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Cake day: August 21st, 2024

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  • if I’m reading this right, it’s a bit like ipfs+dht. is this a content-addressable system?

    anyway, you should probably have demos of

    • large files (like a Linux disk image), to demonstrate consistency in transfer.
    • Video stream, to demonstrate performance and low latency.
    • multiple files shared with many peers at once, to demonstrate scalability
    • sharing with low bandwidth and high latency, to demonstrate possible mobile use cases.

    thoughts:

    • the logo is very close to wireguard’s.
    • if the data is stored on peers, that means there must always be people with free storage online for it to work? how much storage is needed? is that data in plaintext? could a bad actor push illegal content to peers without them knowing?

    also, please convert the whitepaper to a format that is actually readable. rtf? really?







  • everyone focuses on the tooling, not many are focusing on the reason: python is extremely dynamic. like, magic dynamic you can modify a module halfway through an import, you can replace class attributes and automatically propagate to instances, you can decompile the bytecode while it’s running.

    combine this with the fact that it’s installed by default and used basically everywhere and you get an environment that needs to be carefully managed for the sake of the system.

    js has this packaging system down pat, but it has the advantage that it got mainstream in a sandboxed isolated environment before it started leaking out into the system. python was in there from the beginning, and every change breaks someone’s workflow.

    the closest language to look at for packaging is probably lua, which has similar issues. however since lua is usually not a standalone application platform it’s not a big deal there.




  • there haven’t been card fees for end users in Sweden for many years. handling cash is a lot more expensive since you need somewhere secure to keep change, you loose time at the till handling the money, and you need to pay for someone to come pick it up. the time gained from just having the customers pay with card means businesses gladly swallow the fees.

    and yes, i’m always surprised when going abroad how much more analog everything is. the nordics and Baltic’s are generally at about the same level (with Estonia way ahead), but the rest of the continent feels like it’s 10 years behind. I was once asked if I really wanted to pay with card in a corner shop in Leipzig, since the card fee was €10.

    not that i’m a fan of the digitalisation, it makes marginalised groups even more marginalised. i see my elderly relatives struggling with it often.



  • okay, this is going to require some introduction.

    back in the olden days of youtube, there was a channel named silvagunner. it uploaded video game music in high quality ripped straight from the game files. this channel is long since gone due to dmca, although it lives on as the lower-profile followup gilvasunner.

    during the first channel’s reign though, a parody account was created called siIvagunner (that’s two i’s) which exactly copied the style and text formatting of the original channel, but replaced the tracks with “subtle” changes. this one is one of the more famous examples. if you haven’t heard the track in a while you may be lured into a sort of Mandela effect of “maybe it did always sound like this” and then they hit you with the full switch at the midpoint. hilarity ensues. this is, truly, a high-quality video game rip.

    siIvagunner is a really popular channel, and is run by committee. they have a vetting team, and scores of people have contributed tracks. like with everything, there have been trends in what content is included in the rips. from absolute dogshit to frankly insane effort, you at least know you’re in for a laugh when they upload (which they do a lot; for a while they averaged one track an hour). these trends usually take the form of one track being parts of many rips at once, with different spins.

    some people, who i think must have thought that their taste was objective or something, took it upon themselves to police the meme quality of the videos. for a while, it was customary to downvote any rip containing a specific track from the Love Live series, regardless of quality, to simply “warn others”. this brigading was so common they even made memes about it.

    ok, intro over. fact is, brigading occurred. my point is, this has a snowball effect. we know for a fact that only a small percentage of viewers actually like or dislike, which means that when it’s applied as consistently as it was here, great videos are skipped due to some people downvoting out of some sense of “community service”. siIva, of course by it’s very nature can’t make money, but this is in my opinion indicative of a common issue with the platform.


  • i got an interview as an embedded software engineer for a company that makes wireless camera flashes. high-precision real-time programming. i wanted to dive further into that area.

    the first task was… reading comprehension, basic arithmetic, and pattern matching. i was flabbergasted. i wrote a really negative passage in their feedback form about how they apparently don’t trust their engineering candidates to be able to read, and how those pattern matching iq tests are bullshit since you can up your score by like 20% if you practice.

    they called me back and explained that the reason they have everyone from cleaning staff to C-level take the standardized test is to create a workplace of “objective equality”. also they were really confused about my stance on the test because apparently i had scored in the top 5%. that’s the fastest i’ve ever noped out of an interview process.