Recent content on caleb gross
It’s just a symbol. It’s just a clump of cells. It’s just a social construct. The next time you reach for this diminutive qualifier, ask yourself: What obligation are you avoiding? When does “just” ever serve justice? The use of the word betrays its own intent; it implies the very thing it tries to ignore. The carefully (atrociously) separated parts still cast a…
I’m a big fan and frequent user of Claude’s deep research feature, so it caught my eye when the task title from my research subagent was a bit longer than usual. I’d asked about WWI causes and got the research title “Causes of WWI research disabled warnings about …” with some unexpected trailing text at the end. Confused, I inspected the title with Chrome DevTools and…
There is a weird collection of arguments for appraising the value of humans and their creative artifacts. It usually goes something like this: In the age of AI, we should still prefer humans in certain roles because AI could never perform the tasks required for that role. Or, a human can at least do it better . Or, perhaps the output from a human and AI may look similar, but human output is…
Let’s go back to the basics and consider a very simple goal: What if we could find and fix all the vulnerabilities in open source software? This is a pretty ambitious goal, admittedly, but…
Earlier this summer, Sean Heelan published a great blog post detailing his use of o3 to find a use-after-free vulnerability in the Linux kernel. The internet lit up in response, and for good…
Welp, Pocket shuts down tomorrow despite our pleas for it to stay. While migrating 1 all of my saved articles, I noticed that I’ve got almost 900 saved articles spanning nearly 7 years. That’s a goldmine of stuff-I-like data! Some quick analysis using xsv 2 : 𝄢 unzip pocket.zip && xsv headers part_000000.csv 1 title 2 url 3 time_added 4 tags 5 status 𝄢 xsv sample 1 part_000000.csv |…
TL;DR: Raink—a novel, general-purpose listwise document ranking algorithm using an LLM as the ranking model—can be used to solve non-trivial security problems. A very simple explanation of how the Raink algorithm works : Split big list of items into small groups (e.g., 10 items per group) Ask the LLM to rank/order each small group according prompt relevance Shuffle everything and repeat this…
There are two claims I’d like to make: LLMs can be used effectively 1 for listwise document ranking . Some complex problems can (surprisingly) be solved by transforming them into document ranking problems. I’ve primarily explored both of these claims in the context of using patch diffing to locate N-day vulnerabilities—a sufficiently domain-specific problem that can be solved using…
I wanted to write this before I’ve been out longer than I’d been in. I agonized over my decision to leave the Air Force—largely because I experienced it as an issue of professional identity. Why I joined After wrestling at a high school math and science academy, I wanted to keep up physical fitness and develop leadership skills in a technical environment. I also needed financial…
Google recently launched the .zip TLD, and Twitter has been up in arms. It’s hard to imagine that .zip domains would be used for anything legitimate, and would instead give way to more creative phishing attacks . Accordingly, I quickly snagged source-code.zip while these domains were rapidly being bought up, and showed an example of how it might be used to trick a software developer into…
Or, using a content aggregator like it’s 1999. Daniel Miessler writes a lot—and a lot of that lot is about RSS . Daniel inspired me to curate my media intake with RSS (and also more generally to start writing learning in public ). Here are a few RSS-related tools and principles I’ve picked up over the past 6 months. It essentially boils down to discovering new content sources via…
I recently (finally) started using online appointment scheduling software. There are many players in this space, but Calendly is the most popular and featureful. It’s awesome—but in order to use it, you have to give it direct access to whichever calendars you want it to check for conflicts. That means access to all sensitive details like online meeting URLs, attendee information, etc.—and it…
I tend to push a product’s free tier pretty hard. I’ve been using the same free Dropbox account for 11 years (originally 2 GB, but permanently upgraded to 22 GB through various referrals and promotions long ago). I have several free Zoho email accounts grandfathered into supporting custom domains, SMTP, and email forwarding (they still offer a free tier with custom domain support, but…