Something to think about: The general perception is that time flows or moves "from" the past and "to" the future. It's not clear what this "motion" actually is, though. At least, I think, we can all agree that "the place memories represent" is the past (and the "from", if anything is,) and that "the place plans represent" is the future (and the "to", if anything is). Some hold that "causality" …
Blanket anti-hacking laws
I am not a lawyer, much less a cyber lawyer, but I was recently wondering “are there any laws—especially federal ones—that cover just plain old Hacking per se?” Say someone breaks into your blog, maybe they look at your drafts, maybe they deface the front page… is that, in and of itself, a crime no matter where in the United States your attacker is? The answer is—Yes! 18 USC …
[DRAFT] "PROTON_USE_WINED3D" explained
You might have seen many people online talking about how entering the following infamous Steam launch option boosted their game's framerate: PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command% I'll answer the following questions What does this environment variable do? Do I need to apply it to my system? Why is it needed at all? What does PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 do? It signals to Proton to use Wine's Direct3D driver instead of its own. (If you're not …
Transcript: Vanessa Vokey Livestream Jan '22
Livestream by Canadian radical feminist Vanessa Vokey (YouTube) on January 19th, 2022. Transcribed from youtube.com/v/vHITa3W2gTY. Selected live chat messages will be 「angle-quoted」. I am archiving this here because I saw some online trolls trying to take down the video with a brigade of false reports, and the author does not seem to mirror live-streams to her Odysee account. By no means take my obsessive archival as an endorsement of …
a small insight on cryptography
Abstractly speaking, a hash function and a symmetric cipher are "the same thing". But, concretely, there is a symmetry between Stream cipher: map a fixed-length random input to a variable-length random output Hash function: map a variable-length random input to a fixed-length random output
Basic "while" loop in Elixir
Given this Python code: def f(k): n = 2 << k q = 2 i = 1 while q != n: i *= q q <<= 1 return i The Elixir translation is roughly the following: def f(k) do n = 2 <<< k # Remember to add "use Bitwise" at the top of the module q = 2 i = 1 # (Storing the output into a tuple …
Most efficient random integer generator by random bits consumed
Discovered in 2013 by then-UPMC-student Jérémie Lumbroso, and independently re-discovered by an Apple programmer last Fall (with much ado on Twitter and Hacker News), the basic idea is as follows: Take your (infinite) random bitstream as the binary digits of random $r\in\left[0,1\right)$…
Clearing the DNS cache on Ubuntu 20.04
Yeah, lots of people out there saying "leenucks doesn't have a dns cache!!1!" — well, recent versions of Ubuntu do ootb, and just restarting NetworkManager doesn't clear it for some ungodly reason… flush it with sudo systemctl restart systemd-resolved
A very tiny bitmap font
Could be useful for very small LCD displays, or for fitting an entire movie script on your monitor at once. TODO: convert to OpenType Bitmap…
mcomix system-level requirements
Say you don't want sweeping system changes for something idiosynchronous like an unstable build of a comic book viewer…