Distroless, File Manager, FIDO 2.1, UV, GFW, TLS, Ternarization

1. Tested Alpine and Distroless for my Docker containers as base. I've used Ubuntu a lot, but slimming the image down for standalone systems was one of primary goals. Distroless is bit challenging without shell. Yet of course for those minimal bases also the program itself should be as minimal and standalone as possible. The classic problems which I also encountered when using bwrap, if I want to list "all the files" which need to be visible even if read-only inside the isolation. It wasn't a trivial job.

2. Windows File Manager supported archives. It seems that Windows file manager now supports .tar.zstd and .7z archives out of the box. This is wonderful development. No need to install pirated WinRAR anymore. Lol. No I haven't been doing that, but I know many whom do it, and it's quite horrible. Traditional random crack downloading, sigh! - Update, unfortunately AES-256 encryption isn't supported with 7-zip or Zip formats directly by Windows File Manager.

3. FIDO 2.1 adds new algorithm support for EdDSA (Ed25519, Ed448) and RSA-PSS in addition to the existing ECDSA and RSA algorithms. Also the new option to store blobs to secure storage is interesting feature.Simons Observatory

4. Data formats, just for fun made crazy data format: Complex data -> Python class instance(s) (object) -> pickle -> bytes -> sqlite memory database -> memory dump -> bytes -> zstd compression -> file / network stream. Works fine, works well, allows random access with indexed objects and saves into efficient "standard" format. But now if someone asks please explain what the bytes in the final file means, aawww. Example of radical complex being built by standard tools. Parsing the data without the ready tool chain I used is well, almost and practically impossible in any sane way. - Especially fun way to store data which could have been saved key,value\n format. Nah, of course overkill for that, but just for lulz. - Extra fun comes from the fact that python doesn't directly expose the memory databases pages, but you can still access those with low(er) level calls.

5. Tested UV as PIP replacement. Sure it's faster. But in my cases I rarely install lots of packages and or repeatedly, which means that the standard pip is just and good enough. No need to install extra stuff and or complicate things.

6. GFW + QUIC (@ grw.report) quite an interesting report. Listing capabilities and optimizations, which can also account as weaknesses or even vulnerabilities. But in some sense nothing new, if that would be your job, that's what you would do. QUIC initial packet decryption is resource intensive and that's why well, most of systems aren't doing that. It's a good read, don't forget to check out the slides as well! The spoofing trick was neat one.

7. Windows TLS certificates, again some systems switched certificates automatically, invalidating signatures and trusted fingerprints. Thanks! Based on this, why people don't setup SSH servers so that the host key would be recycled aka renewed aka regenerated every week as example. It would improve security, when the attack time frame is limited. - Sigh, right?! Aah, I have to fix that again. And then it takes 6 months to see, if the fix worked...

8. The 3 option [-1, 0, +1] 1.58 bit IA model weight quantization aka ternarization. That allows quite large models with high parameter count to be run on with lighter hardware. That + MoE is powerful combination. It's interesting to see, how much more efficient models can be developed and where this all is going to lead to.

9. Microsoft - Ranting... Outlook.com login is again broken, it runs refresh loop and says we can't log you in... Duh! And Copilot is as usual, insanely slow (tens of seconds of keyboard input / scroll lag) and crashing all the time. - Congratulations, you've unlocked the "Legendary Software Quality" badge! - Great timing, Copilot just asked for user satisfaction and feedback. - I assume they measure their software quality and success, in the terms of suicides committed by employees and customers. - If they're still alive, we've failed with our trolling op.

10. Something different? - Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) (@ Wikipedia) - Simons Observatory (@ Wikipedia)

2026-02-15