Recent content on Techiavellian
It didn’t take long for me to slip. “I built…” Pause. “Claude built…” I don’t remember exactly when it first happened, but it’s happened many times since. I’m not ashamed to admit when I’ve been helped by AI, but I find myself tripping over my words when I describe my work with it. Just now, I wrote and then deleted “our…
I’ve found myself unemployed with a bit more free time than usual for the last few months, and I decided that it was the perfect opportunity to learn a bit about LLM tool use and to try out this whole “vibe coding” thing. Inspired in part by one blog post by Thomas Ptacek saying I was nuts not to use LLMs more and another by Thorsten Ball explaining the nuts and bolts of…
I seem to have a habit of announcing my return to blogging roughly every six years. One might reasonably question whether someone who has to post 3 “hello, world” announcements is truly committed to this whole blogging thing. Maybe it’s a sign that I can’t help myself. That no matter how hard I try, I just can’t quit you, dear reader. Even though some of my old posts…
In this video, I cover a few more interesting features of Roam Research that I find helpful for my note-taking. I particularly recommend considering attributes for your page metadata templates - I learned the hard way that I should’ve used them from the beginning. You’ll learn how to create attributes, and how you can use them in queries and attribute tables , as well as some new…
I did a quick livestream today showing some new (and some not-so-new) features in Roam Research, including: Improved precision in inline calculator New block reference features, especially for using “template” blocks The new mysterious Delta (Δ) button for spaced repetition Mermaid diagrams Code highlighting support for new languages Themes and versioning Hope you enjoy it!
I’ve done a previous video about some cool features in Roam Research , but this time I decided to show what it actually looks like to take notes on something, live. If you’re wondering if Roam is worth the money, this video should give you an idea of how valuable it is to me. Let me know if you’d like to see more live streams in the future!
I recorded an audio version of my first Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks blog post from March 2019. Let me know what you think!
Over the last few years, I’ve seen several instances of (and reactions against) an intellectual denial of service attack that I’ll call “The Number One Priority”. Maybe you’ve seen it, too. conversations lately: “let’s terraform mars!” “let’s fix earth, first 😒” “let’s do both!” ”... anyway terraforming venus makes more sense 😒” “it really doesn’t! [details!]”…
In this episode, I show how I use Roam Research to take book notes (among other tangents). Hope you enjoy it.
I finally bought a camera for my desktop, so I figured I’d give it a spin with OBS Studio. This was mostly a trial run to see how my mic, camera, video quality, etc. were working. In this short video, I give a quick rundown of how I write Go code, and mention some VIM plugins I find useful.
In my first post on intellectual denial of service attacks , I covered something I dubbed “bad infinitum,” a tendency for non-experts to overwhelm experts with repetitive, costly, and often unproductive demands for evidence or counter-argument to oft-debunked or misleading claims. Here, I’ll cover another of these intellectual attack vectors, which I’ll call “the map…
We live in an era that devalues conformity, while simultaneously preserving it in many interesting ways. Everyone is allowed to have an opinion. Divergent views produce conflict, however, and disagreement, argument, and debate define our current moment. If we merely disagreed on matters of taste - our favorite color, music, movies, etc. - we could avoid such conflicts. Increasingly, though, we…
Anyone who read my post yesterday is probably confused by 1) this domain name and 2) my mention of it being my “first post”. This blog is a reboot of my previous site (where the older posts came from). I’m starting over in hopes that it will incentivize me to take blogging seriously again. This post will explain my plans for this blog, and with any luck, convince you to come…
It’s never a good time to suddenly find yourself jobless. But it’s never a bad time to evaluate your skills, your goals, and where you’re headed. We all want to be a valued member of a winning team on an inspiring mission Graham Weston It’s easy to get complacent after a few years in a good job. You tell yourself, “I’m doing such important work! We’re…
I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Pokemon GO since I started playing it, and I’ve been trying to cobble together a mental guide for how to be successful from a hodge-podge of sites, people I’ve met while playing the game, and some of my own experiences. Here’s what I’ve got so far. Items in red are ones I’m less sure of. Finding Pokemon # The panel at the…
Have you ever logged onto Facebook to find “Recommended Friends” that you didn’t expect to see? Maybe someone you briefly met on Tinder, or a co-worker you hate? I think many people are unaware that, by default, the Facebook app on mobile devices automatically imports your contact list, continuously (this includes, so far as I can tell, every piece of information about them that…
(About) 425 days ago (at the time of this writing) I started scraping Hacker News via its shiny new API. And then I promptly forgot about it. That is, until I noticed my cronjob had been throwing errors constantly for a few weeks: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/dummy/projects/hn-cron/hn.py", line 62, in <module> main() File "/home/dummy/projects/hn-cron/hn.py", line 53, in main…
The AddToAny Share Buttons WordPress Plugin was, until recently, vulnerable to a DOM-based cross-site scripting issue. The file in question is hosted on the author’s site, so you’re not vulnerable anymore (you’re welcome). If you just want the vulnerability details, go here . Now for the story of this bug. This particular journey started with an email from XSSposed , a site…
At the risk of spoiling a somewhat-well-known XSS game, I want to share an XSS vector I had never thought of before it forced me to. The premise of this level was, essentially, that you couldn’t use any letters whatsoever in the attack vector, and you had to call alert(1) . So, without further ado, here it is: "" [(! 1 + "" )[ 3 ]+(! 0 + "" )[ 2 ]+( '' +{})[ 2 ]][( '' +{})[ 5 ]+( '' +{})[ 1…
I recently hacked together a little 300-line bash script to manage my dotfiles called dot-man . Basically, it will let you manage your dotfiles in a git repository, and you can run it every so often to keep your local / remote dotfiles up to date. Install is as simple as: git clone git@github.com:cneill/dot-man.git OR git clone https://github.com/cneill/dot-man.git Let me know what you think! You…
Recently, while looking at a JavaScript function intended to generate a cryptographically-secure random IV to be used in AES-GCM, I noticed something interesting which I immediately suspected was not unique to this project. Sure enough, Matt, my awesome colleague, sent me a link to a how-to article describing the process of generating random values in Node.js that included the exact same quirk.…
The “snippet preview” functionality of the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin was susceptible to cross-site scripting in versions before 2.2 (<= 2.1.1). This vulnerability appears to have been reported 2 years ago by someone named “badconker”, but the plugin author said that it was already patched. Unfortunately, it appears that this is not the case. If you are running this plugin,…
I’m happy to announce the latest version of a project that the Security Engineering team at Rackspace has been working on: DefectDojo ! DefectDojo is an open source defect tracking system that was created by our team to keep up with security engagements, but it can be useful for tracking any type of application testing. It supports functionality like Finding templates, PDF report generation,…
I noticed a while back that when I carelessly entered my login credentials to the form for registering a new user account on the front page of the DigitalOcean site, it would still log me in. Neato. However, I was slightly less amused when I noticed that the login event didn’t show an IP address in my security history. I reported this at the time the screenshot was taken several months ago.…
Earlier today I wanted to explore using Growl / GNTP to listen for notifications from a remote server. I checked out the Growl developer bindings page, found the Python implementation , and started working on a simple app to send me notifications about various things. I was planning on running this on my server so I could also interface with Twilio and accept callbacks, without having to expose a…
Innovation is accelerating and entropy is increasing (as always). Several huge scientific revolutions are peeking at us from the horizon of the future. Looking at how we’ve dealt with the Internet revolution, I’m not sure we’re ready for them. What 3 revolutions am I talking about? When are they going to happen? It’s impossible to predict which of these revolutions will…
My last Nuggets post, “ 50 Linux Resources for Developers ” was pretty well-received, so I figured I’d try to do the same thing I did there for Node.js . Hopefully something here gives you some inspiration to make the next great Javascript app. It’s not meant to be an all-inclusive guide to learning Node, but more of a look at my journey with Node and some things I’ve…
These are some cool things you can do with Vim that save time and can help prevent mistakes from mouse selection. They’re mostly little things, but altogether they make up an editing environment that I simply love. 1. NERDTree ( Docs ) file deletion <Ctrl-L> to open NERDTree, hjkl to move, mdy to delete 2. Easymotion ( Docs ). Check out their example GIFs, and you’ll never see movement…
I recently paid for something online using what I considered a secure online payments processor, and they asked that I provide a password to create an account to complete the transaction. You will understand in a second (if you don’t already) why I was so angry when, a few seconds later, I got this: I couldn’t believe it. Please enter a shorter password. Why does this make me mad?…
Tonight on the program “Last Week Tonight” on HBO, John Oliver exhorted his audience to go file comments on the FCC website to address their proposed rules that many believe will destroy Net Neutrality. In visiting the page, it is clear that people are interested in commenting on this particular item. A few more comments than usual. I suspect this didn’t happen in the 5 minutes…
I try to always bookmark interesting things I find as I bumble around the internet. I’ve collected thousands of bookmarks over the years, and I want to share some of the cool stuff I’ve found. I call these Nuggets . Today, I want to bring you a list of links that might help you on your path to understanding and appreciating Linux. I don’t consider myself some wizened Linux guru,…
I first created an account on reddit about 6 years ago, and I think I had been a lurker for a while before that. When I joined, reddit was a place of learning. There was (to me, at least) a sense of community around sharing great philosophical articles, important news stories, and all kinds of learning resources. In essence, it felt like Hacker News before Hacker News. This probably isn’t a…
If you’re like at least a quarter of the people who read my original article, " Am I evil, or is killing patents just plain fun? " a few days ago, you probably read the title of this post as “Killing parents part 2” or “Killing patients part 2.” I have to wonder how many people originally clicked it simply for that reason. This is but one of the many responses I got,…
The other day I re-discovered this post by Joel Spolsky on Hacker News, entitled " Victory Lap for Ask Patents ." I saw it when he originally posted it a while back, but it didn’t resonate with me at the time. But re-reading it today, I realized how great an opportunity we, as software developers, have to force patent reform by actively contributing to this project. Ask Patents , if you…
Checking out Hacker News for a refreshing end to my work day, I was instead greeted with the worst of all tech-related bad news: Heartbleed , an exploit in popular versions of OpenSSL allowing attackers anonymous (read: no way to figure out how widely it’s been exploited up to this point) access to 64kb of memory of an affected client or server . How bad is it? Tor had this to offer in its…
In the spirit of April Fool’s, but also because I think it might actually make me more productive, I’ve made a Google Chrome extension to slow down Facebook’s timeline feature. Long for the days of 56k? All this high-speed gigaboot Internets nonsense got you frazzled? Just install Slowpoke in Chrome by going to chrome://extensions/ and dragging the .crx file onto the page.…
“A man’s true wealth is the good he does in the world.” — Mohammad When you think of free market economics, undeniably the most championed principle is deregulation. By removing the obstacles that prevent us from economic exchanges, we become wealthier. Letting individuals be in total control of their financial decisions is the path to prosperity, as the thinking goes. Getting…
As some of you may know, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein from California has introduced a bill called the Fisa Improvements Act that she is portraying as a reasonable reform of mass government surveillance. I’ve been skeptical from the beginning, reading headlines like " Stop the NSA ‘Fake Fix’ Bill " from EFF and others. I’ve read through some of the bill, but…
You might want to grab a cup of coffee # My last article about the importance of getting started on your programming education is my most-read article on Medium so far. Like anything in my life, my writing is an experiment. When I see as many people getting excited about programming as I have because of this, it excites me too, and tells me I’ve hit a nerve.
Welcome to my blog! I’ll be posting random musings about technology, privacy, entrepreneurship, politics, college, and everything else here. I’m always looking for interesting people with interesting ideas, so get in touch with me if you think you’d make a good fit as a contributor.
Contact Information # @ccneill / @techiavellian @cneill