I just want to say,
wow the Cloudflare API is awesome.

In less then an hour (from a blank file - to automation and tested) I was able to setup a DDNS task that basically just pulls my public ip (see https://devrant.com/rants/2050450/... for details) comparing it to the current DNS records for and update them if anything has changed in the past 30 minutes.

So kudos to these guys letting me in next to no time having a simple yet elegant way of dealing with my missing static ip.

Why can’t all APis be this simple?

To be honest, Windows Vista looks undeniably beautiful, no matter how unpopular it might was.

The user interface looked amazing. It looks decent even by today's standards. Windows XP looks more like a toy with its over-saturated colours, but Windows Vista appears elegant.

The stock wallpaper of Vista, "Aurora", is among the most beautiful out-of-the-box wallpapers I have seen.

Remember, Windows 7, arguably the most popular version of Windows, is a rebranding for a slightly altered Windows Vista Service Pack 2. Microsoft realized the reputation of the "Vista" trademark was ruined beyond repair, so they had to rebrand.

Image source: https://reddit.com/r/WindowsVista/... ( https://i.redd.it/dr4vqiqqi0q81.png ).

Also see: "Was Windows Vista THAT bad?" - Linus Tech Tips ( https://youtube.com/watch/... )

Managed to derive an inverse to karatsuba's multiplication method, converting it into a factorization technique.

Offers a really elegant reason for why non-trivial semiprimes (square free products) are square free.

For a demonstration of karatsubas method, check out:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/...

Now for the reverse, like I said something elegant emerges.

So we can start by taking the largest digit in our product. Lets say our product is 697.

We find all the digits that produce 6 when summed, along with their order.

thats (1,5), (5,1), (2,4), (4,2), and (3,3)

That means for one of our factors, its largest digit can ONLY be 1, 5, 2, 4, or 3.

Lets take karatsubas method at step f (in the link) and reverse it. Instead of subtracting, we're adding.

If we assume (3,3)

Then we take our middle digit of our product p, in this case the middle digit of 697. is 9, and we munge it with 3.

Then we add our remaining 3, and our remaining unit digit, to get 3+39+7 = 49.

Now, because karatsuba's method ONLY deals with multiplication in single digits, we only need to consider *at most* two digit products.
And interestingly, the only factors of 49 are 7.
49 is a square!

And the only sums that produce 7, are (2,5), (5,2), (3,4), and (4,3)

These would be the possible digits of the factors of 697 if we initially chose (3,3) as our starting point for calculating karatsubas inverse f step.
But you see, 25 can't be a factor of p=697, because 25 is a square, and ends in a 5, so its clearly not prime. 52 can't be either because it ends in 2, likewise 34 ending in 4.
Only 43 could be our possible factor of p.

And we *only* get one factor because our starting point has two of the same digit. Which would mean p would have to equal 43 (a prime) or 1. And because p DOESNT (it equals 697), we can therefore say (3,3) is the wrong starting point, as are ALL starting points that share only one digit, or end in a square.

Ergo we can say the products of non-squares, are specifically non-prime precisely because if they *were* prime, their only factors would HAVE to be themselves, and 1.

For an even BETTER explanation go try karatsuba's method with any prime as the first factor, and 1 as the second factor (just multiply the tens column by zero). And you can see why the inverse, where you might try a starting point that has two matching digits (like 3,3), would obviously fail, because the values it produces could only have two factors; some prime thats not our product, or the value one, which is also not our product.

It's elegant almost to the level of a tautology.

Welcome to post 2 of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363374 It's title is: "Oh, you can post only every 2h. Didn't know that". I also didn't know that the rest of my rant would be put into a comment. For consistency tho, this time I am still splitting the story.

A wise person once wrote in their book: "People judge other people by two things: Empathy and competence." This may not be an accurate quote, but it carries the same message. Also, I don't really remember who was the author. I only know they were probably quite wise. Anyway, I just wanted to share that sentence. Have a moment and think about it. Or don't. Here's my story:

A was a software house that looked pretty promising. They were elegant, their page and offer looked nice. Well, unless you consider the fact that they offered me internship. Unpaid. But I decided to meet with them anyway, since I had hope that I could negotiate some sort of paid internship or a job contract even. I did my homework after all, and I was confident I am able to keep up with their requirements. I arrived a little bit... no, way to early. One damn hour. Whatever, I waited. I was greeted by a woman. We had a cultural conversation, she had a list of 12 questions I needed to answer, as a form of a test. We begun. First question: How do you change a value in Oracle Database? "Wait a minute", I thought, "What kind of question is that?". Why in seven hells would you want your frontend developer to know how to handle oracle db? Well, I gave my answer, I did lick some of that SQL in my life. Next question: Java stuff. The bloody gal didn't even care to check what position I am applying to before the interview! At this point I didn't really have very high hopes. A shame on them forever.

The story of B and C is connected and a little bit more complicated. More on that in part 2. B stands for Bank. A big corporation then, by definition. A person I know decided called me that day and told me they're hiring, that he referred me and that they would like to arrange a meeting. And so we did. It was couple of days before Christmas. C was a software house again. Or a startup. Idk really. Their website wasn't finished so I couldn't read anything useful up on them. They didn't tell me much about themselves either. They also started with "unpaid internship".

In C, they would greet me and instantly sit me down next to a mac laptop and told me, "hey, do this stuff in python". What the fuck, not again... I told them that I am frontend dev, they guy said "it's no problem, you said you know python, it's a simple task". And yeah, I did host some apps in Flask and I did use psycopg2. It was in my CV. But never, ever, have I mentioned knowing heuristics nor statistics. I'm no data scientist, monsieur. Whatever, I tried, I failed a little bit, I told them that maybe if I did want to spend half of my day there I would finish this task, but back then I was way too nervous to focus and code. I told them what should be done in code and that I just was unable to code this at the very moment. They nodded, we said goodbye and I was sure not to hear from them ever again.

In B, I was greeted by a senior frontend dev. He told me the recruiter is sick and he couldn't come, so we're talking alone. I can buy it. We sat down in said meeting room, and he asked me if I wanted a drink. No thx, I had digested so much caffeine during last 24h, next dose could be an overdose. And then, he took out my resume printed in paper. With notes on it. With some stuff encircled. That bloody bastard did his homework. We spent over an hour, just talking in friendly atmosphere. It was an interview, but it was a conversation also. We shared our experiences, opinions and it went just perfect.

On December 20, I was heading home for Christmas. My situation looked like this: A called me they could offer me only unpaid internship. I was getting kinda bored of rice and debts, tbh. I gracefully rejected their generous offer. B didn't give me feedback yet(it was a most recent interview, so I didn't expect any message until after Christmas anyway). C told me that they could give me internship, but I managed to convince them to make it paid internship. After three months of very bad times, things were starting to get better.

On part III we will explore further events of my very recent past. That post will be same amount of storytelling and possibly a lesson for those who seek an employer and for those who seek an employee.

For learning purposes, I made a minimal TensorFlow.js re-implementation of Karpathy’s minGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer). One nice side effect of having the 300-lines-of-code model in a .ts file is that you can train it on a GPU in the browser.

https://github.com/trekhleb/...

The Python and Pytorch version still seems much more elegant and easy to read though...

I am busting moves rn. I'm in the bathroom but the surge of energy is making me pump my arms like the time Leo Messi scored a clutch winner against Valencia in 2019

Remember the plugin I referred to in this rant? https://devrant.com/rants/6019851/...

Yup! I managed to subdue that fossilised codebase. Effected all changes required. To have a rough idea about how ancient the code is, its classes use constructors predating PHP 5. It throws away the ~15 years of autoloading, view templates, routing engines, DI, ORMs (NO PDO!!), lower-cased multi word variable names, etc. I'm looking at SCRIPTS with raw functions north of 4-600 lines. The client insisted I zip the folder across

BUT! The good news is, we surmounted it. In fairness to them, it's commendable for one man to have pulled this off. The codebase is massive and appears to have been predominantly written by some Gideon dude. Who knows where he is now

There is one pattern I appreciate –something I wish Transphporm does–some segments of the rendered view are composed using class methods ie instead of having the HTML file mixed with templating syntax, you have class methods that receive the raw data. Then you can extend this class as you wish, overriding just the method that composes the segment you intend to modify. That was elegant to work with. But it can become dreadful if the class expects a specific structure of data (an array with weird keys) that you have no access to sourcing

So, I finally get to enjoy one good evening in 2/3 weeks. I called 2 friends to express an emotion that's not gloomy, but they were unavailable. Will probably get some sleep

https://i.imgur.com/Y1Z7Ohk.png

I've never used Python much, but my network class had an assignment to make a program that would convert a physical MAC address to an EUI-64 address (as well as some other, easier functions). It's not the most elegant solution, I'm sure, but I'm proud of what I created.

(Reposted due to needing to rehost image)