Biggles @Biggles@qoto.org

What do I do for a living? Like many of you, my primary occupation is entering passwords and two-factor codes all into a variety of apps and websites all day long.

Pinball Construction Set (cracked by @a2_qkumba, PACE protection, 12 encrypted blocks with 12 unique keys, all ultimately derived from a single master key stored in the unreadable PACE protection block, which we read and hard-coded)

https://archive.org/details/PinballConstructionSetSanIncCrack

#macintosh #retrocomputing

Holy shit!

"First measurements of p + 11B fusion in amagnetically confined plasma"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36655-1.pdf

Proton-Boron fusion is aneutronic and Boron is a *lot* easier to come by as reactor fuel than 3He: if true, this is the holy grail of nuclear fusion research.

... On the other hand, this is just first light on a P-B experiment. There's a LONG way to go to power break-even, much less a viable production reactor design. Like, oh, fifty years ...

If your GitHub doesn't look like this don't even bother applying

@amaditalks Yes. Here you go 👇

https://downsub.com/

I found this taped to the door of the geography department at GWU today and it brought me so much joy. A guide to figuring out when a map was made based on features. Zoom in. It’s amazing.

Great selection of modern CLI utilities - both new things and improvements on the classics: https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2023/02/17/modern-problems-require-modern-solutions/

TIL that macOS ships with a default CLI command called "sips", for "scriptable image processing system" - and it can convert webp images to PNG, but it can also generate entirely new images from scratch using an almost entirely undocumented canvas-based JavaScript API! https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/sips

If you didn't already know, the Internet Archive has been hiring artists to perform pre-meeting mini-concerts twice a week since the pandemic started. We now have over 200 archived on our site for you to enjoy too:

https://blog.archive.org/2023/02/17/the-internet-archive-musiczoom-collection-continues/

Facts are facts.

Behold "Glaze", a software tool that subtly alters the pixels in a piece of art online 🎨 ...

... in a way that isn't detectable by the human eye 👀 ...

... but renders the image useless for training a visual AI. The AI can't detect the artists' style, and thus can't mimic it and copy it. 🤖 ✖️

It's item #1 in my weekly "Linkfest" newsletter here 📫 : https://buttondown.email/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-6-gps-on-the-moon-8-bit-jane-austen-and/

(Subscribe here! https://buttondown.email/clivethompson)

Computers have been beating the best human Go players since 2016. The Go world champion retired in part because AI is “an entity that cannot be defeated.”

But a human just trounced one of the world’s best Go AIs 14 games to 1: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/man-beats-machine-at-go-in-human-victory-over-ai

I think this news story is more interesting than it might first appear (without knowing details, so grain of salt). It isn’t just a gaming curiosity; it points to a fundamental flaw with “deep learning” approaches in general.
1/

As far as I can tell the only documentation on how to use the JavaScript API is this unofficial documentation here https://github.com/manicmaniac/sips-js-apg

I dislike formerlies, but I'm long overdue for an #introduction. I'm Will Smith (not that one).

I was one of the first editors at Ars Technica, the EIC of Maximum PC for a while, started Tested.com and the YouTube channel. Host of a bunch of podcasts--currently @techpod and The FOSSPod (https://fosspod.content.town). I used to host a talk show in VR and made cartoons in front of live studio audiences.

Now I work on The Anacrusis at Stray Bombay. I live in northern CA with my wife and daughter.

I'm still deeply skeptical that it's a good idea to power a "search engine" with a language model that can't tell truth from fiction and actively invents material like a skilled improv artist, even when it's just supposed to be summarizing content

Related: I am now playing classic DOS Lemmings on my iPad with the magic keyboard + trackpad. 😂 Thanks to @pixel for pointing me to https://github.com/litchie/dospad

Today I'm proud to announce the release of Homebrew 4.0.0.

The most significant change since 3.6.0 enables significantly faster Homebrew-maintained tap updates by migrating from Git-cloned taps to JSON downloads. In short, this means `brew update` and auto-updates will be much faster.

Also, if you read to the end you get to see me in a stupid beer outfit the other maintainers made me wear.

Check it out:
https://brew.sh/2023/02/16/homebrew-4.0.0/

If you've been waiting for full-text #search on #Mastodon, please go to #TootFinder and sign in. The more the merrier.
https://www.tootfinder.ch/

It's opt-in, not opt-out. It respects Mastodon culture and doesn't index accounts that don't sign in.

That means the index might be small if we don't spread the word.

#mastotips#feditips

accidentally wrote "saad" instead of "saas" in a text to my partner; they immediately coined "Software as a Disappointment"

and honestly, where is the lie

@stroughtonsmith I've been working on a GUI for Homebrew. It's written in SwiftUI and already supports many of the core functionalities, like installing, uninstalling and updating packages, tapping taps and more. It even shows some info that is hard to find if you're using the CLI, like when a package was installed and how much space on the disk it takes up.

It's free and open source, you can check out the repo here: https://github.com/buresdv/Cork

#showcase