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fuglede_

468 karma · joined July 17, 2021

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fuglede_··on Llama.ttf: A font which is also an LLM
Very much inspired this earlier HackerNews post which put Tetris into a font, today we put an LLM and an inference engine into a font so you can chat with your font, or write stuff with your font without having to write stuff with your font.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40737961

fuglede_··on Norway discovers Europe's largest deposit of rare earth metals
Said myth being debunked: https://videnskab.dk/kultur-samfund/myte-foraerede-haekkerup...
fuglede_··on Solving the minimum cut problem for undirected graphs
This would prove P = NP. The catch being that only positive weights are allowed.
fuglede_··on Here's a puzzle game. I call it Reverse the List of Integers
They also say that a given integer should be split into two smaller integers.
fuglede_··on Add coffee stains to LaTeX documents (2021)
You and me both. Maybe someone will find this useful: https://photocopy.fuglede.dk/
fuglede_··on EU strikes deal to regulate ChatGPT, AI tech
Sounds what something someone might want to call an expert system?

> In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert.[1] Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if–then rules rather than through conventional procedural code

fuglede_··on The Mummy
Posted two days ago, doesn't have very many upvotes; not super obvious why it's even on the frontpage right now.
fuglede_··on Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS
I don't know how fine grained you want your notifications to be, but you can get pretty far without storing user data by splitting notifications by topic on the queue, or by filtering client-side in the service worker itself.

But even then, the UX seems pretty bad; when I first created an app with web push, a few years ago, there was zero guarantee that notifications would ever show up, and they seemed to fall through very often, when the client (at least with Firefox Android) sits in the background; https://stackoverflow.com/q/60809681

i can't tell if the situation has improved recently -- anecdotally it seems like it's a bit better now -- but depending on what sort of notifications you want to push, that quickly becomes a complete showstopper.

fuglede_··on Show HN: I made a tool that turns screenshots into dramatically angled photos
One can make so many fun things as client-side web tools by compiling ImageMagick to Wasm!

One thing I played around with because I needed it myself was turning pictures into things that look like they've been scanned. Made for documents, but I suppose one could use it for screenshots as well. :) https://photocopy.fuglede.dk

fuglede_··on Wi Flag (2002)
Heh, I remember running into something similar professionally, using the .NET Framework to generate random numbers: When asked to generate random integers, it has a seemingly innocent conversion from integers to floating points and back that ends up causing significant bias on large ranges. Specifically, `Random.Next(b)` produces an integer between 0 and b − 1 by

1. taking a random integer between 0 and 2^31 − 2,

2. dividing the integer by 2^31 − 1 to get a double-precision floating-point between 0 and 1,

3. multiplying this floating-point with b to get a number between 0 and b,

4. taking the integer part of this new number to get an integer between 0 and b − 1.

Do this for b = 2^31 − 1, and 50.34% of outputs are odd numbers, where you'd expect (almost) as many evens as odds.

Ended up doing a bit of a write-up here: https://fuglede.dk/en/blog/bias-in-net-rng/

Another fun thing about their RNG was that it was apparently supposed to follow Knuth's provably useful additive PRNG which, given n − 1 randomly generated numbers, generates a new number by taking the sum of the (n − 24)'th and (n − 55)'th numbers modulo some specific number; back when I looked, Microsoft's implementation for some reason uses 34 instead of 24, probably just a typo, with the unfortunate side effect that Knuth's theoretical guarantees are out of the window.

fuglede_··on Static site hosting hurdles
This had me wondering when GitHub Pages was actually introduced; earliest sign I can find is a blog post [0] from December 2008, so that's almost 14 years ago.

[0] https://github.blog/2008-12-18-github-pages/

fuglede_··on Original source of `(seed * 9301 and 49297) % 233280` random algorithm? (2014)
Fun fact: .NET used Knuth's simple form for their PRNG. Except for some reason they messed up and used Xn-34 instead of Xn-24: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/23198
fuglede_··on Tor Browser 11.5: automatic censorship detection, HTTPS-Only by default and more
Here's a small historical curiosity: In HTTPS Everywhere, the functionality used to be call "Block all HTTP requests" but when that functionality was changed (back in 2016 [0]) to not block connections to non-HTTPS hidden services, it was renamed to "Block all unencrypted requests".

I just checked, and indeed Tor Browser 11.5 does not block non-HTTPS connections to hidden services, even when in "HTTPS-Only" mode. Thankfully.

[0]: https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/pull/4370

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