Notes
Hexing the Technical Interview
The javanisse. Surely you have heard of him! He is a small, magical man–something like a gnome–who inhabits every JVM. If you do not set out an extra constant for him, he can cause segfaults. But keep the javanisse happy, and your mutices will be fair.
I do hope they got hired.
Stop Trying to Schedule a Sales Call With Me
Jokes on them, I go straight to the open-source option.
UTF-16 in Windows Strikes Again!
An incredible security issue that stems from Windows storing everything internally as UTF-16 (wchar_t), but arguments to programs taking ANSI characters (char). Converting from UTF-16 to ANSI is weird, and that allows you to smuggle characters past sanitizers.
Microsoft says this is developers' fault, developers say that this is Microsoft's fault. How do you resolve a vulnerability that is introduced by the compiler?
Exploiting McDonald’s API for Fun and (Nearly) Free Food
API flaws in the McDonald’s McDelivery system in India, one of the world’s most popular food delivery apps, enabled a variety of fun exploits
Who can say no to food for $0.01?
Dreamberd: The Perfect Programming Language
It has every feature you knew you wanted, and every feature you didn't know you wanted.
Just Go Independent
Perhaps running an indie news website isn't as easy as it sounds. Molly White has an excellent view (as always) of how editorial independence isn't that great sometimes.
The Rise and Development of Illumos
An extremely quotable talk by Brian Cantrill from 2011.
Some of my favourite lines:
Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison
What you think of Oracle is even truer than what you think it is: "Shit mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money"
The lawnmower doesn't care about OpenSolaris - the lawnmower doesn't have empathy
Because I didn't work at Oracle anymore, I couldn't quit over this… I wanted to quit over it, but I couldn't
There is a file system crisis in Linux and KVM… it's clown college
If you jailbreak out of QEMU in our KVM implementation, you just find yourself in a zone. Congratulations, you've now burrowed out into a much more secure cell
I didn't think this Illumos hackathon was going to work. Who's gonna hack on an operating system? It's complicated. It's like, "let's go hack on a 747-800!" You don't do that! It might crash!
Go watch the whole thing, it's great.
A Science Lesson On Minerals and Rocks, But In Minecraft
A Minecraft video, but it somehow does weird trickery to explain minerals, rocks, and the chemical structures that make them up.
A science lesson in a Minecraft world, for the modern student.
Terminfo Is Useless and Outdated
It takes literal decades to add capabilities to terminfo—the database that stores terminal compatibility.
I ran into a problem like this myself, and ended up checking if a file exists in the terminfo database, then setting TERM to xterm-256color, because Purdue macbines have a sufficiently old version of terminfo that it doesn't know what Foot is (the terminal I use) and that makes Vim mad.
There's gotta be a better way, right?
Spy Life Isn't That Glamorous
A fascinating look into a real-life spy who got into Al Qaeda, and the subsequent mental health issues.
I don't think this whole "secret agent" thing is as good as people want it to be.
The Las Vegas Hyperloop
The operations manual spends more page length on answering questions about Elon Musk and The Boring Company than it does on fires.
But right now I think the best way to describe the Las Vegas Loop is... "cheap and amateurish." Surprisingly fitting with the Las Vegas vibe, in a way.
An interesting look into the Hyperloop's operations manual, and how the drivers are expected to behave.
They Ran Pong on a Mouse
Pong that runs within a mouse's firmware and renders by moving the cursor fast enough to acheive persistence of vision
Using a mouse cursor to animate a functioning game of pong? I wonder how it'll run on a faster monitor, and how it'll look in person too...
Google Made Me Ruin A Perfectly Good Website: A Case Study On The AI-Generated Internet
The amount of SEO spam on the internet just makes sense now.
The unanimous conclusion was that Google wants you to have a lot of content before they will approve you [for AdSense], and more importantly, the quality of the content doesn't really matter.
Resting is Hard
We rest to give ourselves time to heal and recover, physically and mentally. Rest is characterized by absence. If you were doing manual labor, resting requires an absence of physical activity. If you were writing code, resting requires an absence of that mental effort. Right now for me, resting requires both: shutting off my body and my mind.
I could do with some mind rest, but I don't know how.
But we're not taught how to rest. How to deliberately take a break from doing things to recover. Rest is built into our daily structure, but it's imposed on us, rather than something we're taught to practice and cherish.
That explains it.
3D Geometry Dash
Suffering as entertainment. Also making a 3D level in 2D Geometry Dash.
Developing and Scanning My Own Color Film
"They didn't turn out exactly how I wanted them too, but they're still cool and I'm still learning," I said. My dad asked me what I thought went wrong. I thought about it for a minute, and then told him that some of the photos were blurrier than I was anticipating, and that, for any given photo, maybe it was an issue with my light metering and camera settings, or the camera's focus. Then I thought about it for a second. Maybe it was an issue with the temperature of the chemicals I used to develop the film, or the number of times I'd previously used the chemicals, or how much and how often I'd agitated them while I was developing them. Maybe it was an issue with my negative scanning setup, which has many of its own little things that can affect the quality of the photo. Or, possibly, it was an issue with how I digitized them, the settings on the software I used, or the way I (didn't) edit them in Lightroom after the fact. "So, I guess it could be anything," I said.
An infuriating hobby indeed. But a rewarding one.
Secure Shakespeare
What if Shakespeare took a cybersecurity class?
Sears
Working on the floor at Sears in the early 2000s. A slice of life, a ghost of people long gone.
Git Worktrees
Did not know about this feature, it's super-duper cool!
The TL;DR is that you can have each branch in a repository act as a directory, so it's easy to move around.
The Kernel May Get a CI
Hopefully it catches regressions before they hit people, like that nasty ext4 bug in Debian.
Here I Am, Sad Over A Hunk Of Metal In Space
First Opportunity, now Voyager 1. It's hard not to feel bad for what is essentially a chunk of metal in space, and yet here we are.
It says a lot about humanity and the connections we can make, and the emotions we can feel for anything. I'm sure there's some deep insight I can make about how people can unite to support a space probe, but can't unite to support ourselves. Unfortunately, I'm not quite qualified to talk about that.
Welcome to the Future of Television
This is the true killer app for the Apple™ Vision Pro! Like it says on the website, "It's not TV, it's Television."
Just Because Distribution is Free Doesn't Mean There Isn't a Cost
Because my career as a serial over-sharer of software has taught me that just because distribution is free doesn't mean there isn't a cost.
Call me silly, but there's a certain preciousness to the idea of someone taking a month of their life to build an app that only their spouse will ever benefit from. Tailor-made to their needs. That doesn't have to be shared.
Just go read the whole thing. I agree with it.
Yeah Matrix Sucks
For reasons, I tried to evaluate the distributed Matrix chat and their clients. That did not work out very well.
Unless if you have someone helping you through the process, it's terrible. The whole ecosystem is weirdly fragmented and doing transitional things, so it's even harder now than when I first started however many years back.
Element X is nice, we just need to wait for people to use sliding sync and the new Matrix authentication and oh my god this is gonna be terrible.
Sam Altman Wants How Much Money?
On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in talks with investors to raise as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion for AI chip manufacturing, according to people familiar with the matter.
Stract: Independent and Open Search
It seems pretty nice, actually. The search results are, well, kinda meh. Searching for "nixos" doesn't give me the NixOS website, but it gives me a Wikipedia snippet and a bunch of blogs and tutorials about NixOS. I'll try integrating it into my workflow for researching into weird topics and see if I can use this to evade those SEO websites.
IPv4 Pricing is Very Lucrative for Amazon
Based on data from ipv4.global, the average price for an IPv4 address is currently ~35 dollars. With that data in hand, we can do our back-of-the-napkin math
So the approximate value of Amazon's IPv4 estate today is about: 4.6 Billion dollars! Not too shabby!
Given this data, I believe it's fair to say that AWS will likely make anywhere between $400 Million and $1 Billion dollars a year with this new IPv4 charge! That's a nice bump for AWS, especially given that this was provided for free until today
Man I should've invested in IPv4. Hopefully Oracle Cloud doesn't go the same way, since I depend on their free IPv4 addresses to get my server a public address. If they decide to drop me, then I guess I'll have to take my server out of my dorm and into the little Purdue datacenter a club has set up.
The BTRON Operating System
What if I told you there is an immensely popular operating system that you likely used it at least once, but did not realise what it was?
In fact, it is so popular and important there is an IEEE standard based on it.
It is uncanny how immensely popular AND immensely obscure this system is.
It is scary that until today I have never even heard of its reference desktop implementation.
The system is called "TRON".
Incredible thread, start for the weird computer stuff, stay for the kittens.
Apple's Malicious Compliance with the DMA
I was actually excited for the DMA and what that would mean for consumers (especially since I do have an iDevice through my phone carrier). However, Apple decided to roll out the changes required in the worst possible way.
First of all, the browser changes are limited to the EU only. As someone who is stuck in the United States Midwest, this is not great.
Oh yeah and the third party app stores are rolled out in the worst way possible (you gotta pay a LOT of money to have your app published on the App Store if you also choose to release it on a third-party store).
In short, I hate you Apple and I hope your share price drops.
A New Git CLI Frontend
A new, better way to use Git? Sign me up!
Hopefully I can erase the years and years of muscle memory with using Git and adapt to Jujutsu instead.
And better yet, it's compatible with your existing Git repositories!
It's a typewriter! It's a keyboard! It's both? I hate it.
I don't know what the obsession is of making your keyboard noisier. I don't want to listen to your fake keyboard noises.
Inspiration: “Taking notes in class with my typewriter”
Now you can recreate this moment without the actual need for a physical typewriter!
That is nowhere close to why that was momentous! It was momentous because of the cost. It's hard to get a typewriter, maintain it, and carry it around in 2023 (although I have used typewriters and they are the coolest things ever).
This program is just annoying if you're going to be using it in a room with other people. The annoyance of the typewriter is offset by the novelty of it. Most likely, many folks (in the West™) haven't used a typewriter in the past two-odd decades. People see a typewriter and go "wow, that's cool". That is not the same as having your computer speakers play ding.mp3 every time you press a button on the keyboard. It's annoying, and not novel.
Although I wonder if I can have it play the Taco Bell bell noise on every keypress just for the meme…
Adding custom presets
Turns out I can!
Stop Putting Your Face On The Internet
Please for the love of everything you find holy. Stop putting your face on the internet.
NixOS and Flakes Book: An unofficial and opinionated book for beginners
On the other hand, NixOS has long been criticized for its scattered and outdated official and community documentation. These issues have troubled many NixOS beginners.
Finally, more documentation. Hopefully the upstream project will get it together and stop using a thousand-page HTML document as the single source of documentation.
Noisy Keyboards Sink Ships
Many of us like a keyboard with a positive click noise when we type. You might want to rethink that, though, in light of a new paper from the UK that shows how researchers trained an AI to decode keystrokes from noise on conference calls.
The researchers point out that people don’t expect sound-based exploits. The paper reads, “For example, when typing a password, people will regularly hide their screen but will do little to obfuscate their keyboard’s sound.”
…
It seems to work well, as the paper claims a 97% peak accuracy over both a telephone or Zoom.
Maybe I should switch to using the touchscreen on my laptop for typing in my passwords.
Or enable 2FA everywhere, like a normal person.
AI Writing Detectors Don't Work
Not surprising, given how high the false-positive rate is. Good riddance, and right before the next school year starts up too!
Now I'm just waiting for the rest of the companies to stop doing this too.
Become A Luddite
Reject technology that harms society.
Keyoxide Ariadne Signature Profiles
From Keyoxide:
For the past year, I have been working on my solution to this problem: a type of profile that does not rely on OpenPGP keys and thus allows us to create nice tools and apps to let people create their own profile.
Whatever happened to the regular signature profiles? That's what I'm using. I wonder what this will change.
Mechanical Keyboard (Sound) Conversion
From Hackaday:
This started as a joke among [ac2ev] and some coworkers, who were already teasing about the distinct sound of the mechanical keyboard. This machine, based on a Teensy microcontroller, sits between any USB keyboard and its host computer, intercepting keystrokes and using a small solenoid to tap on a block of wood every time a keystroke is detected. There’s also a bell inside that rings when the enter key is pressed, similar to the return carriage notification for typewriters, and as an additional touch an audio amplifier with attached speaker plays the Mario power-up sound whenever the caps lock key is pressed.
If mechanical keyboards weren't annoying enough.
