robryk @robryk@qoto.org
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
robryk
boosted
Me trying to change my DNS configuration on not enough sleep and too much build infra work:
Jan 27 09:34:14 chaos named[360045]: /srv/dns/delroth.net.zone:58: unknown RR type 'CMAKE'
@rysiek I think this is similar-yet-distinct to your recent thread on various ML-based generators of something.
robryk
boosted
So I've been building a 100% analog polyphonic synthesizer with an unique twist. To use only vacuum tube era technology from the 1930s.
Over 300 neon gas diodes create the sound you hear. Pretty awesome for technology from 100 years ago.
Still a work-in-progress, but I wanted to post a video of it with the innards spread out across the workbench. : }
I call it the "Neon String Machine"
robryk
boosted
A DICOM image.
DICOM is the medical image format, very TIFF-like.
Its preamble makes many polyglots possible, including TIFF-DICOM sharing the same image data.
It doesn't tolerate appended data - but just append a "private" tag if needed.
The excluded middle appeal was granted! (https://efile.dcappeals.gov/public/caseView.do?csIID=63269)
I have no clue what the 2 year pause was about, why the appeal was granted as a result of the _appellee's_ motion to (seemingly) "get on with it" (i.e. why the appellant didn't care to file a similar motion way earlier), or when/under what case number the Superior Court will pick the case back up. The original case is marked as "closed" in the Superior Court.
At the same time: the lack of consequence in case numbers is grating (DC Superior Court uses spaces as separators, other courts replace them with dashes, and the DC Superior Court's lookup thingy doesn't understand those; the lookup thingy also deals in some broken way with parties with a middle name *and* the lookup thingy doesn't ever provide people with stable URLs for anything...).
robryk
boosted
@robryk I thought so, that's the first thing I tried, but apparently you can't LIMIT a DELETE with postgresql!
robryk
boosted
Another example: an identity team kept causing problems because they would conflate a user account and the actual human(s) using that account by calling them both "user".
After a week of me asking whether they were talking about user meaning "sack of meat" or "sack of bits", they did not have that problem any more.
I've just learned (yay @ collecting random data) that when my machine is thrashing (because I put firefox in a memory-limited cgroup, it sometimes runs out of memory, and it doesn't realize this has happened, because the _system_ is not out of memory yet) the _GPU_ gets very hot (85degC). Huh?
Do Swiss courts really consider multiple unrelated charges against one fellow at the same time?
> Dem Beschuldigten wird vorgeworfen, vom betagten Geschädigten im Laufe mehrerer Jahre unter wahrheitswidrigen Angaben mehrfach Darlehen in der Höhe von insgesamt mehreren hundert Tausend Franken erhältlich gemacht zu haben. Weiter wird dem Beschuldigten vorgeworfen, einen Einzahlungsbeleg der Post abgeändert zu haben, um die Zahlung eines höheren Betrags vorzutäuschen. Zudem wird dem Beschuldigten vorgeworfen, auf der Autobahn rechts überholt zu haben sowie während der Pandemie gegen die Schutzmassnahmen verstossen zu haben, indem er eine Party organisiert habe.
-- https://www.gerichte-zh.ch/verhandlungen/obergericht-zuerich.html
(Translated summary: The accused is accused of defrauding an elderly person, falsification of documents to further that fraud, overtaking on the right on the highway, and organising a party during the time it was forbidden by pandemic-related restrictions.)
(Or did that fellow make a very weird appeal that somehow was relevant to all of them? I can't see a way to do so other than sovcitry.)
robryk
boosted
The Furby source code is public and heavily commented. For example, it turns the microphone off when the motors are running.
https://archive.org/details/furby-source
People who know me IRL usually know that I have a very wide definition of "manipulative". In that context, I find it hard to form an opinion on https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/snnfmepzrwpAsAoDT/why-anima-international-suspended-the-campaign-to-end-live (tl;dr let's stop telling people not to mistreat fish, because that causes them to indirectly cause more fish suffering).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen%E2%80%93Scott_South_Pole_Station
Things that my attention was drawn to:
The original site (for IGY) was built by a team led by a Lieutenant JG (one of the lowest officer ranks) of US Navy. That was a really interesting job (https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/36750/Bowers_Transcript.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) for the fellow.
The description of the base when it was mostly within a dome reminds me vividly of places I read about in interactive fiction. Such places seemed to me to be somewhat... unrealistic? (see e.g. the tower that was used for atmospheric observations "and later contained a music room"), but apparently my intuition was very wrong.
The new station is on *adjustable* stilts, so that it can be raised as the snow level rises (well, not really "rises", but as the ground sinks while more snow gets accumulated).
I was really amused by the juxtaposition of content and form of the troubleshooting section of the US Navy Cookbook: https://maritime.org/doc/cookbook1945/pg432.php
robryk
boosted
When electronics importer Cara Leon goes missing, private investigator Sam Mujrif is hired by her sister to investigate. Cara is 8 times taller than Sam, but evidence soon points to players much smaller than either of them.
As Sam and his cross-scale colleagues pursue the case, it becomes apparent that Cara’s disappearance is linked to technology with the potential to reshape their whole society, and radically alter the balance of power between the scales.
A friend was driving me back from new year's boardgames and on the way we've encountered a swan strolling on the roadway of a bridge. (The swan was alone, appeared completely fine, and was AFAICT fully adult: its body was ~1m tall, its head was at ~1.5m and its plumage was fully white.)
I was surprised in many ways:
- did the swan walk there or land there?
- is there some obvious reason why a swan would want to be on a bridge (my friend's hypothesis was that that swan might have been doing that semi-regularly and just been surprised by ~nonzero traffic at that time of night there)?
- do swans stroll? I don't recall seeing a swan more than a few meters away from water (other than a flying one).
robryk
boosted
@ai@cawfee.club
Coherer - The first kind of radio wave detector ever invented in history. It's basically a loose metal contact, similar to a "cold" solder joint. After applying a voltage, even under 1 volt, the contact resistance drops from near-infinity to a hundred ohms or so. Later versions used a tube of loose metal particles. Now 100 years have passed and its exact physical mechanisms remained unexplained.
Coherence of particles by radio waves is an obscure phenomenon that is not well understood even today. Recent experiments with particle coherers seem to have confirmed the [micro-welding] hypothesis [...] so-called "imperfect contact" coherers is also not well understood, but may involve a kind of tunneling of charge carriers across an imperfect junction between conductors.
Exploding bridge-wire detonator - A safe detonator for high explosives and nuclear weapons. You basically discharge a capacitor bank to a tiny wire in microseconds, the high energy causes the wire to explode, achieving detonation. The exact step-by-step physical mechanism that causes the wire explosion is still not fully explained.It is remarkable that 75 years later and after literally millions of EBW detonators have been fired, there is still uncertainty about how they actually work.
Look at the construction (and the proof in appendix) of public key encryption scheme out of witness encryption in https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/258.pdf
It uses witness encryption, where the only confidentiality guarantee is that "if you encrypt the plaintext in a way that does not admit decryption at all, there will be no way to recover the plaintext from ciphertext", to construct something that actually has standardish confidentiality guarantees by exploiting that this property must extend to cases that are computationally indistinguishable from ones where the assumption really holds.
robryk
boosted
Things you can do with zero-knowledge: prove that you performed some algorithmic process correctly.
Things you can’t do: prove that you kept a secret.
This is an important point that really limits what we can do with the technology.
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
