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syncsynchalt commented on A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera   bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/selvan
dotancohen · 6 days ago
Kraken often had very informative posts, but I often feel that he invests in such posts only to promote his five-digit ideology.

That's fine by me. The informative posts are worth it.

syncsynchalt · 6 days ago
This is my first time noticing one of their posts, but to me it evokes the ideals of the Long Now Foundation, putting our thoughts in a future-forward stance.
syncsynchalt commented on A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera   bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/selvan
Sharlin · 7 days ago
I wonder if any exist on the internet and if the camera is still functional.

Edit: it's very likely that no photos exist because the tapes were being reused and there are many reasons why the camera has been nonfunctional for a long time now.

syncsynchalt · 6 days ago
Here's an example image: https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/09/Prorotype-Digit...

Captured on Kodak film, I suspect.

syncsynchalt commented on A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera   bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/selvan
contrarian1234 · 7 days ago
Amazing, a whole article about a camera without a single photo from that camera
syncsynchalt · 6 days ago
The PetaPixel article has a sample, though the original photo from this article is lost.

https://petapixel.com/how-steve-sasson-invented-the-digital-...

https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/09/Prorotype-Digit...

syncsynchalt commented on A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera   bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/selvan
Sharlin · 7 days ago
A very similar PetaPixel article with a couple more technical details: [1] In particular, it describes the reason for the first corrupted image – they had wired the four-bit output in the wrong order so that the high bit was the lowest and vice versa. Thus, all-ones still looked white and all-zeros black, but the rest of the shades were scrambled.

[1] https://petapixel.com/how-steve-sasson-invented-the-digital-...

syncsynchalt · 6 days ago
It's a shame they didn't capture that first image. You'd think someone would have had a camera handy!

I was glad to hear Sasson found a place at Eastman-Kodak and worked there for the rest of his career.

syncsynchalt commented on GNU Unifont   unifoundry.com/unifont/in... · Posted by u/remywang
hnfong · 7 days ago
Note that "nearly all" isn't "all". I have some side project that require rendering of very uncommon CJK characters, and Unifont does not display them as expected. (For that project, I used https://kamichikoichi.github.io/jigmo/ which was the font that was most complete in terms of CJK glyphs )

Unifont seems to have about the same glyph coverage as my system default CJK font (unfortunately I don't know what it is).

syncsynchalt · 7 days ago
Do you know if those characters are in supplemental planes? The BMP would only be glyphs from U+0000 through U+FFFF (though the first 32 and last two aren't printable, and wouldn't be included in this font).

Another example would be emoji, which would probably now be considered "basic" by most people but have always been in a supplemental plane.

Deleted Comment

syncsynchalt commented on Brent's Encapsulated C Programming Rules (2020)   retroscience.net/brents-c... · Posted by u/p2detar
pizlonator · 10 days ago
Good stuff.

Only things I disagree with:

- The out-parameter of strclone. How annoying! I don't think this adds information. Just return a pointer, man. (And instead of defending against the possibility that someone is doing some weird string pooling, how about jut disallow that - malloc and free are your friends.)

- Avoiding void. As mentioned in another comment, it's useful for polymorphism. You can do quite nice polymorphic code in C and then you end up using void a lot.

syncsynchalt · 10 days ago
Yes that section raised my hackles too, to the point where I'm suspicious of the whole article.

The solution, in my opinion, is to either document that strclone()'s return should be free()'d, or alternately add a strfree() declaration to the header (which might just be `#define strfree(x) free(x)`).

Adding a `char **out` arg does not, in my opinion, document that the pointer should be free()'d.

syncsynchalt commented on Brent's Encapsulated C Programming Rules (2020)   retroscience.net/brents-c... · Posted by u/p2detar
syockit · 10 days ago
Check against FLT_EPSILON. Oh boy.

The reason is floating point precision errors, sure, but that check is not going to solve the problems.

Took a difference of two numbers with large exponents, where the result should be algebraically zero but isn't quite numerically? Then this check fails to catch it. Took another difference of two numbers with very small exponents, where the result is not actually algebraically zero? This check says it's zero.

syncsynchalt · 10 days ago
Yeah, at the least you'll need an understanding of ULPs[0] before you can write code that's safe in this way. And understanding ULPs means understanding that no single constant is going to be applicable across the FLT or DBL range.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_in_the_last_place

syncsynchalt commented on Strong earthquake hits northern Japan, tsunami warning issued   www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/e... · Posted by u/lattis
embedding-shape · 11 days ago
The Wikipedia redirect is apparently dead (https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Shadow_clone&redirect=no) and the main page for Naruto doesn't show anything about shadow clones.

Care to explain the reference? Do people dress up like a character from the TV show and help out people or what's going on?

syncsynchalt · 11 days ago
The reference is that the anime character "Naruto"[0] wears the same colors and roughly the same uniform as a Japanese recovery worker[1].

During disaster work, you see swarms of recovery workers and the joke/reference being made is that this looks like Naruto doing a "shadow clone" technique.

[0] https://i.redd.it/psseu93j62la1.jpg [1] https://sendai-resilience.jp/media/images/efforts/case31_ima...

syncsynchalt commented on Perl's decline was cultural   beatworm.co.uk/blog/compu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
creer · 13 days ago
There was no such pressure. That's ridiculous. There were a lot of things people could grab as reasons to form an opinion without even reading articles, never mind the tutorial. They then ended up with php or python, even java for crying out loud, and years later THAT was a problem.
syncsynchalt · 13 days ago
Code golfing originated in perl.

There was strong cultural pressure to be able to write perl in as few bytes as possible, ideally as a CLI one-liner. Books[1] were written on the topic.

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/perl-one-liners-130-programs-t...

u/syncsynchalt

KarmaCake day2513July 12, 2010
About
Michael Driscoll <michael@xargs.org>

I write about cryptography but not from any knowledgable position.

Retired.

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