bspammer

It's unexpected to me that someone with the technical knowhow to build spyware like this and a nice web interface for it, made basic mistakes like storing passwords in plaintext and piping unescaped user input into database queries.

It's one of my most used utilities, as someone who can't help but nerd-snipe myself on the regular. Example questions that I've used it for, just in the last week:

If I work 42 hours/week, how many minutes is that per year?

I've downloaded 4.91GB in the last minute, what's that in Mbps? How long will it take to download a 76GB game?

This AWS feature costs $0.045/hour, how much is that per month?

This guy I read about traveled 58,000km in 27 years, what's his average speed in m/s?

How much would a 10cm sphere of gold be worth in GBP?

If a 36 inch pipeline can deliver 25580 acre-feet of water in a year, how fast is the water flowing in m/s?

That makes sense to me for any image you want to share publicly, but for private images having the location and capture time embedded in the image is incredibly useful.

This is a feature that could probably be added to sponsorblock. They have the data already.

Twitch seems to have won the war against adblockers by injecting directly into the video stream. It’s been months now and I still see ads. I assume it isn’t as easy as you say to skip them otherwise uBlock would have done it already.

I was also surprised by this, does that mean it used to be impossible to not have a publicly routable IP in AWS?

Isn't that situation covered in the original description? They said that marking squares that must be empty is fair game. The only thing not permitted is forced backtracking.

I don't think it's a bug in the javascript either, it seems intentional that it only fills in the x's automatically if you've filled in the squares for that row/column.

This is great, but someone is going to ruin the fun with a bot eventually, I hope you have a way to remove “solves” by IP.

I still think my reasoning holds.

Let's say that I magically manage to find a private key whose public key has a chosen prefix that is the entire length of the key - i.e. the entire key is vanity. Something like myveryveryveryverylongvanitypublickey. Is that equivalent to a 0 length public key in terms of security? I'd say obviously not - there is still no way to get started when it comes to finding the private key.

Fun suggestion: move the "Live Viewers" counter to be a real entry on the site at the bottom.

Viewing this site: 40 (0.0000005%)

I’m not a crypto expert at all, but surely it takes away no entropy because the fixed prefix is on the public key not the private key?

My reasoning is that the full public key could be seen as a 256 bit fixed prefix, but knowing the public key is meant to give no information about the private key by design.

I had the bright idea of symlinking $HOME/.local to an iCloud directory once. About a week later it got completely deleted. No way to restore, or any indication of what happened. Luckily I had a backup with another provider, but I will never trust iCloud again for anything that’s not on the golden path (e.g. photos)

That’s a really clever use for LLMs, I have the exact same problem with my Anki deck. Do you store all the historical sentences for each card or is it just a destructive overwrite each time?

Yes people who talk about vim being more efficient, are in my opinion, misguided. For me it's very little to do with efficiency, and much more to do with creating a more pleasant experience writing text, especially text with an exploitable structure (code).

I really enjoy precision, and that's what vim provides. It's the same reason I'd much rather play an FPS video game with a mouse and keyboard, than an analog control stick. And the same reason I hate doing anything important on a touch screen.

I don't think it's the keybindings in particular that people love about vim, you can rebind everything after all. I'm attached to vim keybindings in the same way I'm attached to qwerty keyboards - something had to be the default, it's fairly arbitrary, and there's very marginal benefits in switching to a different set of bindings.

It really is the modal editing style that's the main draw. Someone who edits frequently should find vim more convenient, not less, but it does require a lot of time to learn all the available commands and burn them into your muscle memory.

The US government itself uses the database, so there is a strong national security interest in it not being in private hands.

I think a lot of environmentalists do have a very anthropocentric view though - humans are viewed as a uniquely corrupting, malevolent force that's a blight on the natural balance of the world. But every other species would do the same, if they could. Our worst instincts are the ones that we share with all other life on this planet - to expand at the expense of everything else. To be selfish, and grow without limit.

Ironically one of the things that's unique to humans is our ability to feel guilty about our impact on the environment.

The cheapening of the experience is the whole point though. People are robbing themselves of the joy that can only come from putting yourself through hardship in pursuit of a goal.

It’s not a moral judgement, that’s just how humans are wired. The lows make the highs higher.

What would you call the ridiculous claim that Ukraine started the war? Who else does that serve but Russia?

For what it's worth, it is an exceptional MOBA FPS. It's genuinely one of my favourite multiplayer games of all time, and it's not even released yet. I know MOBAs aren't everyone's thing, but Deadlock may be the peak of the genre.

It displays the generated command to you, there's an additional step to confirm.

> Implement X, needs Y and Z, ok that was straightforward, also discovered U and V on the way and sorted that out, here's a pull request that neatly wraps it up

This sounds very difficult to review to be honest. At a minimum unrelated changes should be in their own pull request (U and V in your example).

I frequently wish I had a natural number type. So many programs would benefit from the type system guaranteeing that numbers are never negative.

This is an explicit anti-example in the article:

> For example, if you observe that it's silly for people to move from iPhones to Android phones because they think that Apple is engaging in nefarious planned obsolescence when Android devices generally become obsolete more quickly, due to a combination of iPhones getting updates for longer and iPhones being faster at every price point they compete at, allowing the phone to be used on bloated sites for longer, you can't really make money off of this observation.

Who is this hypothetical person who gets outraged at YouTube for having one of their videos embedded on a page with objectionable adverts? I’m sorry but their stated reason is crazy, I can put any site in an iframe on my website, that doesn’t mean they’re associated with me.

Wow I hope that's temporary - I looked at the site less than a month ago and it was still up.

I’m surprised Cloud Run doesn’t let you do this. You can put an AWS lambda in a VPC no problem.

I think this really demonstrates how valuable nixpkgs is. It’s the Wikipedia of building packages, and 10 years ago I wouldn’t believe it could exist, or be this good.