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algesten

935 karma · joined September 23, 2016

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algesten··on Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq
I don't get it. "Instead of learning jq DSL, learn zq DSL".

To me they look similarly complicated and the examples stresses certain aggregation operations that are harder to do in jq (due to it being stateless).

algesten··on London’s Lost Ringways
Technically the Queen (the crown) owns all the land. In practice it doesn't make much difference, but it does kick in if a freehold suddenly has no owner.
algesten··on Rust9x: Compile Rust code for Windows 95, NT and above
I approve of ureq being used on Windows 95 :)

(I'm the original author)

algesten··on Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years
With a 20% market increase in a year, you don't have to rent it. Renting a property out always comes with hassle. Many countries have tenant's rights that kick in after a period of time.

I live in Barcelona, and the rental market is crazy. Technically I should be allowed to sign a contract for 5 years, but because of the rights that kick in after 12 months, there's a ton of landlords that only want to offer 11 month contracts.

algesten··on Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a bug
What?

I'm also playing on PS5 and had zero crashes so far (20+ hours).

Pop-in, flicker and shimmering? It feels like I'm playing a different game to you.

algesten··on Porting Rust's Std to Rustix
Yeah, that's what I mean. Sounds good!
algesten··on Porting Rust's Std to Rustix
If this was merged into Rust, I assume it means the use of `unsafe` in std would be "pushed down" one level into Rustix instead.

Wonder if that means it would be easier to verify the correctness of `unsafe` use inside Rust itself?

algesten··on This Year in Embedded Rust
> A huge chain of dependencies. Security issues aside, I prefer my embedded code to be lean and clean.

Where does your limit go for that? I wrote a eurorack modular embedded thing on Teensy 4.0 (imxrt) in Rust this year. I just inspected the dep tree, it's 38 crates, with 1 being my own.

https://gist.github.com/algesten/9617fc795f2fc94009f1ed311b1...

It was a joy to write this in Rust, I look forward to my next project. This was done with "stable" (not nightly).

algesten··on New EU data blockage as German court would ban many cookie management providers
That's not how that works. One common way here is OAuth2 which includes a callback URL such as:

https://internal.yourcompany.com/oauth2/callback?token…

That token in the callback does not require any kind of cookie to use for subsequent authenticated calls.

algesten··on “Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says
I had this exact experience with New York Times. I subscribed, realized I didn't like their editorial style at all, and then had to call long international phone calls to get it to stop.
algesten··on “Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says
I'm subscribed digitally using apple app subscription. That means I can just end it whenever and The Guardian wouldn't be involved.
algesten··on Basic Music Theory in ~200 Lines of Python
The wikipedia page is pretty good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament#Comparison_w...

A fifth might even sound off key if you're very used to equal temperament (it's about 2 cents below an equal temperament). You know it by there being no or less "wobbling" between the tones.

For listening tips, look for vocalist groups where there's "One Voice Per Part" (OVPP). Voces8, Vox Luminis, etc. When there's only one voice, you don't get the inherent wobbling happening when two instruments/voices play in unison.

Not all genres are possible to have just (jazz chord colors would sound rubbish).

algesten··on Basic Music Theory in ~200 Lines of Python
A perfect 5th is not the same as a diminished 6th unless we assume equal temperament tuning. Granted it is the dominant tuning, but it irks me when this is just silently assumed.

Plenty of music around that is recorded using actual perfect intervals, so why muddy the waters?

algesten··on The Bank of England unveils design of new £50 banknote featuring Alan Turing
We can't cherry pick nice bits of history and ignore the rest. The current government is part of a larger context.

For example, the current British PM does not understand why reciting Rudyard Kipling in Myanmar is a problem (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/30/boris-johns...) and he wrote a book elevating his idol Churchill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Churchill_Factor). He really only thinks of Churchill as someone who "saved civilization", while ignoring that Churchill also caused millions of deaths (Bengal famine, etc) – "the Aryan stock is bound to triumph".

By ignoring historical facts and not recognizing that the UK is directly to blame for a lot of death and suffering in India, Africa, and all other places the empire touched, has consequences also today. For example, BLM also made it to the UK, however the situation for black people in the UK is quite different to the US. Probably because Boris ignores lots of historical facts, he doesn't even understand the first thing of BLM UK (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/08/i-hear-you-b...)

I'm focusing on Boris Johnson here, but his government is largely made up of long time friends from similar backgrounds with shared values.

Ignoring relevant historical context of Alan Turing is an example of larger problem in the current UK government. Gay rights are better today than 1950s, but it's by no means a solved problem. Hate crimes against LGBT are increasing (sexual orientation motivated crimes increasing more than for race and trans is even worse https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...).

algesten··on Firefox 87 introduces SmartBlock for Private Browsing
If you got good enough router/access points, you could create separate VLANs for client vs private.

Thinking about it, I might just do that when I get back home :)

algesten··on What ever happened to scandium bike frames? (2016)
I know what you mean, but I think there definitely is a difference riding cheap versus expensive bikes. As with most sports requiring tech, the more you spend, the less you tend to fight the tech itself (friction, weight, etc). Granted it's diminishing returns.
algesten··on Boeing 737 Max cleared to fly again 'too early'
Ryanair is pretty good on safety (my brother is a pilot with them). However they do absolutely everything to push costs down. MAX is a significant saving in fuel, which is one of the biggest costs.
algesten··on Telegram publishes users' locations online
With enough data points you'd easily figure out that offset. Just overlay each data point with map data and decide whether the location makes sense.

(i.e. you're unlikely to most of the time be in the middle of a lake, farm field etc)

algesten··on Visa Advertising Solutions (VAS) Opt Out
"supporting"

as a european I'm totally ok without this support.

algesten··on Let’s Encrypt comes up with workaround for abandonware Android devices
When I've implemented JWT in the past (yes, I know, "don't use JWT"), I've opted for public/private signatures. The public cert I would publish on some URL for all consumers of the JWT to use. The rotation of certs there was a matter of hours. It would hold 3-4 of the last certs (depending on JWT lifetime).
algesten··on Map of quotation marks in European languages
I don't understand where they got this data from. Double quotation marks is very much the standard in UK press, why are they claiming single is preferred?
algesten··on Six Figures in 6 days
A lot of?

It's like the cost of eating lunch out three times in a big city.

Given the amount of work put into drawing icons, I'd say it's fair. I'm absolutely thrilled someone found a way to charge for something that is a personal project and not backed by some big corporate marketing buck.

algesten··on Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B
I did two play throughs and was very entertained both. The stories and humor is excellent and I like the combat system. You can definitely chose play style, whether you're the creepy sniper, rambo or hammer-in-the-head. It's just a solid fun game.
algesten··on C++20 has been approved
Were the module problems ironed out? I remember reading some scathing criticism of the early designs.
algesten··on Show HN: Talk – A free group video call app with screen sharing
DTLS is only the first part of the encryption. The actual media is transferred of SRTP which is encrypted RTP. DTLS provides the keying material to derive keys for SRTP.

DTLS is however fully used for SCTP, which the protocol for data channels alongside the media streams.

algesten··on Remote Code Execution in Slack desktop apps
They can't go back in time and change how they did it, and they did explain and apologised for not handling it correctly.

Stuff like that happen. We should only judge them if they screw up like that again.

algesten··on A-Levels: The Model is not the Student
> It doesn't really matter how good the model is, it's an impossible task politically. There will always be some people aggrieved by the new process and they will always have plausible ways to spin it as racist or classist or whatever else is necessary to fuel the outrage machine. As if the previous setup was some kind of examplar of egalitarianism.

So just because every system has flaws, we should throw in the towel and give up? Taking that line of thinking all the way means we can just replace university allocations with a lottery.

That's not how society works.

Even if every system have flaws, even if the current suffers from racism and classism, we have to strive towards making it better. The system the UK invented here does not even try. It very clearly favors people with nice postcodes.

Maybe we should replace it with a lottery, it would be equal. But I'm pretty sure the people with nice postcodes would like it much, and that's the people propping up the UK gov. Etonians, Oxford, silver spoon etc.

I for one believe there must be _some way_ to fix the situation and is better than what they came up with.

algesten··on Oatly: The New Coke?
Moral and environmental. Milk is one level up from eating vegetables. Some milk consumption is probably sustainable, but we can't feed the entire world on quark cheese.
algesten··on The Next Steps for Single Ownership and RAII
I don't think you can have a "fully mapped type" the way you describe it. Uninitalized memory in today's compilers do not have an observable value.

https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2019/07/14/uninit.html

algesten··on The modern web makes me want to throw up (2016)
Isn't half the blog argument that this could be solved for native apps too?
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