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thenickdude

289 karma · joined April 16, 2013

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thenickdude··on How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a can of WD-40
Here "www" is read "dub dub dub", which is at least only one syllable per character instead of "double-u double-u double-u"
thenickdude··on Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
You'll absolutely love this one then:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/funny-or-ann...

thenickdude··on How do jewellers capture every last particle of gold dust? (2017)
Reminds me of Cody's Lab refining platinum from roadside dust from the highway: (due to catalytic converters)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5GPWJPLcHg

thenickdude··on RegreSSHion: RCE in OpenSSH's server, on glibc-based Linux systems
There's a purported PoC exploit that delivers shellcode available on GitHub, but I saw someone comment the link here, and then their comment disappeared on the next refresh.
thenickdude··on Tiny beauty: how I make scientific art from behind the microscope
You can even shoot in the field using a microscope! I designed a 3D-printed mount to attach a $25 4x microscope objective to a DSLR or mirrorless camera:

https://www.printables.com/model/143754-microscope-adapter-f...

A shorter version of the adapter "underclocks" the objective to 2x magnification, which is much easier to hand-hold:

https://www.printables.com/model/397489-microscope-adapter-f...

If you already have a 3D printer then this is a very cheap way to get started.

thenickdude··on 16 years of CVE-2008-0166 – Debian OpenSSL Bug
I don't believe this is true, the only knob to tune is for relaxed or strict alignment checks for DKIM and SPF.

How do you configure DMARC to require both of DKIM and SPF?

The RFC says:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7489#section-4.2

   A message satisfies the DMARC checks if at least one of the supported
   authentication mechanisms:

   1.  produces a "pass" result, and

   2.  produces that result based on an identifier that is in alignment,
       as defined in Section 3.
thenickdude··on How an empty S3 bucket can make your AWS bill explode
This does not save you because AWS Account IDs are not private, e.g. if you are using S3 pre-signed URLs anywhere, those URLs include your account ID as part of the X-AMZ-Credential URL field:

https://medium.com/@TalBeerySec/a-short-note-on-aws-key-id-f...

thenickdude··on Glibc Buffer Overflow in Iconv
Or else edit /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gconv/gconv-modules and comment out this section:

  #       from                    to                      module          cost
  alias  ISO2022CNEXT//          ISO-2022-CN-EXT//
  module ISO-2022-CN-EXT//       INTERNAL                ISO-2022-CN-EXT 1
  module INTERNAL                ISO-2022-CN-EXT//       ISO-2022-CN-EXT 1
Then run "iconvconfig" to rebuild the iconv cache. This disables that charset completely.
thenickdude··on Live NASA telescope feed for today's solar eclipse [video]
That same 2028 total solar eclipse is centred right on my city here in Dunedin, New Zealand, at least I don't have to find accommodation!

https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/in/new-zealand/otago?iso...

Queenstown looks like a good option for it too.

thenickdude··on AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License
My approach to generating a music video was to generate scenes using DALL-E 3, and then animate those using Stable Video Diffusion (SVD).

SVD doesn't have well-controllable motion and is utterly blown out of the water by Sora, but it's what we have right now.

Here's the resulting vid, "a death metal song about a macro photographer":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNVRQ1Zg-a0

If you only want a video file from Suno to share with the default static lyrics screen on it, hit Download Video from the three-dots menu.

thenickdude··on AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License
On that theme, I asked Suno to sing a rap but "remove all the vowels", and it's hilarious how well it attempts to sing the silly result:

https://app.suno.ai/song/30f8223e-0d0b-4cac-8b3f-5d8f0f743e2...

The lyrics generator is some version of GPT so you can give it natural language instructions like this.

thenickdude··on AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License
You can fix most misspoken words by tweaking the lyrics. e.g. in my most recent song it pronounced "pasting" from "copying and pasting" as "past-ing.

I just rewrote the lyrics as "paste-ing" and it sung it perfectly afterwards.

thenickdude··on A disk so full, it couldn't be restored
By contrast, ZFS has "slop space" to avoid this very problem (wedging the filesystem by running out of space during a large operation). By default it reserves 3.2% of your volume's space for this, up to 128GB.

So by adjusting the Linux kernel tunable "spa_slop_shift" to shrink the slop space, you can regain up to 128GB of bonus space to successfully complete your file deletion operations:

https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Performance%20and%20T...

thenickdude··on Suno, an AI music generator
Yes, it has a dedicated tickbox for that, check out this instrumental song by Reddit's /u/Dungeon_Sand_Dragons:

https://app.suno.ai/song/5e787b34-0c3a-4790-b88a-bcd54f4f078...

thenickdude··on Suno, an AI music generator
I generated this song which paired Vocaloid voice-synth style vocals with a "death metal" backup vocalist, it came out really nice:

https://app.suno.ai/song/7decbf5b-bd1b-4e13-8ed5-aa8c7a38b1b...

Lyrics are half generated and half hand-written.

It's a shame that I didn't have any control over which vocalist sang which part, and just kept having to re-roll the dice! In general it offers very little control over the performance.

thenickdude··on Lemonade Stand
In highschool my statistics teacher got me to key my Snake game into her graphing calculator instead of having to do the lesson, lol.
thenickdude··on Lead in gasoline blunted IQ of half the U.S. population, study says
Cody's Lab has a video of refining platinum from roadside dust: (due to catalytic converters)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5GPWJPLcHg

thenickdude··on Hetzner switches to new billing model
Yes. New Zealand.
thenickdude··on Hetzner switches to new billing model
Yup, I bought a dedicated server because I needed a CPU with AVX2 and VT-x, and it went poof some days later.

They didn't even do me the courtesy of emailing me to tell me about it, I had to ask support:

> > When I try to log in to my account it tells me that my credentials are invalid, and when I use forgot password it tells me that my account is disabled?

>We recently did some routine reviews of our customer accounts. We noticed some suspicious information in your account.

>We have some concerns regarding this information and we have decided to close your account.

>We do not share details about why certain accounts appear suspicious. Publishing this information would make it easier for people to create fake accounts and abuse our services.

I even went through their live-video face verification and passport scan and they didn't budge on this.

thenickdude··on How to find the AWS account ID of any S3 bucket
Related: AWS key IDs (not the secret key part) include your account ID within them, bitshifted by one position:

https://medium.com/@TalBeerySec/a-short-note-on-aws-key-id-f...

These key IDs are included in the URL for pre-signed links to S3, so there's a good chance you've already been publishing your account ID.

thenickdude··on Don't use NameCheap for the .fr TLD
For reference, NameCheap TOTP released in 2018:

https://www.namecheap.com/blog/protect-account-totp-2-factor...

thenickdude··on GPT-3.5 crashes when it thinks about useRalativeImagePath too much
Can you prove that you think?
thenickdude··on Silent Flyer – A Birdlike Drone
Remote-controlled ornithopters are already flying today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vm-Yq6xiSk

The 3D renders don't look much more ambitious than this.

thenickdude··on Website search hurts my feelings
What's worse is that they explicitly know that they don't have that title, because they do have that title if you visit from a different region. But they waste your time with showing you irrelevant results instead.
thenickdude··on The best WebAssembly runtime may be no runtime
Indeed, my DOS machine got infected by a Jazz Jackrabbit disk borrowed from a friend.

I had a text-mode launcher menu for running programs, and that had an "anti-virus" feature built-in that checksummed programs, and alerted you if their checksum ever changed (since these viruses spread by infecting .exes), which is how I found out about it!

thenickdude··on Write shaders for the (sim) Vegas sphere
Wow, that's cool! I asked ChatGPT "The fragment coloring is currently greyscale, update the fragment coloring to create a rainbow effect." and it created this excellent animated rainbow effect, first try:

https://pastebin.com/raw/NtYuJv1m

It looks especially good with the changing colours highlighting the bloom effect

thenickdude··on Android App Devs now require 20 people to test before publishing to Play Store
I don't even know 20 people
thenickdude··on From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity
At small data scale you fit within the 100GB/month free tier for S3 or 1TB/month free tier for Cloudfront (in front of an S3 backend).
thenickdude··on Anything longer ago than yesterday should just say the actual date
That one makes perfect sense to me, as if it said like "1 second ago", this would almost always be a wrong statement due to differing clocks, and the time taken to render and send you the page.

If the time is static on the page rather than dynamically updating in JS, for such small intervals it'll already be out of date by the time you scroll down to read it. But dynamically updating timestamps is irritating because it causes the content to "animate", and that movement catches the eye for no good reason, since nothing is really changing with the content (Reddit does this).

Due to clock skews you can even have the event come from slightly in the future, and marking that accurately like "2 seconds from now" would be even more confusing.

"just now" solves all these issues

thenickdude··on Gsplat: CUDA accelerated rasterization of gaussians with Python bindings
Wow thanks, I didn't realise there was a WebGL viewer available for these! Very cool!
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