André Polykanine

@menelion@dragonscave.space · Joined ⁨Dec⁩ ⁨2021⁩

A married and happy geek living in Strasbourg, France. #Backend software engineer, #accessibility specialist.
My main programming languages are #PHP and #CSharp.
Pro-European right-centrist. Technical progress must not be stoppable.
#AI is our assistant, not our replacement nor our enemy.
Pagan, worshipper of Scandinavian gods.
This account is multilingual. Posts may contain strong language, not always behind a content warning, and personal opinions.
No alt text, no boost.

Interests
#IT, #SoftwareDevelopment, #AI, #Microsoft, #Windows, #Books, #Languages, #Music, #Ethnography, #ScreenReaders, #Accessibility
Spoken Languages
English, français, українська, русский, deutsch
GitHub
github.com/Menelion verified
About me in emojis
👩‍❤️‍👨, 👨‍💻, 🎙️, 🎹, 🚶‍♂️, 👨‍🦯, 🧝‍♂️, 🐉, 🚳, 🚊, 🚆, ✈️, 🐈; 🥖, 🥩, 🍫, 🍔, 🍟
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André Polykanine@menelion@dragonscave.space

Replying to @⁨wronglang@bayes.club⁩

@wronglang @fastfinge @matt @nolan @zersiax I'll transcribe for you *one* line of logs, so you understand. Remember: one. line.
Left bracket, two thousand twenty-six dash zero seven dash twenty-eight T sixteen colon forty-seven colon fourteen point five hundred fifty-three thousand two hundred three plus zero zero colon zero zero, right bracket, doctrine.INFO colon Disconnecting left bracket right bracket left bracket right bracket
Notes:
1. It's an extremely primitive line of logs. Here it is in notation for normal people:
[2026-07-28T16:47:14.553203+00:00] doctrine.INFO: Disconnecting [] []
2. Punctuation symbols are in fact shortened for me, but I cannot turn them of because you know, a single semicolon in programming matters.
3. It would be super mega nice to be able to turn off timestamps, since, as you can see, it's the main pain in the bottom. However, they are not useless because sometimes you need to know when exactly this or that happened. Of course, I could set up several loggers, one with times, another without, and sometimes I do that (especially in Serilog-powered .NET apps). but still, if you need to sift through hundreds of kilobytes of them… you get it.

André Polykanine@menelion@dragonscave.space

Replying to @⁨pneumasolutions@social.pneumasolutions.com⁩

@pneumasolutions Great news. I don't want to be one of those whiners who spoil birthdays, but still… if you one day consider doing a thing that would work the other way around, i.e., controlling someone's Android phone from a screen reader-equipped PC, I would be extremely glad! It's a real pain to support my sighted mother, unfortunately… Thanks!

André Polykanine@menelion@dragonscave.space
Rant about Mastodon

A post I've recently boosted starts with: "I know #Mastodon hates LLMs and AI."
and unfortunately, it's very true. Although #Fediverse apologists keep saying it's "for everyone", it's actually not. To be welcome on most Mastodon servers, you *ought* to love or hate someone and something you were told to love and hate by leftists de facto governing Mastodon. I won't go into details, but for example, if you don't hate so-called "big tech" and "tech bros", if you don't hate capitalism, if you don't hate AI, if you are not leftist (ideally far/extreme left), — you might have problems on this network.
There are exceptions of course, most significant I know of being the #Blind community exiled from Twitter after Musk banned third-party clients, but again, most of the servers' signup forms say literally this: leftist, anti-AI, anticapitalist, anti-big-tech, pro-open-source (which is not bad per se, but often it drifts to "If you are not using Linux desktop and don't want to, you're evil"). And if you do not suit those standards, you are automatically stigmatized and treated… another way, let's put it like this.
Why this rant? Just for people to understand that this network is also biased, like any other. Many times I heard things like "look, X/Twitter is biased, it's for conservatives", "TikTok and SnapChat are biased, it's for youngsters", and "Mastodon is not biased, it's for everyone".
Nope, it is biased. It is. Like all other network. Except for YouTube probably (too many videos for every taste 😊).

André Polykanine@menelion@dragonscave.space

RE: infosec.exchange/@drwhax/11699

Be ready to receive lots of crappy comments from AI haters.

DrWhax@drwhax@infosec.exchange

I know Mastodon hates LLM's and AI. So here goes!

I recently got access to trusted access of cyber capabilities of both openai and anthropic, which also allows you to weaponize security vulnerabilities.

The speed at which these parrots can find bugs and be creative enough to exploit them is staggering.

I recently pointed an LLM at an kernel fix that was reachable by an unprivileged namespace on Debian and it fully weaponized it, without too much me prompting it in the right direction, in about 7-9 hours.

I don't think open-source and companies will know what's coming for them once these open-source weight models will have broader reach and get better at exploiting vulnerabilities on a massive scale as anyone can access them.

The bottom line I think is, you cannot patch faster than the attackers can easily chain all kinds of vulnerabilities together and just move laterally on an incredibly fast pace.

I've started reporting vulnerabilities to all kinds of projects and the majority have trouble or patching issues found. There's not enough maintainers, or there's simply none anymore.

I've been getting quite worried about what our future will look like for data privacy. I think outright not running an LLM over your codebase to find critical security vulnerabilities because of your moral stance will keep us more insecure.

Please run an LLM over your code base if it's internet facing or something critical, we thank you!

Can't wait for the discussions on this!

André Polykanine@menelion@dragonscave.space

Replying to @⁨skobkin@gts.skobk.in⁩

@skobkin Interesting. yro.slashdot.org/story/26/07/2

yro.slashdot.org'Inside the Dystopian World of Germany's Free Speech Crackdown' - SlashdotThousands of Germans have been threatened with fines or prison sentences for social media posts, reports The Telegraph, calling the country's political speech laws "unusually stringent for an EU member state." One German had his home raided for calling a minister a "Schwachkopf [dummy]" while anothe...