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Mr_Modulo

104 karma · joined August 10, 2019

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Mr_Modulo··on Your Phone Is About to Stop Being Yours: 70 Days Until Lockdown
I don't think you can just do anything you want in the name of security and protecting users. This will make installing apps needlesly difficult. There is already a warning when enabling installation of apps from unknown sources. That should be enough. If users don't read that's on them.

The real problem here is not that Google is doing this bad thing. The real problem is that they can do this bad thing. They shouldn't have this power. Something needs to be done to rain in Google and take back Android as an open platform.

Mr_Modulo··on Can LLMs do randomness?
In the summary at the top it says you used 0-10 but then for the prompt it says 1-10. I had assumed the summary was incorrect but I guess it's the prompt that's wrong?
Mr_Modulo··on One Million Chessboards
Do the boards regenerate at some point? If not, it seems like most of the pieces will be depleted after a while.
Mr_Modulo··on Why is the Oral-B iOS app almost 300 MB? And why is Colgate's app even bigger..?
What's wrong with x.com links?
Mr_Modulo··on Microsoft now thirstily injects a poll when you download Google Chrome
Believe it or not this article does not cover everything. When you try to set Chrome (or any alternate browser) as default on Windows 10/11 a pop up appears suggesting you use Edge[1].

[1]: https://www.techrepublic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Figu...

Mr_Modulo··on Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
Today we have news for conservatives and different news for liberals. That's stupid. News doesn't need built in commentary. Now it seems like history is going the same way. We will have conservative history and liberal history. But I hope not.
Mr_Modulo··on The DeSantis Campaign Texted Me with a Large Language Model
It says online though so it might not apply to SMS. Seems like a pretty big oversite.
Mr_Modulo··on Storing dead people at -196°C [video]
Everyone will be resurrected at the end of the world when Christ returns. I think I'll just wait for that. But it would still be cool if CRYO preservation could work. Medical technology exists today that would have been science fiction 100 years ago. It's definitely possible it could work in the future.
Mr_Modulo··on NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2
Yes, the Safe Mode button. But you have to remember to press it before you start configuring the router and then exit Safe Mode when you're done.
Mr_Modulo··on Devtools for mobile browsers
That is pretty sketchy. Thanks for pointing that out! I've started using Kiwi as my main mobile browser after I got fed up with some issues I was having with Brave.
Mr_Modulo··on Devtools for mobile browsers
Another option to get a JavaScript console on Android is use Kiwi Browser[1] Kiwi allows access to the full Chromium JavaScript console that you can open in a new tab.

Kiwi also allows usage of Chromium extensions. I wanted full ad blocking but Kiwi only had rudimentary ad blocking that was disabled by default. No problem, I installed uBlock Origin!

[1]: https://kiwibrowser.com/

Mr_Modulo··on Reverse-engineering the source prompts of Notion AI
I wonder if GPT-3 is really outputting the real source prompt or just something that looks to the author of the article like the source prompt. With the brain storming example it only produced the first part of the prompt at first. It would be interesting for someone to make a GPT-3 bot and then try to get it to print its source prompt.
Mr_Modulo··on You Don't Need HTML
The author should have used a monospace font or a pre html element. Dang, they can't do that!
Mr_Modulo··on Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
If you can get a copy from another employee then they are in trouble for not securing private communications.
Mr_Modulo··on CS quotes found while browsing Notepad++'s code
I found Notepad Next. It doesn't have all Notepad++ features I use but it is pretty good.
Mr_Modulo··on CS quotes found while browsing Notepad++'s code
I'm a Notepad++ user and I'm not a fan of some of these quotes. I wonder if someone has already made a cleaned up version of Notepad++. I would certainly be interested in that.
Mr_Modulo··on 8-bit number to binary string (2013)
<number>.toString(2) Wouldn't be quite right because the output needs to be padded out with zeros.
Mr_Modulo··on 300 Drones Formed a QR Code That Rick Rolled Dallas on April Fools' Day
It would be even cooler to have a lot of drones with red, green and blue LEDs. You could have them fly in a grid and coordinate the brightness of the RGB lights to play a video.
Mr_Modulo··on Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music (2007)
Did playback cause the OS to freeze? It seems like it must because the BIOS would have to get back control of the CPU to do this and this would before Intel management engine.
Mr_Modulo··on Android: Freeing up 60% of storage for apps by removing parts of the app
The size of apps has gotten so bad Google is now forced to develop 2 versions of their core apps and 2 versions of their OS, one for devices with expendable resources (regular Android) and one for devices with limited resources (Android Go edition).

I have removed most of Google's apps from my phone because of their extreme size.

Looking on my phone it looks like the award for most bloated goes to Google Play Services at 500MB. Wow!

Mr_Modulo··on SingleFile: Save a complete web page into a single HTML file
This is good for people who don't have constant internet access who need to reference web resources offline.

Webpage saving technology does not seem to have kept pace with the evolution of the web.

Images loaded by CSS aren't saved at all. JavaScript on the page will often hijack a saved page and not let it display at all.

One option that works fairly well and does not require installing a browser extension is to save the page as a PDF.

I wish browser developers would put more effort in this area.

Mr_Modulo··on How can you be fooled by the U+202E trick? (2013)
This is almost moot because Windows hides file extensions by default and has done so since like Windows 95. So the user has to enable showing file extensions for known file types. You might as well name the file document.doc.exe
Mr_Modulo··on Pagemap: A mini map for your website
Hey it's like Sublime Text!

I don't see how this is useful. It reminds me of the redundant scroll indicators on the top of some websites.