Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
• Cory Doctorow
John D. Cook
• John
Suppose you were able to go back in time, to an era before computers, and give someone contemporary cryptography. Encryption methods that are essentially unbreakable now would certainly be unbreakable then. But there’s a catch: not only do attackers not have computers, neither do users. If you told someone about RSA encryption, for example, you’d […]
The post Manually unbreakable cryptography first appeared on John D. Cook.
The Silicon Underground
• Dave Farquhar
It was 27 years ago this week, on Aug 11, 1999, that Red Hat, the Linux vendor, conducted its IPO. It was not the biggest IPO of 1999, and it wasn’t even the biggest Linux-related IPO of 1999. But Red
The post Red Hat’s successful 1999 IPO appeared first on The Silicon Underground.
Entropic Thoughts
• kqr
I have never done any time–frequency transformations. I understand the general idea, but I have never worked with the details. Today I had a reason to use it, but that means learning the basics first.
The following is three seconds of a single 5 Hz sine wave, recorded at a sample rate of 100 Hz.
The Old New Thing
• Raymond Chen
Try one of the fancier alternatives to CopyFile.
The post How can I perform a <CODE>CopyFile­</CODE> in unbuffered mode? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson
For long agentic sessions cache reads are most of the bill, not input or output tokens. KV caches have shrunk dramatically while cache read pricing has barely moved.
Terence Eden’s Blog
• @edent
Sex work is work, so we're told. There's no difference between picking up a night job stacking shelves and a night job jacking-off on screen. Right? Perhaps a couple need a little bit of extra cash and the siren song of OnlyFans is right there. Let's fire up the webcam and release ourselves from financial drudgery! Then reality hits. The script by Sean Stillmaker sounds like it was ripped…
Terence Eden’s Blog
• @edent
OMG! If you remember A/S/Ling your way through MSN to fill in your MySpace top 8, then you'll love this show. You're also over 30 and, therefore, old. Ew. The stage is littered with a Nokia 3310, Bliss Magazine, and Charlie Red. Katie (15/F/UK) talks us through the complexities of her nascent love life, what shag band colours mean, and which quotes sum up millennial angst. All the while…
Terence Eden’s Blog
• @edent
The terror of AI has come to comedy. There are a dozen shows this year about the threat that technology poses to the way we live, laugh, and love. In this case, AI stands for Austrian Imperialism and the fight is for Switzerland's independence. Well, sort of. It gets a bit lost in an endless stream of rambly diversions. There's a fine line between surrealist comedy and utter nonsense. If you…
Marcus on AI
• Gary Marcus
How The New York Times just bungled this one, and why it matters, immensely
John D. Cook
• John
The following extraordinary paragraph comes from Knuth’s TAOCP Volume 4A, right before the last set of exercises. Many of the exercises below ask a modern reader to find and/or to correct errors in the literature of bygone days. The point is not to gloat over how smart we are in the 21st century; the point […]
The post Learning from historical mistakes first appeared on John D. Cook.
John D. Cook
• John
In science and engineering classes, you might describe a system using Newton’s laws and end up with a differential equation. You then solve the differential equation, analytically or numerically, to see how the solutions behave. You might also do the opposite, especially in a mathematics class: look at what differential equation a set of functions […]
The post Inverse differential equations first appeared on John D. Cook.
Terence Eden’s Blog
• @edent
My mum's friend Rachel has a one-woman show on at the Fringe. As, apparently, the only orthodox Jew on the UK comedy circuit she has constructed a fully interactive Jewish Mother experience. Like several shows on the fringe, it relies on the audience writing questions on cards and the comedian riffing on them. Unlike other shows, Rachel has a huge stream of anecdotes and songs to weave into her…
The Silicon Underground
• Dave Farquhar
MP3 piracy was born August 10, 1996. That day, a pirate using the handle of Netfrack released a copy of Metallica’s Until it Sleeps for free download on IRC, an Internet protocol intended for chat, not file sharing. It’s appropriate
The post The first pirated MP3 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
• Cory Doctorow
The aliens arrived, and their first instinct was to check our networks. They accessed one of our most important websites. A government website. Unfortunately, they were met with a reCAPTCHA.
Are you a robot?
They are not robots. But after fifteen minutes of squinting and trying to select all the fire hydrants and traffic lights, they gave up. Defeated by a checkbox, they returned to the stars.
The aliens arrived, and their first instinct was to check our networks. They accessed one of our most important websites. A government website. Unfortunately, they were met with a reCAPTCHA.
Are you a robot?
They are not robots. But after fifteen minutes of squinting and trying to select all the fire hydrants and traffic lights, they gave up. Defeated by a checkbox, they returned to the stars.
