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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: August 28th, 2023

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  • If it averages several instances, with enough signal you could decompose a linear combination (e.g. average) of different patterns back out into its constituent parts.

    A smarter system won’t just take the mean of the votes from different instances but rather discard outliers as invalid input (flagging repeat offenders to be ignored in the future) and use the median or mode of the remainder. The results should also be quantitized to avoid leaking details about sources or internal algorithms; only the larger trends need to be reported.

    Of course you could always just keep the collected data private and only provide it to customers willing to pay $$$ for access, which handily limits instance operators’ ability to reverse-engineer the source of the data. And nothing prevents you from using separate instances for public and private data sets.


  • In what sense do you think this isn’t following the email standard? The plus sign is a valid character in the local part, and the standard doesn’t say how it should be interpreted (it could be a significant part of the name; it’s not proper to strip it out) or preclude multiple addresses from delivering to the same mailbox.

    Unfortunately the feature is too well-known, and the mapping from the tagged address to the plain address is too transparent. Spammers will just remove the label. You need either a custom domain so you can use a different separator (‘+’ is the default but you can generally choose something else for your own server) or a way to generate random, opaque temporary addresses.

    If you want to talk about non-compliant address handing, aside from not accepting valid addresses, the one that always bothers me is sites that capitalize or lowercase the local part of the address. Domain names are not case-sensitive, but the local part is. Changing the case could result in non-delivery or delivery to the wrong mailbox. Most servers are case-insensitive but senders shouldn’t assume that is always true.







  • So you’re not remapping the source ports to be unique? There’s no mechanism to avoid collisions when multiple clients use the same source port? Full Cone NAT implies that you have to remember the mapping (potentially indefinitely—if you ever reassign a given external IP:port combination to a different internal IP or port after it’s been used you’re not implementing Full Cone NAT), but not that the internal and external ports need to be identical. It would generally only be used when you have a large enough pool of external IP addresses available to assign a unique external IP:port for every internal IP:port. Which usually implies a unique external IP for each internal IP, as you can’t restrict the number of unique ports used by each client. This is why most routers only implement Symmetric NAT.

    (If you do have sufficient external IPs the Linux kernel can do Full Cone NAT by translating only the IP addresses and not the ports, via SNAT/DNAT prefix mapping. The part it lacks, for very practical reasons, is support for attempting to create permanent unique mappings from a larger number of unconstrained internal IP:port combinations to a smaller number of external ones.)



  • Examples of local commands I might run in tmux could include anything long-running which is started from the command line. A virtual machine (qemu), perhaps, or a video encode (ffmpeg). Then if I need to log out or restart my GUI session for any reason—or something goes wrong with the session manager—it won’t take the long-running process with it. While the same could be done with nohup or systemd-run, using tmux allows me to interact with the process after it’s started.

    I also have systems which are accessed both locally and remotely, so sometimes (not often) I’ll start a program on a local terminal through tmux so I can later interact with it through SSH without resorting to x11vnc.


  • Not the GP but I also use tmux (or screen in a pinch) for almost any SSH session, if only as insurance against dropped connections. I occasionally use it for local terminals if there is a chance I might want a command to outlive the current graphical session or migrate to SSH later.

    Occasionally it’s nice to be able to control the session from the command line, e.g. splitting a window from a script. I’ve also noticed that wrapping a program in tmux can avoid slowdowns when a command generates a lot of output, depending on the terminal emulator. Some emulators will try to render every update even if it means blocking the output from the program for the GUI to catch up, rather than just updating the state of the terminal in memory and rendering the latest version.