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[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

'Suspicious given the elections going on'screenshot showing lemmy's reports interface where someone (username redacted) has submitted a report about this post with "Reason: Suspicious given elections going on and the recent influx of rhetoric around this."

😭

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago

yep. (see my other comment in this thread)

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 95 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

another screenshot of a tweet, no link, no alt text, smh my head.

imo science memes should link the science!

Here is the paper from April which this tweet is actually referring to: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/293/2069/20252994/481340/The-phonology-of-sperm-whale-coda-vowels

Unsurprisingly the tweet's characterization of the research as finding whale language "structurally comparable to Chinese" is an exaggeration; they are actually saying it is similar to tonal languages and then using Mandarin as one example of a tonal language.

here are the two paragraphs which actually mention Chinese

Human vowels consist of a sequence of glottal pulses produced by vocal folds. Whale codas consist of a sequence of clicks produced by vibrating phonic lips, which play a role similar to the human vocal folds [15]. In human languages, the frequency of glottal pulses corresponds to pitch—closely spaced glottal pulses give rise to a higher pitch, while more widely spaced pulses give rise to a lower pitch. In linguistics, tone refers to pitch as recruited to express linguistic meaning. Many languages use tone to distinguish between different words. For example, in Mandarin Chinese, the following four words differ only in their tonal contour, while having the same consonants and vowels [21]: high and level tone ma ‘mother’, rising tone ‘hemp’, falling-rising tone ma ‘horse’ and falling tone ‘scold’. The coda types can therefore be compared to human tone: ‘regular’ coda types can be compared to level tones, codas with ‘increasing’ ICIs to falling tones and codas with ‘decreasing’ ICIs to rising tones. (However, our analogy has a limit: while in human languages, different tones can be associated with different meanings, the meanings conveyed by sperm whale codas have not been established.) In figure 1, the ‘F0’ (fundamental frequency) of each coda is represented with a blue line.

Beguš et al. [15] show that different coda vowel qualities can be instantiated on the same coda types and propose that coda type and coda quality are orthogonal [15]. This points to another parallelism between the sperm whale communication system and human language, as tone and vowel quality are often similarly orthogonal. For example, in Mandarin Chinese, the falling–rising tone may appear on any vowel, e.g. ma ‘horse’, ma ‘rice’ and ma ‘smear’. Orthogonality, in this case, is used to describe the independent mechanisms of production between the traditional timing or source features and the vocalic or filter features. In other words, the rate of vocal fold or phonic lip vibration can be independent of the shape of the resonant body (the vocal tract or the distal air sac), and both vowel types surface on several traditional coda types. However, while the production can be independent, there can still exist distributional patterns, where a vowel quality is more frequent on certain tones or some coda vowels are more common on certain traditional coda types. Our paper builds on Beguš et al.’s [15] findings and reveals further complexities within the system of sperm whale vocalizations.

Here is an article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/15/sperm-whales-alphabet-vocalizations-similar-humans ...which also links this other fascinating news from the same lab from back in March https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/27/scientists-film-whale-giving-birth-other-whales-help-her ("This is the first evidence of birth assistance in non-primates")

finally here https://xcancel.com/kuso_otoko/status/2062224294835540161 is the tweet this post is a screenshot of, where you can find people in the replies already making the predictable "met them at a very Chinese time in their life", "that's why japan hates them", etc jokes.

notei'm definitely not working in China's Cetacean Ops and trying to prevent the western world from finding out that whale speak is just super slowed down Mandarin, i swear

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago

One shot rewriting the whole test suite

tridge's blog post makes it clear that this was not "one-shotted" at all.

You should read the whole thread

I regret reading it; I'll assume in good faith that it wasn't LLM generated but it is ironically as confidently wrong as if it were.

It almost (and should have) lost me when it started by quote-agreeing with someone else saying "rsync was basically done until the maintainer discovered vibecoding" - no, pay attention, it was not "basically done", there were/are a mountain of CVEs!

But then this got my interest:

This does not “translate tests into pytest” or a unit testing framework, it writes its own testing framework where tests are whole python scripts that redefine basic test functions in every script. Surely there would be a single way to “run rsync and get the results” - nope, well, there is, but then every test file will randomly redefine its own _run_and_capture function.

tridge says he has used pytest on other projects and had good reasons not to use it here; I'm inclined to believe him.

But the notion of every test defining its own way to invoke rsync sounded like a valid criticism, and an easy one to verify, so I checked: It turns out that there is in fact a common run_rsync function which is used by the majority of the tests. One test defines its own _run_and_capture function (which differs in that it writes the output to a file, for reasons I didn't investigate), and it looks like a few others invoke rsync other ways, but the majority of them use the common function.

So, that rambling thread's sole concrete criticism of rsync's new python tests turns out to be false.

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago

Mamdani signed an “executive order”

in comic sans

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submitted 2 days ago by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/security@lemmy.ml

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/48231531

June 2026 Android Security Bulletin notes CVE-2025-48595 is being exploited in the wild. It's being widely misreported in tech media as a 0-day vulnerability being exploited. That's a major misunderstanding of Android Security Bulletins and how poorly OEMs keep up with patches.

Google disclosed CVE-2025-48595 to OEMs in a security preview release near the end of September 2025. Those patches are allowed to be shipped right away, so it was included in our 2025092501 release. We noted it was already publicly fixed so it was added to our regular releases too in 2025100300.

We quickly shipped the patch after it was disclosed to OEMs by Google but we plan to do better in the future. SQLite 3.44.5 was released with this backport on 2025-07-24. We weren't previously aware SQLite maintained upstream LTS branches for Android but our plan is to closely follow those now.

In this case, Google slipped up and took 2 months to add the patch to the security preview releases. We plan to avoid that in the future by handling this ourselves because this happens too often. It's also a nice example of how Android Security Bulletins are set extremely low expectations for OEMs.

GrapheneOS quickly ships all security preview patches. Every AOSP patch included in the Android Security Bulletins was already available in GrapheneOS for over a month. We end up shipping patches 2-3 months earlier. Google having such low expectations for OEMs and even themselves is ridiculous.

Android's security patch system doesn't make any sense and is completely at odds with how quickly people can discover and exploit vulnerabilities with the help of LLMs. The security preview release system would be far more reasonable if the embargo for sources and details was no more than 48 hours.

Google's embargo system harms security for nearly all Android users by setting the expectation of patches taking 2 to 6 months for OEMs to ship after disclosure. Patches are available to sophisticated attackers as soon as Google discloses them to OEMs. A partial embargo for months makes no sense.

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 8 points 3 days ago

the tweet this post is a screenshot of: https://xcancel.com/EmbaCubaUS/status/2060376971247337849

the vaccine it is about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racotumomab (trade name Vaxira)

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

The 2021 paper OSRM-CCTV: Open-source CCTV-aware routing and navigation system for privacy, anonymity and safety says they published source code at https://github.com/Fuziih but I don't see it there now (though there is a related project called cctv-exposure).

The final published version of the paper seems to be paywalled; it's probably on scihub but there is also a preprint of it here on arxiv.

https://github.com/FNBIP/ghost-route (just 3 commits, from February this year) says it is inspired by the paper and "extended to a production-grade multi-mode threat routing system". It's a node app you run locally (there doesn't appear to be a public instance currently) which would be nice if it could work offline but unfortunately "Offline mode with pre-downloaded OSM tiles" is still on the roadmap and it currently lists "A Mapbox GL JS token (free tier works)" as a requirement (which is probably why there isn't a public instance - someone would need to pay mapbox if they wanted to run it for other people).

I have not tried it; if anyone reading this has or does please post here about how it works!

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submitted 4 days ago by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/goodnews@lemmy.ml
[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

The ISA was published 11 years ago and many companies have been shipping hardware for years now; you can even get a RISC-V mainboard for a Framework laptop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#End-user_hardware

Unfortunately the performance is more comparable to a raspberry pi than a modern x86 PC; the faster ones are still coming soon.

You can follow RISC-V developments here on lemmy at !riscv@lemmy.ml btw

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[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 14 points 6 days ago

this is part of the Journey of the Magi on the east wall of the Magi Chapel in Florence, painted by Benozzo Gozzoli around 1459.

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Does that loop infinitely

yes and no; i've now edited the comment.

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