praptak

11 ms·

211.
by praptak 1y ago
PSA: it's easy to miss on the first watch because the big action happens in the background behind the gate.
212.
by praptak 1y ago
> I thought I was the only one who knew about Mugsy! I played Mugsy on an actual Spectrum that I owned at that time. I think it was a pretty popular game, so I bet a large fraction of former Spectrum owners do know about Mugsy.
213.
by praptak 1y ago
Encoding with common objects was (and maybe still is) actually used in practice by actual spies, see CIA shoelace code.
214.
by praptak 1y ago
I would not call it a city builder unless you stretch this category to include games with no map at all. I'm not sure if this genre has a name but it's basically a turn based game with the state modeled as a fixed length vector of
215.
by praptak 1y ago
The story works for any tech pushed on people for profit rather than to scratch their itch.
216.
by praptak 1y ago
I was promised a Free Market that Satisfies Needs. Maybe it's time to read the fine print disclaimers on that. (The author made the story about AI but I'm reading it more generally)
217.
by praptak 1y ago
This also touches mind theory. In particular it relies on the belief that running a Turing machine that kills 3^^^^3 people is as bad as breeding and killing the same number of people in the physical world we live in.
218.
by praptak 1y ago
It has a wiki page under a slightly different name (but the concept is the same): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging
219.
by praptak 1y ago
I agree that fully redundant & separate infrastructure is unrealistic. I'm also not saying you can be 100% prepared. My point is that you can improve your posture. What you can do is to have a sandbox environment where you periodic
220.
by praptak 1y ago
It's a model of a realistic scenario. Hackers (like in the article), long running ransomware that managed to corrupt lots of data, maybe a natural disaster. So by "wiping all data storage units" I meant the dynamic ones used
221.
by praptak 1y ago
You can help instead of waiting for politicians to "do something about it". It's not that hard to find a reputable organization that helps Ukraine and send it some money.
222.
by praptak 1y ago
Not many companies explicitly prepare for the scenario where every single data storage unit in the company is effectively wiped and you have to redeploy from zero. If you never bootstrap from zero (nor simulate this) then your systems proba
223.
by praptak 1y ago
I remember having woken up from a dream where I recognised that a) I'm dreaming and b) It's the same dream I had years ago (a sequel maybe). I can't keep dreaming while being aware that I'm dreaming (supposedly you can t
224.
by praptak 1y ago
Inevitabilism has a long history of being used to persuade people to accept shitty stuff. Soviet bloc used Marx's historicism (or their interpretation thereof) to argue that communism (or their implementation thereof) is inevitable. Th
225.
by praptak 1y ago
It also has a really cool solitaire game-in-game as an... addition? Ornament?
226.
by praptak 1y ago
FFmpeg uses assembly and they use it so extensively that they put up their own assembly tutorial: https://github.com/FFmpeg/asm-lessons Maybe there is something to do there (I haven't checked).
227.
by praptak 1y ago
Paul Khuong "Starting to hack on SBCL" has a good list of reference material: https://pvk.ca/Blog/2013/04/13/starting-to-hack-on-sbcl/ Also the rest of his blog is worthy of at least a ski
228.
by praptak 1y ago
Yes. My point is that: 1. "No cycles in call graph" is not about memory usage but about having an easily provable limit on call stack and 2. "No cycles in call graph" is not about banning recursion. I agree that the call
229.
by praptak 1y ago
It's more about having an easily verifiable limit on the size of the call stack. You can still use recursion in algorithms with this rule. It just forces you to allocate a separate stack to manage it.
230.
by praptak 1y ago
I don't believe a purely technical solution exists. This needs to get political, ideally making it a crime to use technology in this way. The scope is much broader and more dangerous than niche forums. This shit has the potential to ki
231.
by praptak 1y ago
You cannot disengage from capitalism. The tricks you describe are perhaps useful to not be the slowest antelope in the herd but that doesn't mean you are fully free from being exploited.
232.
by praptak 1y ago
This sounds like Marx's alienation from labor. Do whatever, get your wage but not the satisfaction from a job well done.
233.
by praptak 1y ago
Yes. Now we only need a legit use case for code that swaps values only if they are in different locations, otherwise zeroes the aliased location. Then we can finally do it using the xor swap!
234.
by praptak 1y ago
Fun fact: the xor swap fails when the variables are aliases. This was the trick used in one of the underhanded code competitions. Basically xor swapping a[i] with a[j] triggered the evil logic when i was equal to j.
235.
by praptak 1y ago
This says you can't fix what you don't notice. This is obviously true. But then it jumps to the moment where you jot the impulse down. There's a gap here - to write something down you gotta notice it first too. Anyone working
236.
by praptak 1y ago
No, because there is no reason to expect that they will just swallow the costs of the unreasonable replacements for the slightly scratched dashboards. Even if we made them by law it would just be a stupid tax on insurance companies, proceed
237.
by praptak 1y ago
Shah was a dictator propped up by US. There's no going back to these times.
238.
by praptak 1y ago
Commercial developers could afford cross development setups where the actual development happened on PCs and the code was transferred to the Spectrum, see for example: https://bizzley.42web.io/assets/it_s_behind_you___t
239.
by praptak 1y ago
There was also the screen border which generally had to have one color but you could use a similar trick to draw static stripes on it (ZX wasn't fast enough to change the color more than a few times per scan line, so you could not real
240.
by praptak 1y ago
What I never got about the simple symmetry-based solution is "if we accept the idea that we can treat the current fields for the positive and negative nodes separately". Why are the currents in the two node solution (not symmetri

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