Ciro Santilli's hardware / Dell Inspiron 15 3520 Updated +Created
Some reviews:
  • the keyboard is kind of crap. Notably the key "a" is very hard to press!!
  • the lack of a sleep state indication LED and "I'm powering on LED" compared to Lenovo is really sad
  • it gets way too hot doing work (Monero bootstrap) with lid closed, likely brought system down
OPSEC: will run only cryptocurrency wallets and nothing else. Will connect to Internet, but never ever to a non clean USB flash drive.
The OPSEC for this machine supposes:
Bootstrap OPSEC:
It must have taken about one week running full time to sync the Monero blockchain which at the time was at about 3.1M blocks! I checked on system explorer, and CPU and internet usage was never maxed out, suggesting simply slow network. But the computer still overheated quite a bit and froze a few times.
Compile Linux kernel for Ubuntu Updated +Created
This section describes our attempts at compiling the Linux kernel for Ubuntu so as to use the exact patches and build configuration as used for a given Ubuntu release. The same toolchain would also be ideal, but perhaps this would require a Linux distribution buildable from source.
canonical-kteam-docs.readthedocs-hosted.com/en/public/how-to/build-kernel.html seems promising it says that for Ubuntu 24.04 and above you should do the following which was tested on Ubuntu 24.10:
sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list~
sudo sed -Ei 's/^# deb-src /deb-src /' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt build-dep -y linux linux-image-unsigned-$(uname -r)
sudo apt install -y fakeroot llvm libncurses-dev dwarves
apt source linux-image-unsigned-$(uname -r)
~/tmp/ubuntu/linux-6.11.0
cd linux-6.11.0
chmod a+x debian/rules
chmod a+x debian/scripts/*
chmod a+x debian/scripts/misc/*
fakeroot debian/rules clean
fakeroot debian/rules binary
The build is extremely slow compared to a build of a more embedded and specifically targeted minimal kernel, and took about 2 hours on P14s. Their philosophy is likely to enable as many drivers as possible so that a single download will work for everyone. Which makes sense, fair enough. It would be cute though if there was a smarter way. Oh well.
After it finally finishes the build including our vmlinux is present at:
linux-6.11.0/debian/build/build-generic
Symmetric encryption Updated +Created
Symmetric encryption is a type of encryption where you use a password (also known as a "key") to encrypt your data, and then the same password to decrypt the data.
For example, this is the type of encryption that is used for encrypting the data in our smartphones and laptops with disk encryption.
This way, if your laptop gets stolen, the thief is not able to see your private photos without knowing your password, even though they are able to read every byte of your disk.
The downside is that that you have to type your password every time you want to login. This leads people to want to use shorter passwords, which in turn are more prone to password cracking.
The other main type of encryption is public-key cryptography.
The advantage of public-key cryptography is that it allows you to send secret messages to other people even an the attacker is able to capture the encrypted messages. This is for example what you want to do when sending a personal message to a friend over the Internet. Such encryption is especially crucial when using wireless communication such as Wi-Fi, where anyone nearby can capture the signals you send and receive, and would be able to read all your data if it weren't encrypted.
Easily sending encrypted messages over the Internet is not possible with symmetric encryption because for your friend to decrypt the message in that system, you'd need to send them the password, which the attacker would also be able to eavesdrop and then decrypt the message that follows using it. The problem of sharing a password with another person online is called key exchange.
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is one of the most popular families of symmetric encryption algorithms.
OpenSSL is a popular open source implementation of symmetric and public-key cryptography. A simple example of using OpenSSL for symmetric encryption from the command-line is:
echo 'Hello World!' > message.txt
openssl aes-256-cbc -a -salt -pbkdf2 -in message.txt -out message.txt.enc
This asks for a password, which we set as asdfqwer, and then produces a file message.txt.enc containing garbled text such that:
hd message.txt.enc
contains:
00000000  55 32 46 73 64 47 56 6b  58 31 38 58 48 65 2f 30  |U2FsdGVkX18XHe/0|
00000010  70 56 42 2b 70 45 6c 55  59 38 2b 54 38 7a 4e 34  |pVB+pElUY8+T8zN4|
00000020  4e 37 6d 52 2f 73 6d 4d  62 64 30 3d 0a           |N7mR/smMbd0=.|
0000002d
Then to decrypt:
openssl aes-256-cbc -d -a -pbkdf2 -in message.txt.enc -out message.new.txt
once again asks for your password and given the correct password produces a file message.new.txt containing the original message:
Hello World!
This was tested on Ubuntu 24.04, OpenSSL 3.0.13. See also: How to use OpenSSL to encrypt/decrypt files? on Stack Overflow.
There is no provably secure symmetric-key algorithm besides the one-time pad, which has the serious drawback of requiring the key to be as long as the message. This means that we believe that most encryption algorithms are secure because it is a hugely valuable target and no one has managed to crack them yet. But we don't have a mathematical proof that they are actually secure, so they could in theory be broken by new algorithms one day.
Updates / Post OurBigBook job search round 2025 Updated +Created 2025-05-23
I shouldn't be doing this on funded OurBigBook time which is until the end of May, but I was getting too nervous and decided to start a casual job search to test the waters.
In particular I want to see if I can get past the HR lady step without toning down my online profiles. If nothing works out for the next round I'll be hiding anything too spicy like:
Another interesting point is to see if French companies are more likely to reply given that Ciro Santilli studied at École Polytechnique which the French worship.
Figure 1.
Gay Putin, currently used in Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow profile
. Ciro's profiles may be a bit too much for the HR ladies who reject his job applications on the spot. To be fair, perhaps not enough years of experience for certain applications and job hopping may have something to do with it too. But since they don't ever tell you anything not to get sued, we'll never know.
I'm looking in particular either for:
I spent the last two weeks doing that:
I'll make sure to add two weeks of OurBigBook work after May to make up for this.
Updates / Text-to-speech software comparison Updated +Created
I tried to use every single free offline text-to-speech engine that would run on Ubuntu 24.04 without too much hassle to see if any of them sounded natural. pico2wave was the overall winner so far, but it is not perfect.
I've been noticing a gap between the "AI" SOTA and what is actually packaged well enough to be usable by a general audience.