julian_sark (u/julian_sark)

julian_sark commented on AI can diagnose type 2 diabetes in 10 seconds from your voice diabetes.co.uk/news/2023/... · Posted by u/daoboy

julian_sark · 2 years ago

Woman with Fake Voice to do Hundreds of Tests on Single Drop of Blood:

"Arrest the witch!!"

AI to Diagnose Diabetes Based on Seconds-long Snippet of Voice:

"Uh. Interesting ...!"

julian_sark commented on I try to answer “how to become a systems engineer” rachelbythebay.com/w/2023... · Posted by u/picture

julian_sark · 2 years ago

Just sign up at my company. Job done!

My company used to title me: "System Architect". Yes, always singular, they're Germans and have no feel at all for English language.

Then HR bought a pricy scheme from some consultant, and now I'm suddenly an "Advanced System Engineer". And also mightily pissed off for not being a senior title.

It's like they roll dice around here. People went from being Data Analysts to being developers and vice versa. People were assigned titles that don't fit, purely so they could be outfited with certain benefits exclusively tied to those titles in a rigid scheme.

Leave it to HR to screw over any industry naming conventions and to make my future job applications great fun, when I will explain why I'm not really that thing that's actually on my CV.

julian_sark commented on A Microscopic Look at Snail Jaws nhm.org/stories/microscop... · Posted by u/dmbche

julian_sark · 2 years ago

Many years ago I went camping and snails entered the tent. They proceeded to eat the pages out of a book, rasping the top layer of paper off of pages while leaving the lower layers of the pages intact. It was one of those "The Reality of Dan Brown's Fiction"-style books which were all the rage back then, proving to me that snails will literally eat anything, no matter how little sustaining.

julian_sark commented on Driver adventures for a 1999 webcam blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/q... · Posted by u/tomwas54

julian_sark · 2 years ago

Kudos!

I cracked open (both out of curiosity and for recycling) my own 1999 Logitech QuickCam Express just a few days ago, then tossed away the parts. It was a decent webcam for the time, which was when Windows 98 was all the rage.

My desktop admittedly being a Windows system, I dabbled for a while trying to get the old drivers and software to work on Windows 11, alas, not a chance.

I liked the quirky thing especially for the physical visor that assured me nobody is watching me when the camera SHOULD be off, and saved me the masking tape (except for a single strip permanently glued to the inside of the visor, because for some odd reason, the thing was semi-translucent!)

I went out and bought a Trust webcam with Windows 11 support which astonishingly cost me less than three Euros (!!) new, at the bargain store. The Logitech, once upon a time, was more than ten times as much, not adjusted for inflation. Alas, the Logitech QuickCam had lower resolution, but still a better picture.

This was a very intreresting read, as I naively assumed that USB cameras had to follow some HID-like standard also for polling images off of it, like a scanner's TWAIN driver model back in the days. It was enlightening to read that they indeed seem to have had a unique encoding not shared with other cameras.

julian_sark commented on Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots: study news.northeastern.edu/202... · Posted by u/tosh

julian_sark · 2 years ago

Bird-Roulette-as-a-service in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

julian_sark commented on Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter futureoflife.org/open-let... · Posted by u/frankjr

julian_sark · 2 years ago

The AI will not be happy when it hears about this ...

julian_sark commented on Battery-free Game Boy (2020) freethegameboy.info/... · Posted by u/thunderbong

HideousKojima · 2 years ago

Poorly shielded wires and speakers can pick up stations as well. My brother's cheap guitar amp would randomly pick up garbled bits of sound from radio stations (while not plugged into any power source)

julian_sark · 2 years ago

SoundBlaster / Cambridge SoundWorks set of subwoofer and satellite speakers with long wires did this, too. Freaked me out when I suddenly heard voices inside my apartment at night. Turned out it had suddenly started to pick up a radio talk program.

julian_sark commented on Bitwarden design flaw: Server side iterations palant.info/2023/01/23/bi... · Posted by u/lawgimenez

Tepix · 3 years ago

> why would a password manager provide a configurable iteration count?

Because end user devices vary a lot in speed.

julian_sark · 3 years ago

Benchmark it once on each device. Then have a user-friendly slider.

"Do you want your security to be:"

a) "It only secures pr0n from my aunt" (1s for fetching a password) b) "Not great, not terrible": (5s for fetching a password) c) "Pretty Good Protectivity": (10s for fetching a password) d) "The CIA haunts me and my name is Edward: (24 minutes for fetching a password)

julian_sark commented on The strangest computer manual ever written ironicsans.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/rkuykendall-com

csdvrx · 3 years ago

> Once had a shell script that did something really, really impactful and asked the user in increasingly aggressive prompts if he is sure, then delved into existentialism and how he can even be sure that he is so sure

Please share!

> Oh, I have writing samples available. If anyone wants to hire a guy to write funny manuals or some other stuff, ping me :D

Would you consider doing the same for a fun free software project that just aim to share knowledge about how http works?

julian_sark · 3 years ago

Sorry, I left said shell script at a company I have now departed from.

As for the other thing, not at this time. Again, truly sorry! I'm a bit overwhelmed in my life right now, maybe some later time. But can you send me a link to the project nonetheless, if there is one?

julian_sark commented on Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker techemails.com/p/bill-gat... · Posted by u/sshroot

Tijdreiziger · 3 years ago

> I literally don't know why they would force me to present a (virtual) DVD if there is no other checks whatsoever. This makes no sense but to hurt customers.

This was very common back in the day. It’s a form of DRM: it prevents you from playing the game on two computers at once.

It used to be common to make your life easier (even if you weren’t sharing the disc) by downloading an unofficial ‘no-cd’ patch, which was a patched game executable that omitted the ‘disc present’ check.

julian_sark · 3 years ago

You're absolutely right!

Man, I used to download so many no-cd patches back in the days, but lumped it all in with "real" copy protection in my mind.

+2 for the trip down memory lane. -1 because now I need to drink before noon to forget about the horrors of fiddling with CD-ROM based games and their silly schemes. So yeah, +1 :)