datenwolf

Hacker, Physicist, CCC, µC³, Chaotic Neutral, INTJ-T – 𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 – recruiting an army of corvids. /// followbacks mostly only for other birders.

OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9413-3474

Public Key

npub1mkmzc7ttrmlp3vzthpq6ztd6923dv4yf507vee99q7euu7rhwldqsuc0eu

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsdmd3v0943alsckp9mssdp9kaz4gkk2jy68lxvujjs0v7w0pmh0kspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsfna2nw

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nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1mkmzc7ttrmlp3vzthpq6ztd6923dv4yf507vee99q7euu7rhwldqsuc0eu

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Last Notes

2026-06-12 16:36:18 GMT

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But, as far as my line of work goes, because LLMs and coding agents (still) struggle to "see" (they don't see, they're "just" extremizing the Laplacian action between the prompt and the generated token stream) the big picture, they still tend to produce terrible code.
Every now and them – with a lot of hand holding – I test them on the finicky problems I had to solve as a baseline. The code that comes out often resembles my naive, low perf PoCs.
3/3

2026-06-12 16:30:36 GMT

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Regarding security work: I actually foresaw the enormous capabilities of ISA/programming language coupled LLMs for the discovery of vulnerabilities. As far as reversing binaries go, I have to agree that LLMs are quite effective deobfuscators/prettifiers. You can throw at them x86 code naively decompiled to C and LLMs will do a quite impressive job.
2/
I posted a somewhat provocative remark toward this 2 years ago on Xitter: https://x.com/datenwolf/status/1798261751714295973
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/116/738/075/942/494/417/original/6709f9d31a0bac79.png

2026-06-12 16:20:11 GMT

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Regarding navigating codebases: Personally I take great enjoyment in figuring out the low level stuff. You're a demoscener? Isn't most of the fun in discovering the workings of the machine?
Regarding boilerplate: Lots of boilerplate is a sign of a poor foundational design. My current project actually is a large-ish refactoring task with the aim do eliminate most of the boilerplate that did accumulate. It's about 80% theory building, not coding.
1/

2026-06-12 16:05:26 GMT

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Out of curiosity (I mean this honestly!):
What benefits do you get out of LLMs?
(P.S / Re seniority: Every now and then I cross paths with people much younger than me, which I immediately recognize as far more skilled and intelligent than I am, and I usually get excitement and amazement from their feats. Laps around the Sun in age or developer years IMHO is a very poor metric).

2026-06-12 14:04:10 GMT

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At the end of the 30 minutes time limit the state polling priority queue was messed up, leading to the laser controller being hammered with bursts of redundant state requests, a couple of particular corner cases in the implementation of the command were not dealt with (maximum frame size of comms buffers, requiring diagnostics data traces to be fragmented).
Eventually I aborted the mess, and just wrote it down myself. 10 minute job.
3/3

2026-06-12 14:00:55 GMT

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Most recently they urged me to try them out to add support for a new command added the the lasers our company makes in the complementing communications library I maintain. Since I built the library for extensibility doing it fully manual was a 10 minute task, including writing tests.
I set a hard time limit of 30 minutes using Claude code to add the functionality.
2/

2026-06-12 13:57:13 GMT

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I spend most of my time earning money with developing software (specifically realtime RF signal processing and image conversion using GPUs). In the past I've written ROTS kernels, networking stacks, laser control firmware to name a few. I also happen to know exactly how LLMs work and are trained.
From time to time coworkers try to "convince" me of the usefulness of coding agents.
1/

2026-06-12 13:37:59 GMT

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I'd like to encourage you to read up on the Gell-Mann-Amnesia Effect (the term was coined decades ago):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#%22Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect%22
In short: When reading reports of any kind one will immediately recognize misrepresentations or outright fabrications in the own field of expertise, even if presented confidently with eloquence. But outside the own expertise one is oblivious if presented the same way.
I keep being unimpressed by AI systems in my field of expertise.

2026-06-08 17:43:29 GMT

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Here's some ammunition to shoot it down:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02132-9

2026-06-04 09:31:11 GMT

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If you're putting lots of text on your slides, you're doing it wrong anyway. The slides are stage dressing for your talk, they NOT ARE your talk!
Put in your slides which can't be communicated verbally. Like photos of your experiments, data graphs, figures, the likes.
Example:
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/116/691/116/641/993/653/original/6d0168abdc8760b9.png
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/116/691/118/816/195/259/original/f15768f36752e0ec.png
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/116/691/120/841/291/149/original/abeb19a6e4c00d84.png
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/116/691/124/734/754/526/original/87bccee935c6d5ec.png

2026-06-02 21:59:09 GMT

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Apparently this a.out performs simulation of Mott scattering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mott_scattering
And if I'm not mistaken there's also the Fortran-77 source code for it. No license information, and I honestly don't remember if I wrote this, or if we were given the code by our TA.

2026-06-02 21:35:24 GMT

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I just did a `find -name a.out` on my homedir, and apart from the CMake occassional configuration artifacts, there's one a.out that apparently belongs to one of the physics lab courses of my undergrad years, dating to August 2008.
Total XKCD-1360 situation discovery.

2026-05-27 19:33:51 GMT

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No. It doesn't take external input to be inspired. It's a BS argument, an excuse used by (lazy) people to rationalize their behavior.
Here's a suggestion: Ask your favorite GenAI tool to create an entirely new conceived language (conlang), with a fully fledged grammar and rich vocabulary, under the codition that it's completely removed from any existing human language.
Current GenAI tools are incapable of this task (because they don't know what language is).

2026-05-27 19:23:41 GMT

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No. The history of art is full of cases where a daring artist tries something so new, that it lacks any form of preconceived example.
Usually it's those pieces of art that are considered "scandalous" at first.
Also trained GenAI systems are not inspired. The training process is an extremely efficient lossy data compression method, and inference is a fuzzy keyed value lookup.
With the right prompts you can extract pretty much the original input data.

2026-05-27 19:08:52 GMT

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In visual arts, prompting at best can be compared to writing a screenplay, whereas the actual artistic creation is the creative work of set builders, grips, cinematographers and special and visual effect artists.
In the case of AI what you have a humonguous set of stolen works that have been numerically correlated between different domains of expression, and a machine that pieces together blurps matching the statistical profile of the prompt, then smoothes the seams.

2026-05-27 18:46:48 GMT

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"The new instruments" / synthesizers argument is bullshit. It's bullshit in the same was as the "photography vs. painting / drawing" argument is bullshit.
Playing a synthesizer requires skill. Creating a patch for a synthesizer requires creativity.
Phtotography is a form of artistic expression that requires skill and creativity. A skilled photographer can create art with the crapiest cameras, working the medium. But handing a Hasselblad to a noob will not make good photos.

2026-05-16 10:58:56 GMT

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This!
Also worth pointing out: LLMs are essentially "love bombing" their user. A technique (among others) used by cult leaders to isolate their marks from their social framework.
I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it: LLMs are cult indoctrination machines. They're short circuiting mental fault detection mechanisms that evolved for purpose of breaking cognitive feedback loops. LLMs create, amplify and steer cognitive feedback loops.

2026-04-01 13:01:34 GMT

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https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/116/329/569/937/695/816/original/1b5ebb26078e1a38.jpg

2026-04-01 12:57:07 GMT

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Darf ich vorschlagen, dass Du alle Zwischenschritte überspringst und direkt zum Acetylenschneidbrenner greifst?
Als Flüssigkeit kann es definitiv nicht mehr festgrefressen sein ;-)

2026-03-21 11:13:13 GMT

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And once again the Zig language project shows, that there's a better way: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/#strict-no-llm-no-ai-policy

2026-01-29 16:45:59 GMT

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If you were in need of DDR5, I have two kits of 2x 32GiB = 64 GiB 6400MT/s that I misordered by accident just days before the price hikes started.
For trusted people in the FOSS community who are in serious need for RAM, I'd part with them for a price close to what I bought them at.

2025-11-26 16:06:24 GMT

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I take it, that the name of the parrot is "stochastic", right?

2025-10-26 21:35:29 GMT

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if you find it, can you pass it on? I'd like to read _that_, too.

2025-10-23 17:31:01 GMT

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1. Yes
2. No
3. No - specifically those "features" are often XY-problem emanations
4. Yes, and hence contradicts 2
5. Yes, sort of. The fact that you actually can shell script X11, but (by design, not directly) Wayland / re competitors is often reason enough to not use it.

2025-09-12 08:19:50 GMT

Frage an die #Solar & #Akku Bubble: Ich würde mir gerne für Camping / Kleingarten (& Notstrom) eine #Powerbank die sich auch direkt per #Photovoltaik DC aufladen lässt zulegen; etwas so um die 1kWh (+/- 25%).
Früher (vor >20 Jahren) hätte (sogar "habe") ich mir sowas selber gebastelt, aber dafür fehlt mir jetzt die Zeit (und der Nerv).
Es gibt ja einige Offerten von diversen Herstellen. Gibt es gute Empfehlungen?

2025-07-23 10:02:05 GMT

#Cursed #programming idea: When autogenerating filenames escape characters that are unsafe to use in file path and command line with their corresponding Unicode Fullwidth Form counterparts:
/ → ／
\ → ＼
# → ＃
! → ！
" → ＂
' → ＇
( → （
) → ）
[ → ［
] → ］
{ → ｛
} → ｝
| → ｜
* → ＊
+ → ＋
, → ，
. → ．
- → －
: → ：
; → ；
< → ＜
> → ＞
= → ＝
? → ？

2025-07-09 14:01:48 GMT

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> You don’t have to be a pilot to design an aeroplane cockpit.
Yes, you do. In all major airplane companies user interface design decisions directly involve the end users (i.e. pilots); it's a lesson learnt the hard and bloody way.

2025-06-28 17:46:48 GMT

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Well that much I understood. Which is why I want to read it, so that I know the roadmap – in order to know where to place the roadblocks or maybe even turn parts of the path into a moat proactively.

2025-06-28 17:37:09 GMT

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May I ask you to reconsider, not sharing this study? The people who work hard to suck people into Gen AI will read it anyway, passing it along by word of mouth. And it's difficult to build social defenses if you don't know what to look out for and be wary of.

2025-01-15 21:46:01 GMT

How a Tesla autopilot computer vision system interprets the visual input when confronted with a train. 😆
@npub1z7x…q5jf
via: https://labyrinth.zone/notice/Aq5V74iVZRc1GyRCm8
(EDIT: rephrased for clarity)
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/113/834/558/306/205/219/original/55ec2f82c593fa48.mp4

2024-12-27 09:51:22 GMT

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Dieses Schlupfloch ist IIRC in der Petition (habe ich vor gefühlt einer Ewigkeit gezeichnet) explizit adressiert.

2024-10-15 16:42:59 GMT

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Jupiter has the strongest, largest magnetosphere of all the planets in the whole solar system; it even reaches into the inner system and directly interacts with the solar magnetosphere. This gives Jupiter the monster version of Van-Allen belts. The inner jovian moons pass through these belts. Io is the most extreme, its volcanic eruptions moving so much plasma into space, that it creates a radiation channel between Jupiter and its radiation belts.

2024-10-01 08:09:49 GMT

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So what will it be? Panic buying a whole bunch of essential ICs, CPUs, GPUs, memory? Or investing in Wacker Chemie stock, under the presumption, that they're going to increase their polysilicon purification and synthetic quartz/silica production capabilities…?
Decisions to be made.

2024-09-06 21:41:45 GMT

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weird cognitive biases, maybe. Maybe because I'm terrible with names all the time, and they have a much much weaker associative weight in my mind, than the actual work and ideas of a person.
Fun fact about me: I really, really struggled in math class, because I couldn't make a solid connection between some person's name and e.g. a series they formulated. Like Cauchy series.

2024-09-06 21:02:03 GMT

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understood. Didn't know before if you'd share names, or not.

2024-09-06 20:58:11 GMT

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maybe your head mate?

2024-04-11 18:01:00 GMT

@npub18rm…qeha @npub1j9l…jvxt nah, it's just the same, if not worse in the German speaking parts of the Internet.