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zoky

1,081 karma · joined June 14, 2023

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zoky··on Time Travel in Braid (2015)
It seems like over the years Braid has gone through alternating periods of being praised as an absolute masterpiece and being derided as pretentious self-gratification by an arrogant and particularly insufferable developer.

In any case, anyone who like Braid should play Baba is You. Both games present the same sort of enjoyable mindscrew.

zoky··on Fastpotify
It supports WinAmp skins too… Dare I say it?
zoky··on A shell exclamation mark is not for yelling. Be lazy
Running it through the pipe lets you preview the command first and make sure it actually looks correct. Then you just re-run the command and append the bash pipe.
zoky··on A shell exclamation mark is not for yelling. Be lazy
The cool thing about programming languages like Ruby is that they’re very conducive to one-liners. You can use them to generate bash statements that you can then pipe back to bash. `ls | ruby -nle 'puts "mv #{$_} #{$_.gsub(/_/, ".")}"' | bash` is a pattern I use all the time, for example. Easy way of generating complex bash statements without having to bother with the bash man page.
zoky··on git's –end-of-options Flag
As a primarily FreeBSD user who feels like I have to relearn the idiosyncrasies of practically the entire system every I install a new Linux distro, the mess of configuration options somehow actually seems entirely on-brand to me.
zoky··on SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format
something something XKCD competing standards something something
zoky··on The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
Not at all. That’s like saying learning how different kinds of engines work is redundant in the age of taxis. You don’t have to know any of this stuff in order to get from A to B. But if you want to understand the processes involved in getting there, or you maybe want to be the one that builds a better self-driving vehicle, this is where you should start.
zoky··on Show HN: MacMind – A transformer neural network in HyperCard on a 1989 Macintosh
This is both simultaneously false, and true but largely meaningless. If you mean the Mona Lisa is somehow directly encoded somewhere in pi, then of course it’s not. It’s just a number.

If you mean that when you feed the numbers starting with some offset of pi into a specific algorithm you will get a rendering of the Mona Lisa, then yes, but so what? Allow me to introduce you to the PiMona algorithm. I won’t bother you with the implementation details, but it takes exactly one integer parameter. If it’s 3, it produces a beautiful rendering of the Mona Lisa. Anything else and it generates random garbage. Turns out, it’s really easy to find where the Mona Lisa is encoded in pi! It’s right there at the start.

But let’s say you meant that the digits of pi at some offset, when encoded properly and fed into any algorithm that is theoretically capable of generating the Mona Lisa will cause that algorithm to do so, then sure. But that’s also true of random noise, and says more about the algorithm and the nature of random numbers than about the Mona Lisa somehow being encoded into the fabric of the universe (which I’m sure isn’t what you meant, but I’m just saying there’s nothing really special about pi in that regard, except that as far as we know, it continues infinitely).

zoky··on Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
Passersby
zoky··on Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
And likewise the Romanian “dumneavoastră” evolved into… nothing, that’s still the polite form of “you” in Romanian. Interestingly though, it can be used in both the singular and plural, and takes verbs conjugated exactly the same way for both forms (i.e. the second person plural).
zoky··on Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs
The 2019 Intel Mac Pro had PCIe slots. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro still has them as well, but they’re pretty much useless.
zoky··on Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional
Except that requiring you to testify in order to absolve yourself of guilt violates your Fifth Amendment right not to testify in a trial against you. It is up to the government to prove you did something, not up to you to prove you didn’t.
zoky··on Meta Deployed AI and It Is Killing Our Agency
Man, fuck Facebook Marketplace. I cannot figure out for the life of me why everyone decided to abandon the perfectly useable Craigslist for that unreliable, buggy, scam-laden pile of hot garbage. Never once have I had a single good experience with Facebook Marketplace.
zoky··on Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus
Well, okay, but that’s like 95% of flying.
zoky··on An open replacement for the IBM 3174 Establishment Controller
It is a work in progress and is far from providing all the features you might expect from a later model 3174, but it does provide basic TN3270 and VT100 emulation.

+ TN3270

+ Extended Data Stream

+ Basic TN3270E

+ Device name (LU) negotiation

o SSL/TLS

I think that last one is a joke but I really don’t know enough about this sort of thing to be sure…

zoky··on A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
Such a weird way to do it when it would be a vastly easier to just blow the document out to paper and re-scan it.
zoky··on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers
I mean, technically it’s short for alter on the way to being short for alternate
zoky··on Email experiments: filtering out external images
I see them all the time. Usually it’s in the form of “choose your 2FA method” and it gives you a choice between SMS/email/phone call or whatever.
zoky··on Television is 100 years old today
For one thing, it’s much easier to measure spans of time when you have an integer frame rate. For example, 1 hour at 30fps is exactly 108,000 frames, but at 29.97 it’s only 107,892 frames. Since frame numbers must all have an integer time code, “drop-frame” time code is used, where each second has a variable number of frames so that by the end of each measured hour the total elapsed time syncs up with the time code, i.e. “01:00:00;00” falls after exactly one hour has passed. This is of course crucial when scheduling programs, advertisements, and so on. It’s a confusing mess and historically has caused all kinds of headaches for the TV industry over the years.
zoky··on Captive Wi-Fi
How do they block them? The only way I can think of would be signal jamming, which is super illegal and would have the FCC on them like brown on coffee beans…
zoky··on Cartoon Network channel errors (1995 – 2025)
Actually, the Canadian government suppresses it because they just really don’t want anyone to know how to get to 64K RAM, ON.
zoky··on History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts
I mean, you gotta read it. I’m not normally a huge fan of the classics; I find Steinbeck dry and tedious, and Hemingway to be self-indulgent and repetitious. Even Twain’s other work isn’t exactly to my taste. But I’ve read Huckleberry Finn three times—in elementary school just for fun, in high school because it was assigned, and I recently listened to it on audiobook—and enjoyed the hell out of each time. Banning it simply because it uses a word that the entire book simply couldn’t exist without is a crime, and does a huge disservice to the very students they are supposedly trying to protect.
zoky··on History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts
Banning Huckleberry Finn from a school district should be grounds for immediate dismissal.
zoky··on Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards
Contact a known and trusted security researcher who can verify to the world that you did what you said you did, so everyone else can have as much time as possible to figure out exactly how fucked they are. Doing nothing isn’t an option; once someone figures something like that out, it signifies that conditions were ripe for the discovery to be made, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s discovered again independently.
zoky··on Simple Hotkey Daemon for macOS, Ported to Zig
> The one thing I really can't stand about macOS is "Secure Input". It won't let you use something like TE or KM to input a password.

It actually will. The problem is that when secure input is enabled, you can’t trigger a macro from the keyboard, because the daemon isn’t allowed to intercept keystrokes. But if you can trigger the macro some other way, like through a mouse button or a MIDI message, keystrokes can be sent just fine, even into a password field.

zoky··on Imagining a language without booleans
Well, that’s true and false.
zoky··on Images over DNS
Wouldn’t the solution be to just start charging for excessive DNS traffic?
zoky··on Samsung confirms its smart fridges will start showing you ads
I mean, to be fair, most people’s TVs have shown ads since forever. Granted, those ads were distributed by the broadcaster rather than the TV manufacturers, but the association between TV and ads goes back far enough that it’s just sort of part of the cultural consciousness. I’m not sure that means that people “don’t care about ads”, especially when they are appearing in their homes through channels other than television. It may be that people who normally wouldn’t accept having ads on their devices have a blind spot for TV ads, just because that’s how TV has always been.
zoky··on Marshal madness: A brief history of Ruby deserialization exploits
As a general rule they will work anywhere, as long as the major version of the Marshal format is the same, and this hasn’t changed since Ruby 1.8. I expect if it ever did change (I can’t see any reason for it to ever do so though) there would probably be some sort of backwards compatibility available, as the Ruby community really hates making breaking changes between language versions, especially without offering some kind of relatively easy solution for making older code work.
zoky··on I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
> This company is profiting immensely off of your work

I wouldn’t say that’s exactly the case. Not to denigrate the author or anything, but this library is a relatively minor part of what Anthropic is doing. It’s a UI manipulation library, specifically one that simulates keyboard and mouse inputs. While something like that is certainly necessary for the project in question, it’s not anything that couldn’t be rewritten in-house without too much difficulty, especially since they’re only using a subset of the platforms supported by the library.

I’m sure that working on this project has provided the author with expertise in this area that Anthropic could benefit from, and so in that sense it’s still a shame that they wouldn’t give him an interview, but that’s really all that can be said about it.

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