I've heard that LLMs can perform worse with these more efficient representations compared to e.g. JSON, because they've seen far fewer examples of them during training. Do you know how true that is?

Absolutely, but usually when working with a bespoke format for optimization, it's paired with an LLM specifically trained on that format.

You are right about cryptic formats. CommerceTXT is semantically structured. Models like GPT, Claude and Gemini understand it out-of-the-box via ICL.

I think you're being oversensitive, especially in the context Raycast adding support for Windows.

The whole purpose of Raycast is to improve productivity and UX, be that under macOS or Windows. It'd be a pretty shitty launch announcement if the blog post didn't mention the problem that they're trying to solve.

Edit: I'm not sure if the post was edited after my reply, but ATM there's no mention of BSODs - the closest I can see to a dig at Windows is:

> You know the feeling. Search that can't find your files. Apps buried in menus. Simple tasks that take too many clicks. Your computer should be faster than this. It should feel like everything is at your fingertips. That’s why we built Raycast.

That's certainly what the app itself does (I'm even using it myself!), but I just don't understand why they couldn't resist putting in these overused digs.

> live video on the self checkout screen with the notice "Monitoring In Progress"

That really winds me up too - it shows such contempt for legitimate customers.

I imagine it may not be a proxy in the true sense, but a headless browser that's "proxying" the application process rather than the network traffic itself.

There's a really interesting article from Tavis Ormandy about the instruction set and virtual machine used in RAR: https://blog.cmpxchg8b.com/2012/09/fun-with-constrained-prog....

The docs for the toolchain he implemented (https://github.com/taviso/rarvmtools) allude to a number of bugs, but doesn't sound (??) like they're related to this vulnerability.

The VM has long since been torn out of the RAR decompressor. These days, when it finds a file containing bytecode, it just hashes the bytecode and matches it against a few hardcoded routines that existed at the time.

Sounds like a good ingredient for a CTF or other puzzle. It could be a small obfuscation where player has to install an ancient version with the VM, or get crazier with a byecode hash collision or abusing undocumented VM quirks.

There's a write up from Alexey of different approaches considered for clickhouse-obfuscator here: https://clickhouse.com/blog/five-methods-of-database-obfusca....

The summary is pretty funny:

> "After trying four methods, I got so tired of this problem that it was time just to choose something, make it into a usable tool, and announce the solution"

These guys are building foundational models for this purpose: https://reveng.ai/. The results are quite compelling, and they have plugins for your favourite reverse engineering tools.

I was about to comment that the domain was quite clever...

oooh, it's Rev Eng checks tfa

i don't think so (that it is a terrible name); it's a pretty common term https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=reveng

It'd be interesting to learn more about how this line was identified - was it by eye, or is there some neat analysis that was (or could be) performed to find it?

Part 2 goes into the methodology - it's some neat analysis!

http://www.statsmapsnpix.com/2023/04/the-longest-line-part-2...

Yeah, this feels like a non-story.

But this gives us an excuse to moan about cookie banners, so up to the front page it goes

Because they're interesting?