lolinder (u/lolinder)

lolinder commented on I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst fransskarman.com/phd_thes... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

codeape · 2 months ago

From https://www.latex-project.org/about/:

"LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right content."

IMO, the only people that use LaTeX are people who are willing to trade the convenience and productivity of using a sane document authoring format for the warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you use an outdated piece of typesetting software that is a) hard to configure, b) hard to use and c) produces output for the least useful reading platform available (paged pdfs).

And the pronounciation is stupid.

lolinder · 2 months ago

Alternatively, they're people who write documents in a field where LaTeX is the standard, they're not computer savvy enough to try to even look for something new that might be acceptable or might compile to LaTeX, and at any rate they want to focus more on their research than they do on changing the typesetting norms in their field.

(No shade on people who do decide to use alternatives, and Typst is great!)

lolinder commented on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites bbc.co.uk/news/live/ckg3r... · Posted by u/mattcollins

bigyabai · 2 months ago

In Iran's defense, there was credible OSINT[0] warning of the B-2s taking off 12+ hours in advance of the strike. Iran knows what a GBU-57 is, the writing was pretty clearly on the wall that a strike was imminent.

It's possible (though not guaranteed) that they simply relocated the enriched uranium before the attack.

[0] https://x.com/thenewarea51/status/1936391071430308207

lolinder · 2 months ago

Yes, that too. It was in newspapers hours before the attack, so there's no way Iran didn't know it was coming.

lolinder commented on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites bbc.co.uk/news/live/ckg3r... · Posted by u/mattcollins

VikingCoder · 2 months ago

"The U.N. nuclear watchdog says there's 'no increase in off-site radiation levels' after US strikes on Iran nuclear sites"

https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-n-nuclear-watchdog-says-0510491...

That's the whole article.

If we blow up a place filled with enriched uranium, shouldn't there be an obvious spike in off-site radiation levels, as the uranium settles to the ground?

Meaning, isn't this damning evidence that there was no enriched uranium?

lolinder · 2 months ago

Possibly. It could also be evidence that the bombs didn't really do their job. Either they missed or the bunkers were fortified enough and/or deep enough to avoid even the bunker busters.

lolinder commented on Record DDoS pummels site with once-unimaginable 7.3Tbps of junk traffic arstechnica.com/security/... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

saulpw · 2 months ago

Sounds like you've never managed tens of thousands of nodes in a distributed system. It's not trivial.

lolinder · 2 months ago

Coordinating a botnet to launch a DDoS is commodity software at this point. You could argue that the engineering that went into the coordination software is good, which may or may not be true, but simply launching a botnet is well within the capabilities of a script kiddie and not something that shows sophistication on the part of the attacker.

lolinder commented on Record DDoS pummels site with once-unimaginable 7.3Tbps of junk traffic arstechnica.com/security/... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

motorest · 2 months ago

> A well-engineered attack would not draw headlines for its scale because it would take down its target without breaking any records.

You don't hear much about DDoS that are either comparable in size or bring down targets. How do you explain why this one made the news in spite of not having met your arbitrary and personal bar?

lolinder · 2 months ago

Like I said: it broke records for data throughput. It doesn't hurt that Cloudflare has an interest in publicizing the size of the DDoS attacks it fights off.

> in spite of not having met your arbitrary and personal bar?

I'm not sure what you mean by this. I didn't establish any sort of bar for what sorts of DDoS should get headlines, I'm just agreeing with OP that that line in the article doesn't make any sense. There may be other reasons to believe this attack was well-engineered but the article doesn't get into them.

lolinder commented on Record DDoS pummels site with once-unimaginable 7.3Tbps of junk traffic arstechnica.com/security/... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

ukuina · 2 months ago

Because it's a distributed for loop?

lolinder · 2 months ago

Not necessarily. It could be one for loop running on tens of thousands of compromised IoT devices, with the only thing distributed being the command that starts the loops.

lolinder commented on Record DDoS pummels site with once-unimaginable 7.3Tbps of junk traffic arstechnica.com/security/... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

monster_truck · 2 months ago

You can't just spray every port blindly if you are maximally trying to disrupt, there is nuance to it.

lolinder · 2 months ago

Right. So why does the fact that they targeted 34,500 ports show it was a well-engineered attack? By itself it's just evidence that they know how to iterate over ports. Coupled with the data size (7.3Tbps) we know they had an enormous botnet. None of this points to a well-engineered attack, it just means that lousy IoT has made botnets incredibly cheap.

A well-engineered attack would not draw headlines for its scale because it would take down its target without breaking any records.

lolinder commented on Sega mistakenly reveals sales numbers of popular games gematsu.com/2025/06/sega-... · Posted by u/kelt

dijit · 2 months ago

It’s more interesting to me that so many are.

It’s rare for any product to have more success in later invocations than the first edition, that is where the narrative is fresh and strong- and even in the event sequels are stronger, they tend to increase sales of the first season/movie/etc; because people want the whole experience.

lolinder · 2 months ago

Video games I feel like reverse this general trend, though. Unless they have a major story component (and sometimes even if they do) many games get iteratively 'better' (better for the purposes of making sales if not of making original fans happy) for various reasons: improvements to the core game loop, polish that makes the game more appealing to new audiences, and most importantly graphics.

Story-based content is what struggles with sequels because it's really hard to both capture the feeling of the original sufficiently to satisfy existing fans while also telling a new story that's interesting in its own right. Being derivative without being too derivative.