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duckqlz

234 karma · joined September 6, 2016

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duckqlz··on How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs
This comment literally forced coffee through my nasal passageway as laughter erupted from my mouth.

Thank you.

duckqlz··on It's Not the End of Programming
I’m confused by your example. Prior to the printing press, hand written books (or any reading material) would not have been accessible to the masses; hence the low literacy rates.

Furthermore, while no one was saying “I’m going to go buy WinZip now”, many were lining up to buy WinRAR?

Finally, the issue with “high quality hand crafted software” is that software and similar projects are made possible through engineering not through artistry.

Simply put:

"Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure." — Henry Petroski

duckqlz··on The Most Powerful Server Embiggens a Bit with Power11
Embiggen is a perfectly cromulent word!
duckqlz··on WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
If any lawyers or FAA employees are reading this I’m genuinely interested in what, if any, legal implications there would be for running nmap mid flight on an airline. Surely once you have spoofed the MAC address and IP of another passenger to gain unauthorized access to the planes LAN you have committed a crime but what about passively scanning?
duckqlz··on Fancy Parking
Op was talking about the front wheels pivoting. Rear wheels do not pivot. Furthermore, the quality is sometimes better on rear tires in a rear wheel drive car if the owner is trying to be frugal and save money when changing their tires. Similarly with front wheel drive drive train, owners will often opt to replace only their front tires as they will wear quicker. This is all due to the traction needed to start the car moving. Now, back to the crux of the question, why fancy park? Reversing and turning creates a wider turn radius, reduced control and greatly increases the size of the cars “blind spot”. A driver can opt to have their driving ability impacted while they safely enter an empty spot by reversing in or deal with the hustle and bustle of reversing into a busy parking lot. Despite the efficiency and obvious gains from “fancy parking” some people have parked forward their entire life and have honed their spacial sense around a certain car or truck making the switch impractical, at least until the purchase of their next vehicle!
duckqlz··on Paris to bring back swimming in Seine after 100 years
€6000 to look inside of your walls for bats?!

Quitting my job today to move to the Netherlands to start a bat inspection business.

duckqlz··on LazyVim
I vehemently disagree with this. I find managing vs code extensions a nightmare and having to download them based on rating alone when there are 300 extensions for every query is untenable in a production environment.

Furthermore if you want to customize a vsc extension to do something unique for your set up you have a whole new set of issues like finding the settings, documentation etc.

Now if you can get over all of that it’s still a bulky, slow and cluttered IDE that is constantly sending telemetry data and other nonsense around the web

While I haven’t tried LazyVim I would strongly recommend LunarVim to anyone new to the vim ecosystem. It installs fast, needs minimal set up and packages can be installed with a single line in the config or through packer. Most things work out if the box. But if they don’t vim is so mature you can just ask chatGPT.

Seems like ease of use is also the aim of lazyvim so I would not discourage anyone from trying this flavour as well.

In the end it is whatever works for you.

duckqlz··on Matrices and Graph
Does anyone know how the graph illustrations were created? I have driven myself mad with tikz and dot .
duckqlz··on Simpsons Hit and Run source code (2003)
I love how the comments in the code keep the same tone as the game and the Simpson itself.

“”” // Synopsis: Blahblahblah “””

I want to work in a place that allows this or encourages it.

duckqlz··on Can a Rubik's Cube be brute-forced?
https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/cube-clock Or buy the same clock?
duckqlz··on 32“ E Ink screen that displays daily newspapers on your wall (2021)
What an amazing project. I will be copying or becoming a customer in the coming weeks. Lots of comments about the high price, I do wish large e-ink displays would come down in price the but for ~$3k this will look good on my office wall , how could I resist. It’s art it is not just tech.
duckqlz··on Using GPT-4 to measure the passage of time in fiction
In the quote the author is speaking about students handing in an assignment and using ChatGPT to write it. He says:

> This may not count as plagiarism, but it won’t produce anything new.

First, it is plagiarism by definition. Any time one presents work as their own which they did not create themselves is plagiarism .

Second, and vastly more importantly going forward, students were never handing in “new” ideas on an assignment. Using an LLM to generate a “pastiche” that is then read by the student (hopefully) before being handed in is still a win in my book. Having students ask their questions to an LLM can be an amazing tool to further learning but when students and educators are terrified of this new tool they will hide their usage of it and then it becomes a tool for copying rather than learning and plagiarism is the only consequence.

duckqlz··on A ‘lost world’ of early microbes thrived one billion years ago
“Professor Jochen Brocks inspecting the 1.6-billion-year-old rocks in Australia’s Northern Territory. The rocks contained a primordial chemical structure that hinted at the existence of the Protosterol Biota.”

Not sure where this sentiment is coming from… Considering it’s fat traces of a primordial species that is a common ancestor of all complex life on earth, which went extinct over 800 million years ago, and is found in ancient rocks around waterways literally all over the world; I think we are fine to touch it.

duckqlz··on A new line drawing method for the cycle savvy
This was my first introduction to the “demoscene”. I would really like to get into this type of programming, it is so beautiful. The efficiency and creativeness of the programmers who make these c64 demos is jaw dropping when looking at any of the top submissions.

I will be investigating further but to anyone else interested in this specific rabbit hole:

https://csdb.dk/event/?id=3187

duckqlz··on Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)
From the first chapter:

“The first two chapters of this book are friendly non-technical intro- ductions to key topics and skills. For readers curious to learn more about behind-the-scenes details, chapters 3 and 4 contain conceptual non-mathematical explanations of Monero's privacy features and blockchain. Later chapters dive into complex technical details for understanding, developing, and integrating Monero.”

duckqlz··on The AARD Code and DR DOS (2021)
Actually it was shipped. “Microsoft disabled the AARD code for the final release of Windows 3.1, but did not remove it, so that it could have become reactivated later by the change of a single byte in an installed system.” [1]

[1] Schulman, Andrew; Brown, Ralf D.; Maxey, David; Michels, Raymond J.; Kyle, Jim (1994) [November 1993]. Undocumented DOS: A programmer's guide to reserved MS-DOS functions and data structures - expanded to include MS-DOS 6, Novell DOS and Windows 3.1 (2 ed.). Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-63287-X.

duckqlz··on Rooms.xyz
Really interesting concept. The most intriguing part is the ability to add LLM functionality directly in your code. From the documentation:

```

local PRIMER =

  "You are a sushi chef in a sushi restaurant. " ..

  "You are kind and cheerful and excited about offering " ..
  
  "different kinds of sushi to the customer."
function onClick()

  aiCharacter(PRIMER)
end

```

This opens up a world of possibilities for a casual game developer and there are many other interesting features. I would love to read more about how they are controlling cost on their api searches with the LLM. I look forward to seeing more from rooms.xyz.

[1] - https://rooms.xyz/docs#aiCharacter

duckqlz··on Distrobox: Use any Linux distribution inside your terminal
From the first line of the README:

"Simply put it's a fancy wrapper around podman or docker to create and start containers highly integrated with the hosts"

duckqlz··on The .zip TLD sucks
I absolutely agree. If it were a ‘.html’ extension that opened a self extracting zip we would have an issue but I struggle to see the danger with this. If someone, technical or not, is already accepting the risk of opening a ‘.zip’ file from an unknown source the attack vector doesn’t grow by opening a webpage unexpectedly. Furthermore I can rename a malware.exe to malware.zip and send it out by email and the implications are obvious. Maybe the .zip TLD will dissuade technical users from accessing the domain but I hardly see it as a new danger that could be described as “evil” or “malicious” on googles part. I could be wrong and would love to hear a clever person think of a feasible attack but imo this does not warrant any panic.
duckqlz··on Unrelated Words Puzzle
Comparing the first example against a similar guess based on intuition:

zuckerberg => investor(21%), mark(20%)

cuban => investor(3%), mark(%4)

Using google as a general guide to how often these words appear together

mark cuban => About 40,500,000 results on google

"mark cuban" => About 13,200,000 results on google

"mark" "cuban" => About 33,500,000 results on google

investor cuban => About 80,800,000 results on google

"investor cuban" => About 945 results on google

"investor" "cuban" => About 9,810,000 results on google

mark zuckerberg => About 41,700,000 results on google

"mark zuckerberg" => About 29,400,000 results on google

"mark" "zuckerberg" => About 35,700,000 results on google

investor zuckerberg => About 11,100,000 results on google

"investor zuckerberg" => About 479 results on google

"investor" "zuckerberg" => About 3,160,000 results on google

Considering the above results of how often the base words appear together and the added knowledge that Mark Cuban is more recognized for his investment activity than Zuckerberg I wonder how the relational scores are calculated by the game.

(Note: I realize this is nit-picking in an extreme sense but I found myself very interested in the underlying tech behind the game and this was part of my exploration so I thought I would share it with everyone else. Feel free to tear apart my methods I am still very interested in how the OP coded their solution)

duckqlz··on A team of sleuths quietly hunting cyberattack-for-hire services
Your assumption that you need to develop or even use malware to commit these attacks is incorrect. As the article eludes to, most "script kiddies" would be using simple reflection attacks like those utilized by anonymous. This would equate to changing a few lines in a TCP or UDP packet and mass spamming 3rd party site to elicit a flood of responses. This is pretty simple for any 13+ year old with visual basic and some time. Large bot nets rented out for attacks are clearly more dangerous and I would assume (hope) the FBI does target the malware creators and distributors.
duckqlz··on Firesky – The Bluesky Firehose
Skeets

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/27/23701551/bluesky-skeets-n...

duckqlz··on New Playground: Integer.exposed
I'm confused by what you are saying?

111..11111 = -1 (for Nbit) 100..00000 = -2147483648 (for 32bit)

Therefore 11...1 is smaller than 100...01? Maybe I am dumb and missing something? Can anyone help?

duckqlz··on New C features in GCC 13
Everyone is so angry in the comments about c adopting c++ traits. I do not see it that way. This is not the language standard this is just GCC. Clang and GCC have always had compiler specific features which could only be described as wizardry to a regular c user. GCC has always kept the c standard at arms length, clang is a bit better but using compiler specific features has always been reserved for mavericks. Conversely, C23 has some great additions, none that remind me of C++? [1]. I don't think the standards enthusiasts that hang out on #c in freenode would be happy to think this many people see c going in the direction of C++.

[1] https://open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG14/www/docs/n3054.pdf

duckqlz··on Show HN: I made a SQL game to help people learn / challenge their skills
Very creative game. Pretty basic sql but that’s probably good anything heavier would be enraging. really wonderful production putting it all together. I enjoyed it.

FWI On iOS you must refresh, or click the show/ hide the answer input section whenever the keyboard disappears. This usually happens if you use a suggestion rather than typing it out.

duckqlz··on A Love Letter to Make
I am guessing this was written by ChatGPT. As far as I know, No one likes make. Imagine having a choice between make and cargo and still picking make. ridiculous.
duckqlz··on Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negative Game Review Useful
I don’t think that the anti cheat was doing anything shady. It’s pretty much industry standard to have the anticheat start from the registry and run in the background as a service. While I’m not advocating the general shadiness of anticheat software this doesn’t stand out as a particularly interesting case. Valorant is a great example once installed their anticheat is so pervasive I wouldn’t be surprised if a full OS reinstall didn’t wipe it. Then there is fortnite who advertises to use easy’s anti cheat solution on their splash screen (and they do) but then have multiple obfuscated and hidden running processes made by battleeye. Battle eye not only hides itself from the screen ask manager it also installs as a separate package which doesn’t uninstall with fortnite. I mean the games are free and very fun so it’s hard to be mad. I just heavily segregate my gaming pc from anything else on my network . I never browse the web on it or do anything but game and that makes me feel 1% better about the Orwellian nightmare of spy software sitting within it.
duckqlz··on Zig build system
The best debugging experience imo is using gdb and rr within nvim. Works for zig, c, rust, etc. with minimal configuration in nvim. The less I leave vim the more productive I can be. Same thing probably goes for emacs although I will never admit it.
duckqlz··on Magnon-based computation could signal computing paradigm shift
So if I am understanding correctly this YIG-nanomagnet device expands on the work of spin-wave computation in a hybrid CMOS setting and allows for read and write which would allow in memory computation? How does a YIG-nanomagnet work? Does it hold its state after a charge is applied or does it need a constant amplitude to keep it in either a 0 or 1 state? I find this very interesting and would love to read more about the work.
duckqlz··on Type system of Fortnite's Verse language
Coming from the paper on Verse Calculus and having watched Simon Peytonjones’ talk last year I was super excited to try Verse in UEFN last week. Much to my dismay instead of a rich functional language I was met with something that looked like a DSL with python inspired syntax. As I played with the language I couldn’t stop thinking about “choice” and the other feature of verseMax I felt I was missing out on but after making a few toy maps I realized that epic had released a language entirely meant for the public. Reading Verse can be accomplished by anyone who can write a python for loop. The language is VERY accessible.

From the comments below I can see a lot of people are turned away by the idea of FP and this language was clearly meant to address those concerns. The type system is interesting from a high level view but for non-coders I can see how it would make sense.

For instance writing `if var = int` looks perfectly reasonable for someone who has never programmed before and it just works in verse.

So all in all while I was upset on a personal level at what Epic has released, I hope it is a stepping stone to their overall goal of verseMax. Furthermore I am excited at the idea of millions of people (kids) learning functional programming as their first language and think this iteration of verse may just be the perfect gateway drug.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=832JF1o7Ck8 [2] https://simon.peytonjones.org/assets/pdfs/verse-conf.pdf [3] https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/uefn/verse-lan...

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