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gengkev commented on California is nearly out of license plate numbers   sfchronicle.com/californi... · Posted by u/rntn
k310 · 4 months ago
Who is going to request 9ZZZ999 as a vanity number, if possible?

I prefer remaining relatively anonymous. Some others seek notoriety. :-)

gengkev · 4 months ago
I tried this but the DMV doesn't let you request it ;-( Alas, probably for the better...

At each DMV there are a stack of license plates that they hand out on-site. So requesting a vanity plate of the same format would probably require them to search those stacks (across all DMVs) to pick out the plate.

gengkev commented on I fixed a parasitic drain on my car in 408 days   davidmuller.github.io/pos... · Posted by u/dmuller
WirelessGigabit · 2 years ago
My car beeps loudly and angrily at me if the doors are not 100% closed when I hit the close button on the fob.
gengkev · 2 years ago
With my car, trying to lock the doors just doesn't work if one is left open — not always the most obvious failure mode, but it's been enough to get me to notice something's wrong.
gengkev commented on Bitwarden PINs can be brute-forced   ambiso.github.io/bitwarde... · Posted by u/aborsy
0xdeafbeef · 2 years ago
You can use pbdkf2 with 200k iterations or argon2 to derive key from pin
gengkev · 2 years ago
Suppose it takes 2 seconds of 100% cpu usage to compute the password hash (you probably wouldn't want to wait much longer).

Then brute forcing a 4 digit PIN will take 20000 seconds ≈ 6 hours maximum. There's no way around that, no matter what hash function you use.

gengkev commented on The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability   dirtypipe.cm4all.com/... · Posted by u/max_k
bananabiscuit · 4 years ago
Oh, interesting, did not know it could be so fast.
gengkev · 4 years ago
For me, at least, there's an important difference missing from the debate over the term "C/C++": compiling C code is always much faster than you would expect, but compiling C++ code is always much slower than you would expect...
gengkev commented on Features that more cameras should have   photographylife.com/featu... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
jl6 · 4 years ago
Whatever happened to love for Live Photos?

I think they’re great - absolutely perfect for situations with young kids who are constantly moving, or just to capture little vignettes of movement that bring a photo to life for a moment.

But support for them is virtually non-existent outside the iOS Photos app.

You can extract them as a pair of HEIC and MOV files, but I know of no Free photo management software that is capable of associating them and displaying them together (and yes, there are internal IDs in both files that make it possible to link them, so they aren’t quite as fragile as most sidecar files, although they are still fragile because Apple for some insane reason decided not to make use of the HEIF container format’s native ability to store both in the same file).

I’m unsure if Android has an equivalent feature or how it’s implemented, but I’m pretty sure no DSLRs have anything like it.

gengkev · 4 years ago
Pixel phones can take "Motion Photos" — it seems like this is basically just an mp4 file stuffed into a jpg somehow (but without sound). The Google Photos app lets you export it as an mp4 or gif file, or pick a specific timestamp to export a still image.

It looks like the Samsung Camera has something similar, but I'm not sure if it's compatible...

gengkev commented on NFT misconception: JPEG aren't stored on the Blockchain   erickhun.com/posts/nft-mi... · Posted by u/greenSunglass
crorella · 4 years ago
exactly, anyone could alter the content the URL points to.
gengkev · 4 years ago
Right, I'm really surprised that there isn't at least a hash or something for that reason...
gengkev commented on OO in Python is mostly pointless   leontrolski.github.io/mos... · Posted by u/leontrolski
BalinKing · 5 years ago
C++ et al's "this" keyword seems perfectly reasonable to me--the whole point of being a member method is that you have some sort of implicit state. Otherwise, why not just make them top-level functions, if you have to take the object as a parameter anyway?
gengkev · 5 years ago
Conversely, I think the beauty is that they _are_ the same as top-level functions, just in a special namespace. This means that you can call "instance methods" directly from a class, i.e. the following are equivalent:

    (1) + 2
    (1).__add__(2)
    int.__add__(1, 2)
This comports with the "explicit is better than implicit" policy in Python. The only "magic" part is when dot-notation is used to call an instance method, which is just syntactic sugar. Another example of this philosophy is that operator overloading is simply reduced to implementing a method with a specific name.

I think a "magic" this keyword can create a lot of nasty edge cases that can be difficult to reason about; the way "this" is used in JavaScript is notoriously complex in ways that it might not be in a statically typed language like C++. What should "this" evaluate to outside of an instance method? What about in a class definition inside an instance method? What if an instance method is called directly instead of on an instance? All of these situations require making their own "rules", whereas in Python the correct answers can be easily reasoned about by starting from first principles.

gengkev commented on Google's Sundar Pichai says future of office is employee 'on-sites'   businessinsider.com/googl... · Posted by u/ma2rten
ooobit2 · 5 years ago
I would prefer that companies follow the law, which is that they are grossly abusing workers' rights demanding the right to use an employee's personal residence as a condition of pay. When you sign on, your offer is, of course, partly based on the locale, but as an employee, you do not have a vote or a decision in where the office you work at is located. By their logic, employers should be required to pay a cost of living differential, which they are not, and rarely if ever meet on initial offering, which introduces the gap observed preceding 1980 that shows striking differences in income growth vs. average living expenses.

I don't care where you work, nor where your office is, nor how often you appear there each week. I care that VMware is demanding you subsidize your own employment costs by returning up to 18% of your annual pay to the company... because the company chose to build where cost of living is significantly higher than you can afford on the pay VMware has already been paying you.

The answer should be an emphatic NO. "No, I will not take 80% of my original pay simply because I moved. Where I live is none of your business, except with respect to securing company data and property while I am employed by you. You pay me based on an already unfair exchange for the value my skills and time bring your organization. You don't get to make me pay you back for the inconvenience of having to employ me remotely." That's what needs to be said. And there needs to be class action lawsuits to recover damages for this as well. VMware wasn't charging $100 less per license for sales to Midwest companies. They didn't slap a $100 Silicon Valley differential on local sales. This is bullshit, through and through.

And I apologize for my rage and language, but damn it. Every single one of these executives built their companies on keeping pay low. I've got friends who got stuck in dead-end contracts at these tech firms. One of 'em has literally been on contract with IBM for 5 years, waiting for some kind of fulltime opportunity that they never have "need" for. Another just got furloughed after two years on contracts at Ubisoft. Had a friend from school who launched the Palm Pre only to get laid off within 9 months of joining the company. No transfers, no options, just a "hey, so our idea for that... turns out no one wanted to buy it! You gotta go." Well, not our problem, dude. We didn't get to pick which product our work went into. We didn't get to make a career-interest decision after watching you present to us that you'd done the market- and competitive analyses to back some likelihood of demand for what you wanted us to commit no-strings-attached to.

It's immature, and malicious and deceitful. And too many people break bread and break their backs to get their Agile and SCRUM releases out the door every 5 minutes. Everyone under the executives and senior management deserves more damn respect than this.

Edit: And Sundar has needed to go for a long time. The guy is an idiot. How do you turn the largest consumer and commercial OS into a dumpster fire of exploits, half-finished ideas (Settings vs. Control Panel, anyone?!?), and have to give it away for free because you lacked the expertise to implement a logistics plan that would comfortably roll all consumers and commercial deployments forward without exposing them to significant downtime? You employ people like Sundar. If the man spent 5 fewer minutes writing verbose excuses for not getting results, he'd have 5 minutes each day to work toward getting results. If he tries hard enough, he may up it to 10 minutes in a few years.

gengkev · 5 years ago
> And Sundar has needed to go for a long time... How do you turn the largest consumer and commercial OS into a dumpster fire of exploits, half-finished ideas (Settings vs. Control Panel, anyone?!?)...

So Windows was made by... Google?

gengkev commented on Beware of Being “Right”   psychologytoday.com/us/bl... · Posted by u/_zhqs
jhanschoo · 5 years ago
I'm surprised that you didn't also observe how the need to be "right" is related to people not caring about having true beliefs. That is, the need to be (have been) "right" is a great motivation for people to cling on stubbornly to false notions.
gengkev · 5 years ago
I always found this an interesting phenomenon. I hate being "wrong" as much as anyone else. But it seems like the best way to not be wrong is being aware of the uncertainties in your understanding, not making claims about topics where you have gaps in your knowledge, and adjusting your understanding based on new information. To have absolute confidence in what you are saying without regard for reality seems like the easiest way to be wrong...
gengkev commented on The Fourth of July   popehat.com/2020/07/04/th... · Posted by u/apsec112
dnautics · 5 years ago
Not really. Arlington VA was retroceded, no reason the rest (aside from actual federal buildings and facilities) couldn't be.
gengkev · 5 years ago
I imagine it's possible, but "no reason" is definitely a stretch. The parts of DC that are federal land are hardly contiguous, and trying to force a clean split between DC and Maryland looks like it would be a nightmare: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/local/dc-marijuana-m...

u/gengkev

KarmaCake day146January 25, 2012
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