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ultimape

192 karma · joined October 16, 2013

I make computers do things

@ultimape on twitter

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/ultimape; my proof: https://keybase.io/ultimape/sigs/1jWSGDe8bEAIgoncD403hKZEPKD630seN3QC1O5AZik ]

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ultimape··on Why public chats are better than direct messages
Good luck with all the alcoholic types you're going to be generating as a side effect of forcing people with anxiety issues into talking in a public space. You'll be seeing self-medication for gaba dysfunctions as people try to keep their job. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4303399/
ultimape··on Togethr: Own Mastodon-compatible decentralized social network instance
This appears to be a managed hosting provider offering access to a pleroma instance underneath, not a software package.
ultimape··on COBOL Programming Course
LEARNING COBOL IS VERY GOOD IF YOU WANNA INFILTRATE AND HACK LEGACY SYSTEMS.
ultimape··on YouTuber builds his own x-ray machine after $69k hospital bill (2021)
In the context of buying used hospital equipment and the concerns of a layman making a mistake due to the very confusion you highlight... Seems at least relevant.
ultimape··on Electric fields, not individual neurons, may hold information in memory: study
Maybe. There was a guy who induced aphantasia after a stem cell transplant and one of the hypothesis is the loss of gut bacteria via antibiotics. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8143657/

I reversed a life-long case of Prosopagnosia after doing some n-of-1 experiments with replenishing my gut bacteria, so it seems plausible to me that losing intestines could impact this.

I also have a friend had her intestines removed due to Crohn's disease. She had an infection from the surgery that put her in a coma she woke up unable to picture things in her head. Hard to say what caused it.

ultimape··on IBM open sources fully-functional Lego microscope design (2020)
Many of the plastics have stress lines that show up under polarized lens IIRC. And many of the techniques used to detect crystals in fluids also use polarized light that would be incompatible with such a lens.
ultimape··on PUBG Game maker says Apple, Google selling rip-offs in new lawsuit
Pubg itself is a ripoff of minecraft hunger games.
ultimape··on Making Open Source economy more viable with dual license collectives
Next level game theory: going with AGPL specifically because google banned it lmao.
ultimape··on Hundreds of ancient Maya sites hidden under Mexico reveal a mysterious blueprint
I found a bunch of churches were built on ground that has been shown to contain soil bacteria with anti-biofilm properties. This means the 'holy ground' was literally able to heal wounds. Likewise, a lot of 'holy water' has similar healing properties because it often contained gold and silver nanoparticles.

The ritual use of these sites usually occurred afterwards once economic situation and custom solidified it as an area of rulership. Often cargo-cult'ing what would have been a genuine healing process.

ultimape··on Car accidents cause death, injury and trauma. Why do we shrug them off?
Obesity is a risk factor for many types of cancer and also risk for Alzheimer's because both are tied to the hip with blood sugar problems.

Most of the older folks to who get cancer and age related neurodegenerative disease also seem to succumb to age related diabetes symptoms and poor insulin.

These things aren't separate-able as cleanly as you suggest.

ultimape··on Car accidents cause death, injury and trauma. Why do we shrug them off?
What if you don't see them because its the middle of the night and they're not at a crosswalk, a situation designed to have high visibility?
ultimape··on Deadly infection linked to contaminated room spray sold at Walmart
It largely gets captured in the mucus barrier in the lungs, but people with COPD or asthma also tend to have poor barrier function (Both mucus and lung liner) so it leaks into the blood stream easier.
ultimape··on The 100 MHz 6502
Unconventional computing platforms FTW. https://phys.org/news/2012-04-scientists-crab-powered.html
ultimape··on This implanted microchip may one day control your sleep
Have you managed to boost oxidative stress removal? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4117056/
ultimape··on Drug users use a lot of drugs
Survival stress also impacts liver function leading to poor lipid metabolism which in turn can impact cholesterol absorption and lead to cortical thinning. Which is also an effect that we see from methamphetamine use in various animal models, which by it's nature of being controlled trail seems to exclude the stress factor. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28689763/

I would agree with you in general, but there are situations where prescribed methamphetamines also lead to cortical thinning when not used as recreationally. This seems to suggest that stress may not be the entire player here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3870784/

It was likely decided because of the dose of meth found in the persons systems that correlates with various findings on dose-dependence https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

If you would like to read more about PTSD findings as it relates to stress and liver function, I would be happy to expound upon the way that corticosteroids impact gut bacteria that directly affect FXR metabolism and bile acids and further lead to cortical thinning. https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/30/2/575/5521088

Its really fascinating how a drug like methamphetamine impact neuroactive steroids that impact the same pathways tha stress does. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6862925/ We've been able to reverse it in rats https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131007093739.h...

ultimape··on Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening (2010)
Ironically the supicious and fightening url generator thinks that isn't a valid url. Tho it does seem to work in reverse https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
ultimape··on Why bugs might feel “impossible”
I routed out a couple thousand heisenbugs in an old system I was working on. Turned out the web based platform had no cache invalidation / cache-busting feature enabled, so any time an update would be published, the browsers didn't always get the changes.

The icing on the cake was that it was our app that was bad, and the 'fix' they implemented was a completely broken work-around.

It was SOP to instruct the clients to turn off browser caching. So the app was slow as well. Inevitably the Client's on-site IT would install a new desktop and forget to turn off browser caching. So you'd get these weird states were errors would occur randomly and depend entirely on if someone had changed or hadn't set that setting.

Years of cruft and chaotic deployment workflow meant there were easily 10,000 different places where the cache busting would need to be implemented. I figured out a way to fix this using nginx as a caching layer, and using features of a brand name Web Toolkit which we had already partly implemented without caching. Even had a test harness set up and way to catch bugs during a transitionary stage.

Shame there wasn't any specific tickets on this exact fix because otherwise I would still be working there. Sure, I was assigned a bunch of the random error ones and found out what was causing them, but apparently being assigned a ticket and fixing the problem isn't part of my job?!

The head of the web dev team (and my manager) quit shortly after I was hired. I now understand why.

Fixing bugs is impossible sometimes.

ultimape··on Sperm DNA methylation epimutation biomarker for paternal offspring autism
I haven't found one specifically on autism. Most of the mothers' risk in offspring seems to be gestational factors during brain development stages, and later on impacts on milk.

This gets close "Epigenetics in Families: Covariance between Mother and Child Methylation Patterns" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7913850/

ultimape··on Fractalrabbit: Simulate realistic trajectory data from sporadic reporting
The companion git repo is fascinating. https://github.com/probabilist-us/contact-rabbit

Trying to reverse engineer indirect infection.

This is useful for seeding propaganda and any other virally driven phenomena by modeling gathered exploratory behavior of a user.

ultimape··on A robot to replace the need for farmers to go inside the grain bin
Yes, this is basically a mini "screw-propelled vehicle"
ultimape··on Drug users use a lot of drugs
Because it seems to cause cortical thinning https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3135731/ which is correlated with psychosis https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/952628 and so has been associated as partly causal?
ultimape··on Developer of aluminum-ion battery claims it charges faster than lithium-ion
obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/567/
ultimape··on Developer of aluminum-ion battery claims it charges faster than lithium-ion
left hand side of the road, or right hand side of the road?
ultimape··on EU set to unveil plans for bloc-wide digital wallet for various services
The article says

> "The digital wallet will securely store payment details and passwords and allow citizens from all 27 countries to log onto local government websites or pay utility bills using a single recognised identity, the newspaper said, citing people with direct knowledge of the plans."

Doesn't that directly imply that it is more than a simple SSO?

ultimape··on Space Debris Has Hit and Damaged the International Space Station
You can shoot lasers at it and the vapor knocks it out of orbit.
ultimape··on Space Debris Has Hit and Damaged the International Space Station
Much of the coal we have is because ancient trees weren't biodegradable. It would just build up because nothing could eat it for quite a long time. Nature also has a waste stream problem.
ultimape··on Twitter confirms Twitter Blue
I have been trying to transition to mastodon/pleroma.

ActivityPub is an open protocol for this kind of thing.

I use twitter as an external brain not that dissimilar to a a Xanadu inspired Memex intermixed with a Zettelkasten.

ultimape··on All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
you can survive a lot of inefficiency if you are a natural monopoly.
ultimape··on Kill the Advert Model and Free US All
This is not the place to recruit talent for a non existent product that doesn't even bother to change their wordpress icon on the adhoc landing page. Please don't spam your vaporware idea.
ultimape··on Fake_contacts: Android app to create fake phone contacts, to do data-poisoning
This is basically a mechanism that would allow for a honeytrap on steroids. https://blog.finjan.com/honeytokens-used-to-track-cybercrimi...

> that would require keeping track of bogus submissions

You don't have to keep track of the submissions because you can generate them with a reversible algorithm. Basically use a word list method https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawi... but have the list be entirely people's names (or generated from a corpus of known accounts and something like https://github.com/minimaxir/textgenrnn to make them harder to spot)

> generating new data for each company where you create an account.

yes https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.15794

Basically treating the data from various email honeypots as a "Numbers station" but instead of using it to prime encryption keys, you use it as a form of steganography. To do this entirely anonymously, the next step would be to publish on a public blockchain or anonymous service so that the owner's device (that generated the emails originally) can uploaded a signed statement that proves they were the phone pwned and who the offending app was.

A similar idea seems baked into a couple of crypto initiatives https://coincentral.com/sentinel-protocol/ but fundamentally we're talking about an anonymous reputation system modeled after how swarms operate to gossip risk.

It would be necessarily stochastic in nature because you'd be depending on the 3rd parties to send emails a bit at a time, but if you get a deluge of phones all reporting the same app, you can assume fairly confidently that app has been compromised. Punishment (Brand reputation, sanctions by app store) for being compromised would encourage better security.

This could (and would need to be) operated at the hardware level and orchestrated by the OS, and OS provider. This is the kind of thing apple and google could do as part of their privacy initiatives around "differential privacy" https://venturebeat.com/2019/12/21/ai-has-a-privacy-problem-...

What, you think that deep learning chip on your phone is there to make cute avatars?

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