Posts by Jan Ingvoldstad

A quick guide to tool-calling in large language models

Executing arbitrary code from an LLM is such a great idea

"The right tools can give LLMs the ability to execute arbitrary code, access APIs, ..."

... and no critical eye towards what the consequences of these accesses are.

Bravo.

Spam blocklist SORBS closed by its owner, Proofpoint

Good riddance to all the false positives

In my opinion, this is one of the worst blocklisting services ever.

Delisting or expiry? Forget it. Entries from 2004 hung around *forever*.

Accuracy? Don't make me laugh. The false positives abound.

A SORBS listing, if you could verify that it was recent, could have had some value as input in spam scoring, but has regrettably not been useful for making a direct yes-or-no decision.

For that purpose, I would rather have gone with Spamhaus' or Invaluement's free services, or paid for the services, combined with easy bypassing for the very few false positives.

Stable Diffusion 3 to debut on June 12

Re: Perfectly ordinary 7-string guitar

No worries, mate :)

Re: Perfectly ordinary 7-string guitar

Yes, they exist. And SD 1 XL at least got string spacing reasonably correct. SD 3 does not. :)

Perfectly ordinary 7-string guitar

And I can't help noticing that they are proud of going from slightly weirdly contorted dark hands to slightly weirdly muscular lighter hands.

Is this the best they can do?

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

Barbarians …

… put milk in their tea, drowning the flavors.

Ah, there’s my coat!

tz database community up in arms over proposals to merge certain time zones

Re: Don't mention the...

In the interest of factual honesty, I seem to be mistaken here. (East, West, and reunited) Germany appears to have had the same deviations from the current DST regulations as Norway in 1980, and in 1981-1996.

Re: Wow, just wow

Well, some of us handle data from the past, and doing so consistently requires that essential libraries don’t suddenly change semantics radically.

Re: Don't mention the...

In 1980, Germany started DST on the last Sunday of March, while Norway started on April 6th.

DST was standardized in the EEC as of 1981, and Norway (and, I assume, the rest of the EEA) joined.

Re: Is UCLA forcing the hand?

If there is an issue in non-European nations past, present or future being incorrectly bundled together, the obvious solution to me would be to fix the incorrect bundling.

Re: Don't mention the...

Seems like most people have forgotten that 1981 is 40 years ago, not 50.

Europe/Oslo had no DST until 1980, when DST started in early April, thereby divergent from Europe/Berlin, until the EEA coordinated from 1981.

How I poured a client's emails straight into the spam bin – with one Friday evening change

Too much info in too few X-Spam headers

Trevor, if I may:

The solution should have been to have a separate X-Spam header that *only* carries the black-or-white status of YES or NO, and no other information.

X-Spam-Flag, X-Spam-Is-It, or whatever.

But I'm way too late to help you :)

Spectra builds MONSTER TRUCK of tape libraries

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!

Sorry, sorry, this just hasn't been said in a long time, has it?

I'll get my coat.

Thousands of WordPress sites commandeered by Black Hole

TimThumb is not a WordPress plugin.

It is more commonly a part of themes and other WordPress plugins, so you won't know that your TimThumb is out of date. You have to trust that the WordPress plugin creators provide an updated version.

Unfortunately, many of the plugins and themes using TimThumb are commercially paid editions which are not managed directly by WordPress' own plugin database, you download and install them semi-manually or fully manually.

Also, these plugins and themes rarely publish which TimThumb version they use, they don't publish security advisories or notes regarding their products, and and and.

Nevermind that the entire concept of TimThumb is b0rken, technically speaking. :)

Generally, allowing pluggable PHP code is a Bad Thing security wise.

Did a Seagate sales bloke just say 5TB drives are coming?

And we never did!

That is, at home we started with a 5 MB HDD connected to the dual-drive IBM PC. We never managed to fill that disk, and couldn't see how it would even be possible.

Later, we upgraded to an IBM PC XT with a 10 MB HDD, and then we filled it, of course. :)

Adobe Flash vulnerable to remote-execution exploit

Yes, Flash 10 is vulnerable.

http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb09-01.html

The link IS in the advisory that El Reg links to, but the iDefense advisory sucks royally.

"iDefense has confirmed the existence of this vulnerability in latest version of Flash Player, version 9.0.124.0. Previous versions may also be affected."

Well, that's not the latest version of Flash Player, not by a long mile. This marks down iDefense as an unreliable source for advisories in my book.

VeriSign remedies massive SSL blunder (kinda, sorta)

It's not as if botnets ...

... have much CPU power available for massively parallel computing, now is it?