Any Wikipedia article that has been mathematized is practically guaranteed to be incomprehensible. And it’s definitely guaranteed to be illegible. The article for locality sensitive hashing doesn’t disappoint.
Why is math illiteracy rampant? Because nobody should be forced to read text like this unless they’re guilty of some heinous crime.
Sometimes I receive mail from people with msn.com (or outlook.com or live.com) email addresses. Legit mail, even including patches for OpenBSD (crazy!). Unfortunately my IP address was blacklisted, so my direct replies would bounce back to me. The good news is that Microsoft has a support form you can use to resolve this issue. The bad news is it asks 30 (thirty!) questions (all required!) about my business and my mailing list.
“What OS are you using?” OpenBSD
“What mail transport software are you using?” smtpd
“Provide the URL of your web site.” ok... www.tedunangst.com
“Provide the URL of your Privacy Policy.” uh...
“In what manner(s) are recipients added to your mailing list(s)?” I type it in the To: box. Sometimes I click reply.
“Please copy/paste samples of a few of the messages you’re sending.” (An email containing a patch for src/lib/libfuse. Bet they haven’t seen that before.)
The good news is somebody at Microsoft has decided I “qualify for conditional mitigation” until such time as I have “established a good reputation” according to the form letter response. The bad news I don’t know if anybody read my answers to their inane questions and had a chuckle, or just clicked the green button and moved on to the next spammer trying to cheat the system.
I’ve skirted around the issue of paging flak for some time. It’s not that it’s hard; it’s quite easy. Easy to do wrong, that is. As explained here page numbers should start at 1 for old posts. That part is easy, but it leaves open the question of what to put on the last (highest numbered) page.
Lacking an obvious technical solution, I turned to rationalizing the absence of the feature as a feature in its own right. Without an easy way to dig through old posts, I needn’t worry about keeping their content updated. Old posts naturally fade away and decompose.
There’s also a certain psychological trick involved, call it the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There’s the implied promise of posts worth reading, if only you knew the right search terms to find them. A wonderful conceit.
Ah, well, all good things must end. Punting on the issue of paging, I redefined the problem. There’s now a one page flak archive. Minimal info to keep it small, should scale for the next few years without too much trouble.
Was compelled to see Transcendence, which I knew I would regret. I wish I could quip that it was better when the computer was in Johnny’s head instead of Johnny’s head being in the computer, but then I realized Depp didn’t play Johnny Mnemonic.
It’s a strange movie, as some kind of techno romance thriller. Spends way too long setting up the love story, but then realizes too late that it really wants to be a summer action blockbuster. Spoiler: the ending makes no sense. Also, to pick on one petpeeve, why do movie producers demonstrate glitches by having 3D textures replaced by code fragments? Enough people have played various Bethesda games to know what real texture glitches look like. :)
The consensus seems to be that Her is a better disembodied computer soul movie, but I skipped it because Phoenix was really creepy in the previews. Maybe I’ll add it to my list now.
The Thirteenth Floor is a much better movie to watch if you want to ponder the nature of virtual consciousness. It’s more of a stretch, but Don Jon (starring the voice of Her, Scarlett Johansson, in a great role) actually does some philosophizing on human connections, real and virtual, as well.
I keep wanting to compare Transcendence to Source Code (a decent, but terribly, terribly named movie), but there’s not much similarity. I think that’s because there was a preview for Edge of Tomorrow, which looked like an awesome sequel to Oblivion until I realized it wasn’t. It’s actually Source Code but with mech suits.
jwz has some singularity reviews as well. The Machine is ok. Apropos current events, it features a Turing Test.
(Watched Her on the plane back from the hackathon. Creepy and uncomfortable doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s a good film, and well made I think, but I won’t be watching it again. Actually lots of parallels with Don Jon.)
When writing C++ code, remember to close your static_cast<type> operations with </type>, as demonstrated in this Facebook post.
Reminds me of too much email protection, but I’m not sure where it was introduced. Facebook’s online editor? Or some overly helpful text editor used to compose the draft? Doesn’t appear dynamic, but the source for the page is over 300K of impenetrable data spread over a mere 39 lines. Hard to imagine a person actually typing it in as posted.
While I still remember the timeline and before I get confused by outsiders trying to rewrite history, here’s the official unofficial history of libressl. If there’s any one person to blame for causing libressl to happen, I’d have to say that it’s me. That’s not to say it was my idea, just that I instigated. This is how it began; who knows how it ends?
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The common way to approach software portability is to establish a baseline and then program to that least common denominator. The portability layers in OpenSSL, however, go way beyond least. This is a fully realized experiment in worst common denominator programming. Some examples.
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The last two issues of The New Yorker had a great series of articles on aspects of human culture. Stepping back and looking at ourselves as aliens, it can be hard to comprehend all the “others”.
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A little while ago, Tavis Ormandy twitterated about an OpenSSL bug he reported. This didn’t sound good, so I took a look.
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“Snowden had a fall back question: “Can it be conclusively proven that you’re not the greatest leader in human history?“” - steven_metz
“Told Snowden Russia does NOT collect data of millions of citizens. Instead we collect the actual citizens. In camps. Long as they can work.” - ViktorInEnglish
“I think the keyword there is “uncontrolled”. It’s totally controlled. They target everyone individually. It’s not “mass”” - thegrugq