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sanqui

2,845 karma · joined March 25, 2013

owl, any pronouns

founding member of czechoslovak video game archive: https://herniarchiv.cz/en

old technology • video game history

birds • nature conservation

reverse engineering • ROM hacking

internet and furry culture

data preservation and archival • digital archeology

historical linguistics

chiptune • vocaloid

synesthesia • lucid dreaming

website: https://sanqui.net

email: me@sanqui.net

submissionscomments
sanqui··on Removed all counters, replies, following/ers, timestamps, from textlog
The late Cohost also lacked like, reply, and follower counters; it was generally regarded positively. It did have an unread notifications counter though, so you knew you went viral when that read 99+.
sanqui··on Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewing
I'm a fan of compatibility with established formats!

Sounds awesome. There is a lot of untapped potential with respect to efficiently archiving and indexing websites. I saw the impressive things Marginalia Search is doing in this area (the blog is great when it gets technical). There is also a lot of very complete archives of websites out there which are not being indexed at all, and I would love to make them available for researchers. In any case, I'm interested in your project!

sanqui··on Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewing
That's neat! In my opinion, the WARC format is quite tricky and underspecified especially since HTTP2 introduced new semantics. It encodes too much in-band and requires rewriting of the server data. A mitmproxy capture is higher fidelity and supports capturing modern features such as WebSockets. I think if we could wrap Kage's crawler interactions by it and store its capture (the intercepted traffic), we could make a potentially nice new archival format.
sanqui··on Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewing
Cool concept. I would like to see this combined with mitmproxy for archive grade fidelity. You could be saving exactly the data served and at the same time a representation by a modern (contemporary) browser, with all JS having run. This combination would be my perfect replacement for the WARC format.
sanqui··on WikiLambda the Ultimate
Looks nice! I have my own vision and plans in this field :)
sanqui··on WikiLambda the Ultimate
I rather like Wikidata and see a lot of untapped potential in it. In contrast, WikiLambda feels like a fully utopian project. I already shudder from the complexity of a medium to large MediaWiki template, and I'm not convinced this system can be expanded into a full programming ecosystem - one that's supposed to cross the bridge to natural language too.
sanqui··on Do we fear the serializable isolation level more than we fear subtle bugs (2024)
I only recently learned about serializable transactions and it seems bonkers that this is not the default. It makes a lot of sense combined with the event sourcing pattern. I believe it allows you to query for state in the decide function and then emit events safely without having to implement aggregates or versioning (aka you have "dynamic consistency boundaries"). The crucial part is that if any of the queried information changes before the event is emitted the transaction fails and business logic has to be retried until you get a conclusive answer.
sanqui··on Loading Sega Games Off a Vinyl Record [video]
At the Czechoslovak Game Archive, we have recently received and digitized a version of the Robot Karel educational programming environment for the Czechoslovak IQ 151 home computer stored on a vinyl record: https://herniarchiv.cz/en/blog/88-robot-karel-na-vinylove-de...
sanqui··on Positional preferences, order effects, prompt sensitivity undermine AI judgments
Meanwhile in Estonia, they just agreed to resolve child support disputes using AI... https://www.err.ee/1609701615/pakosta-enamiku-elatisvaidlust...
sanqui··on How to learn a new language like a baby
I'm learning German and I've been enjoying browsing and reading with Nuenki. It's a lot of fun to see a sentence in context and find out you are simply able to understand it, though sometimes I have to fight the urge to instinctively hover to reveal the original text. Thank you for this plugin!
sanqui··on XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support
Check out waypipe. It's not compatible with every piece of software, but when it works, it's like one of those magic "run x application over the network" legends except it actually works well.
sanqui··on The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
I think you are mischaracterizing both fandoms and furries (which I categorize to be distinct, because they're not "fans" of any particular popular media property, but I already digress). Much like people can form major hobbies in music, fantasy (books), theatre, sports et cetera, being a furry means being appreciative of art of anthropomorphic animals and connecting with other people over that. Now there are many in the furry community who are hurt, traumatized, "not normal", seeking escape as you are saying, and the community is exceptional for giving them space (that's a good thing, this community is then replacing traditional spaces providing community that may be failing them, like churches). But being a furry in itself is nothing indicative of not being able to, at the same time, live a "normal" life that you imagine.
sanqui··on Not a Normal Field Trip
I'm from a central European country and my mother always made sure to record episodes of the Magic School Bus shown here on TV for me to watch on VHS. No doubt an influential show even beyond the US.
sanqui··on Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset
I wasn't able to figure it out. The docs [1] have absolutely no information or overview on how the tool works, or how you should get started with creating a simple installer. Besides setup instructions, it only has details on individual sub components, beginning with with "Burn bundles". All linked tutorials are for previous versions of WiX. Is the expected workflow that I read a v3 tutorial and then read the "v4 for v3 users" article (which immediately leaves me discouraged with "A lot about WiX has changed between v3 and v4"), or that I immediately purchase enterprise support?

[1]: https://wixtoolset.org/docs/

sanqui··on Unplug Your Laptop Now, or It Will Stay Plugged in Forever
Please explain like I'm five: if continuously charging and drawing power at 100% hurts my laptop's battery, why doesn't the laptop bypass the battery circuitry, keeping it idle, and use the incoming juice directly?
sanqui··on The Infinite/Eternal Jukebox has been revived
I really miss the Infinite Jukebox. The original had MP3 upload support though, and this one doesn't...
sanqui··on Link's Awakening DX HD
I might be the only one thinking this but in my opinion seeing more than a single screen at once doesn't really suit Link's Awakening. The entire gameplay is built up around restricted scrolling: the screens are designed as puzzles to tackle individually. With free scrolling, the map looks very squairy. I think it might work if the map is redesigned and reimagined, and I'd definitely be interested in seeing that done, but I imagine that would be too much for the purists. I do like the subtle soft shadows behind the character sprites though!
sanqui··on Internet Artifact Museum
I with the website used proper URLs so it would be possible to use permalinks as a reference for individual items...
sanqui··on Intel QuickAssist Technology Zstandard Plugin for Zstandard
Btrfs, the file system I use, utilizes zstd for transparent compression. That's using a lot of CPU all the time on laptop. So more efficient compressing is great news! Is this for future CPUs?
sanqui··on Firefox 115 can remotely disable any extension on any site
StopTheMadness appears to be a Firefox extension that's only available for Mac users?
sanqui··on The Group Decode ROM: The 8086 processor's first step of instruction decoding
This is tangential, but seeing the 8086 opcode table organized in octal groups made me realize the same applies for the instruction set of the Z80 (my home CPU). Your articles are always very insightful, thank you!
sanqui··on Lotus 1-2-3
I don't use my HP 200LX much, but one of the reasons is definitely the constant risk of data loss. Are those backup macros available anywhere?
sanqui··on Minetest: An open source voxel game engine
John Lin's voxel engine showed a lot of promise in this department: https://m.youtube.com/@johnlin9665/videos
sanqui··on Show HN: I made a retro game archive for Polish games
From a Czechoslovak video game archivist, well done! We have our own databases of video games and even a dedicated person reviewing every single public release on 8-bit micros, but no website with such a clear presentation. Inspiring!
sanqui··on Major GNOME infrastructure outage
Flathub is also having issues: https://status.flathub.org/
sanqui··on A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page
Bulbapedia was launched in February 2005[1], while Wikipedia reached the consensus that "not all Pokémon are notable" in mid-2007[2].

[1] https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pok%C3%A9mon_test

sanqui··on It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak
That looks great so far! Pair it with open cloze with translation once you determine that the user should know the word and you've got magic going. You could even "beep" the word out of the recording (I'm assuming they're TTS).

Edit: typo

sanqui··on It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak
It's a paid app, but I enjoyed Speakly's approach of "endless stream of open cloze exercises". It forces you to actually type words in the target language (unlike Duolingo which is mostly translations into the source language), it has a clever spaced repetition algorithm, and it lets you practice for as long as you want and stop immediately at any point, unlike Duolingo locking you into 20 question long lessons.
sanqui··on Doom RPG Ported to PC
Oooh, that's a cool way to visualize branching playthroughs. Great inspiration for potential future projects!
sanqui··on Scapy: Low level packet hacking toolkit for Python
Unfortunately, in my experience Wireshark sometimes fails to reassemble TCP streams after a retransmission or out-of-order event, despite the presence of a checkbox to do just that...
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