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indrora

2,551 karma · joined September 23, 2010

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indrora··on Kaitai Struct: declarative binary format parsing language
You're using it for the wrong thing, then.

KS isn't for general data mangling, it's for "I have this format and I need a de novo parser for it that works under explicit rules" and you're willing to do the work of fully implementing it from the bytes up.

indrora··on Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage
I was curious why and the answer is stupider than you'd think:

The circle in the image is an embedded PNG which has not been pngcrushed at all.

Instead of building a few gradients out, it looks like whoever did the export to svg out of Illustrator or whatever let it export this horrendously large circle. With a gradient. That costs 2.5MB.

indrora··on We found a bug in Go's ARM64 compiler
There are more assembler dialects than I care to remember.

The 2A06 assembler that people who write NES code (and later on SNES/GB/etc) use has some real quirks: $ prefixes a literal hex value but % is binary, but # in front of that is an address, registers are baked into the opcode (ldx -> load into X), and more.

Playstation folks all just used MIPS dialects which are mostly AT&Tish but the PS2 used an Intel style assembler.

indrora··on Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot
A few years ago, I was in Vegas for an event.

All factors of "it was Vegas" aside, one of the things that stood out to me was that the hotels have moved rapidly to rapid checkin/checkout systems where you punch in your confirmation code or name/dob and present a photo ID of some kind (passports can just be slapped against the reader) and it asks a few questions ("do you need late checkout", etc), directs you to the exact place your room is (and prints it, which was nice) and tells you where the bellhop station is if there's more than a little while before your room is ready and it can't dispense your cards.

All told, four of these stations had roughly 90% the throughput of the four real humans, but they "moved faster" because it didn't feel like queuing for a human, more... "waiting for a toilet"?

Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes.

As for the washing machine bit: Why not push for more standards usage in home automation? We have Thread, which is really cool, and which is driving the home automation future that we're slowly getting. Once it's loaded, a homebot should't have to check the thing manually, it should get information about when, what, and how and be able to have "eyes in the back of its head" so to speak.

indrora··on What GPT-OSS leaks about OpenAI's training data
There's an interesting set of options for the weird "xadder" token: misspellings of "xpadder" (a game pad helper), xadder (the name of at least two or three tools), xadder (a parameter in an XLib call), XAdder (the Xilinx full adder implementation for the Vivado FPGA platform), and more than a few usernames on various forums.
indrora··on In Maine, prisoners are thriving in remote jobs
The kinds of folks I've worked with who have served time vary from place to place, but I'll give you a good rundown of some of the flavors I worked with when I did daylabor work in college and high school...

* People charged with something stupid (e.g. shoplifting) that turned into a larger problem (e.g. crossing state lines) which became an even larger problem (e.g. nonviolent, passive drug charges). One guy I worked with had lived on one side of the river in St. Lois but worked on the other side. Walmart decided that he'd "shoplifted" a $2 bottle of soda, legally he fled the state by going home, and his kid had hid a gram of weed in the shoebox by the door that nobody opened except of course the cops that flooded the house. He served 10 years after a plea deal that sunk his kid into juvie for 5 years.

* People who "did a crime" to prevent a crime. Another person I worked with shot his son 5 times in the chest after his son attempted to murder the wife. Because the only testimony they had was an asian woman who didn't speak great english and the court denied an interpreter for her native language (laoatian) because she "speaks good enough english", her description of the events was murky (having been asleep) and so he landed murder charges and a stint in prison.

* People who got racism'd into prison: Same work as the previous, the older latino guy in this group was framed for the death of a woman he spent the evening with; he had left after they hooked up and she ended up falling off the balcony of her apartment later on, but because time of death is like, +/- a few hours when it snows on top of you, he was the last one to see her. He spent 4 years in prison before he was released on a mistrial.

* Drug users of the nonviolent variety. Nose candy, heroin, weed, usually white collar or upper blue collar. Several folks like this, all who just wanted their past to be shoveled behind them.

* People who legitimately did a crime, did the time, and now they're out: Plenty of situations where legit crimes happened... Theft, assault, even a case of money laundering on occasion. They went in, did their time, and came out, and day labor was the one thing that didn't ask too many questions and paid regularly.

A fair number had degrees -- from associates and bachelor's degrees to even a PhD who was nailed for what the state called a "gambling ring" (some informal betting around the office that ended up snowballing into a massive pot). many of them could do remote work of some kind, be it customer support roles or tech work. The MBA that did nose candy? He stayed on the board of directors for a local nonprofit _while serving_ and would relay his comments through his lawyer, being entirely upfront as to why he was incarcerated, then ended up doing accounting for the day labor company after a while.

All this to say: our system is fucked up and needs rehabilitation systems for the murky area between those two extremes.

indrora··on Apple Photos app corrupts images
My Olympus camera only embeds 1MP thumbnails in RAWs, but my iPhone embeds full JPEGs.

It varies by vendor and sometimes even firmware revision.

indrora··on Irrlicht Engine – a cross-platform realtime 3D engine
Technically, the GPL has no such direct requirement, only a theoretical one, from everything that I’ve seen.

If that were the case, no automaker or fridge manufacturer that ships Android would be able to, since in so many of their products, you’re not really able to replace the Linux kernel.

indrora··on Apple Photos app corrupts images
Speed. It all comes down to speed.

Processing RAW can be expensive time wise. If you’re sorting through a session of 10,000 photos, you want the speed that comes with the jpeg variant, which allows you to quickly sort out blurry, smeared, severely mis-exposed, and other various defect photos.

The storage cost is negligible (JPEG75@10MP is cheap) and the workflow benefit is immediate. Additionally, cropping and early white balance corrections (as well as a handful of other things) are much faster to preview with a non-RAW version of the image; since you’ll be processing that detail later anyway from scratch in the RAW later, it’s functionally free to do it on the jpeg version before you dig into the raw.

Additionally, there’s a cheap debugging aspect that you saw here: was it Apple Photos mishandling ORF? Was it something else? When working with both, you have a “reference” that can be used to make sure your digital development pipeline is set up correctly; finer details about the imager can sometimes get mangled by some RAW developers like pixel order and sub pixel blending. Not every CCD is a linear grid, not every LCD looks the same, but if you can get your RAW pipeline producing ≈the same as your camera did, it verifies that you have things mostly set up correctly.

indrora··on Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
Even regional differences in things.

If you say "one bar of butter", "one stick of butter", and "one pat of butter", these can all refer to three different things or the same thing, depending on where you are located. East Coast and West Coast US butter are sold in different size blocks (though both are "8 tbsp") however sometimes you'll find 4tbsp sticks on the west coast that look like 1/2 an East Coast stick that I've heard called pats.

Then Europe comes along and all the fancy European butters are made in 250g blocks, which are bigger than the 110g sticks but smaller than the package of 4 of them! This always confused my European friends when I'd say "oh I'll toss in a stick of butter" because they thought I was adding a quarter kilo of butter.

indrora··on Irrlicht Engine – a cross-platform realtime 3D engine
Saleco is doing just fine, and it's based on Doom.
indrora··on Nintendo Switch 2 Dock USB-C Compatibility
Not even.

Early devices were things like the OnePlus 2 [0] and there were plenty of phones out before the Switch even hit the market in 2017 [1]. There were some issues with standards compliance, sure, but the market had vastly improved by the time the Switch had come out.

[0] https://www.gsmarena.com/oneplus_2-6902.php [1] https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMax=2017&nUSBType...

indrora··on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
Windows 10 Mobile was good.

The entire developer experience was fantastic and the thing that killed it was a lack of desire from the upper leadership when it felt like they couldn't compete with the duopoly.

indrora··on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
Apple requires you to get a developer account with them.

Nowhere does that require you to go and get a DUNS number, which is onerous for a single developer to do without the infrastructure of a company.

indrora··on Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain (2010)
All fair.

This is likely also related to the (likely stretched) story about a train full of radioactive meat that floated around for a while [0] that seems to get interpreted a little differently each time [1].

[0] https://time.com/4305507/chernobyl-30-agriculture-disaster/#...

[1] https://origins.osu.edu/milestones/april-2016-eating-you-foo...

indrora··on OpenFreeMap survived 100k requests per second
It's also way more than 1px/30s -- Its like 20px/30s and you have a "tank" of them, which you can expand to however big you want.

Placing pixels gives you points, which you can turn into more pixels or a bigger bag of pixels over time. I've seen people who have done enough pixel pushing that they get 3-4K pixels at a time.

indrora··on Abusing Entra OAuth for fun and access to internal Microsoft applications
Having done two rounds at different Fortune 10s (one being Microsoft) I can tell you: This isn't AI, this is the result of years of "make it work" and duct tape.

This is "It'll be safe if we leave it on the intranet" and then someone says "Zero trust!" and then all the sudden things that had authentication on the inside are also going through a new and different layer of authentication. A stack of totally reasonable expectations stack tolerance on tolerance, and just like the Sig Sauer P320, it has a habit of shooting you in the foot when you least expect it.

indrora··on It's a DE9, not a DB9 (but we know what you mean)
British English, most likely.
indrora··on Complete silence is always hallucinated as "ترجمة نانسي قنقر" in Arabic
When YouTube began building automatic transcriptions for captions, it regularly flagged any noise or music -- typically industrial noise -- with "[foreign]"

If it couldn't understand it, it was "foreign" for the longest time.

indrora··on The sadist assault on the 'Coldplay couple'
I'm consistently reminded of Brin's The Transparent Society [0], which has some interesting arguments about this sort of thing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

indrora··on Modern Debian-based Window Maker distribution
I've wished for a better WindowMaker experience for years -- and that more places would adopt the distribution solution that NeXT and its children adopted.

Is it perfect? No, but it's sure a step closer to an ideal than whatever .so hell that we came up with before.

indrora··on The hidden JTAG in a Qualcomm/Snapdragon device’s USB port
Just wait until you find out about Apple's magical USB shenanigans like the Chimp Cable https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Chimp_Cable
indrora··on Reverse Engineering Vercel's BotID
Anubis does it pretty decently.
indrora··on Reverse Engineering the Microchip CLB
> only 32 LUTs also made me scratch my head: what kind of useful things can be made with so few components?

There's plenty of options: Memory mappers and Very Simple encryption come to mind. Stuff that is intended to make it Just That Much Harder to get to. Very tiny little finite state machines that handle One Thing.

indrora··on The Fairphone (Gen. 6)
... And the interface for my IBM 729?
indrora··on Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM
https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor

You'd be surprised.

indrora··on Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM
There are still places for good easter eggs.

In a past life I did technical writing and slipped all sorts of fun things into my documentation: Multiple 4/20 references, my birthday, in-jokes from the team that I was working with, even the occasional proper meme. When I needed a link? Something funny from the official corporate channel on YouTube that I could get away with. Needed a company name? I checked every trademark we had on file to find Something.

Never be afraid to hide something wonderful in your code. The header for UFS2 contains the author's birthday [0] and OpenVMS has several interesting exit code states [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Kirk_McKusick [1] https://www.parsec.com/os/openvms/undocumented.php?page=13

indrora··on Backlash to artificial dye grows as Kraft ditches coloring for Kool-Aid, Jell-O
Supply chains.

EU and US supply chains are vastly different, plus shifting the production lines from one to another doesn't happen overnight. This means that it could well take two years to fully move all their production facilities off synthetic food dyes.

indrora··on Show HN: Ts-SSH – SSH over Tailscale without running the daemon
0.0.1 - I fixed a bug

0.1.0 - I rearchitected the bug

1.0.0 - The bug is integral to the codebase.

indrora··on Steam Beta enables Proton on Linux making Linux gaming simpler
I wish Apple and Valve would get together and actually make Proton on MacOS a more streamlined experience. the Game Porting Toolkit just isn't where it needs to be -- It feels like it's based on vinegar rather than something that has had lots of compat work done on it.
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