wang_li (u/wang_li) - Readit News

wang_li commented on Nearly 1 in 3 Starlink satellites detected within the SKA-Low frequency band astrobites.org/2025/08/12... · Posted by u/aragilar

squigz · 12 days ago

Why do we have to launch tens of thousands or even more satellites?

wang_li · 12 days ago

You should also ask why do we have to do this particular research? Both parties are impacting this particular band of the spectrum. One by excluding others and the other by radiating in those frequencies.

wang_li commented on F-Droid build servers can't build modern Android apps due to outdated CPUs · Posted by u/nativeforks

eadmund · 12 days ago

> I'd assume that a modern CPU would do the same amount of work with a fraction of energy so that it does not even make economical sense to run such outdated hardware.

There are 8,760 hours in a non-leap year. Electricity in the U.S. averages 12.53 cents per kilowatt hour[1]. A really power-hungry CPU running full-bore at 500 W for a year would thus use about $550 of electricity. Even if power consumption dropped by half, that’s only about 10% of the cost of a new computer, so the payoff date of an upgrade is ten years in the future (ignoring the cost of performing the upgrade, which is non-negligible — as is the risk).

And of course buying a new computer is a capital expense, while paying for electricity is an operating expense.

1: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

wang_li · 12 days ago

You can buy a mini pc for less than $550. For $200 on Amazon you can get an N97 based box with 12 GB RAM and 4 cores running at 3 GHz and a 500 GB SATA SSD. That’s got to be as fast as their current build systems and supports the required instructions.

wang_li commented on OpenSSH Post-Quantum Cryptography openssh.com/pq.html... · Posted by u/throw0101d

lucb1e · 14 days ago

Besides what's public knowledge, I tend to put a bit of stock in our intelligence agency calling for PQ adoption for systems that need to remain confidential for 20 years or more

edit: adding in some sources

2014: "between 2030 and 2040" according to https://www.aivd.nl/publicaties/publicaties/2014/11/20/infor... (404) via https://tweakers.net/reviews/5885/de-dreiging-van-quantumcom... (Dutch)

2021: "small chance it arrives by 2030" https://www.aivd.nl/documenten/publicaties/2021/09/23/bereid... (Dutch)

2025: "protect against ‘store now, decrypt later’ attacks by 2030", joint paper from 18 countries https://www.aivd.nl/binaries/aivd_nl/documenten/brochures/20... (English)

wang_li · 14 days ago

I don't want my government to keep secrets for 20 years. There is nothing I am OK with them doing that they can't be generally open about in time. Ex. the MLK files. No justification for the courts saying that the FBI files regarding MLK have to be kept under lock and key for 50 years.

wang_li commented on Stop SSL certificate outages with automated monitoring – Enterprise Ready sslguardian.io... · Posted by u/ignaciovdk

riffic · a month ago

Unrelated to the marketing attempt here but it should be noted that the CA Browser forum voted to drastically shorten certificate lifetimes. Look for 200 day expiration cycles starting next year, 100 days in 2027, and 47 days in 2029.

wang_li · a month ago

CAs need to go away. They’re untrustworthy and their inclusion in browsers and OSes seems largely unregulated.

wang_li commented on Show HN: I made a tool to generate photomosaics with your pictures pictiler.com... · Posted by u/jakemanger

bazzargh · a month ago

While this is nice enough, it bothers me that these don't look much like "art". If you look at real roman mosaics, they do not place points in a grid - they use a technique called "opus vermiculatum" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_vermiculatum ... snaking the tiles around so that there is a flow to it; the overall effect is much better.

I think that'd be possible to automate too. I was doing something related over here: https://hachyderm.io/@bazzargh/112767548339559102 - in that I was trying to generate sketch-like renderings from photographs. What I did was to pick random points, look at the brightness gradient (taken from the Sobel operator, there are other ways to do this), move up the gradient a bit and sketch some parallel lines (and then various experiments with hatching for shading the flatter areas)

In a similar way you could start with a grid of tiles _with some separation_, and allow them to move and align better with the gradient of the underlying picture, and not lie _on_ edges, if possible. If they overlap, allow the tessera to be cut, and only then choose images to colour-match the average on the tile, leaving some "grout" in the image (I'd probably speckle that a bit so it didn't look too uniform). Then the result might look more like real mosaics.

I might give this a go...

wang_li · a month ago

There is a naive approach to making this kind of thing that reduces the component images to such a small size (2-3 pixels in large image) that turns this into more of a dithering exercise than looking for artifacts in each component image to match up lines. It's still a nice effect, but it's quite different when the component images are > 10% the size of the final image, instead of < 1% the size.

wang_li commented on Mistakes Microsoft made in the Xbox security system (2005) xboxdevwiki.net/17_Mistak... · Posted by u/davikr

wang_li · a month ago

RSA doesn’t take that much code. The Atari lynx would initialize all the hardware, perform RSA, and load the next step from the cart in 512 bytes.

wang_li commented on Why are there no good dinosaur films? briannazigler.substack.co... · Posted by u/fremden

joshmarinacci · 2 months ago

Finding the impact crater pretty much cemented it. It absolutely happened. The remaining questions are around if the impact was enough to trigger the extinction on its own or if other factors compounded the problem.

wang_li · 2 months ago

There's a strong case to be made that the impact not only was enough to trigger the extinction, it happened in 1 day. The theory is that the ejecta from the impact was voluminous enough that it was sent into space and then spread around the Earth. On reentry it heated the atmosphere to thousands of degrees. So animals in New Zealand that likely didn't even feel the impact died when the air was too hot to breath. The only survivors were things in burrows or nests or under water.

wang_li commented on The first alpha of Turso: The next evolution of SQLite turso.tech/blog/turso-the... · Posted by u/vlod

wang_li · 2 months ago

Looks like some real issues with trademark violation in the way they are pitching their product.