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missblit

1,049 karma · joined December 2, 2013

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missblit··on The Zizians and the rationalist death cult
Rationalism doesn't involve doing math, but _role-playing_ like you're doing math. There's lots of talk about updating priors and bayes; but in practice a lot of stuff isn't that quantifiable without running scientific studies, so this comes down to #yolo-ing it.

Of course thinking about stuff without always using formal statistics is fine and how people work, but if you trick yourself into thinking that you do use statistics for everything it may become harder to evaluate or second guess your own thinking.

missblit··on ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or Tab Delimited Text
See this is why I once used moon-viewing-ceremony-seperated-values (MVCSV). The Moon Viewing Ceremony emoji was unlikely to show up in my dataset, and not only is the emoji visible, it's quite visually pleasing.
missblit··on WebGPU-Based WiFi Simulator
Bugs:

#1 if you spam the "add a new source" button you eventually get a JavaScript exception logged to the screen due to an array with a fixed max size of 128 elements overflowing.

#2 this could be graphics card or driver specific (I have an AMD card), but scrolling just right can can break the simulation due the the text boxes; for example by quickly paging up and down, or scrolling all the way to the bottom and then wiggling the scroll position up and down. Once this happens the bad data propagates until the entire thing is filled with noise, solid black, or solid white. If you then scroll up to 3D mode the screen will be filled with a mess of polygons.

missblit··on Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games
Steam has supported native Linux games for a decade.
missblit··on Safe C++
C++ is a very slow moving language. There are various rumblings about making it memory safe, but if we get a proper memory safe C++ it'll probably be in the '30s.
missblit··on The Fennel Programming Language
With "[sprintf] unexpected placeholder".

This is presumably https://github.com/fengari-lua/fengari/issues/147. You can workaround it by substituting "%.f" for "%.0f" in https://fennel-lang.org/fennel/fennel.lua.

However Chrome won't let me override the contents of this URL for some reason. And the first Firefox response override extension I tried ended up confusing the page. So you can alternatively override the contents https://fennel-lang.org/fengari-web.js as follows:

`"string" == typeof o.response ? a.f = yt(o.response.replace("%.f","%.0f")) : a.f = new Uint8Array(o.response.replace("%.f","%.0f"));`

(Just before `var l = Ee(a);`)

Opened a bug for it: https://github.com/bakpakin/Fennel/issues/485

missblit··on How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins
And it is a feature.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...

missblit··on Show HN: "data-to-paper" – autonomous stepwise LLM-driven research
Hello,

Your example paper has omitted non-English characters in the names of anyone who gets cited. Look especially at citation [5], where a lot of the authors have European characters in their names which get omitted.

There is also possibly a missing × or ⋅ in "1.81 10^5" on page 3.

missblit··on You can't just assume UTF-8
Encodings I have used or been exposed to in my career: ASCII, Latin1, Windows-1252, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, GBK, Zawgyi, Shift-JIS
missblit··on Xz: Can you spot the single character that disabled Linux landlock?
You are quoting Jia Tan [1]. The malicious actor wrote that comment when deliberately breaking the check in the first place.

Fixing headers or extra tests would not have prevented this, as there is no indication the headers were broken in the first place, and extra tests could have been compromised (or ignored for release tarball) some other way.

[1] https://git.tukaani.org/?p=xz.git;a=commit;h=328c52da8a2bbb8...

missblit··on Bitboards and Connect Four
I used a similar technique in a university class. We were doing a Connect 4 bot tournament, and I wanted mine to be as optimized as possible.

But in the end I spent all my time playing around with bitwise operations, so had no time left to add in multiple threads (so couldn't was slowed down by a factor of 4 or so) timing (so had to cut off the search early to not accidentally go over the limit), or to tweak the score heuristic.

Which meant my program only got second place. Still, I think the teacher enjoyed it, and there were some oohs and aahs when my program output moves basically instantly during the tournament.

missblit··on The revenge of Unicode
> I sometimes wonder how many of its 149,813 ‘characters’ any one human is likely to use, and suspect for most that’s in the low hundreds or less.

Chinese sends it's regards.

But also text interchange is useful even if most people only use a fraction of it most of the time. How else is an English document supposed to quote Chinese characters for instance (this happens all the time on wikipedia pages which share the original name of something next to the translation).

The days before unicode were dark days, nowadays besides the ocassional oddity text pretty much just works without users thinking about it -- thanks to unicode.

missblit··on I pwned half of America's fast food chains simultaneously
He's using the word as meaning "insert", not the JS function. He is saying he inserted a new row into a database to get admin access to a dashboard.

'splice" means to join two things as if by weaving them together. If used as "splice into" or "splice in" there is a sense of breaking something apart, inserting something into the gap, and joining it back together.

This all makes a bit more sense if you look up the etymology which was about ropes (despite splicing being about uniting, it's closely related to the word 'split').

missblit··on Google is apparently struggling to contain an ongoing spam attack
So this is pure speculation, but more people should be aware of parser differentials (same thing as that email thing the other day) so let me say what I mean...

Hypothetically say a website has an internal service to index posts for keywords for search, that just so happens to unescape HTML entities during keyword normalization due to a seemingly harmless bug.

Plus a second internal service to identify keyword spam that _doesn't_ do any HTML entity unescaping (because why would you?)

Then you could end up in a situation where a spammer uses HTML entities to avoid spam detection while still showing up in search results. They hope that the user ignores the nonsense text and just clicks their link based on the image (a list of big shopping brands in the middle east) instead.

missblit··on Google is apparently struggling to contain an ongoing spam attack
Well the text is HTML entities to escape ASCII text. "People being end with a person. Like everything in OUNASS ProMo CODE Onas OuNaS oNass cOuPOn DiscOUnt NoON SiVvl non toyou NaMshi"

Here Sivvi, toyou, Namshi, noon, and OUNASS are all brands of shopping websites and you can see their logos in the image.

Clearly this is some sort of keyword spam, though it's hard to tell more than that from your screenshot. It's also not clear why they'd bother to use HTML entities... a bug in the spam code? Or perhaps exploiting some parser differential between different twitter systems? Who can say.

missblit··on My favorite coding question to give candidates
The rationale for not wanting SQL solution feels a bit strained. If you don't want an SQL answer just say "Hey buster this is a C++ interview!"
missblit··on Othello Is Solved?
I only skimmed it, but it looks like they described this to me.

The next sentence:

> Although there are numerous ways to select subsets that would prove the initial position results in a draw, we used algorithm 1 to obtain a small subset.

Algorithm 1:

> We developed an algorithm that requires predictive scores for all positions with 50 empty squares and returns a subset such that if the all positions belonging to that subset are solved, and the all solutions match the predictions, the initial position is consequently solved. It was described as Algorithm 1.

(The algorithm is also printed out)

missblit··on iLeakage: Browser-Based Timerless Speculative Execution Attacks on Apple Devices
Besides windows.open I'd wonder if iframes could also be vulnerable if they launch in the same process.

Chrome and Firefox both support Out-Of-Process Iframes as part of their security setup; though I'm not sure if Firefox has it enabled by default yet. Firefox even drew some lovely pictures about it here: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-si...

missblit··on Transcoding Latin 1 strings to UTF-8 strings at 12 GB/s using AVX-512
Be careful, since at least Chrome may choose a different charset if loading a file from disk versus from a HTTP URL (yes this has tripped me up more than once).

I've observed Chrome to usually default to windows-1252 (latin1) for UTF-8 documents loaded from the network.

missblit··on Transcoding Latin 1 strings to UTF-8 strings at 12 GB/s using AVX-512
The spec may disagree, but webservers do sometimes send bytes outside the ASCII range, and the most sensible way to deal with that on the receiving side is still by treating them as latin1 to match (last I checked) what browsers do with it.

I do agree that latin1 headers shouldn't be _sent_ out though.

missblit··on Pay no attention to the USB port behind the “no USB” sticker
I just remove stickers because I hate all manner of visual distractions. If I could find a way to remove etched in / painted on logos from from computer hardware I'd do that too.

Got a (pretty good) apron from William Sonoma but it had the logo sewed on with a huge patch, had to painstakingly unstitch it to get a pretty apron without any branding emblazoned across the front.

missblit··on Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC
My NUC Phantom Canyon is completely 100% silent after adjusting the fan curves to not turn on the fans until they're needed. It's awesome as an HTPC.
missblit··on Mid-1990s Sega document leak shows how it lost the second console war to Sony
Nights into dreams was my favorite game as a kid. The graphics were just mind-blowingly pretty at the time to the point where I had dreams about visiting dreamland.

Though the whimsical fantasy setting of Spyro the Dragon on Playstation was up there too. And I do agree that the Saturn was missing a killer Sonic game. Sonic 3D Blast was a bit too quirky, not 3D enough, and not exclusive enough to be a system seller.

Also I'm a die-hard Sega super fan so totally biased.

missblit··on Mid-1990s Sega document leak shows how it lost the second console war to Sony
The Dreamcast wasn't competing against the Playstation 1, the Sega Saturn was. And price and game library aside it had the hardware to back it up. You can see this in gameplay videos of, say, Nights into Dreams or Tomb Raider.

If anything the Dreamcast was competing against the PS2 and Gamecube (despite coming out at an awkward time significantly earlier than the competition)

missblit··on SlowDownAndWasteMemory()
Referer https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
missblit··on MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information
The linked bug report has four examples of it being wrong. And the bug reporter mentions there's no workflow to submit corrections.

Also hallutination was probably the wrong word to use for LLMs being incorrect since it might imply they could be correct if they would only just focus on the right input data rather than, say, simply not understanding complex technical concents, but I guess that ship has sailed.

missblit··on The Staggering Frontiers of CSS
> CSS has caught up to JavaScript ;-)

Google CSS houdini

(Holy Hell)

missblit··on Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread protests
I know I have accidentally followed like half a dozen people. Looks like the UI is a bit different now but it used to be way too easy to click that button.
missblit··on It’s not wrong that "🤦🏼‍♂️".length == 7 (2019)
Measuring the length of text is easy. Now measuring the length of text before actually printing it / running the shaping engine, now that's hard.
missblit··on Math That Goes on Forever but Never Repeats
Hey this is a math fight, no computer architecture allowed!
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