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francoi8

61 karma · joined February 4, 2014

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francoi8··on Websites have a new way to spy on visitors: analyzing their SSD activity
It should be fairly easy to mitigate no? Simply add random access times. Localstorage doesn't need to be that fast. More generally I find it very annoying how much browsers allow by default (javascript, localstorage, gpu access etc.) - there's only a very limited amount of websites I want to be able to run gpu accelerated shaders.
francoi8··on 1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)
For those wanting to explore automatically converting art pieces to 1-bit you can use 8Bit Photo Lab on iOS or Android. Select the black and white palette and choose resolution and dithering type.

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ilixa.ebp&...

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/8bit-photo-lab/id6759910005

francoi8··on We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
All of these could have a set of standard non identifiable answers (eg. firefox reports the same 20 fonts, couple video formats, one among a few standard window sizes etc.) and for anything more extensive/precise, it would require the user's authorization and the user should have the option of feeding fake info (eg. fake timezone)
francoi8··on Generative art over the years
One Lab is an Android/iOS app I develop that has quite a few generative algorithms (mostly pixel shaders). You can combine them with the various effects in the app to create your custom generative stack.

Link: https://onelab.ilixa.com/

francoi8··on LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
This blows my mind. What good reason is there for giving javascript such permissions by default? This should at the minimum trigger an explicit permission request from the user.
francoi8··on I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too
There's nothing silly about those reasons.
francoi8··on Busy beaver hunters reach numbers that overwhelm ordinary math
Busy Beaver is non computable and grows much faster than the various subcubic graph numbers (you could easily encode a subcubic graph number computation in a relatively small turing machine).
francoi8··on Powers of 2 with all even digits
I wonder if we can get a sense of how fast it would grow if we hypothesize it is an infinite sequence.

And if it is a finite sequence, one could define f(p, n) as the sequence of successive exponents of 2 such that the ratio of even digits over its total number of digits is greater than p. This could be an interesting way of describing a set of fast growing functions from exponential growth (p=0) to arbitrarily fast growth as p grows closer to 1 (or P where P is the smallest number such that f(P, n) is a finite sequence).

francoi8··on Meta's Mark Zuckerberg explores purchase of Washington DC property
I would say any large corporation should meet higher standards of public benefit.
francoi8··on How many holes does the universe have?
I don't understand why the 4 corners of the screen make up the single hole. You could scroll the screen by 1 "square" which would change the corners which makes me feel there is nothing special about the original four corners.
francoi8··on Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on?
These past 4 years, I've been working on One Lab https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ilixa.onel...

It's a non destructive photo editor with a strong bend towards procedural generation.

Working on a video touch recording feature at the moment.

francoi8··on Launch HN: OutSail (YC W23) – Wingsails to reduce cargo ship fuel consumption
For CO2 at least the average price that it costs to pump the CO2 out of the atmosphere.
francoi8··on Bitcoin drops below $18,300 as sell-off accelerates
A lot of people are rooting for Bitcoin to crash so it will stop pumping carbon in the atmosphere like a middle sized country.
francoi8··on The Crypto Elites Are Plotting a Wall Street Merger
Unfortunately, it's a sandbox that consumes as much electricity as some mid-sized countries. An absolute obscenity.
francoi8··on Ubisoft’s first NFT plans make no sense
No, it's just a URL.
francoi8··on Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook
The larger a company becomes, the more it should be regulated.
francoi8··on NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
Except they're shitting on our planet in the process!
francoi8··on Live feed of Starship SN10 flight test [video]
It felt like CGI
francoi8··on Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
Back of the envelope calculations for the yearly operation of:

- Visa: 7 million GJ

- Bitcoin: 403 million GJ

francoi8··on VLC 3.0 release
I gave 10€.
francoi8··on We have a pretty good idea of when humans will go extinct
I think his argument is wrong and the fallacy comes when making the hypothesis the is a "50 percent chance that it was somewhere in the middle portion of the wall's timeline". It seems like a relatively reasonable assumption in that context but it is actually very arbitrary.

Imagine applying his reasoning to any building that has just been completed. Say we visit it the following day, make the 50% hypothesis and then conclude the building has a 50% chance of falling within 8 hours to 3 days. Obviously the conclusion is wrong as vastly more than 50% of buildings last longer than 3 days. We see in this case that postulating that there is a 50% chance that we visited the building somewhere in the middle portion of the building's timeline was completely unreasonable - we know from experience that buildings tend to last years.

So basically his estimation of when humans go extinct derives from a guess that may or may not be correct and in any case seems very arbitrary.