Posts made by aitap
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RE: In other news today...
@Mason_Wheeler said in In other news today...:
High-concentration acetic acid can be pretty scary stuff.
While some of the SDS somehow both fall way too far on the "better safe than sorry" side of the spectrum and understate some of the dangers of the really dangerous substances, with high-concentration acetic acid, caution is in order.
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RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
@LaoC It's even better than that. The attackers didn't have to phish for the wallet private key; they got access to iCloud, which automatically gave them the wallet key backed up by the app.
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RE: WTF Bites
I suspect convert (ImageMagick) is trying to be "smart"
That's exactly what's happening, it's trying to preserve aspect ratio. You have to shout at it so that it wouldn't try anything:
-resize 517x384!
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RE: WTF Bites
:
stopifnot(x)
R: (nothing, exception not raised)
all(x)
R:[1] TRUE
Makes sense,x
must be a logical vector consisting of a number ofTRUE
, right?
:any(x)
R:[1] FALSE
:Now, what
A zero-length logical vector. In a way, it's even convenient: when validating that any user-submitted widget must have property foo and the user submits zero widgets, the validation check rightfully passes, because no user-submitted widget has been found not to possess property foo.x
actually was? -
RE: WTF Bites
@hungrier Might want to check your Firefox installations. Most of mine got the banner, but one was already on Cloudflare DNS over HTTPs when I opened connection settings.
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RE: Programming Memes Thread
@MrL said in Programming Memes Thread:
Again?
Every user is a Boomzilla alt. Every joke is . It makes certain sense
, if you're . -
RE: WTF Bites
@topspin There's always
['hello ' char(39) ' world']
Filed under: because strings are obviously row-vectors of characters
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RE: THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
@Benjamin-Hall Wow. That's almost exactly like Snow Crash, except completely devoid of futuristic safety equipment that helped suspend the disbelief in the original book.
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RE: Resources to learn about database schema design and optimization?
@Benjamin-Hall said in Resources to learn about database schema design and optimization?:
What are some resources (ideally free and online) that people would suggest to learn more about writing performant queries and better structuring table definitions?
I've been planning to read Use the index, Luke! for a year or so. Table of contents seems to be exactly the kind of thing you're looking for.
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RE: An amusing rant about C
@Benjamin-Hall said in An amusing rant about C:
It was more about why would you do Fortran anyway (and yes, I've done a little bit of it).
Was it fixed-form "exactly like on a punch card", "
GOD
isREAL
unless declaredINTEGER
" FORTRAN-77, or a more modern variety, with free-form source code, OOP, built-in MPI-like parallelism, operations on whole arrays and other goodies?Probably the former, if my colleague's experience of fixing some quantum chemistry program that was older than him is any indication. With no comments. And a homebrew "dynamic" memory allocator that works from statically pre-allocated memory.
I would agree that most of the time, one doesn't need the power of Fortran-like languages that offer relatively high-level abstractions (your variables can be arrays! not, like, pointers and other stuff that fits in registers like in C!) while staying pretty close to the bare metal. But when you do, modern Fortran doesn't have many rivals. Numerical Recipes went from FORTRAN-77 to C++. Maybe C++ with Eigen would give you similar experience. Perhaps Rust, but numeric Rust is still somewhat niche.
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RE: Random thought of the day
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
We need to start The Microwave Challenge: Put Your Head In A Running Microwave!.
âI didnât even think a microwave oven would go on unless the door was closed. What with microwaves oscillating all over, inside. I thought there was like a refrigerator-light or Read-Only-tab-like device.â
âYou seem to be forgetting the technical ingenuity of the person weâre talking about. As we later reconstructed the scene, heâd used a wide-bit drill and small hacksaw to make a head-sized hole in the oven door, then when heâd gotten his head in heâd carefully packed the extra space around his neck with wadded-up aluminum foil. Have you for example, say, ever like baked a potato in a microwave oven? Did you know you have to cut the potato open before you turn the oven on? Do you know why that is?â
âJesus.â
âThe B.P.D. field pathologist said the build-up of internal pressures would have been almost instantaneous and equivalent in kg.s.cm. to over two sticks of TNT.â
âJesus Christ, Hallie.â
âHence the need to reconstruct the scene.â
âJesus.â -
RE: WTF Bites
Still sounds not like, say, the worst of the worst? Said iPad was using an iPhone hotspot over wifi.
The punchline? We were driving down the highway while I was doing this.Let's try to make it even worse.
We've already established this was PHP(sorry) Let's say, the one patching is the same person as the one driving. And the reason for having to patch like this is because the release pipeline crashed following the prod crash, Ă la Facebook 2021 outage. -
RE: The Official Funny Stuff Threadâ˘
@GÄ ska said in The Official Funny Stuff Threadâ˘:
parody of Matrix where a happy pig on a happy little farm gets visited by pig Morpheus, takes the red pill and discovers it actually lives in an industrial size piggery
(Stumbled upon by accident while reading stuff about Matrix: Resurrections.)
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RE: WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else
@GÄ ska said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
If you can do it manually, you can do it programatically. Shouldn't even be hard.
On the one, ic hand, you're right.
On the other hand, this covers cases ranging from use of undocumented interfaces to breaking the DRM via the analog hole.
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RE: Semi-quasi-unofficial unhelpful comments
@Tsaukpaetra said in Help Bites:
Ah, right, something happened. :(
Something happened. -
RE: Help Bites
@HardwareGeek Do you get any interesting results if you capture LibreOffice trying to save the file there vs saving it anywhere else using Process Monitor? The problem with this is the sheer amount of stuff happening at this level. You will definitely need to filter by process ID, maybe something else too.
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RE: WTF Bites
I opened Excel
It should be already signed in
Imagine reading this
${a few}
years ago. "What do you mean, sign in into a spreadsheet? Is there a macro that asks the password? " -
RE: The Official Status Thread
@Carnage said in The Official Status Thread:
I've had two students under my tutelage that was fast ahead the average developer with raw ability. Sometimes you're surprised by people.
This one takes programming courses from local FAANG wannabes. I don't know about the ability yet, but the knowledge must be there. We'll see.
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RE: Tinder is shit
@GÄ ska Did it help?
âI thought that we were meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something. Thatâs what they told us in the army.â âWill that help?â
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RE: The Official Status Thread
@Benjamin-Hall said in The Official Status Thread:
Not a good sign, especially from non-technical folks.
I'm trying not to be dismissive of the student. My first dynamic website was a failure in everything except teaching me how web stuff works. Maybe it's inconvenient or it'll result in performance problems if we enter 10000 Semantic MediaWiki data points to display in Maps for MediaWiki. (So if we go with a custom solution, we can at least make it more convenient to enter data.) Maybe if I'm there to steer things, learning will occur without the failure part.
Academia could be enabling abuse like this, but at least this time, it's between consenting (no, enthusiastic!) adults, and the student gets paid.
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RE: The Official Status Thread
Found myself in a meeting about a new website / web app to be developed. The meeting consisted of my co-supervisor, their student, and me. Neither person has any relation to professional software development. Not only I was arguing against software architecture considerations ("I don't care whether it'll run Go or Django, let's just decide how this thing should behave"), I also ended up speaking in user stories. What has become of me? I don't even like web development!
Left the meeting with a nagging suspicion that the whole thing could be replaced with a couple MediaWiki plug-ins that I don't have time to verify. Also, someone is already invested in their architecture.
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RE: Not sure if good idea, bad idea or evil idea
@GÄ ska .NET is very well suited for this kind of tasks. I once fixed a locale-related bug (the app needlessly tried to round-trip arbitrary bytes through unicode strings and assumed that the runtime would always default to
CP1252
, which resulted in lots of?
bytes in the serial port when the assumption was broken), never having worked with C# before, and only afterwards learned that the app had been written in VB.NET, not C#. -
RE: Cancelling out speaker audio from microphone input
My very brief and not at all thorough research in form of googling shows that there's no ready-made software capable of that.
I think that the Windows 7 sound card drivers in my Lenovo X220 have something like that built-in. I think I've seen it in sound settings elsewhere, too.
I remember reading about how it's done (I don't think I saved any links, sorry). Later I found out it's been implemented in PulseAudio and Mumble, most likely via libspeexdsp. Maybe that could save you some work.
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RE: Semi-quasi-unofficial unhelpful comments
@Benjamin-Hall said in Handling when invalid data sneaks past into the db:
Oh, and suicide is messy for others to clean up, so....
"Assume you have some kind of programmers working on programming tasks like handling when invalid data sneaks past into db. But someone messed up the database in that one particular case involving
Foo.count
and is now in a messy state resulting from throwing self off nearest tall building.There's validation when the medics try to reconstruct them from the messy bits, which fails on some bad values. Which is good, it's doing what it says it should, preserving the business rules. But bad because errors.
So what's better?"
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RE: Handling when invalid data sneaks past into the db
@Benjamin-Hall said in Handling when invalid data sneaks past into the db:
Assume you have some kind of business rules like "All
Foo.count
values, if they're set, must be between 2 and 43, inclusive." But someone messed up the validation on the server so that in one particular workflow,Foo.count
could be anything. And so some invalid (but still type-consistent) values like 123 or -2 have gotten into the database.How do you get the correct value for
Foo.count
once you realise it's wrong? In this example, it could be an expensiveselect count(...)
and a materialised view, but I expect your actual use case to be nastier. -
RE: WTF Bites
@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Linux on PlayStation
That could be PS4: PC Master Race, one of my favourite conference talk videos.
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RE: Tinder is shit
So, a friend of mine decided to try Tinder shortly before moving 3000 km to another country. Fast forward a few weeks, there's a sudden logout and an
Oops, something went wrong
every time the friend enters their phone number to log in again."Can you try logging in from your country? I'll send you the code."
I navigate to
tinder.com
, enter the phone number and don't get asomething went wrong
. Instead, my friend receives the phone verification code, I enter it and land in an empty account page.I guess it was predictable. Still, if only we didn't have to rely on the kind of services that arbitrary terminate our access to them according to their faulty machine learning with no meaningful appeal process. If only there was something we could have done differently...
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Threadâ˘
@Vault_Dweller I wonder if it's going to be less or more confusing with the antibody COVID-19 tests, the kind that can show up to three stripes: control, IgM, and IgG antibodies.
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RE: Offline, transport-agnostic, PGP-like encryption but for humans
@Zecc Thanks! That's an out-of-the box answer I wouldn't be able to come up with myself, and they seem to support all the platforms I care about and then some. I'll definitely consider this.
@Jaloopa Well, maybe not, if there's such a service that doesn't base the security on a phone number, doesn't Facebook the private keys, and has a real⢠PC client (and not just an Electron app -- that would be exchanging one set of UX problems for a new, different set of UX problems). I've been looking for services like that. Do you have experience with Matrix, or Element, or however they call themselves now? Wire's desktop client was a real turn-off for me last time I tried it.
In a way, being transport-agnostic means that we can jump ship from one service as it becomes too shitty to use to a different one that's still good enough. We used to exchange encrypted 7-Zip archives, sending one-time passwords via text messages, until most e-mail services blocked encrypted archives for "safety" reasons. For the most part, I don't blame them -- they made it easy to escape AV scanning -- but banning them all the way is also terrible for privacy.
@pcooper Thanks! I'll see if there's any downsides to exchanging encrypted text files. I foresee newline-related problems (I should be careful to always send them with CR-LF newlines) and encoding-related problems (will Windows notepad auto-detect UTF-8, or should I use the ANSI code page of the recipient?), but those are all solvable on my side.
I'm also a bit afraid of PGP in the browser, with it constantly being exposed to websites we visit and the telemetry added with the updates.
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Offline, transport-agnostic, PGP-like encryption but for humans
I've been using Gpg4win to exchange private information with a small number of people I couldn't contact otherwise (or that we had previously agreed about not transmitting elsewhere). While my girlfriend is fine with this despite the UX, my parents just don't manage it well, which caused a few problems while I was in a different country.
What typically gets them is the requirement to copy&paste the whole armoured message block, from
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
to-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
. They can botch the newline after theBEGIN
line, or forget some dashes, or forget theBEGIN
andEND
lines, resulting in a honest but mostly unhelpful message from Kleopatra telling them that their text doesn't look like an OpenPGP message. I can't rely on the mail client to do it right for them because one of them uses web-mail; besides, we could be using a different transport.I guess we could exchange UTF-8 encoded .txt.gpg files to avoid the problems with armoured blocks, just like we exchange other encrypted files, but is there other software we could use instead?
Being transport-agnostic is a requirement. I don't particularly care about forward secrecy (which seems to preclude offline encryption) or metadata (of course I exchange information with my relatives and friends, that's not exactly secret). I just need signed and encrypted files and text that I can send over whatever.
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RE: Good reading for self-taught programmers?
My own quest for The Book on Architecture has yielded Clean Architecture: A Craftsmanâs Guide to Software Structure and Design
by Robert C. Martin. I haven't finished it yet, but I think it's good. It's not only about patterns, it dips into fundamentals where needed, but it doesn't stray too far from the main path.It also has funny pictures.
Evidence-based Software Engineering has been sitting in my reading list for a while. I like the idea but I don't know yet how well it's been implemented.
I've also read Systemic Software Debugging by Per Mellstrand and BjĂśrn StĂĽhl. Given your experience, it's unlikely it would tell you something you don't already know, but maybe it's helpful to just skim it.
SICP was fun, but I'm not sure how useful. Knuth is very fundamental, I didn't have enough free time to do it justice.
A Description of One Programmerâs Programming Style Revisited is just fun to read. Very .
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RE: Good reading for self-taught programmers?
@Benjamin-Hall said in Good reading for self-taught programmers?:
It wants software to be "smart" and "proactive", remembering everything you've done and trying to apply it, relying on undo rather than asking.
I had forgotten how infuriating was chapter 8 before I got to re-read it. I always remember examples of software trying to be "considerate" in terms of the book, but failing badly. Perhaps Cooper et al. would argue that the programs were ; I just think what a privacy nightmare it could be made into. Bloody software! I don't want a program that learns! I want a program that stays stupid!
(In the spirit of advocatus diaboli, perhaps I'm just jaded by software that tries and fails to be considerate and hate the idea of "smart" software because of that, but maybe could find a really considerate program convenient. I don't know; I've never seen one that was.)
For me, useful lessons start approximately from chapter 9.
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RE: Not sure if good idea, bad idea or evil idea
The last chapter of Half-Life, Xen, but everything's backwards. You're playing as an alien, and The Factory is actually an Amazon warehouse.
(Doubly so if it's Black Mesa: Source. There are a couple episodes where the vortigaunts go "I'm not paid to deal with this shit, let's just let Freeman in and keep pretending he's been there before my shift started". I usually roleplay an "I'm the new manager and we'll be seeing a lot of improvements" attitude in that chapter.)
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RE: I just feel like I need to talk
it's driving me mad how stupid the population has become
Unfortunately, no matter what you do, 50% of the population will be stupider than the median. (And approximately 50% will be stupider than the mean, but that's relying on the distribution being symmetric.) Maybe it's not the population itself, but increased ability to communicate with different layers of the population exposing you to the stupidity?
then i apply for this thing called technation visa from within the uk <...>, but then i basically was terminated <...> applying for promise route of the exceptional tier 1 visa in 2018
Making a living in a foreign country is hard. A friend of mine is in a similarly precarious situation in a EU country with a PhD visa that's about to expire and uncertain financing prospects. Unfortunately, all immigrants start at -100 points, even if their home country offers much lower standards of living. Will you be able to get some psychological help in either country? It's the only thing that helped my friend the EU PhD student to get through a really bad spot and recover their performance enough to avoid getting terminated (and having to leave the country).
use works of Nietzsche, Ayn Rand And unabomber's manifesto
Your work risks not being accepted by the people you want to convert if you rely on works they didn't believe in in the first place. I mean, I read all three of those, but mostly didn't find them convincing. Convincing large masses of people of something is essentially engaging in PR and politics, and most successful politicians don't rely on Ayn Rand. Perhaps your message could be accepted on its own merits, if the improvements to the quality of coding life you are promising are so noticeable?
People want a professional tool like Photoshop to make software, but they get Gimp. Adobe used to provide enterprise-experience to millions of people, but now it's all open source.
I'm sure there are people on both ends of the spectrum. A person with 350 EUR in monthly income wouldn't buy an Adobe product anyway, but they might still need to develop some scripts to analyse their PhD project data. I do agree that diminishing quality as a result of commodification is a problem though. One of my colleagues swears by their copy of Visual Studio 2010 because "it got worse in the later versions".
P.S. Depending on which direction you prefer for this thread, the right place for it might be a limited-access category
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RE: jsdoc 2.0
Kudos for making the website mostly readable with JavaScript disabled, I really appreciate that. Not a professional JavaScript dev (although I had to write a few hundred LoC of JS for a lab website), so I can't comment much on the usability of your proposal. Do I understand it right that it's about prototype-based OOP in JS (plus annotations in the comments) vs TypeScript?
I wouldn't be so sure in the static vs dynamic typing debate. On the the one hand, when writing R (another mostly dynamic language), it helps to avoid the boilerplate of specifying that the
x
argument should be amatrix
or adata.frame
and have the language mostly do the right thing when passed any of the matrix-like objects. On the other hand, when writing my own APIs, I get bitten by corner cases like 1-row matrices supplied instead of vectors until all my constructors start with a hugestopifnot
call verifying the types of the arguments... exactly how a language with static typing would do it, except in runtime instead of compile-time.I think that your website is in need of some proof-reading. Two glaring examples (and I'm not even a native speaker) are the use of the verb "loose" in the sense of "lose" and "curtesy" where "courtesy" is actually meant (also, quadrupole â quadruple). In my opinion, there's also a little bit too much formatting, especially in the beginning of the article, and not enough formatting and paragraph breaks in some of your other posts.
I appreciate the points you made about the Big Tech, and I don't like it when products are free-as-in-spyware, but un-commodifying some kinds of products feels like an impossible battle to me. Can you imagine paying for a browser? Too late,
Internet Explorer has been bundled for free with your operating system for many years nowGoogle Chrome has been bundled with your Android phone for years now. Same goes for instant messengers and JS developer tools. Once it's been free for a while, getting paid even for a much better alternative becomes much harder. -
RE: The Official Short Movie Review Topic
@boomzilla Couldn't get around to watching it, but I've checked the credits music, and I don't like the arrangement of Wake Up they used there. In my opinion, they completely miss the point by starting it with "I think I heard a shot" . Of course you did, it's a Matrix movie!
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RE: When one's scientific equipment is another's BadUSB
@Circuitsoft Oh well. Ours is actually FLIR. There seem to exist some combinations of computer and USB port where it seems to work in a relatively stable fashion, like when we plug the camera in a USB2 port
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RE: WTF Bites
@Tsaukpaetra This is TikTok we're talking about. Their idea of "screenshots" is probably "video with a stream of emoji floating all over the place".
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RE: When one's scientific equipment is another's BadUSB
@Circuitsoft said in When one's scientific equipment is another's BadUSB:
The best U3v cameras I've found yet only require power cycling a few times a day.
Wow, that's just horrible. Would you mind telling me which brand of cameras is the least bad, in your experience? I only need precise exposure control, a 12-bit ADC and external synchronisation.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Threadâ˘
@loopback0 Are those two argument rooms with different levels of sound-proofing?
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RE: When one's scientific equipment is another's BadUSB
@JBert Thanks for reminding me! There's an external power supply. We ran some tests with it and observed no difference.
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When one's scientific equipment is another's BadUSB
As an experimental laboratory, every now and then we buy all kinds of exotic equipment, join it together using curses and electrical tape and then use our computers to make it do our bidding. Increasingly, there's a tendency to switch away from strange custom cables to be wired to a serial port (well, a USB-serial adapter, anyway) to more modern interfaces, like USB (except those are still mostly virtual serial ports), although some devices take pride in their poliglotism and have not only USB and RS-232, but also an Ethernet interface.
Now, we all know that USB is a cursed protocol. People who doubt that are welcome to follow the links from the Wikipedia page on USB-CDC and find themselves in a maze of twistly little PDF documents, each describing some small aspect of the overall picture of USB Communication Devices and referencing all other documents (and their errata). I followed them once when I was curious about implementing a virtual serial port with V-USB on an ATTiny85 I had handy. I don't want to follow them again.
Still, it all mostly works, so we didn't suspect much in the way of problems when we plugged in our new USB3 Vision camera and ran the vendor software to play with it.
Then the video stream froze. We thought it was a minor glitch and restarted the stream. It worked for a while, but then froze again. After some prodding, we decided to reconnect the camera. That was when we discovered that (1) USB hot-plug no longer works until reboot and that (2) the computer gets stuck shutting down before rebooting and needs a hard reset. Every time.
Well, perhaps it's a bad computer, or some driver incompatibility Windows update bullshit, surely it would work on a different one? It seemed to work for a minute or so. Then the camera stopped responding. Then the rest of the computer stopped responding. At all. Not even the CapsLock LED; the kernel was completely stuck.
You might be saying, perhaps it's a driver problem. USB3 Vision is a known standard. Just ditch the buggy vendor's kernel drivers and run a userspace implementation. Worst case scenario? It crashes, you restart it. Computer keeps working. CapsLock uptime up to five nines.
After another reboot, we found the driver in
%windir%\System32\drivers
, renamed it and only then plugged in the camera. The device manager told us there was a problem because a driver could not be loaded. The system seemed stable, but then we checked whether USB hot-plug still worked; it didn't.The next camera we buy? It's gonna have a gigabit Ethernet interface. I'm sure they'll screw it up too, but it'll probably be less spectacular.
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RE: THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
@Zecc said in THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
Yeah, imagine if this happened every time you went out to get a drink.
That's right, I forgot it's a thing that happens.
New bad idea: zero-knowledge proof of age! Though it's probably too late to design it on tapes and pencils.
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RE: THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
@obeselymorbid said in THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
Is that (certificate + ID) not the case pretty much everywhere?
Officially, that's the case more or less everywhere. Unofficially, I've seen people just skim the PDF with the naked eye (or do they have QR parsers implanted in the eyeballs?) and decide that it's valid. Or even accept a certificate that's not formally valid in the country, out of their goodwill and my trustworthy looks, also without checking the ID.
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RE: THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
@dkf said in THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
They might constitute proof of authenticity, but proving ownership is something they're actually terrible at.
Ownership is probably the hardest part of all this. Given a vaccination certificate, I can easily check whether it's signed by the right key, but does it actually belong to the person showing it to me? A code saying "the bearer of this is vaccinated" is trivial to copy, but make it reference a government ID, and suddenly all the randos who only need to know whether I'm vaccinated want to see that ID and possibly process and record it for their commercial purposes: otherwise my certificate is unverifiable.
I don't have a good solution to this problem.
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RE: THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
Hey everyone, I know that people are worried about these vaccination certificates, that they could be fake or easily cloned, which is a problem, and I've just read about these non-fungible tokens or something, and the best thing about those is that they are non-fungible and therefore constitute both certificate of authenticity and proof of ownership, right? So, let's all put our vaccination certificates on a blockchain and mint them as NFTs! It's gonna be great. No more forged certificates.