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missblit

1,049 karma · joined December 2, 2013

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missblit··on Safari Ruined My Tuesday
Your bug reported 16,384px after accounting for device scale: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=992398

I knew it'd be this number right away, because it's also the maximum screenshot height thanks to being the maximum height of a surface in Chromium (Actually last I checked this technically depends on the GL backend used, but 16kpx seems common)

missblit··on Web fonts, boy, I don't know (2016)
Yes. Although I don't know if it's an issue on phones/tablets or not.

Also Firefox has an option to ignore CSS specified fonts.

missblit··on I don’t know how to count that low
> I didn’t know the limit because it had been many years since I’d had a problem that could be solved with a DB small enough to be held in its entirety in memory. And they were right to fail me for that: the fact that I was good at solving strictly more difficult problems didn’t matter because I didn’t know how to solve the easier ones they actually had.

No way it's "right" to fail an interviewee because they wondered outloud if a dataset can fit in memory. A candidate should be able to estimate the answer, but beyond that it's trivia that can be researched as needed -- indeed even asking the question is a positive signal not a negative one (it's not just people with "google scale" background who reach for over-complicated solutions).

missblit··on The latest campus cancellation is different
Social Media is not the purest form of democracy because the people using social media, or who have a lot of followers on social media, are not representative
missblit··on For software performance, can you always trust inlining?
AFAIK nothing requires generic code to be compiled inline in C++.

Heck with explicit template instantiation the generic code may not even be in the same translation unit as the calling code. At that point it'd require link time optimization to inline it.

missblit··on The Mind Has No Firewall (1998) [pdf]
Yeah that article (and reading some of Yudkowsky's stuff back as a teenager) is the only reason I can claim to understand how it works.

I also may be underestimating the number of futurology / AI enthusiast types; but my intuition is that there can't be _that many_ of them outside of Silicon Valley bubbles.

missblit··on The Mind Has No Firewall (1998) [pdf]
I heard of (and even understood) Roko's Basilisk and I don't feel the least bit in danger.

You need some pretty niche AI / futurology beliefs to even have a chance of considering it dangerous. For most people it's no more convincing than Pascal's Wager.

missblit··on Sunlight affects whether languages have a word for ‘blue’
The spectrum it generates is based on your test result, so if you get a "passing" score the two images are identical (I verified in an image editor that they're functionally identical)

For comparison here's what an "almost passing" image looks like: https://www.colorlitelens.com/images/test/T1.jpg -- the blue section should look a bit darker on the bottom spectrum, and it's a bit more "pastel" in general (but yeah, monitors can confound this a lot).

missblit··on First Human Case of Rabies in Illinois Since 1954
When I was bitten by a dog around 7 or 8 my doctor just said it was no big deal.

Granted it was a domesticated dog (that I liked to pet on my way to school) but still they probably should have been a bit more careful!

missblit··on I like e-readers now
> buying from amazon ties me to their devices and they give me a "license" to read on their devices only

This isn't strictly true since you can also read Amazon ebooks on 3rd party android devices that have the Kindle application installed.

It's true in the more general sense that the Amazon ebooks have DRM that limit interoperability.

missblit··on Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development
Ah I shouldn't have stopped reading. Then as one of the rare browser replay experts (there's gotta be at least like... 7 of us right?) I can certify your project as the real deal.
missblit··on Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development
> Likewise, the raw pointer values don’t have an effect on the behavior of the JavaScript

There are actually some cases where raw pointer values can effect user-visible browser behavior indirectly. Notably if the pointer values affect iteration order in an associative data structure which the browser uses in some way that tickles JS differently depending on the order.

There are bunches of other bizarre edge cases you'd never think of as well that never come up (until inevitably one day they do). Another example: In old versions of Blink I've seen ligatures fail to form depending on what was in the font cache when the page was loaded.

missblit··on Mozilla has defeated Microsoft’s default browser protections in Windows
Icon fonts like `Material Icons` are a terrible idea for exactly this reason.

They can also confuse search engines (Try a Google search for "keyboard_arrow_up" and scroll down a few results for instance, Bing too if you put it in quotes).

Webmasters should use SVGs or bitmaps with appropriate alt or aria attributes; but it's easier to just load in a font and hope that it loads fast enough to not cause problems / that the user doesn't override it

missblit··on Pinky and the Brain
There are tons of ways to write a story involving the force that doesn't boil down to destiny or power creep. Jedi are essentially swordsmen / samurai / ronin characters; and not every swordsman needs to be in a hero villain pair.

And there's plenty of fun stuff in the EU (Luke's Jedi academy, the force blocking Ysalamari lizards, Sith Holocrons, etc.) that could have been used to write a solid force-centric plot.

Though as you say the writers were too timid to do anything really interesting with it.

missblit··on How to properly load a dishwasher (2020)
Touching a clean dish with a clean finger won't make it unsanitary or gross.
missblit··on How to properly load a dishwasher (2020)
My Maytag dryer is around 37 years old (older than I am!) and works great.

So when I read articles claiming dryers have a life of around a decade I can't help but laugh.

missblit··on The number of legal chess positions estimated at 4.5x10^44 – proof games wanted
The threefold repetition has to be claimed, so the game can legally go on if both players overlook (or ignore) it.

There's also the fivefold repetition rule, which draws the game automatically.

missblit··on Abusing the Chromium Devtools Scope Pane
Naturally this sort of issue has been reported in the past: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=672625

From the comments on that bug there's other ways to detect devtools (including timing attacks), and it wouldn't be worthwhile to track down every possible case.

As someone who uses devtools debugging a lot I think that answer is reasonable, these kinds of shenanigans mostly only slow down and amuse expert debuggers.

missblit··on How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
It's unfortunate the top level comment was flagged so I can't check exactly what it said, wasn't it about feminization of _society_, not men?

My point was just that being feminine isn't inherently a bad thing, and also not the right word to describe society being overly sensitive. Not that men should be expected to be feminine or that that would be a good thing.

missblit··on How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
Well feminization is the completely wrong word for one thing, since being feminine is totally A-OK and not anything negative.

Ain't nothin' wrong with flowers and dresses and whatnot even if people on this website might not like it!

missblit··on Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls
Hmm, I've never had devtools break my browser despite using it fairly extensively. I think I confused myself once by forgetting about a local override I had turned on, or accidentally cleared more cookies than I intended to, but that's about it.

I have had locally compiled builds break my profile data once or twice, but that's a seperate issue.

missblit··on Exploring Clang/LLVM optimization on programming horror
> Of course the real goal is to eventually get it to optimize `while (number != 1) { ... }`

Valid C++ programs are guaranteed to be able to make forward progress [1].

So if `number` is a normal stack allocated integer (and not volatile, etc), then the infinite looping case is undefined behavior here.

So it would be a valid optimization to transform this to `number = 1;`.

(And indeed: https://godbolt.org/z/eodhfWe6h )

[1] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/memory_model

missblit··on To remember everything you learn, surrender to this algorithm (2008)
Totally agree with this.

When learning Japanese grinding vocab was extremely boring but did a fantastic job of bridging the gap between textbook literature and actually being able to read simpler (middle school level) native literature / comics / news stories.

And I didn't even need that many words to bridge that gap. Maybe like 1000 or so over what I'd already picked up from textbooks.

Now? There's no way in heck I'm going back to grinding vocab and instead slowly pick up new words by reading tons and tons of books.

I still need to rote memorize a bunch of kanji since picking them up naturally is pretty brutal, but like with vocabulary I'll only do it to the point where I can stumble through YA-level books without looking something up every other sentence.

missblit··on Mastering Web Scraping in Python: Crawling from Scratch
Yeah architecturally Chromium Headless is an "embedder" so it doesn't automatically get all the front-end goodies full-fledged Chrome supports unless someone puts in the work to plumb through the code.

So stuff like extensions don't work at all.

missblit··on Mastering Web Scraping in Python: Crawling from Scratch
This is highly domain (and sometimes User-Agent) dependent and in my experience JS is required more and more.

e.g. good luck trying to get much out of youtube.com (or any other video site) without executing JS.

missblit··on Leaked voting machine BIOS passwords may implicate Q-friendly county clerk
> That said, the EMS is usually a small half-rack setup and I'd be surprised for there to be a router at all

There isn't, you can actually see their EMS diagram here: https://recorder.maricopa.gov/justthefacts/pdf/Maricopa%20EM...

(Switches yes, but no routers)

missblit··on Leaked voting machine BIOS passwords may implicate Q-friendly county clerk
The subpoena is not a judicial subpoena at this point but a senate subpoena, that's why the senate would need enough votes to enforce it.

This is a bit confusing because there was a judge who decided the senate's first subpoena was valid [1], but that too was still a senate subpoena.

They certainly could try to go to court to get an enforceable subpoena, if they do I'll make some popcorn.

As for the routers my current position towards the AZ auditors is "put up or shut up". If the EMS really was connected to an external network then they must have some event logs somewhere showing an unexplainable MAC address or something; if they don't then asking for unrelated routers just feels like a fishing expedition.

[1] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2021...

missblit··on Leaked voting machine BIOS passwords may implicate Q-friendly county clerk
Which "they" are you talking about?

If you mean Arizona, see Title 16:

> After the canvass has been completed, the officer in charge of elections shall deposit the package or envelope containing the ballots in a secure facility managed by the county treasurer, who shall keep it unopened and unaltered for twenty-four months for elections for a federal office or for six months for all other elections, at which time he shall destroy it without opening or examining the contents.

> The officer in charge of elections shall ensure that electronic data from and electronic or digital images of ballots are protected from physical and electronic access, including unauthorized copying or transfer, and that all security measures are at least as protective as those prescribed for paper ballots.

missblit··on Leaked voting machine BIOS passwords may implicate Q-friendly county clerk
Maricopa has already confirmed that their EMS didn't contain any routers whatsoever (https://recorder.maricopa.gov/justthefacts/#tabs=1).

The subpoena requested "all routers used in connection with the November 3, 2020 general election"; so I guess it could arguably cover routers outside of the EMS.

That said:

#1 It's unlikely that the AZ senate has the votes to hold the county in contempt at this point (the audit has only gotten less popular over time).

#2 They want to avoid handing them over for security / privacy reasons (they've mentioned a few times the sheriff's department has concerns -- nothing concrete but c'mon who among us would be happy to hand over a ton of info about an intranet we're in charge of).

To put this all in context: the county took a much more aggressive position against the audit after the audit twitter account accused them of deleting a DB file to hide evidence and the AZ senate was about to drag them into a hearing they planned to broadcast on OAN. In particular the county has done an incredible job of countering misinformation with facts on their twitter account.

missblit··on Are dynamic languages going to replace static languages? (2003)
Also fuzz tests! I cannot stress enough how important fuzz tests are if your security model solely relies on your C++ being memory safe (a lot of code should be sandboxed as well but that's another discussion...).

Even when using modern stuff correctly on a mature codebase fuzz testing will find bugs. So if you don't fuzz test and someone evil has your binary then they'll fuzz test for you...

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