WTF Bites
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
Have you swapped1
and2
?
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
The CEO made some kind of mathematical discovery that makes factoring large primes easy. This breaks current encryption methods that rely on prime factorization being difficult.
This is funny because they're now shilling for investor money, instead of first claiming the roughly half a million dollar from RSA factoring challenges, then making a lot more by coming up with whatever arrangement necessary to sell it to the NSA.
(It would be worth even more to sell it to the highest bidder between NSA, FSB, the Chinese equivalent, etc. But you don't want to wake up in Gitmo / with Polonium breakfast / getting organ harvested, so probably a bad idea)
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
Have you swapped1
and2
?No. OK, I admit, the details behind how he's claiming to factor big numbers seem ridiculous, but not nearly as ridiculous as the details behind his encryption method.
@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
The CEO made some kind of mathematical discovery that makes factoring large primes easy. This breaks current encryption methods that rely on prime factorization being difficult.
This is funny because they're now shilling for investor money, instead of first claiming the roughly half a million dollar from RSA factoring challenges, then making a lot more by coming up with whatever arrangement necessary to sell it to the NSA.
(It would be worth even more to sell it to the highest bidder between NSA, FSB, the Chinese equivalent, etc. But you don't want to wake up in Gitmo / with Polonium breakfast / getting organ harvested, so probably a bad idea)Yep.
EDIT: I'd forgotten about the prize, but yeah, being able to break that stuff would be pretty valuable knowledge.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
Have you swapped1
and2
?No. OK, I admit, the details behind how he's claiming to factor big numbers seem ridiculous, but not nearly as ridiculous as the details behind his encryption method.
I guess you could put it this way: the claim that there's a way to factor big numbers would be a huge breakthrough, yet by itself plausible. And also trivial to demonstrate. What is entirely implausible is that this guy has made that breakthrough and is announcing it this way.
@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
The CEO made some kind of mathematical discovery that makes factoring large primes easy. This breaks current encryption methods that rely on prime factorization being difficult.
This is funny because they're now shilling for investor money, instead of first claiming the roughly half a million dollar from RSA factoring challenges, then making a lot more by coming up with whatever arrangement necessary to sell it to the NSA.
(It would be worth even more to sell it to the highest bidder between NSA, FSB, the Chinese equivalent, etc. But you don't want to wake up in Gitmo / with Polonium breakfast / getting organ harvested, so probably a bad idea)Yep.
EDIT: I'd forgotten about the prize, but yeah, being able to break that stuff would be pretty valuable knowledge.
So valuable, in fact, that the prize is irrelevant peanuts.
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I guess you could put it this way: the claim that there's a way to factor big numbers would be a huge breakthrough, yet by itself plausible. And also trivial to demonstrate. What is entirely implausible is that this guy has made that breakthrough and is announcing it this way.
Yes, that's basically what I meant. As opposed to some encryption method that notices when it is "attacked" and changes to adapt. Seriously.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
The CEO made some kind of mathematical discovery that makes factoring large primes easy. This breaks current encryption methods that rely on prime factorization being difficult.
This is funny because they're now shilling for investor money, instead of first claiming the roughly half a million dollar from RSA factoring challenges, then making a lot more by coming up with whatever arrangement necessary to sell it to the NSA.
(It would be worth even more to sell it to the highest bidder between NSA, FSB, the Chinese equivalent, etc. But you don't want to wake up in Gitmo / with Polonium breakfast / getting organ harvested, so probably a bad idea)I think the potential profit from selling to the NSA and/or its ilk is significantly reduced if you have announced your results, whether by claiming the RSA money or by any other means.
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@PleegWat True, whatever an arrangement to sell it to the NSA would look like, it would surely make it classified information.
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You thought automatic semicolon insertion in JS is a WTF? Think again! TIL Ruby does the same kind of thing for every syntax error:
"when it sees a syntax error, it tries another way", but it is limited to one token into future
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
The CEO made some kind of mathematical discovery that makes factoring large primes easy.
I can find the factors of large prime numbers in my head. (It comes from knowing the definition of a prime number…)
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
The CEO made some kind of mathematical discovery that makes factoring large primes easy.
I can find the factors of large prime numbers in my head. (It comes from knowing the definition of a prime number…)
The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers. —Bill Gates, "The Road Ahead"
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You thought automatic semicolon insertion in JS is a WTF? Think again! TIL Ruby does the same kind of thing for every syntax error:
It's plain old LALR(1) grammar. Every other language does that!
"when it sees a syntax error, it tries another way", but it is limited to one token into future
There is no syntax error here. There is just ambiguity in the grammar that is resolved the only way it can.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
- Crown Sterling has some new encryption technique that doesn't rely on primes.
But 2 sounded like a Star Trek episode to me. Which may simply be my unfamiliarity with the math they claimed to be talking about, or some misleading descriptions, as you often get when someone tries to explain technical details to a lay audience.
Primes aren't the only hard problem used as a foundation of encryption, could use discrete logarithms.
But haven't RTFA; based on comments above, sounds like a crank.
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You thought automatic semicolon insertion in JS is a WTF? Think again! TIL Ruby does the same kind of thing for every syntax error:
It's plain old LALR(1) grammar. Every other language does that!
"when it sees a syntax error, it tries another way", but it is limited to one token into future
There is no syntax error here. There is just ambiguity in the grammar that is resolved the only way it can.
On a quick check, PHP does the same thing, but C (gcc) and javascript (chrome, firefox) give me an error. Likely depends on whether the lvalue/rvalue distinction is made in the grammar or only checked later. In this case I think the second approach is more intuitive, but I expect there's an edge case or two where you want the first.
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This crappy VPN did its stupid dance so many times this morning that the number stopped updating even though it was still doing the thing:
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This crappy VPN did its stupid dance so many times this morning that the number stopped updating even though it was still doing the thing:
Should've said
See more (Any)
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Stumbled across a post about "Randonauts" (warning: slashdot), and it sounded deliciously WTFy.
From their wiki on reddit:
The Fatum Project was born as an attempt to research unknown spaces outside predetermined probability-tunnels of the holistic world and has become a fully functional reality-tunnel creating machine that digs rabbit holes to wonderland.
Tl;dr seems to be:
- Send your location to their bot/service
- Bot/service generates random points within a certain radius using quantum random generatorliness (the randomness making you go out of your "reality tunnel").
- You go there (possibly finding a
glitch in realitybottle of pee) - Repeat
Filed under: Pokemon Go without the Pokemon, At least they're not trying to sell something called "Time AI", so good for them.
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@cvi From the FAQ on their subreddit
Did the writer have a quantum stroke while writing that bullet point?
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Looking on TripAdvisor at the entry for a restaurant I was thinking of going to.
Someone's asked if they're dog friendly and this person has answered.
Helpful.
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quantum stroke
Are they playing quantum golf when their Schrodinger's ball dips into the electron sea and is annihilated as a result?
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playing quantum golf
their Schrodinger's ball dips into the electron sea
These are the nerdiest euphemisms ever.
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@cvi From the FAQ on their subreddit
Did the writer have a quantum stroke while writing that bullet point?
Hey, if the bot is meant to give random locations then why couldn't it use random localization as well?
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@loopback0 I read this three times until I realized he means "I regret I don't know the answer to your question", not "I don't know the feeling of regret".
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@loopback0 I read this three times until I realized he means "I regret I don't know the answer to your question", not "I don't know the feeling of regret".
I read it once and comprehended it twice. How does that compare?
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quantum stroke
Are they playing quantum golf when their Schrodinger's ball dips into the electron sea and is annihilated as a result?
Electron sea, electron do...
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@Mason_Wheeler said in WTF Bites:
quantum stroke
Are they playing quantum golf when their Schrodinger's ball dips into the electron sea and is annihilated as a result?
Electron sea, electron do...
Much style! So beauty!
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It is $CURRENT_YEAR and we still have
Sorry, Excel can't open two workbooks with the same name at the same time.
Also, you used to be able to press CTRL+C top copy the contents of a
MessageBox
into the clipboard. But like so many people reimplementing it without all features, it doesn't work in the Excel version.
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It is $CURRENT_YEAR and we still have
Sorry, Excel can't open two workbooks with the same name at the same time.
As ever, it's an issue of backwards compatibility. Although I thought you could work around it as of a few years ago by opening separate instances of Excel as different processes
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It is $CURRENT_YEAR and we still have
Sorry, Excel can't open two workbooks with the same name at the same time.
This almost certainly upsets fewer people than fixing it would.
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I saw a billboard-on-a-semi with the tagline "Who Says You Can't Roast Coffee in Texas?"
Um. Nobody. Literally nobody has ever said that. Stop making shit up.
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I saw a billboard-on-a-semi with the tagline "Who Says You Can't Roast Coffee in Texas?"
Um. Nobody. Literally nobody has ever said that. Stop making shit up.Maybe they had really small text "on the sidewalk"?
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WhyTF does my employer insist on censoring the inputs for transient 2FA tokens that are only valid for 30 seconds?
Filed under: Luckily, I have a homebrew Chrome extension that fixes things like this.
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It is $CURRENT_YEAR and we still have
Sorry, Excel can't open two workbooks with the same name at the same time.
As ever, it's an issue of backwards compatibility. Although I thought you could work around it as of a few years ago by opening separate instances of Excel as different processes
I think they painted themselves into a corner by exposing an API that lets you reference an open document by filename.
Source: My ass
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@error I know the backwards compatibility constraints. It's still dumb as fuck. Maybe only give that error message when dealing with documents that actually use such macros.
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It seems the only native JS implementation of XSLT is not even 1.0 complaint (the most basic version).
not implemented yet: XPath function local-name()
My only options seem to be to suck it up or call out to a native or Java library (which I wouldn't mind except it makes my code non-portable).
Filed under: Yes, Java runs anywhere but then I have to ship with instructions for installing and configuring the JRE.
Edit: No, there is another.
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@levicki zOMG tdwtf is github for sluts now
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The NSFW thread is
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@Gąska Pull requests.
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@levicki
go gummy
That is a bizarre euphemism.
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My favorite thing about Youtube is how the video always starts playing instantly, but the title and description (which contain literally thousands of times less information) generally take at least 3 seconds to load.
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@levicki zOMG tdwtf is github for sluts now
I was referencing https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/26247/instagram-is-linkedin-for-sluts, which (I presume) was referencing that comic.
Filed under: Why didn't you use ?
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So I went to the website for a certain French aerospace company (not Airbus, the other one) and also owners of a major software developement company in Europe apparently (Dassault Systèmes).
What do you immediately see when loading their website for the first time?
Holy crap I have 19 notifications! On a website I've never been to! What on Earth could they be?
Oh I see. Pages have been updated. Well I guess that was worth notifying everyone.
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Filed under: 99 notifications on the wall...
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@anonymous234 said in WTF Bites:
Holy crap I have 19 notifications!
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
@anonymous234 said in WTF Bites:
Holy crap I have 19 notifications!
Your active language has been updated