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foodevlon Backdoor in Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace

Timing. A megabyte of "sleep 10;" would be read from the server more slowly when piped to bash versus written to a file

I feel that AI does have individual taste (and even "personality"), but it's the same monotonous individual taste across all instances of the same trained AI. The sheer scale of its repetition turns it into a hated trope: like how we can immediately identify slop writing, diagrams, websites, etc.

I'm sure we've all met someone who has a unique speaking style and might repeat phrases or words unusually often, but that still doesn't bug us as much as "the honest truth.." or "load-bearing.."

foodevlon Jim's TrueType QR Code Font

This doesn't use hinting. Some reasons why are listed at: https://github.com/jimparis/qr-font/blob/master/design.md#wh...

foodevlon Jim's TrueType QR Code Font

Just glancing I would say it seems a bit different.

foodevlon Jim's TrueType QR Code Font

I haven't tried on macos, but yeah, the biggest problem right now seems to be implementation differences with how embedded spaces are handled. Earlier, the biggest cross-browser issues were pixel alignments within the QR codes, but those seem largely resolved.

foodevlon Jim's TrueType QR Code Font

Some details of how it works are in https://github.com/jimparis/qr-font/blob/master/design.md

Fair warning though: this was designed and implemented by an LLM, as an experiment to see if it was possible. I only guided it to a working solution by pointing out problems, and never dug deeply into its inner workings.

foodevlon Libre Barcode Project

Yes. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48703200

foodevlon Show HN: QR code renderer in a TrueType font

1bpp's comment suggesting this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48682460

foodevlon Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry

It is not a tricky problem because it has a simple and obvious solution: do not filter or block usage just because the input includes a word like "gun".

foodevlon Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week

My dad wears smart glasses because he's nearly deaf and the classes show captions for the person he's talking to. They're great. He doesn't use or care at all about the camera. Having the captions would be very useful to him in a courtroom setting. Collateral damage I guess.

foodevlon Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

It's not enclosed in the final product. It is used during manufacturing. For example, you mechanically compress helium to get liquid helium, then when it depressurizes back to ambient pressure, it's -269 C, which is pretty close to "as cold as possible", and colder than any alternatives.

foodevlon Microgpt

Yeah, everyone learns differently, but for me this is a perfect way to better understand how GPTs work.

foodevlon Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English

> > some folks want to use lossless cut > In that case I would encourage you to ruminate on what the following in the post you're replying to means and what the implications are:

You may have misunderstood the comment: "lossless cut" is the name of an ffmpeg GUI front end. They're not discussing which exact command line gives lossless results.

foodevlon A year without caffeine (2013)

200mg/day is not a "very very small dose". FDA recommended maximum safe amount is 400mg/day.

foodevlon SimpleFold: Folding proteins is simpler than you think

I was curious what the protein picture was showing: "Figure 1 Example predictions of SimpleFold on targets ... with ground truth shown in light aqua and prediction in deep teal."

and now I'm even more curious why they thought "light aqua" vs "deep teal" would be a good choice

foodevlon Meta Ray-Ban Display

Zuck owns 13% of Meta shares and 61% of the voting power

Jensen Huang owns 3.8% of Nvidia and 3.8% of the voting power

Tim Cook owns 0.021% of Apple and 0.021% of the voting power

Previously, Steve Jobs owned 0.6% of Apple and 0.6% of the voting power

So yeah, there's a structural difference here and Meta is much closer to being owned, managed, and controlled by Zuck alone

foodevlon Sequence and first differences together list all positive numbers exactly once

I don't know (and don't need you to elaborate on) exactly what you're referring to in that last sentence, but I suspect you are confusing Eric W. Weisstein with Eric Weisstein.

foodevlon What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

Lazy, or more efficient? If you type a time and hit start, you're not microwaving until you're done with all the buttons. If you hit "QS" a bunch to reach the duration instead, the microwave starts cooking immediately on the first press. Your nuggets get done a whole second earlier!

foodevlon A Scientific American bolt puzzle

Relative to the handedness, one bolt is always moving with it, one bolt is always moving against it. Switching direction doesn't change that. So switching direction can't change whether it moves inward or outward.

foodevlon A Scientific American bolt puzzle

Switching the direction that you're twiddling the bolts would have to change the direction of any movement. But by symmetry, clockwise and counterclockwise twiddling are identical (looking down on the head of each bolt, one is always moving clockwise and one is always moving counterclockwise). So there must be no in/out movement at all.

foodevlon Perpetual stew

some math because I'm curious: If you draw down and replace 50% of the water every day, each molecule has a 1/2 chance of sticking around. After 3 months that's 1/(2^90). A 5 gallon pot contains around 2^87 water molecules. So after 3 months there's basically none of the original liquid left.

foodevlon Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]

They were screwed from the start...

The Xbox came out when the PS2 did. When it came time for the next generation, Sony went with the obvious PS3. Microsoft of course couldn't compete with an "Xbox 2" vs a "PS3", and they couldn't skip right to "Xbox 3", so they called it the "Xbox 360", which was frankly genius because it had the 3 there anyway and put it on the same level in consumers' eyes.

But after that it all fell apart -- they had no good options. They still couldn't jump to "Xbox 4". Maybe "720" would have worked. Someone decided to have a clean break and restart at "One" but of course that fell apart immediately at "Two". So another clean break to "Series..". And by that point it's so screwy they've lost any chance of fixing it...

foodevlon SpaceX Super Heavy splashes down in the gulf, canceling chopsticks landing

If the earth were a point mass than almost any trajectory at all would be orbital.

foodevlon The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

> This is no good. Let me just try reverting to a version from a month ago. Nothing. Three months ago? Nothing. Still failing. A year ago? Zilch.

Reverting your own code, but still using a broken PostHog update from that same day? For me, the lesson is to make sure that I can revert everything, including dependencies.

foodevlon Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908)

> This reminds me of some experiment (that I will never be able to find again)

That was from Richard Feynman.

foodevlon How I replaced deadly garage door torsion springs (2002)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SawStop

"An oscillator generates a 12-volt, 200-kilohertz (kHz) pulsed electrical signal, which is applied to a small plate on one side of the blade. The signal is transferred to the blade by capacitive coupling. A plate on the other side of the blade picks up the signal and sends it to a threshold detector. If a human contacts the blade, the signal will fall below the threshold. After signal loss for 25 micro seconds (µs), the detector will fire. A tooth on a 10-inch circular blade rotating at 4000 RPM will stay in contact with the approximate width of a fingertip for 100 µs. The 200-kHz signal will have up to 10 pulses during that time, and should be able to detect contact with just one tooth.[4] When the brake activates, a spring pushes an aluminum block into the blade. The block is normally held away from the blade by a wire, but during braking an electric current instantly melts the wire, similar to a fuse blowing."

foodevlon As I retire, my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code

The Arduino build system does this (preprocesses your source code to pull out prototypes and put them at the top). To make things easier for beginners.

foodevlon Improved audio rendering with an optimised version of memcpy (2013)

Yes and yes

foodevlon When negotiating a price, never bid with a round number (2016)

Maybe the prices were calculated to make post-sales-tax amounts round numbers? That's been the case when I've seen weirdly precise store pricing in the past.

foodevlon How to write idempotent Bash scripts (2019)

Maybe find a mnemonic? In college, while I paused to remember the order, a friend blurted out "fake things last", and that phrase has stuck with me. I always hesitate a second but never get it wrong now.