In other news today...
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@JBert said in In other news today...:
Somebody wanted to keep some social distance inside a random restaurant:
I wonder if it was really thousands of dollars worth, or if the owners were just figuring what they would charge customers if they prepared it.
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Management of the eatery estimate Ortiz illicitly consuming or removing thousands of dollars worth of provisions, including 70 bottles of liquor.
That could easily be thousands of dollars right there.
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@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
Management of the eatery estimate Ortiz illicitly consuming or removing thousands of dollars worth of provisions, including 70 bottles of liquor.
That could easily be thousands of dollars right there.
How's he still alive?
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@dcon said in In other news today...:
@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
Management of the eatery estimate Ortiz illicitly consuming or removing thousands of dollars worth of provisions, including 70 bottles of liquor.
That could easily be thousands of dollars right there.
How's he still alive?
consuming or removing
He didn't necessarily drink all of it.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
Wait, so their software engineers come up with some awesome audio software, but then someone realizes that doesn't sell hardware so they slap a completely made-up "RTX" label and restriction on it? Classic.
I'm not saying you're wrong but they're probably also only testing it on the current RTX hardware, so only supporting that.
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Apparently, burglaries are down by up to 90% during the last couple of months. Total thefts down by 1/3.
TL;WL;DR: Because of COVID, people stay home, so there is less opportunity. Also, usual cross-border crime has been stopped by the closed borders.
Yeah...
Most burglaries, break-ins, heists and even pickpocketing has been outsourced to East-Europen gangs whose usual modus operandi is a cross-border task-force, that stays in the country only the minimum time necessary to go through the selected targets.
Except the pick-pockets. Those are just plain seasonal labor.
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@acrow I wonder when they'll grow wise to that and we see a rise in break-ins in things that see less traffic than normal. More people at home (so you can't steal there) probably means less people somewhere else where you can steal instead. Although e.g. office buildings probably have better security.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@acrow I wonder when they'll grow wise to that and we see a rise in break-ins in things that see less traffic than normal. More people at home (so you can't steal there) probably means less people somewhere else where you can steal instead. Although e.g. office buildings probably have better security.
Office buildings probably have the same security now during the week that they usually have during weekends and other off-times.
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@anonymous234 Yeah, I got WTDWTF for that.
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There was a rather similar problem with PS4 last year or so. Can someone explain to me how this particular class of bugs is even possible? Incorrectly setting text buffer length? Rendering stupid Unishmode-emoji zalgo that didn't have any reason to exist in the first place outside the available canvas area? Does Unischmode implementation now require Turing-complete regex? I don't get it...
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@Applied-Mediocrity Dunno what exactly is causing this, it's strange that it would affect the whole device instead of just a single process.
However: fun fact: true type fonts contain a turing complete byte code. Never dug into it, but perhaps should.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
it's strange that it would affect the whole device instead of just a single process.
For performance reasons, font operations are handled in kernel mode. Any bug in font rendering code is therefore usually a privilege escalation. Applies to: Apple (all the iOS crash bugs), Microsoft (all the Xbox jailbreaks), Linux in some circumstances (text-mode framebuffers).
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@TwelveBaud You forgot to mention Adobe fonts on PC Windows.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
true type fonts contain a turing complete byte code. Never dug into it, but perhaps should.
So, you're saying that, now that JavaScript has mostly been successfully confined into a sandbox, and ActiveX stopped being a thing... I can still run arbitrary code in Windows kernel, on the machines of millions of people, just by stuffing a custom font in an ad-box?
Le sigh.
And the worst thing about that? I tried turning font downloading off in Firefox. Turns out, all the icons on the top panel of TDWTF are fonts. If the custom fonts are turned off, this site is unusable.
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@topspin To a very limited effect, maybe. Since the borders are closed, they can't fence the goods as easy.
Household goods and jewelry can be sold domestically perhaps. But a load of laptops or office supplies? Not so much.
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@brie said in In other news today...:
@dkf Basically... yes. The demand is so low that there's a risk of running out of places to put it.
West Texas Intermediate, the US marker, lost 99 per cent on Monday, with the price of oil for delivery next month sinking to record lows on warnings that traders were struggling to access storage capacity at the refinery hub of Cushing, Oklahoma, which is expected to be full within weeks.
CME Group, the operator of the exchange where WTI trades, took the extraordinary measure of saying prices could even turn negative for the current contract, which expires tomorrow. That means producers would be paying buyers to take their oil in order to delay the shutdown of their fields.
Someone at our sister site StackExchange has helpfully linked back to a front page classic:
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
However: fun fact: true type fonts contain a turing complete byte code. Never dug into it, but perhaps should.
:butwhy.png:
I know that PostScript is Turing complete. You can send a tiny file to a printer and it computes and prints a Mandelbrot fractal. And WMF files are supposedly just a recorded set of GDI calls. Because it's Microsoft, so of course they are.
But why fonts? You only need some Bézier paths for that and maybe some circular arcs. No more than what SVG specifies, which isn't Turing complete nonsense.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
You can send a tiny file to a printer and it computes and prints a Mandelbrot fractal.
You should still be able to do so; the features required are part of the base language and none of that is a privilege escalation (the only real limit usually is the size of the output, which as it is to the page buffer…). It's just a huge use of resources that probably are better done by running on a computer with more processing power.
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@TwelveBaud said in In other news today...:
For performance reasons, font operations are handled in kernel mode. Any bug in font rendering code is therefore usually a privilege escalation. Applies to: Apple (all the iOS crash bugs), Microsoft (all the Xbox jailbreaks), Linux in some circumstances (text-mode framebuffers).
Yeah, wasn't sure if that was still the case (or indeed if it was ever the case on iOS). Tried to google it briefly yesterday, found only some mention that Windows 10 with the anniversary edition finally moved text rendering into user space.
Fortunately browsers tend to handle their own text rendering, so they don't rely on the kernel mode code anyway.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
You can send a tiny file to a printer and it computes and prints a Mandelbrot fractal.
You should still be able to do so; the features required are part of the base language and none of that is a privilege escalation (the only real limit usually is the size of the output, which as it is to the page buffer…). It's just a huge use of resources that probably are better done by running on a computer with more processing power.
Yes, being Turing complete is by itself not a security problem, if you can properly sandbox it. That's what we do with JavaScript, which is obviously Turing complete, and assume that's safe. It can be an avenue for denial of service, though. The printer might not deal well with wasting its resources that way, and for JavaScript you definitely have the
fool's moneycrypto coin mining problem.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
But why fonts? You only need some Bézier paths for that and maybe some circular arcs. No more than what SVG specifies, which isn't Turing complete nonsense.
Apparently it's used to fix up stuff at small (or otherwise awkward) sizes, where rasterizing pure geometry shapes would look crap due to aliasing/low resolution.
I'm a bit meh about the whole thing. Yeah, it sounds crazy at first, but considering how text is kinda everywhere, it's not entirely unsurprising that people go to extreme lengths to (try to) make it look good. Even under special circumstances like very low resolutions.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
if you can properly sandbox it.
Printers are usually well sandboxed; the dangerous operations are all in the system dict (with much erring on the side of caution for what goes in) and that simply isn't there when the printer's running a normal user job. Without a filesystem or a network or otherwise access to the tricksy bits of hardware, there's just not that much you can do (except print, of course; the standard built-in commands for that are there).
As security models go, it's quite a good one. I wonder why so many programming language creators are so resistant to doing things that way.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
But why fonts? You only need some Bézier paths for that and maybe some circular arcs. No more than what SVG specifies, which isn't Turing complete nonsense.
Apparently it's used to fix up stuff at small (or otherwise awkward) sizes, where rasterizing pure geometry shapes would look crap due to aliasing/low resolution.
I'm a bit meh about the whole thing. Yeah, it sounds crazy at first, but considering how text is kinda everywhere, it's not entirely unsurprising that people go to extreme lengths to (try to) make it look good. Even under special circumstances like very low resolutions.
I assume you mean what I've heard called "hinting"? Basically, the MS philosophy was to make text look crisp on low resolution by snapping lines (especially horizontal ones) to integer pixel positions, whereas the "designer" types in the Mac world preferred
blurryanti-aliased but exact down-scaling.
That's certainly useful, but I don't see why you would need a Turing complete language to define that.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
whereas the "designer" types in the Mac world preferred
blurryanti-aliased but exact down-scaling.They tend to have HighDPI screens and sub-pixel rendering that works (and not just for fonts).
That's certainly useful, but I don't see why you would need a Turing complete language to define that.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
You only need some Bézier paths for that and maybe some circular arcs. No more than what SVG specifies
Sweet naïvité. I see you haven't yet sacrificed your sanity to computer typography. Good! Keep it this way.
Suffice to say, modern fonts are so much more than glyph outlines. Of note here is the substitution table (GSUB), with as many subtables as you want for replacing sequences of one or more glyphs with one or more others, including by surrounding context.
Subtables which can be self-referencing. Recursion puts anything 80% of the way to Turing-completeness.
So you get, for instance, font-based addition.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
That's certainly useful, but I don't see why you would need a Turing complete language to define that.
As said, I'm not too familiar with those details, but I did stumble across this 300+ slide presentation yesterday
beforeinstead of going to sleep. Slide 35+ seems to show why you'd want something more than just geometric shapes.Whether or not that needs to be Turing complete is a good question. I guess at some point it's just easier to design a Turing complete language, rather than trying to keep it from becoming one.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
You can send a tiny file to a printer and it computes and prints a Mandelbrot fractal.
Apparently, the method of "use the copy command to splat it to the printer" doesn't work anymore.
So I tried HP ePrint, but apparently
.ps
files aren't supported.Then I realized I was being an idiot and using some bad syntax and...
And it did the needful!
That's pretty fucking neat!
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@kazitor said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
I see you haven't yet sacrificed your sanity to computer typography. Good! Keep it this way.I've sacrificed enough sanity to use LaTeX and spot (and yell at) bad kerning when someone typesets text and formulas in Word (and its abominable word wrapping). But not enough to actually go full retard Knuth-style and delve into how, e.g., MetaFont works. Life has an upper limit to how much insanity you can process.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
Because Type 1 font programs were originally produced and were carefully checked only within Adobe Systems, Type 1 BuildChar was designed with the expectation that only error-free Type 1 font programs would be presented to it. Consequently, Type 1 BuildChar does not protect itself against data inconsistencies and other problems.
The preface of every good security bug!
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
Word (and its abominable word wrapping)
It doesn't look quite so bad when you turn on hyphenation, but because that's a global setting (:why.png:) it does mean that you'll also now have hyphenation enabled in all the text boxes in your diagrams, even if they're pasted in from Excel or Powerpoint. Because of course you want that! That's almost as good as changing the default paragraph style for fucking up everything in the graphical parts of your docs (unless you only insert static images).
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@dkf It also defaults to flush left ragged right, I guess because it sucks at justification.
But let's get back to the news, I guess.
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
And the worst thing about that? I tried turning font downloading off in Firefox. Turns out, all the icons on the top panel of TDWTF are fonts. If the custom fonts are turned off, this site is unusable.
Pretty awesome font, though amirite?
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Looks like Bing is still the best to find porn
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Spanish man takes goldfish for a walk, police is not amused and fines him for violating the corona measures, then posts this image to Twitter:
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
Life has an upper limit to much insanity you can process.
I'm pretty sure Twitter and Facebook prove you wrong, or at least that the limit is so high as to push you over the line into insanity before you reach the limit.
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@Dragoon in a world where left-pad is 46MB, that's truly impressive.
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@kazitor said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
You only need some Bézier paths for that and maybe some circular arcs. No more than what SVG specifies
Sweet naïvité. I see you haven't yet sacrificed your sanity to computer typography. Good! Keep it this way.
Suffice to say, modern fonts are so much more than glyph outlines. Of note here is the substitution table (GSUB), with as many subtables as you want for replacing sequences of one or more glyphs with one or more others, including by surrounding context.
Subtables which can be self-referencing. Recursion puts anything 80% of the way to Turing-completeness.
So you get, for instance, font-based addition.
Cool. I knew about ligatures before, and figured it was pretty much the same magic for e.g. fancy arrows in FiraCode or word substitutions in Bullshit Sans, but I didn't know how deep the rabbit hole could go
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@dkf It also defaults to flush left ragged right
Quite a sensible default, tbh
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@hungrier said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@dkf It also defaults to flush left ragged right
Quite a sensible default, tbh
Only if your paragraphs look shit when justified. So yeah, almost a sensible default for Word.
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@topspin full justification is an abomination across the board. Hard to read, does messy things with alignment. Left justification is the way to go.
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@Benjamin-Hall A couple of centuries of experience with printing disagree with you. Vast majority of books is printed with full justification, because anything else looks ugly and is harder to read.
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@Bulb As I understand it, early printers used full justification because they had to (to make their plates line up), and it stuck. Not because they wanted to. It's horribly unnatural and does awful things with resizing/reflowing text on a digital platform.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in In other news today...:
As I understand it, early printers used full justification because they had to (to make their plates line up), and it stuck.
It does not make sense. The plates line up simply because they are boxes of the same size, and justifying it with all the tiny bits of spacers spread throughout the line is still harder than putting a larger one at the end.
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@Bulb Doing more research, it seems that it dates from working in two-column manuscripts/printed works (where yes, justification is generally better due to the oddness at the center margin of ragged-edge text). I still don't like how it looks--I hate reading newspapers (in part) for that reason. It forces me to read at the word level, rather than taking in whole blocks of text at a time because the wildly-varying spacing breaks whatever algorithms/heuristics my brain uses.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in In other news today...:
working in two-column manuscripts/printed works
Because paper formats above A5 are really too wide for only one column of text. And monitors being even wider and fitting even more letters on a row (even at the bigger size needed due to usually being viewed from larger distance) are even worse. That's why we get the massive blank side margins on most webs these days.
@Benjamin-Hall said in In other news today...:
I still don't like how it looks--I hate reading newspapers (in part) for that reason.
Yeah, newspaper make the columns really narrow and then the spacing becomes too distorted. The variation is not really noticeable on a normal A5 book page.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in In other news today...:
wildly-varying spacing breaks whatever algorithms/heuristics my brain uses.
I like ragged right for this reason as well, although in books, they typically have hyphenation and long lines that keep the variation in spacing to a minimum