etatoby's comments

etatoby | 3 months ago | on: Android developer verification: Early access starts

Something I've never understood about DRM is, if the content is ultimately played on my device, what stops me from reverse engineering their code to make an alternative client or downloader? Is it just making it harder to do so? Or is there a theoretical limit to reverse engineering that I'm not getting? Do they have hardware decryption keys in every monitor, inside the LCD controller chip?

etatoby | 4 months ago | on: Language models are injective and hence invertible

> Just intuitively, in such a high dimensional space, two random vectors are basically orthogonal.

Which, incidentally, is the main reason why deep learning and LLM are effective in the first place.

A vector of a few thousands dimensions would be woefully inadequate to represent all of human knowledge, if not for the fact that it works as the projection of a much higher, potentially infinite-dimensional vector representing all possible knowledge. The smaller-sized one works in practice as a projection, precisely because any two such vectors are almost always orthogonal.

etatoby | 4 months ago | on: Zoo of array languages

Came here to say the same thing. Uiua is my favorite language by far. BQN is also a cool "Nu-APL" but Uiua is just a full generation ahead.

etatoby | 3 years ago | on: No Start Menu for You

> I have a good understanding of the problem, but I do not have a solution

REALLY

Just don't call background services, unless the user explicitly requested a remote service! My Linux installs and (to a lesser degree) my Windows LTSB/LTSC installs don't have these issues, you know?

etatoby | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: Cosh – concatenative command-line shell

Even after perusing jq's manual multiple times and having written several complex incantations, I still have no idea how to properly combine `|` and `.[]` except by trial and error, or why `select()` needs to be used inside `map(select(...))`

Recently I needed to extract some data, and after fighting with jq and its manual for half an hour, I solved the problem in 30 seconds with node.js

I appreciate the idea behind jq, but its language is horrible. Even XPath was easier and cleaner.

etatoby | 4 years ago | on: Space anemia

IIRC a spinning space station would only be beneficial if it was very large and thus far from Earth and expensive.

Otherwise the difference in gravity acting on different sides of the body and more importantly the Coriolis forces would wreak havoc and cause more harm than good.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: I love coding in C

Have you considered Nim?

Much better type system than C, syntax is very similar to Python, compile times are excellent and speed analogous to C++.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

Yes, it will complain and for good reason: it has no way of knowing whether the kid next door is spoofing your router's IP or Mac address and presenting their own self-signed certificate.

I wouldn't go as far as calling it «capricious constraints imposed by the system of "certificate authorities"» but at the same time, I agree that it's not a fundamental limitation of the technology.

Better protocols could be developed to allow a browser to trust a server without (all) the limitations of the current system.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are Wrong

> Futurama was right: nuclear winter cancels global warming

I'm not sure it does (I'd love to read an accurate model of it) but I get your point. It's a very compelling point.

I wish humans didn't need the threat of nuclear weapons to keep the basic needs of other humans in mind, but since they do... there you go.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are Wrong

It was definitely not. It was in the food we interested.

Trees and other plants take carbon from air, energy from the sub, and use it to build themselves. We take carbon from them and put it back into the air, using the excess energy to move and think.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: Gibberish Asian Font Mystery Solved (2006)

To play devil's advocate, such a thing as transcribing Western names phonetically using Chinese characters does exist, both in contemporary Chinese and in other historical or minority Chinese-derived languages, as well as in old Japanese.

Here are the current rules for standard Chinese:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_cha...

And here is some information about the same thing historically done in Japanese:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateji

That being said, I have only glanced at that tattoo table and it seems wildly inaccurate and simplified. But the underlying concept does exist.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: Gitlab ‘rethinking’ third-party telemetry

With the second party (Gitlab in this case) I have a contact, give them money regularly, and have other such leverage in case they screw up. Third parties generally could not case less what damage they may cause.
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