FOUND! https://aisle.com/blog/ai-cybersecurity-after-mythos-the-jagged-frontier

A web search is not pulling anything up for me, because the infosphere is currently flooded with credulous repetition of Anthropic's marketing materials (and I have no reason to believe those aren't just lies)