links (88)
Tech Trees, Fast, Slow, Password Replacements, Gettysburg, Prompt Injection, SVGs, and other links
But software that's fast changes behavior.
What problems can human beings only solve over a very long period of time? And how can we build institutions that solve those problems?
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
Speaker Notes
[Transcribed from voice recording by A. Lincoln, 11/18/63]
These are some notes on the Gettysburg meeting. I'll whip them into better shape when I can get on to my computer.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation…
We replaced passwords with something worse
Too many services have been using the following login method:
Enter an email address or phone number
The website will send a 6-digit code
Use the 6-digit code to log inPlease stop.
Clarity is one of the most underrated tools you have. Without it, people spin. They waste time guessing what “done” means, or whether their work matters, or if you’re secretly disappointed in them. Your job is to remove that ambiguity.
Because they are so free and loose, some of our best ideas emerge from ramblings. They’re often the source of feature ideas, small prototypes, and creative solutions to long-standing problems.
How to write a good design document
The most important person to convince is the author. The act of writing a design document helps to add rigor to what are otherwise vague intuitions. Writing reveals how sloppy your thinking was (and later, code will show how sloppy your writing was).
url.town doesn’t have any overly lofty ambitions; we’re just building our own directory of really nice websites. We’re not trying to fully recreate the original Yahoo! or DMOZ directories. We’re not aiming for some astronomical number of links. This is just one space on the web, tied to a community that loves to share neat things with one another.
The server keeps a record of what name was last sent to it from each IPv4 address.
If you hold more IPv4 addresses in a /8 address block than anyone else, that means you control that block.
Each block you control gives you 1 point.
Creating Apps: Lovable. This is new to me. I’ve created a couple of apps, one of which I plan to share, and I’m working on a couple more.
A Friendly Introduction to SVG
One interesting difference between HTML documents and SVG illustrations is that SVGs don’t have edges. In theory, they extend in every direction by an infinite amount. There’s nothing stopping us from placing a shape 1,000,000 pixels away from the origin point, in any direction.
I ended up choosing Litestar, which is the [python web framework] that doesn’t have a ravenous all-consuming hype machine surrounding it. And I’m very glad I did, because today I’m more convinced than ever it was the right choice, and for the last 18 months or so every new project I’ve started at my day job has been built with Litestar.
Tuba (1835)
69.1 = 30.8 (source: OpenAI)
Prompt injection engineering for attackers: Exploiting GitHub Copilot
For open-source projects, issues may be filed by any user. This gives us the following exploit scenario:
The attacker opens a helpful GitHub issue on a public repository owned by the victim.
The victim assigns Copilot to the issue to have it implement a fix.
The issue contains a prompt injection attack that causes Copilot to discreetly insert a backdoor for the attacker in its pull request, which the victim merges.
To demonstrate this exploit scenario, we will target a repository containing a simple Flask web application we created.
