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Search - "decoding"
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Friend texted me some binary.
Decided to impress him and decode it by hand.
Spent 5 minutes decoding "I eat ass".6 -
This facts are killing me
"During his own Google interview, Jeff Dean was asked the implications if P=NP were true. He said, "P = 0 or N = 1." Then, before the interviewer had even finished laughing, Jeff examined Google’s public certificate and wrote the private key on the whiteboard."
"Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers."
"gcc -O4 emails your code to Jeff Dean for a rewrite."
"When Jeff Dean sends an ethernet frame there are no collisions because the competing frames retreat back up into the buffer memory on their source nic."
"When Jeff Dean has an ergonomic evaluation, it is for the protection of his keyboard."
"When Jeff Dean designs software, he first codes the binary and then writes the source as documentation."
"When Jeff has trouble sleeping, he Mapreduces sheep."
"When Jeff Dean listens to mp3s, he just cats them to /dev/dsp and does the decoding in his head."
"Google search went down for a few hours in 2002, and Jeff Dean started handling queries by hand. Search Quality doubled."
"One day Jeff Dean grabbed his Etch-a-Sketch instead of his laptop on his way out the door. On his way back home to get his real laptop, he programmed the Etch-a-Sketch to play Tetris."
"Jeff Dean once shifted a bit so hard, it ended up on another computer. "6 -
Spend several days decoding API legacy code from the guy who got paid shitload of money and then stumble on the piece of code that shows he isn't even aware there is a count function in SQL (or rowCount in PDO)
:)))))4 -
A poor horndog developer started bothering me with useless appreciations like «Oh, a female developer, such a rarity...»
After some chatting he asked me: «How tall are you?»
My answer was: «2FuF8A, find the correct decoding by yourself».
It is "1,67" encoded in Base58 (because Base64 is too mainstream).
He never came back with the solution.9 -
One of the things I love the most about programming is that sometimes you feel like you're taking a step forward when you're taking a step back... and sometimes you feel like you're taking a step back when you take a step forward.
Or maybe that's just me. XD12 -
Uggg..... I'm trying to encode a binary file in Python which may be an image or may be an executable, and then decode it back into a file (I plan on editing it in the middle, but baby steps for now..) but nothing is working!!
My plan is to:
Open binary file.
Decode as base64, or something else that could easily handle binary.
Convert byte data to string (for editory perpousos - I won't be editing bytes, I'll be doing custom encoding but that's irrelevant for this test)
Convert back to a byte string/array (with .encode(), probably)
Write to file.
I do this, yet the output has been altered... Though I haven't touched anything..
It's so enfuriating.. x.x18 -
I spend the whole day decoding Assembly code for special formulas that we require for a current project.
And the client doesn't have them anywhere else.
There's only that old desktop application - written in assembly.
My Pc and I never felt so close before...
If it sounds like it was fun, it wasn't.
NOT. AT. ALL.1 -
Don't you just hate it when you have some of the best programmers in the office with you, but none of them can fucking spell! Imagine having to spend more time decoding comments than actual code8
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So I think I saw a post on here about dvds in virtual machines. Got me thinking, and here's my results trying to play a dvd using linux running inside a vm.
Setup:
Windows 10 Professional
Hyper-V VM running Debian 4.19
Xming website release for video (also works with the free version)
PulseAudio for windows to play sound
So, pretty straightforward, right? Insert DVD, tell Hyper-V to map the dvd drive to the virtual one and run `vlc dvd:///dev/sr0'
But of course, DVDs have copy protection (read: playback protection), so I downloaded the dvdcss package file from videolan's ftp server and installed it. This still didn't work though, vlc said it couldn't decode the dvd. Then, to make sure my dvd was okay I played it with vlc in windows, which worked fine. When I tried again inside the vm it suddenly "worked". Maybe running it inside of a vm prevents some access to the dvd drive required for decoding? Go figure.
The video was very corrupted though, and vlc puked out a lot of errors.
So in conclusion, playing a dvd in a vm is weird, unwatchable, inefficient and only works if you can also play it on the host.
And yes the audio is just as choppy as the video, no idea what causes this. I can play normal videos fine (for some reason that doesn't really work with the free version of xming) although it uses about 200% cpu since there's no hardware acceleration, and the framerate isn't necessarily what it is supposed to be.7 -
In 2015 I sent an email to Google labs describing how pareidolia could be implemented algorithmically.
The basis is that a noise function put through a discriminator, could be used to train a generative function.
And now we have transformers.
I also told them if they looked back at the research they would very likely discover that dendrites were analog hubs, not just individual switches. Thats turned out to be true to.
I wrote to them in an email as far back as 2009 that attention was an under-researched topic. In 2017 someone finally got around to writing "attention is all you need."
I wrote that there were very likely basic correlates in the human brain for things like numbers, and simple concepts like color, shape, and basic relationships, that the brain used to bootstrap learning. We found out years later based on research, that this is the case.
I wrote almost a decade ago that personality systems were a means that genes could use to value-seek for efficient behaviors in unknowable environments, a form of adaption. We later found out that is probably true as well.
I came up with the "winning lottery ticket" hypothesis back in 2011, for why certain subgraphs of networks seemed to naturally learn faster than others. I didn't call it that though, it was just a question that arose because of all the "architecture thrashing" I saw in the research, why there were apparent large or marginal gains in slightly different architectures, when we had an explosion of different approaches. It seemed to me the most important difference between countless architectures, was initialization.
This thinking flowed naturally from some ideas about network sparsity (namely that it made no sense that networks should be fully connected, and we could probably train networks by intentionally dropping connections).
All the way back in 2007 I thought this was comparable to masking inputs in training, or a bottleneck architecture, though I didn't think to put an encoder and decoder back to back.
Nevertheless it goes to show, if you follow research real closely, how much low hanging fruit is actually out there to be discovered and worked on.
And to this day, google never fucking once got back to me.
I wonder if anyone ever actually read those emails...
Wait till they figure out "attention is all you need" isn't actually all you need.
p.s. something I read recently got me thinking. Decoders can also be viewed as resolving a manifold closer to an ideal form for some joint distribution. Think of it like your data as points on a balloon (the output of the bottleneck), and decoding as the process of expanding the balloon. In absolute terms, as the balloon expands, your points grow apart, but as long as the datapoints are not uniformly distributed, then *some* points will grow closer together *relatively* even as the surface expands and pushes points apart in the absolute.
In other words, for some symmetry, the encoder and bottleneck introduces an isotropy, and this step also happens to tease out anisotropy, information that was missed or produced by the encoder, which is distortions introduced by the architecture/approach, features of the data that got passed on through the bottleneck, or essentially hidden features.4 -
This is why I love Mr.Robot. They hide easter eggs in there for programmers and such. I found this at around the same time as these guys did but they beat me to decoding it. https://m.reddit.com/r/MrRobot/...4
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My dad asked a facebook group for help decoding a calibration script I wrote for the new 3D printer, instead of just asking me, and every single person yelled at him that "oh that's so dangerous if you didn't write it yourself don't run it, if you can't manually write gcode sell your printer" etc.
why are these groups always full of degenerate assholes? (and why do they legitimately think calibrating a printer has to be done by manually writing bits to the EEPROM with a needle, or it's not worth having a printer?)4 -
Just found out the API of our zentracloud sensors is sending the units with a space before the actual unit. Couldn't figure out for half an hour why Doctrine is not finding the unit in the database. Encoding? JSON decoding? Character itself? Screw you. Screw you...6
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Project Zero team found that a specially crafted URL could make the Git client into sending credential information of an alternative host to an attacker's host. In this case, the specially crafted URL needs to contain a newline character to trick the credential handling (performs url decoding on most possible url components, no additional validation) and sending the data off to an alternate host.
Updated Now : Credential protocol code is now forbidding newline characters in any values.
More : https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/...1 -
!rant
Ever find something that's just faster than something else, but when you try to break it down and analyze it, you can't find out why?
PyPy.
I decided I'd test it with a typical discord bot-style workload (decoding a JSON theoretically from an API, checking if it contains stuff, format and then returning it). It was... 1.73x the speed of python.
(Though, granted, this code is more network dependent than anything else.)
Mean +- std dev: [kitsu-python] 62.4 us +- 2.7 us -> [kitsu-pypy] 36.1 us +- 9.2 us: 1.73x faster (-42%)
Me: Whoa, how?!
So, I proceed to write microbenches for every step. Except the JSON decoding, (1.7x faster was at least twice as slow (in one case, one hundred times slower) when tested individually.
The combination of them was faster. Huh.
By this point, I was all "sign me up!", but... asyncpg (the only sane PostgreSQL driver for python IMO, using prepared statements by default and such) has some of it's functionality written in C, for performance reasons. Not Cython, actual C that links to CPython. That means no PyPy support.
Okay then.1 -
Last weekend I was working on a small project for a friend of mine: a dockerized webapp, plus API backend and DB. I had some problems with the installation on the vps and had to try out different images and never really did a complete setup of my usual dotfiles. Got it running on an Ubuntu distro. Everything great.
It was the first release so I still had to check that every configuration worked ok, like letsencrypt companion container, the reverse proxy and all that stuff, so I decided to clone the whole project on the server tho make the changes there and then commit them from there.
Docker compose, 10 lines of code, change the hosts and password. Boom everything working. Great... Except for the images in the webapp.
WTF? Check the repo, here they are, all ok. I try different build tactics. Nothing. Even building the app on another docker always the same. Checked browser cache, all the correct ports are open. I even though that maybe react was still using some weird websocket I didn't know, but no.
Damn, I spent 5 hours checking why the f*** the server wouldn't make it out.
Then, finally, the realization...
I didn't install the f******* git-lfs plugin and all I was working with were stupid symbolics links! Webpack never even throw an error for any of the stupid images and the browser would only show a corrupted image, when decoding the base64 string.
Literally the solution took 5 minutes.
F*** changes on production, now I do everything on a fully automated CI. -
Good java books for beginners:
Moksh Jawa's book "Decoding Computer Science A"
Herbert Schildt's book (Oracle Press)
The Litvins' book "Java Methods"2