someplaceguy (u/someplaceguy)

someplaceguy commented on The provenance memory model for C gustedt.wordpress.com/202... · Posted by u/HexDecOctBin

This would cause your compilation to fail, unless you were deliberately declaring and using near identical symbols. Which would violate the whole "Code is meant to be easily read by humans" thing.

someplaceguy · 2 months ago

> unless you were deliberately declaring and using near identical symbols.

Yes, that would probably be one way to do it.

> Which would violate the whole "Code is meant to be easily read by humans" thing.

I'd think someone who's deliberately and sneakily introducing a security vulnerability would want it to be undetectable, rather than easily readable.

someplaceguy commented on The provenance memory model for C gustedt.wordpress.com/202... · Posted by u/HexDecOctBin

OkayPhysicist · 2 months ago

Why shouldn't they be? It's not the 00's anymore, Unicode support is universal. You'd have to dust off some truly ancient tech to find something incapable of rendering it.

Source code is for humans, and thus should be written in whatever way makes it easiest to read, write, and understand for humans. If your language doesn't map onto ASCII, then Unicode support improves that goal. If your code is meant to directly implement some physics formula, then using the appropriate unicode characters might make it easier to read (and thus spot transcription errors, something I find far too often in physics simulations).

someplaceguy · 2 months ago

> using the appropriate unicode characters might make it easier to read

It's probably also a great way to introduce almost undetectable security vulnerabilities by using Unicode characters that look similar to each other but in fact are different.

someplaceguy commented on Using eSIMs with devices that only have a physical SIM slot via a 9eSIM SIM car neilzone.co.uk/2025/01/us... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

PopAlongKid · 8 months ago

I wish I knew if this would have helped me on a recent trip out of the U.S. In preparation, I upgraded my older, low-end smartphone to one with a more recent version of Android, NFC (for tap-to-pay), a headphone jack, and support for two physical SIMs.

So when I arrived at my destination, I was able to purchase a 30-day SIM for a local phone number and data, but my primary SIM was useless outside of the U.S. so no access to my primary phone number (I ended up using WhatsApp a lot). My carrier (Boost Mobile) advertised an add-on for "Global Roaming", but despite non-trivial time spent reading and talking to them on the phone, I got merely a vague impression that only an eSIM would have allowed me to continue to use my primary number out of the country. Would this solution have worked for me?

Meanwhile, I still have the (now deactivated) second SIM in my phone, hope that is not a security risk of some kind.

someplaceguy · 8 months ago

Recently I tried to reinstall an eSIM on my Android phone while overseas but was told by my carrier that the eSIM can only be activated while connected to antennas located in the carrier's country, i.e. it can't be activated overseas, despite my plan supporting call roaming and both countries being in the EU.

I don't know whether this is carrier-specific or the same for all carriers.

someplaceguy commented on All software in EU under product liability from 2026 consilium.europa.eu/en/pr... · Posted by u/phkamp

master-lincoln · a year ago

It's easy: if you as a website owner transfer personally identifiable information to a third party and it's not strictly necessary to provide your service, then you need consent from the user.

If you would refrain sharing that info, you wouldn't need to ask for consent. There is no law that asks for cookie popups

someplaceguy · a year ago

Even the EU's own official web portal [1] has a cookie pop-up that covers half the screen of my mobile phone when I visit it.

[1] https://europa.eu/

someplaceguy commented on The Asteroid-in-Spring Hypothesis nymag.com/intelligencer/a... · Posted by u/Hooke

dredmorbius · a year ago

The significance is likely more about paleontological methods of time determination than it is about what the difference of the impact would have been had it struck during another season, though that could also turn out to matter.

A massive asteroid impact is a singular event, and most especially in the realm of geology and paleontology, where the minimum timespan of concern is frequently one million years, the notion that we have reasonably postulated that specific fossil finds can be pinned to the day of the event (there's a T. Rex find that seems to have occurred on the date), and then to identify when in the year that day happened to fall (based on specimens of fish and fauna found in a deposit timed to the impact) provides methodologies which might be used to confirm (or refute) the timing both of other K-Pg boundary finds, and of paleontological / paleobiological finds more generally.

What we don't have, mind, is a speific timing of the Alvarez impact. The current estimate, based on argon dating, is "66,038,000 years ago, plus or minus 11,000 years" (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvarez_hypothesis#Evidence>). Though that itself is pretty remarkably precise.

someplaceguy · a year ago

Awesome, thanks!

someplaceguy commented on The Asteroid-in-Spring Hypothesis nymag.com/intelligencer/a... · Posted by u/Hooke

bregma · a year ago

Because there has been significant academic infighting over whose theory it is, and whether the evidence comes from a faked source.

someplaceguy · a year ago

What I meant is, why is it significant whether the asteroid impacted in the spring or not?

someplaceguy commented on The Asteroid-in-Spring Hypothesis nymag.com/intelligencer/a... · Posted by u/Hooke

1GZ0 · a year ago

Just in case you're curious.

The asteroid in spring hypothesis suggests that the asteroid impact that led to the K-Pg extinction event, occurred during spring season in the Northern Hemisphere.

someplaceguy · a year ago

> The asteroid in spring hypothesis suggests that the asteroid impact that led to the K-Pg extinction event, occurred during spring season in the Northern Hemisphere.

Why is that significant?

someplaceguy commented on Make your electronics tamper-evident anarsec.guide/posts/tampe... · Posted by u/walterbell

walterbell · a year ago

Cameras continue to shrink in size and price. TEMPEST / Van Eck phreaking can be used to detect and locate hidden cameras, https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec24fall-prepub-357-zha...

> For all spy cameras.. raw image.. encoding and compression.. takes place in an inbuilt read-write memory whose operations cause electromagnetic radiation (EMR).. Whenever the visual scene changes, bursts of video data processing.. aggravate the memory workload, bringing responsive EMR patterns. ESauron can detect spy cameras by intentionally stimulating scene changes and then sensing the surge of EMRs.. Experiments with 50 camera products show that ESauron can detect all spy cameras with an accuracy of 100% after only 4 stimuli, the detection range can exceed 20 meters even in the presence of blockages, and all spy cameras can be accurately located.

someplaceguy · a year ago

That's really cool! I wonder how soon I can buy one of these ESauron thingies.

someplaceguy commented on My Favorite Algorithm: Linear Time Median Finding (2018) rcoh.me/posts/linear-time... · Posted by u/skanderbm

thrw2486776 · a year ago

If you set n=2^140, then sure, it’s constant. If instead you only have n<=2^140, then n varies across a large set and is practically indistinguishable from n<=infinity (since we get into the territory of the number of atoms in the universe), therefore you can perform limit calculations on it, in particular big O stuff.

In the article n was set to 5. All of those arrays (except maybe 1) have exactly 5 elements. There is no variance (and even if there was, it would be tiny, there is no point in talking about limits of 5-element sequences).

someplaceguy · a year ago

> In the article n was set to 5. All of those arrays (except maybe 1) have exactly 5 elements. There is no variance

No, the code was:

    # If there are < 5 items, just return the median
    if len(l) < 5:
        return nlogn_median(l)

> and even if there was, it would be tiny, there is no point in talking about limits of 5-element sequences

So your point is: not all constants are created equal. Which circles all the way back to my original point that this argument is pretty funny :)

someplaceguy commented on My Favorite Algorithm: Linear Time Median Finding (2018) rcoh.me/posts/linear-time... · Posted by u/skanderbm

raincole · a year ago

Big-O notation and "real-world computer" don't belong to the same sentence. The whole point of big-O notation is to abstract the algorithm out of real-world limitations so we can talk about arbitrarily large input.

Any halting program that runs on a real world computer is O(1), by definition.

someplaceguy · a year ago

> The whole point of big-O notation is to abstract the algorithm out of real-world limitations so we can talk about arbitrarily large input.

Except that there is no such thing as "arbitrarily large storage", as my link in the parent comment explained: https://hbfs.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/to-boil-the-oceans/

So why would you want to talk about arbitrarily large input (where the input is an array that is stored in memory)?

As I understood, this big-O notation is intended to have some real-world usefulness, is it not? Care to elaborate what that usefulness is, exactly? Or is it just a purely fictional notion in the realm of ideas with no real-world application?

And if so, why bother studying it at all, except as a mathematical curiosity written in some mathematical pseudo-code rather than a programming or engineering challenge written in a real-world programming language?

Edit: s/pretending/intended/