masfuerte (u/masfuerte)

masfuerte commented on Dark Alley Mathematics blog.szczepan.org/blog/th... · Posted by u/quibono

lupire · a day ago

"Three points are chosen independently and uniformly at random from the interior of a unit circle. "

The distribution is under specified

Is it "uniformly" over area, even though it's not an area problem? That is, is it independent random coordinates (x, y) in rectangular coordinate space, or (r, theta) polar space, or in some other parameterization?

masfuerte · a day ago

If you choose uniformly from a set then all possible selections are equally likely, by definition. The set is the interior of a circle, which is an area. There's no ambiguity.

masfuerte commented on Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments neosmart.net/blog/recreat... · Posted by u/ComputerGuru

kevin_thibedeau · 3 days ago

pdftoppm and Ghostscript (invoked via Imagemagick) re-rasterize full pages to generate their output. That's why it was slow. Even worse with a Q16 build of Imagemagick. Better to extract the scanned page images directly with pdfimages or mutool.

Followup: pdfimages is 13x faster than pdftoppm

masfuerte · 2 days ago

This. Not only is it faster, the images are likely to be of better quality. If you rasterize the pages then the images will be scaled, unless you get very lucky.

masfuerte commented on Everyone Is Stealing TV theverge.com/streaming/87... · Posted by u/naves

trinix912 · 3 days ago

This works as long as each of these boxes connects directly to the streaming provider's servers. With pirate streams often there's a pirate streaming provider with a legitimate subscription, whose STB handles the rekeying, then the already-decoded AV stream is captured and redistributed. The end-users never actually stream from the streaming company, they stream from the pirate. That's often how sports are pirated, and your best bet is going to everyone's homes and checking that they're not watching your streams without a license.

masfuerte · 3 days ago

Right? Each legitimate stream, including the pirate's, includes a unique ID. The content protection company subscribes to the pirate stream, gets the ID, and shuts down the pirate. This works today.

The problem that Sky has is that most premium sports content is available in other countries with less effective copy protection, so that's where the pirate streams originate, and Sky can't do anything about them.

You're right that none of this affects the end-users.

masfuerte commented on Everyone Is Stealing TV theverge.com/streaming/87... · Posted by u/naves

trinix912 · 3 days ago

Good luck finding the person streaming it and proving that they did. The days of BBC TV license vans are long over.

masfuerte · 3 days ago

You don't need to. During premium streams the clients are frequently rekeying. So you cancel the streamer's subscription and the stream soon stops. The streamer also loses the rest of the month's subscription and goes onto a blacklist. This is already a thing with, for example, Sky in the UK.

masfuerte commented on What's up with all those equals signs anyway? lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

mmooss · 5 days ago

How do you do that, by default? Can you tell an IMAP client to work like POP3 and download everything?

masfuerte · 5 days ago

In Thunderbird you can "Select this folder for offline use".

masfuerte commented on The largest number representable in 64 bits tromp.github.io/blog/2026... · Posted by u/tromp

masfuerte · 6 days ago

> The largest number (currently known to be) representable in 64 bits is w218

In my representation the bit pattern 00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000001 stands for the number w218+1.

I win!