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irobeth

109 karma · joined November 22, 2017

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irobeth··on Fingerjigger
I also find some difficulty in reading the next word because of the animation obscuring it; this has my net wpm at 61, but my monkeytype average wpm is ~120
irobeth··on The Adrian Dittmann Story
Then you have to answer for yourself if/why you believe Elon would/wouldn't lie about having an alt account to attempt controlling a narrative or keep a troll running longer than it could?
irobeth··on The trap of "I am not an extrovert"
Is anyone else like me? A little socializing goes a really long way for me. I don't hate it, it's not exhausting, I can do it well, and I'm generally seen as a fun person to talk with.

I'm an introvert but not because my "social battery" is discharged by socializing, but instead because I need to discharge in solitude

I have unlimited social stamina and can do it forever, if by forever you mean that if I'm left in socializing without that necessary solitude I will spin off into mania and eventually get in serious trouble

irobeth··on Tell HN: I just updated my wife's Chrome, and uBlock is no longer supported
It really is amazing how things have come full circle from the point where chrome positioned itself as a "Libre" alternative to the IE near-monopoly

There was a point between IE and chrome when Mozilla was always in the near-foreground offering alternatives to every internet hegemony, right around web 2.0, kinda makes me optimistic for the internet to see a resurgence of recommendations

irobeth··on Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'
i'm reminded of a story from around 2012? about an aerial surveillance program where they recorded a bird's-eye view of the city [1?]

they used the footage to solve some cartel murder by playing the footage in reverse to track the origin of the killers

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Lowrider

irobeth··on Trump wins presidency for second time
I'd point back to at least 2000 and the Supreme Court stopping the count in Florida, but maybe back to when we sabotaged the Iran hostage deal so Carter couldn't have a win
irobeth··on Internet Archive: Security breach alert
I recently started getting "targeted" bitcoin extortion emails that have your home address (or what they scraped from public records) and a picture of Google Street view, but they're all going to the email I used for a now-defunct online grocery
irobeth··on Internet Archive: Security breach alert
I have this same setup and this conversation happens often, you get used to it happening and navigating it.

ON only one occasion in ~20 years, someone refused to do business with me because they thought I was impersonating them and told me I was being disrespectful by using their brand as my email, and even after explaining how it works they weren't happy.

irobeth··on Bricked iPhone 16 Can Be Restored Wirelessly Using Another iPhone
Locked iPhone owned by law enforcement target will accept remote firmware push from trusted device?
irobeth··on "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows
some endpoint protection services will block anything not signed by a trusted signature or that doesn't match an allow-list of known-good file hashes
irobeth··on New study simulates gravitational waves from failing warp drive
I thought branches happened when a wavefunction 'collapsed' -- i.e. for every possible value of the wavefunction, you get a branch with a unique answer for 'value of the wavefunction'?
irobeth··on Magnets are switching up the keyboard game
"slam any key to continue"
irobeth··on White House wants Moon to have its own time zone, Coordinated Lunar Time (CLT)
to hear Lenny Susskind say it, "light moves at the speed of light"
irobeth··on 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
I'm reminded of [1] a recent Palantir promotional video

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEM5qz__HOU

irobeth··on White House wants Moon to have its own time zone, Coordinated Lunar Time (CLT)
The way I've understood it is that everything which can 'move' in spacetime has to have a momentum vector with constant magnitude C (when expressed in the right units, C = 1)

The faster you 'move' through space, the more you have to 'borrow' from the time component of the vector to maintain a magnitude of C

That means your 'position in time' moves slower; and so for people who aren't moving as fast through space as you are, they appear to 'experience more time'

irobeth··on How the XZ Backdoor Works
most people now will say something about the commit timestamps indicating this is an Eastern European actor, but it seems like any sufficiently dedicated intelligence service could script their commits or even assign a person to keep certain sleep/wake hours just to falsify that data
irobeth··on Opera becomes the first major browser with built-in access to local AI models
I think it's better to look at it like the old AOL client? I've used Opera on and off for ~20 years, and in that time I've seen it strive to be more like a "Web OS"
irobeth··on Show HN: Fake or real? Try our AI image detector
seconding this, it failed to correctly identify an AI image which had the DALL-E watermark clearly visible

what plans are there to guard against people intentionally poisoning your training data by miscategorizing the images they upload for classification?

irobeth··on Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location
I just lied about both things it wanted and it was fine with that, so it seems a little silly to make it a requirement
irobeth··on Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero
seems like a sophisticated theft ring would have access to the keys for the most common guards like this, reminds me of the TSA key debacle[1]

[1]: https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master-keys

irobeth··on Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
one notable exception to this is the grappler archetype, where their 'close proximity command grab' is a massive tool which you always need to respect

the mere presence of the grappler causes a pressure on your decision-making process, since you always have to respect this option from them

but even here, the grappler has more tools than just 'grab you', they have an entire neutral kit still, as well as specials oriented around space control and 'trapping you' in the range where their grab is effective

irobeth··on Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
> once you are competent you know everything that opponent can do

This reads a little like saying "you are competent at chess when you know all the moves the pieces can make"

In Chess, knowing your opponent's available moves might make the difference between an absolute beginner and a 300 rated player

Knowing some opening theory might make the difference between 300 rating and 1000 rating

But I don't know that I'd call a 300 rated player 'competent', or even say that they 'know how to play' versus 'know the rules of Chess'

It's consistency in knowing what are good options and what are likely choices that makes a competent/good/great player in any game (most fighting games are perfect information, too!)

irobeth··on Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
> That is in fact the entire concept behind combos- sequences of moves that your opponent can’t do anything during outside of more modern combo breaker mechanics.

You can flow chart combos, sure, but that's not the whole fighting game; most people who play fighting games competitively will tell you that knowledge of combo theory is maybe 20% of what makes you good at a game

The rest is a dance of turn-taking, knowing when you are in advantage or disadvantage state and behaving accordingly, and 'neutral' - your behavior during the times where you aren't performing a combo or being pressured by your opponent

Outside of advantage and disadvantage and neutral lies 'oki' - your behavior during the period where you have finished a combo, aimed at gaining advantage or at the very least, preventing disadvantage (by returning to neutral in a controlled form)

Samurai Showdown is an example of a fighting game with extremely limited combo/oki mechanics and a heavy emphasis on neutral play -- most characters have only 2 or 3 hit combos which anyone can perform and the entirety of the depth in its gameplay is inside 'neutral' - the spacing between characters, the choice of when to attack and when to defend, when to throw, when to parry, etc.

Blazblue is an example of a fighting game with an extremely deep combo system, every character has a unique archetype and mechanic, and combos can last tens of seconds, and set-ups to turn 'lost neutral' into 'lost neutral again' are abundant

The difference between a good combo and bad combo in Samurai Showdown can be like 5% of your life bar, meaning if you don't have 'good combos' then you might need to 'win neutral' 1 more time to win the match (compared to if you could perform good combos)

The difference between a good combo and bad combo in Blazblue is maybe 50% damage (2500 vs 4500) meaning you need to 'win neutral' maybe 3 more times than if you did a 'good combo' every time you 'won neutral'

irobeth··on YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads
Back in the day you if you wanted to 'watch internet videos' then you needed a video player, you needed codecs, you needed to download the videos, you needed to find the videos

If you wanted to share videos online, good luck? You needed somewhere you could upload them and a lot of forums had file size limits, so sometimes you just spread/discovered them via p2p services. For the non-technical person, there were a few places you could submit videos to or browse 'funny internet videos', but most video sites were an individual or community's curated collection

Youtube bundled all of that up as "a video repository and search engine that provides a streaming player which is already supported by your browser", and (in the US anyway) that moment coincided with: (a) wide-spread broadband access and (b) digital cameras becoming accessible to consumers

So in that context, I think it might be a bit like saying "interest in reading increased after book printing technology made libraries comparatively inexpensive"

irobeth··on Stuxnet Source Code
the payload had a few modes of operation, IIRC

one was to spin it far faster than it should, then stop abruptly in an attempt to damage the centrifuge

one was to run it at the wrong RPM to spoil the product of the centrifuge

in either mode, it would replay 'good' data to make the centrifuge look functional to an administrator

the way I understood, a 'bonus goal' was to keep the Iranians unable to diagnose what was going wrong, both with their production process (producing bad stock) and the failures (promoting distrust in their engineers) - i can't find an article right now, but I remember reading they were churning through site engineers at the time - presumably firing them for the on-site failures of centrifuges or their inability to stop them

irobeth··on Stuxnet Source Code
A phenomenal piece of engineering and spycraft, this implant was the reason I wanted to apply for officer school at the airforce

Shortly after, the Snowden leaks would happen, which influenced my decision otherwise

irobeth··on Stuxnet Source Code
I guess to be more exact, Stuxnet didn't break anything, but the PLC payload it delivered was designed to damage centrifuges, and that would have been the module under test in that QA environment
irobeth··on Netflix engineer on solving their "Black Mirror S1.E1 Pig f–-er" problem [video]
main content starts around 6:30
irobeth··on Go with PHP
> when it goes wrong you find yourself sifting through OOP-obfuscated layers of framework and libraries just to find out how exactly your controller is called.

debug_backtrace() has always been my friend in situations like this

irobeth··on Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”
worse, ai.txt could become an adversarial vector for attempts to trick the AI into filing your information under some semantic concept
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