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simplicio commented on Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?   eieio.games/blog/ssh-send... · Posted by u/eieio
dathinab · 22 days ago
> Keystroke obfuscation can be disabled client-side.

please never do that (in production)

if anyone half way serious tries they _will_ be able to break you encryption end find what you typed

this isn't a hypothetical niche case obfuscation mechanism, it's a people broke SSH then a fix was found case. I don't even know why you can disable it tbh.

simplicio · 22 days ago
The fix seems kind of crazy though, adding so much traffic overhead to every ssh session. I assume there's a reason they didn't go that route, but on a first pass seems weird they didn't just buffer password strokes to be sent in one packet, or just add some artificial timing jitter to each keystroke.
simplicio commented on Vietnam bans unskippable ads   saigoneer.com/vietnam-new... · Posted by u/hoherd
Aachen · a month ago
> ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it.

They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it

If the viewer doesn't have the money to pay the first party fair and straight (say, a video website), they also don't have money to splurge on that fancy vacuum cleaner in addition to the website and advertisement broker getting paid, no matter how many ads you throw at them

Ads are useful for honest products, like if I were to start a company and believe that I've made a vacuum cleaner that's genuinely better (more or better cleaning at a lower or equal cost) but nobody knows about it yet. However, I don't see the point in money redirection schemes where affluent people inefficiently pay for public services (if they're indistinguishable and the company shows ads to both, thereby funding the poor people's usage). Let's do that through taxes please

simplicio · a month ago
"They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it"

The first part is true, the second part pretty obviously isn't. Advertizers expect to net $ from ad buys, but most advertising isn't trying to increase a consumers total spending, its trying to drive that spending towards the companies products.

To give the most obvious example, the largest category of advertising is for food and beverage products. But no one thinks that if those ads all suddenly disappeared, people would stop buying food.

simplicio commented on Vietnam bans unskippable ads   saigoneer.com/vietnam-new... · Posted by u/hoherd
iso1631 · a month ago
If a company is willing to spend $5 to force you to watch an advert, then they are expecting more than $5 from you in return.
simplicio · a month ago
Sure, but a lot of that is 1) just influencing what type or brand you get of products your going to buy anyways, and 2) only an average, presumably wealthier consumers are "subsidizing" poorer ones, since they have more spending to be influenced.
simplicio commented on Vietnam bans unskippable ads   saigoneer.com/vietnam-new... · Posted by u/hoherd
austin-cheney · a month ago
> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion.

Why?

simplicio · a month ago
Think the best argument against it is that it makes advertising less valuable, which in turn limits the how many "paid for with advertising" services will be available and how good those services will be.

Especially in a developing country where consumers ability to pay for such things is going to be limited, that will presumably deprive some margin of the population of media/services that are currently ad supported.

simplicio commented on Vietnam bans unskippable ads   saigoneer.com/vietnam-new... · Posted by u/hoherd
_jab · a month ago
I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present.

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.

simplicio · a month ago
Maybe, but on the otherside, ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Like, I suspect a non-trivial percentage of people wouldn't have email if it weren't for gmail and other free w/ads services.
simplicio commented on These Men dove to the Edmund Fitzgerald shipwreck decades ago. Their stories   freep.com/story/news/loca... · Posted by u/rmason
jacquesm · 3 months ago
I lived on an Island in Lake Huron for about 5 years and went visiting the Lake Superior area many times. To call it a lake does not really do it justice: it's an inland sea, and a most impressive one. I've seen the lake from the shore in more than one storm and it didn't look any different than the ocean, except that it seemed in many ways more violent. I asked the locals about it and they said that the lake is more violent than the sea in places but there wasn't any coherent explanation, it could be the steep rise of what eventually becomes the shoreline rather than the much more gradual one the ocean usually has.

There are also much lower periodicity waves in such constrained bodies called 'seiches':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiche

There is a museum dedicated to the wrecks, well worth visiting, but do bring earplugs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Shipwreck_Museum

simplicio · 3 months ago
Heh, yea my parents were big on folk music so I heard the song a lot growing up, and was always vaguely puzzled how a such a large ship could get in so much trouble on just a lake.

I still remember the "oh I get it" moment when I visited Michigan as a teen and saw Lake Michigan for the first time.

simplicio commented on Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left   theguardian.com/business/... · Posted by u/mazokum
tyre · 4 months ago
Looks like they tried two attempts to land in Prestwick over two hours, then flew to Edinburgh and made one aborted landing, then finally went to Manchester.

What a nerve wracking experience for those pilots. I wonder if on the final attempt they knew they had to force it down no matter what.

simplicio · 4 months ago
Assuming it wasn't just luck, it seems impressive they managed to maximize their (landing attempts/fuel reserves) ratio like that.
simplicio commented on Standard Thermal: Energy Storage 500x Cheaper Than Batteries   austinvernon.site/blog/st... · Posted by u/pfdietz
onlyrealcuzzo · 6 months ago
I have more questions than answers.

Does the article describe how the heat gets from the mound to the houses or buildings it plans to heat, or factor in the cost of that?

Naively, I'd assume that would like 90% of the cost.

I know that physics is under no obligation to be intuitive, but it's also surprising to me that it's so easy to heat and keep dirt this temperature (600C / 1100F) throughout Winter, and I didn't see how that piece worked either, though I'm willing to assume that part is figured out and factored in.

simplicio · 6 months ago
I think there have been about 5 different contexts over the years where I've been surprised by how good an insulator a pile of dirt is.
simplicio commented on 1976 Soviet edition of 'The Hobbit' (2015)   mashable.com/archive/sovi... · Posted by u/us-merul
bombcar · 6 months ago
It’s not specified - he never has the Ring in the Hobbit - Bible finds it before we meet him.

In LotR it’s revealed that he rarely wore it anymore by that time.

simplicio · 6 months ago
Bilbo doesn't see him wear it, but he's described as having put it on to steal goblin children for food. So he does wear it in the books.

Its on such an expedition that the ring "slips" from him, further suggesting the ring is actually not only his size, but a little large.

simplicio commented on 1976 Soviet edition of 'The Hobbit' (2015)   mashable.com/archive/sovi... · Posted by u/us-merul
NateEag · 6 months ago
Fascinating - Jansson's artwork is lovely. Thank you for sharing it!

I think the huge Gollum is a very understandable misinterpretation, but I think it's likely false the text she worked from was ambiguous about Gollum's size.

If she was working from the 1951 revision, which seems likely if she was working in the 60s, then there is an explicit cue in the text showing that Gollum must be roughly Bilbo's size, when Bilbo is escaping the caves:

> Straight over Gollum’s head he jumped, seven feet forward and three in the air...

If Bilbo could jump over Gollum with a three-foot leap, Gollum cannot be a giant.

That said, it's well after the passage she illustrated, and would require a pretty attentive reader to catch, so as I said, the mistake is certainly understandable.

Additional caveat that I've not read the second edition of The Hobbit, only more recent ones, so it's conceivable that passage wasn't _exactly_ as I've quoted it.

I strongly suspect was largely as written, however, and even without the explicit numbers, if Bilbo jumps over Gollum, the inference remains largely the same.

simplicio · 6 months ago
Also the ring fits both Gollum and Bilbo, which limits how different in size they could be.

(LOTR says the ring can change size, but this wasn't discussed in the Hobbit, and presumably hadn't occurred to Tolkien yet when he wrote it).

u/simplicio

KarmaCake day1805October 22, 2014View Original