We can all be AI engineers – and we can do it with open source models
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk at Hannah Foxwell’s amazing AI for the Rest of Us conference about something that’s been brewing in my mind after years of working in DevOps, MLOps, and now GenAI: the barriers to AI engineering are crumbling fast. The tools have gotten good enough that if you […]
Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs
Abstract:This study investigates the emerging phenomenon of “ghost hiring” or “ghost jobs”, where employers advertise job openings without intending to fill them. Using a novel dataset from Glassdoor and employing a LLM-BERT technique, I find that up to 21% of job ads may be ghost jobs, and this is particularly prevalent in specialized industries and […]
PyPI now supports digital attestations
publishing security oidc PyPI package maintainers can now publish signed digital attestations when publishing, in order to further increase trust in the supply-chain security of their projects. Additionally, a new API is available for consumers and installers to verify published attestations. Many projects have already begun publishing attestations, with more than 20,000 attestations already published. […]
The Onion Buys Alex Jones’s Infowars Out of Bankruptcy
The satirical news site planned to turn Infowars into a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” who peddle conspiracy theories and health supplements. The Onion, a satirical publication that skewers newsmakers and current events, said on Thursday that it had won a bankruptcy auction to acquire Infowars, a website founded and operated by the […]
A memory leak in Apple’s Network Extension framework
Is it normal for the Little Snitch Network Extension to consume Gigabytes of memory? No it isn’t. Unfortunately that’s another new bug in the Network Extension framework of macOS. It’s a memory leak in Apple’s framework, which developers must use to create a firewall for the Mac. This bug first occurred in macOS 15.0 Sequoia. […]
Typesetting and printing a family memoir (2017)
July 17, 2017 In the 1980s, my great-uncle, André Klat, wrote his memoirs on a typewriter. The memoirs included the family history going back to 1760 and charming stories of his youth and adulthood in Egypt. The copy that made its way into my hands had been photocopied so many times that some pages were […]
Keycloak took 10 months to fix a 2FA bypass
Earlier this year, I was working with my colleague Ema on a source-assisted application and architecture assessment for a client who was using Keycloak to implement single sign-on on their applications. The purpose of the assessment was not to audit Keycloak itself. However, being it at the core of the authentication system, we took a […]
MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
November 12, 2024 Today marks two years since I first set up an e-ink display in my mom’s apartment to help her live on her own with amnesia. The display has worked extremely well during those two years, so I’m sharing the basic set-up in case others find it useful for similar situations. Note: unless […]
Waiting for many things at once with io_uring
When doing systems programming we often need to wait for something to happen. Common examples might be waiting for some data to come through a socket or waiting on a lock. We also often want to wait on any of several conditions to become true. A web server might be handling many sockets at once, […]
The geometry of data: the missing metric tensor and the Stein score [Part II]
Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Rigby. / The James Webb Space Telescope captures gravitational lensing, a phenomenon that can be modeled using differential geometry. Note: This is a continuation of the previous post: Thoughts on Riemannian metrics and its connection with diffusion/score matching [Part I], so if you haven’t read it yet, please consider […]