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What I'm posting here is my 'manifesto'/the things I stand for. You may like it, you may hate it, you may comment but this is what I stand for.
What are the basic principles of life? one of them is sharing, so why stop at software/computers?
I think we should share our software, make it better together and don't put restrictions onto it. Everyone should be able to contribute their part and we should make it better together. Of course, we have to make money but I think that there is a very good way in making money through OSS.
Next to that, since the Snowden releases from 2013, it has come clear that the NSA (and other intelligence agencies) will try everything to get into anyone's messages, devices, systems and so on. That's simply NOT okay.
Our devices should be OUR devices. No agency should be allowed to warrantless bypass our systems/messages security/encryptions for the sake of whatever 'national security' bullshit. Even a former NSA semi-director traveled to the UK to oppose mass surveillance/mass govt. hacking because he, himself, said that it doesn't work.
We should be able to communicate freely without spying. Without the feeling that we are being watched. Too badly, the intelligence agencies of today do not want us to do this and this is why mass surveillance/gag orders (companies having to reveal their users' information without being allowed to alert their users about this) are in place but I think that this is absolutely wrong. When we use end to end encrypted communications, we simply defend ourselves against this non-ethical form of spying.
I'm a heavy Signal (and since a few days also Riot.IM (matrix protocol) (Riot.IM with end to end crypto enabled)), Tutanota (encrypted email) and Linux user because I believe that only those measures (open source, reliable crypto) will protect against all the mass spying we face today.
The applications/services I strongly oppose are stuff like WhatsApp (yes, encryted messages but the metadata is readily available and it's closed source), skype, gmail, outlook and so on and on and on.
I think that we should OWN our OWN data, communications, browsing stuffs, operating systems, softwares and so on.
This was my rant.17 -
PHP arrays.
The built-in array is also an hashmap. Actually, it's always a hashmap, but you can append to it without specifying indexes and PHP will use consecutive integers. Its performance characteristics? Who knows. Oh, and only strings, ints and null are valid keys.
What's the iteration order for arrays if you use them as hashmaps (string keys)? Well, they have their internal order. So it's actually an ordered hashmap that's being called an array. And you can produce an array which has only integer keys starting with 0, but with non-sequential internal (iteration) order.
This array weirdness has some non-trivial implications. `json_encode` (serializes argument to JSON) assumes an array corresponds to a JSON array if its keys are consecutive integers in increasing order starting with 0, otherwise the array becomes a JSON object. `array_filter` (filters arrays/hashmaps using callback predicate) preserves keys, so it will punch holes in the int key sequence if non-last items are removed, thus turning arrays into hashmaps and changing your JSON structure if you forget to discard keys before serialization.
You may wonder how JSON deserialization works, then? There's a special class for deserialized JSON objects, `stdClass`. It's basically a hashmap too, but it's an object, not an array, and all functions that would normally accept arrays won't work with it. So basically its only use is JSON (de)serialization. You can even cast arrays to objects, producing `stdClass`.
Bonus PHP trivia:
Many functions return nonsensical values. `preg_match`, the regex matching function, returns 1 for success, 0 for no matches and false for malformed regular expression. PHP supports exceptions, so it could just throw one on errors. It would even make more sense to return true, false and null for these three cases. But no, 1, 0 and false. And actual matches are returned by output arg.
`array_walk_recursive`, a function supposed to recursively apply callback to each element of an array. That's what docs say. It actually applies it to leafs only. It will also silently accept object instead of array and "walk" it, but without recursing into deeper objects.
Runtime type enforcing is supported for function arguments and returned values. You can use scalar types, classes, array, null and a few special keywords. There's also a `mixed` keyword, which is used in docs and means "anything". It's syntactically valid, the parser will accept it, but it matches no values in runtime. Calling such function will always cause a runtime error.
Strings can be indexed with negative integers. Arrays can't.
ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor: "Creates a new class instance without invoking the constructor". This one needs no commentary.
`array_map` is pretty self-explanatory if you call it with a callback and an array. Or if you provide more arrays of equal length via varargs, callback will be called with more arguments, one from each array. Makes sense so far. Now, you can also call `array_map` with null instead of callback. In that case it treats provided arrays as rows of a matrix and returns that matrix, transposed.5 -
Buckle up, it's a long one.
Let me tell you why "Tree Shaking" is stupidity incarnate and why Rich Harris needs to stop talking about things he doesn't understand.
For reference, this is a direct response to the 2015 article here: https://medium.com/@Rich_Harris/...
"Tree shaking", as Rich puts it, is NOT dead code removal apparently, but instead only picking the parts that are actually used.
However, Rich has never heard of a C compiler, apparently. In C (or any systems language with basic optimizations), public (visible) members exposed to library consumers must have that code available to them, obviously. However, all of the other cruft that you don't actually use is removed - hence, dead code removal.
How does the compiler do that? Well, it does what Rich calls "tree shaking" by evaluating all of the pieces of code that are used by any codepaths used by any of the exported symbols, not just the "main module" (which doesn't exist in systems libraries).
It's the SAME FUCKING THING, he's just not researched enough to fully fucking understand that. But sure, tell me how the javascript community apparently invented something ELSE that you REALLY just repackaged and made more bloated/downright wrong (React Hooks, webpack, WebAssembly, etc.)
Speaking of Javascript, "tree shaking" is impossible to do with any degree of confidence, unlike statically typed/well defined languages. This is because you can create artificial references to values at runtime using string functions - which means, with the right input, almost anything can be run depending on the input.
How do you figure out what can and can't be? You can't! Since there is a runtime-based codepath and decision tree, you run into properties of Turing's halting problem, which cannot be solved completely.
With stricter languages such as C (which is where "dead code removal" is used quite aggressively), you can make very strong assertions at compile time about the usage of code. This is simply how C is still thousands of times faster than Javascript.
So no, Rich Harris, dead code removal is not "silly". Your entire premise about "live code inclusion" is technical jargon and buzzwordy drivel. Empty words at best.
This sort of shit is annoying and only feeds into this cycle of the web community not being Special enough and having to reinvent every single fucking facet of operating systems in your shitty bloated spyware-like browser and brand it with flashy Matrix-esque imagery and prose.
Fuck all of it.20 -
I didn't leave, I just got busy working 60 hour weeks in between studying.
I found a new method called matrix decomposition (not the known method of the same name).
Premise is that you break a semiprime down into its component numbers and magnitudes, lets say 697 for example. It becomes 600, 90, and 7.
Then you break each of those down into their prime factorizations (with exponents).
So you get something like
>>> decon(697)
offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]
offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]
offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]
And it turns out that in larger numbers there are distinct patterns that act as maps at each offset (or magnitude) of the product, mapping to the respective magnitudes and digits of the factors.
For example I can pretty reliably predict from a product, where the '8's are in its factors.
Apparently theres a whole host of rules like this.
So what I've done is gone an started writing an interpreter with some pseudo-assembly I defined. This has been ongoing for maybe a month, and I've had very little time to work on it in between at my job (which I'm about to be late for here if I don't start getting ready, lol).
Anyway, long and the short of it, the plan is to generate a large data set of primes and their products, and then write a rules engine to generate sets of my custom assembly language, and then fitness test and validate them, winnowing what doesn't work.
The end product should be a function that lets me map from the digits of a product to all the digits of its factors.
It technically already works, like I've printed out a ton of products and eyeballed patterns to derive custom rules, its just not the complete set yet. And instead of spending months or years doing that I'm just gonna finish the system to automatically derive them for me. The rules I found so far have tested out successfully every time, and whether or not the engine finds those will be the test case for if the broader system is viable, but everything looks legit.
I wouldn't have persued this except when I realized the production of semiprimes *must* be non-eularian (long story), it occured to me that there must be rich internal representations mapping products to factors, that we were simply missing.
I'll go into more details in a later post, maybe not today, because I'm working till close tonight (won't be back till 3 am), but after 4 1/2 years the work is bearing fruit.
Also, its good to see you all again. I fucking missed you guys.9 -
I don't know if this is a problem only in Belgium or also in other countries but while I love Bluetooth for audio playback (headsets, speakers and everything) despite being extremely convoluted as a protocol.. FUCK Bluetooth keyboards.
Several of them I've tried. Several of them, from various brands. Pairing, setting the Belgian keyboard layout (which on that shitty Android 7.0 tablet that I want to use the fucking things with apparently has to be done *every fucking time you connect*, because reasons) all well. Except half the keys don't fucking map properly. A keymap, it doesn't get easier than that! How hard is it to make buttons map to the right keys!? They're literally fucking push buttons on a matrix! Seeing which points in the circuit make contact and sending that off to wherever it needs to go!
And to put the icing on the cake? USB keyboards with the same fucking layout settings work without any problems. So it's extremely likely that it's something in those shitty keyboards' controllers or Bluetooth going full rart on all of them.
Of course, Bluetooth being as convoluted as it is, manufacturers just copy each others' implementations of it if they can.. so there's that.
Can really nobody make a product halfway decent anymore before putting it on the market!?
Another one bites the dust.. JUNK!!! Every single goddamn one of them!1 -
I. HATE. DELL. WITH. MY. GUTS.
Their low tiers products are full black plastic overpriced fuckshit, if you press too much the cover you can actually destroy your display. Fuck shitty laptops and fuck this shitty laptop in particular. It's slow. It's so slooooooow. It's everflying fucking slow motion, being on the web is like being in the matrix while dodging bullets made of wordpress plugins. The only good thing I can say is that is living right now, it has been... Three years? I only picked it because of high discount and ubuntu preinstalled (that made me think: oh, maybe they have components that are linux compatible regardless of distros. It was not). I'm enjoying Manjaro, when I'll have the skillz i'm going full Arch.
I will start university this fall. It's going to be a math major. I absolutely need something better than this anyway. I am also freaking out because I don't know which genre of software they could want to make me install and if they're windows/mac only. In the meanwhile I do photography, video, design and as you may suppose Adobe is often my go-to; I also have to build a workstation at home. I am freaking out because WELL FUCK WINDOWS 10 AND ITS PRIVACY NIGHTMARE PERIOD.
Which laptop I buy?
How well does heavy software run in a Windows virtual machine (on the desktop, not the laptop)?10 -
I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.
I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.
I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.
I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.
Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.
I barely sleep.
It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.
And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.
Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?
I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.
I don't fucking know.
I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.
And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.
And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."
And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.
And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.
It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.
Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.
Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.
Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.
Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.
As if the universe were bored.24 -
skyRant, an unofficial devRant client has received a new update!
You can now read devRant's unofficial magazine in the app! Plus, view the latest matrix messages. The user interface has been updated too! [and more]
Read on it over on kbin.melroy https://kbin.melroy.org/m/drbboard/... or even in the new skyRant magazine page!
Note: any previous version of skyRant must be uninstalled before updating. Download from here: https://devrant.com/rants/6573682/...
here's a preview!
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Okay then, ex-android user there.
It started with Xperia TX - it was flagship Sony phone back then. It blew my mind when I touched it for the first time. You know, exploring android for the first time in my life was amazing.
It ran just well for about a year. Then it started to fall apart. I need to clarify that I kept it non-rooted, full stock. I'm not into that customization things.
At first, I noticed significant lags. They were everywhere. The longer I used smartphone, the more lags I encountered. I did factory reset, but lags haven't gone anywhere.
Year 2. Front camera stopped working. Battery became unreliable as fuck, going down to 40% and then instantly to zero. What?
Year 3. Camera broke. It refused to start, just giving me "Camera is not available" error.
I tried factory reset again. It helped at first, but month have passed and all that issues came back. And it also became sluggish as fuck.
Got Meizu m3s year ago. The exact same story. Long story short, in one year I got this:
1. Black spots on every picture I take. Much likely a matrix issue.
2. Camera also became slow as fuck, requiring about 10 seconds to even start.
3. Vertical stripes all along the screen. I never dropped my phone, it just appeared once and became brighter and brighter every day I used the phone.
4. Two huge yellow spots on screen. I think it happened because phone's cpu heat up the screen and it broke.
But the most important thing is that fucking lags chased me in every app, they were everywhere. Fucking tiny-ass lags. And they're not going anywhere, they're become more and more significant with time.
Don't say me about oneplus, samsungs and other top android phones. They are conceptually the same, the only different thing is hardware.
That's why I switched. IPhone has its downsides, but it's silky smooth. And my friend's iPhone 4 (not s) feels just as smooth as my brand new se.
I'm not going to jailbreak it. I don't need customizing the hell out of it.
I just needed quick and reliable phone, and SE seems to be exactly what I wanted.
Peace to android folks tho✌️17 -
"What is going on... this should work?!
Is my maths wrong?
My maths is wrong...
Oh no!
It's a model view projection matrix?!
I'm shit if I'm failing at this, it's 3D dev 101!
I got a first class degree... I don't deserve any of this or this job!!"
<2 seconds later>
uniforms.viewMatrix.set(camera.matrixWorldInverse.elements);
uniforms.viewMatrix.set(camera.projectionMatrix.elements);
"You set the same uniform twice you tool, due to copy and paste..."
Imposter syndrome in my early days put myself into a roller coaster of emotions. I always compared myself to others to the detriment of myself.
Thankfully overcame that working with some great guys.
But yeah, coding has impacted life for the best though. The challenge, creativity and constant learning is beautiful. -
Working in an expanding business is mostly fun, can be kind of challenging (for those who don't like to step in and do what's needed). One thing in particular you need to do a lot - is interviews. Lot's of them.
There are alsways two sides of the coin, for sure. But, just a little tip/hint to everyone looking for a job - please, please, please make sure your CV and letter at least makes sense for the position you're trying to get.
This (screenshot) is just one example of things in a CV which really makes me want to shout and kick people out.
It's part of the front page of a CV, for someone who is looking for a position as front-end developer / UX specialist. This person claims to be very interested in UX, and has done wome work already in this field.
Can ANYONE explain to med WHAT THE F*CK this actually means?
1) How many stars can a row have? 10, 6, 8?
2) What does it mean to have 4 starss in PHP knowledge? What's lacking to get 5?
3) What's the scale based on, at all?
And you want me to hire to to do UX of loyalty communication (e-mail, mobile apps, websites/landing pages) for our customers - who in turn have millions of customers/prospects?!?
ARE YOU F*CKING KIDDING ME?
If you can't even make a visualization of your _own_ knowledge which can be interpreted into some sort of competence matrix, but you just use something you think looks cool... Damn, you could at least have tried.
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I wonder if anyone has considered building a large language model, trained on consuming and generating token sequences that are themselves the actual weights or matrix values of other large language models?
Run Lora to tune it to find and generate plausible subgraphs for specific tasks (an optimal search for weights that are most likely to be initialized by chance to ideal values, i.e. the winning lottery ticket hypothesis).
The entire thing could even be used to prune existing LLM weights, in a generative-adversarial model.
Shit, theres enough embedding and weight data to train a Meta-LLM from scratch at this point.
The sum total of trillions of parameter in models floating around the internet to be used as training data.
If the models and weights are designed to predict the next token, there shouldn't be anything to prevent another model trained on this sort of distribution, from generating new plausible models.
You could even do task-prompt-to-model-task embeddings by training on the weights for task specific models, do vector searches to mix models, etc, and generate *new* models,
not new new text, not new imagery, but new *models*.
It'd be a model for training/inferring/optimizing/generating other models.4 -
MATLAB literally has matrix in the name but the fucking array start at 1 thing fucks up every single time I try to use a matrix or array. How do you do the one thing you designed your program to do so fucking poorly. Whoever decided they were going to make arrays start a 1 for a matrix manipulation program should be hung and quartered.4
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I need to tell you the story of my MOAB (Mother of all bugs).
I need to write some stuff in C (which i am fairly used to) and have a function that allocates memory for a Matrix on the heap. The matrix has a rows and columns property and an associated data array, so it looks like this
struct Matrix{
uint8_t rows;
uint8_t columns;
uint8_t data[];
}
I allocate rows*columns + 2 bytes of memory for it.
I also have a function to zero it out which does something like this
for(int i=0; i < rows*columns;i++){
data[i]=0;}
Let‘s come to the problem:
On my Mac the whole stuff works and passes all tests. We tried the code on a Linux machine and suddenly the code crashed in various places, sometimes a realloc got an invalid pointer, sometimes free got an invalid pointer and basically the code crashed at arbitrary points randomly.
I was confused af because did i really make THAT many errors?
I found out that all errors occured when testing my matrices so i looked more into it and observed it through the debugger.
Eventually i came to the function that zeroes out my matrix and it went unusually high and wondered if my matrix really was that big.
Then i saw it
The matrix wasn‘t initialised yet
It had arbitrary data that was previously in the heap.
It zeroed out a huge chunk of the heap space.
It literally wrote a zero to a shitload of addresses which invalidated many pointer.
You can imagine my facepalm2 -
I have decided that massive natural selection events are a thing with humans. When resources appear to be getting low a group of people will prepare and wipe out a large portion of consumers. The most straight forward way is to create a crisis and then offer the "only" solution. Make that solution a weapon and you are done. The masses gladly accept the solution. At all times appear benevolent. Silence dissenting voices swiftly. Make the dissenters look like nutters and publicly humiliate them and apply labels to them. Labels are effective because it creates pariahs. People like to not be singled out and called names.
What do you end up with? People who distrust government and the institutions. I don't know how this benefits the orchestrators (how to spell) of the genocide. Perhaps if the numbers are small enough they can just be rounded up and killed by force rather than coercion.
I get the feeling this approach has been used in the past. Like it has been at least tested on smaller scales. Maybe even on past civilizations. Did we learn to do this from space visitors? I wonder.
2021 has certainly been an interesting year. I used to think people were just stupid. This year has confirmed that for me. But I am not sure stupid is the right word. They are certainly book smart. Maybe naive is a better word. I pray and hope 2022 turns out better for people. Maybe they start seeing signs they have been lied to by people they trust. Maybe not. When you are in the matrix it is hard to see through the facade. The matrix feels very real, until it doesn't.
Dev Goal?: To not be murdered by the matrix.6
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