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0110101001

227 karma · joined February 7, 2021

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0110101001··on What happened to the Snowden archive
Because I know that's what we'd all do when fleeing our home country with a couple million highly desirable classified documents, attempting to avoid prosecution.

We'd all make sure to "protect" ourselves from "leverage" by the people who might (and ultimately did) help us achieve our goals by destroying our one and only bargaining chip.

0110101001··on Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
Getting rid of the blobs and putting a smiley face on 'pile of poo' were sad days.
0110101001··on 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
In the 2x2 resolution (which can't support all of Braille, but does support the first 10 characters), A, B, C, E, and F are all the recognizable Braille shapes for those letters (though in offset positions).

At first, it seemed like an Easter egg, but it's probably just a natural happenstance of two people centuries apart deciding to represent the first ten letters of the alphabet in a 2x2 grid with a general idea to use fewer dots at the start than at the end.

0110101001··on The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline
The proximate cause is Trump's crackdown on immigration. Immigration was responsible for 84% of the US's population gain in 2024.

Both immigration rates and population gain were halved between 2024 and 2025.

0110101001··on Disney Lost Roger Rabbit
Not exactly the same, but in Japan (where obviously many of the great games of the 80s and 90s were authored) there's a mechanism to acquire a license from the government to publish abandonware. The government collects a royalty from the new distributor that it holds in case a valid copyright holder comes forward.

Little Samson, a late-era NES game that because of its rarity can sell for thousands, was developed by a now-defunct company and is getting a re-release next year using this process.

https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025/10/daunting-limited-...

0110101001··on Notes on the History of the Map Tile
> How else would you do it?

Render a viewport, given an API like mining/maxing/minlat/maxlat.

0110101001··on Gene Hackman died of heart disease, his wife died of hantavirus 1 week earlier
The dog that died was kept in a crate.
0110101001··on Shaping ligatures in monospace fonts
Decided to check those ligatures out, but this is pretty much entirely unreadable to me.

https://usgraphics.com/static/products/TX-02/images/TX-02-li...

0110101001··on World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating
The alleged cheater was also the head judge of the tournament.
0110101001··on Epoch Times CFO charged in $67M crypto money laundering plot
> They used stolen identity information to make false unemployment insurance claims in other people’s names.

I don't think "they," meaning Epoch Times, did the actual identity theft / unemployment insurance fraud. The indictment says they "purchased" the debit cards, and there are no charges related to those crimes.

It sounds like Epoch Times found a platform where such fraudsters were offloading their phony unemployment debit cards at a discount (this started in 2020, when I presume there was a huge boom in unemployment fraud) and tried to flip them around as legitimate donations and subscription revenue for an easy profit.

0110101001··on OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
Just to clarify for people who don't read it, the article isn't claiming this was trained on the voice of someone doing a Scarlett Johannson impression. It says it was trained on the natural voice of someone who sounds similar to Johannson's, hired months before Altman reached out to her.
0110101001··on Baltimore's Key Bridge struck by cargo ship, collapses
> Started on the cheap during the Korean War, the Tappan Zee was deliberately built to last just 50 years.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/nyregion/a-bridge-that-ha...

0110101001··on Ask HN: Do you also marvel at the complexity of everyday objects?
Interesting. Perhaps different tellings of the same story? This appears to be the story I read from the book Nothing to Envy:

> A North Korean soldier would later recall a buddy who had been given an American-made nail clipper and was showing it off to his friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edges, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sinking heart: If North Korea couldn’t make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons?

0110101001··on The Format Dialog in Windows NT
> I was able to confirm in the Windows NT4 source code that he originally wrote some of the code for the format dialog on 2-13-95.

That was a dry Monday, not a rainy Thursday. It's possible he wrote the code Thursday, but didn't get to check it in until Sunday (though Thursday was dry too), but I know I couldn't tell you the what the weather was for code I wrote last month.

0110101001··on Ask HN: Do you also marvel at the complexity of everyday objects?
Yes, that's where I read the story
0110101001··on Ask HN: Do you also marvel at the complexity of everyday objects?
Reminds me of a story I read about a North Korean who defected to the US during the Korean War. He came across an American nail clipper and was amazed by the machining and intricacy that went into something as mundane as trimming nails. He realized that if this is the complexity of a nail-clipper, he was surely no match to American weapons. He'd defect soon after.
0110101001··on Pentagon ex-UFO chief says conspiracy theorists in government drive spending
> At what point does sufficiently advanced technology become not human?

When it's not obviously just an airplane.

0110101001··on OpenCola
I could still taste the difference after decanting to a cup. I felt like it was still mostly can/bottle, but didn't have an American bottle to use as a control.

There definitely is a subtle difference. I was about to pick out the different drink reliably. It's just hard to imagine the difference is make-or-break between enjoying and intolerable for anyone. And it less likely comes from the sweetener and more from the Mexican water versus the water at your local Coca-Cola bottler.

West coast Coke vs East coast Coke would be an interesting test I've never thought about doing.

0110101001··on OpenCola
Having done triangle tests with Mexican Coke and HFCS Coke, I find it unbelievable someone "can't stand" one and enjoys the other.

Mexican Coke doesn't use cane sugar anymore. But when it did, I'd read that the sucrose in peak-era Mexican Coke broke down into a HFCS-similar mix of fructose and glucose in the drink's acidity anyway.

I'm convinced the Mexican Coke thing is just some hipster thing, and Coca-Cola is glad to exploit it.

0110101001··on FAA authorizes Zipline to deliver commercial packages using drones
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/the-l...

TLDR: They use various ways of emphasizing words and adding variety to speech. It's almost exclusively done in videos where it's just a face talking to camera to try to make it attention grabbing.

They use Jon Stewart's Daily Show as a pre- YouTube example of someone using the same techniques for the same reasons.

0110101001··on Google redraws the borders on maps depending on who’s looking (2020)
It's "don't be evil," not "do no evil." They're accepting of small amounts of evil so long as it doesn't come to characterize the company.
0110101001··on Google Maps Testing New Apple Maps-Inspired Map Style
Haven't seen these new Google Maps yet, but from the screenshots, I couldn't disagree more.

Broadway is completely invisible in the "old" map, but visible on the "new" map.

But I guess the more usable contrast makes the Madame Tussauds label slightly harder to read?

0110101001··on Lawyer who used ChatGPT faces penalty for made up citations
Yes, ideally everyone should check every e.g. Wikipedia citation before relying on it, but obviously most people don't.

In the past, the only way to come across completely made up court citations regarding obscure bankruptcy procedures would've been that somebody intentionally made them up, probably maliciously.

Given how unlikely that is, if you didn't understand that GPT just makes up text that resembles what you want to see, I'd understand trusting it as you would a search engine.

It's not like lawyers are visiting court clerk's office to verify every case they find in some online database.

0110101001··on Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations
It seems either like his goal was treason, and going public was a bargaining chip to avoid being extrajudicially disappeared somewhere or whistleblowing was his goal and doing it in an adversarial country with loads of confidential documents that have nothing to do with any possible NSA wrongdoing was a bargaining chip to avoid US prosecution.

The latter seems far more likely to me as an observer, but in either case, both public revealation AND harm to the US were on the table.

0110101001··on My new hobby: finding public domain images that Getty sells for $500
It's not about denying anyone revenue. The goal is to make easily accessible artwork that apparently has enough value to be sold commercially.
0110101001··on Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill
The authors of that study started by filtering down a giant list of survey responses to those where there's a significant difference in responses between the "donor class" and everyone else. I forget exactly how often that happened, but it's a small number.

So, just in the premise the study, by needing to throw away almost all the survey responses where everyone agrees and get the policies what they want, actually goes a far way to debunking the populist premise that "economic elites" and "the People" are opposing factions with inherently different political opinions.

Further, the study considered the group as "disagreeing" if the margin in survey answers was at least 10%. So if 90% of one group wanted something and 80% of the other, that was considered as them disagreeing.

When a follow-up study further filtered responses to questions where more that margin spans the 5% mark, i.e. most people in each group disagree, then the effect completely disappears and it's more or less a coin toss which way policy goes.

0110101001··on Japan skiers’ smartphones making unnecessary emergency calls
US skiers' phones too

https://coloradosun.com/2022/12/26/skier-iphone-crash-detect...

https://www.explorebigsky.com/iphone-software-issued-28-fals...

0110101001··on 'Oumuamua: An analysis of the debate regarding the first interstellar visitor
I think the difference is that your historical examples of skepticism (which are a bit exaggerated, btw. Da Vinci was a pretty bright guy who thought human flight was possible; Churchill summed up the current understanding of nuclear physics 99 years ago as "Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power... to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?"; Konstantin Tsiolkovsky described the science of space travel by rocket in The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices back in 1898)... your examples of skepticism are based on ignorance, not science. As far as I'm aware, nobody ever had a scientific rationale to think humans couldn't achieve flight. If so, it was obviously extremely flawed. We have well-supported science to support the idea that interstellar travel at human timescales isn't possible.

But any scientist will also tell you that there are potential methods to achieve interstellar travel that are consistent with our laws of physics. It's just that, unlike your examples, it's not a matter of human ingenuity to find them. It's a matter of the very nature of our universe whether things like wormholes or negative energy exist or not.

0110101001··on Distributor cancelled an order and we need to move 30k bags of coffee [updated]
Assumigly, they're offering I'm the coffee for 50% retail price. Sounds like that would put everything in line with standard grocery store markups.

https://bellwethercoffee.com/blog/how-to-start-selling-whole....

0110101001··on WikiLeaks is struggling to stay online as millions of documents disappear
Assange had a TV show on Russian state TV.
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