@robryk@qoto.org avatar

robryk

@robryk@qoto.org

I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work in infosec, am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.

I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.

If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.

I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

rysiek, to random
@rysiek@mstdn.social avatar

Okay, so, podcasts are great but sometimes I prefer to read instead of listen. 🤔

So what if – hear me out – there was a thing like podcasts, but for text! 🤯

It would still be distributed via RSS, you could still follow them and automagically pull them to your device. But instead of audio, there would be text. ✏️

👉 We could call them: textcasts!

And get this: I already have one! It was super easy to set up, actually. You can find it here:
https://rys.io/en/feed.rss

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@tadzik @rysiek

TBF I would really like something that transcribes podcasts or videos and maybe removes/deemphasizes[1] the speech mannerisms that are helpful for speech but not for text (e.g. some kinds of repetitions). I haven't seen yet anything that would do even the first part well totally automatically, but I think both parts are much closer than other things people dream of AI doing.

[1] in text, one can use various font style tricks to do so

robryk, to nuclear
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

Why do PWR reactors use boric acid, as opposed to some random salt of boron? Apparently boron salts are often well soluble, from the nuclear POV we only care about boron being present, and I'd expect salts to cause fewer chemical problems due to their closer-to-neutral pH. In fact some random papers (https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/28/034/28034575.pdf) describe tradeoffs involved in maintaining pH as boric acid concentration changes.

There clearly must be some reason why boric acid is preferred over any simple boron salt. What is it?

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

Hm~ is it about those salts decomposing into something else in solution at high temperature?

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

So there's a lot of kvetching, from myself included, about how the modern internet has gotten worse, usually due to a combination of SEO, social media gone evil, and the prevalence of money as more and more of a guiding factor in tech.

But of course the old internet had the problem of being fairly boring. The interesting question is how to get a third way. I've heard a few proposals:

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@ZachWeinersmith

Can you expand on what you mean by boring? When I was a preteen I could find random websites with lots of circuit diagrams for simple things someone found useful, Seaview fanfiction, and various very esoteric topics. My impression is that finding as satisfyingly in-depth descriptions, especially of niche topics, is now harder.

kravietz, to random Polish
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

W UK przeszły właśnie wybory lokalne. Od zeszłego roku Brytyjczycy mają nowy powód do narzekania, a mianowicie wymóg przedstawienia dowodu tożsamości. Przedtem do komisji się po prostu przychodziło i mówiło “jestem taki i taki, mieszkam tu i tu”, a komisja wydawała kartę. Oczywiście, otwierało to pole do masowych fałszerstw, więc w ubiegłym roku wprowadzono w końcu identyfikację wyborców.

Ale… w UK nie ma dowodu osobistego. I tu zaczynają się schody, które moim zdaniem doskonale ilustrują absolutnie betonowy i irracjonalny konserwatyzm brytyjskiego systemu. Oczywiście, w UK w latach 2000-ch próbowano wprowadzić pojedynczy dowód tożsamości, tak jak wszędzie w EU. Tyle, że skończyło się to po wielkiej medialnej kampanii pod hasłami “naruszania prywartności”, “permanentnej inwigilacji”, obsługiwanej głównie przez brukowce w stylu Daily Mail.

No i pojedynczego dowodu osobistego w UK rzeczywiście nie ma. Ale biznesowo tożsamości jest oczywiście wymagana wszędzie tam gdzie w Polsce. Jak rozwiązano ten problem w UK? W sposób typowy dla UK, czyli tak jak ze słynnymi osobnymi kranami (z jednego cieknie wrzątek, z drugiego zimna woda, w teorii należy sobie zatkać zlew i w nim zmieszać wodę z obu). Czyli w sposób przeciwskuteczny i absurdalnie skomplikowany.

W UK oczywiście istnieje tuzin państwowych baz danych osobowych (NI, HMPO, rejestr wyborczy, DWP, DVLA itd), za którymi idą zbliżone do dowodu osobistego dokumenty tożsamości. Tyle, że żadna z nich nie ma statusu oficjalnego dokumentu tożsamości, więc identyfikacja wobec banków, pracodawców czy nawet głupiej agencji wynajmu wymaga przyniesienia nie tylko dwóch różnych dokumentów tożsamości (np. prawo jazdy i paszport) ale do tego stosu wyciągów z banku, rachunków z elektrowni lub wodociągów i okazania tych - dość wrażliwych jednak - dokumentów przypadkowym pracownikom prywatnych firm, którzy zwykle je jeszcze sobie kopiują. “Ochrona prywatności”, powiadacie?

A teraz clou: oczywiście, poza bazami państwowymi istnieje mnóstwo baz prywatnych, w tym chyba największa zagregowana baza Experiana, która zbiera w jednym miejscu dane osobowe, adresowe oraz finansowe. Ponieważ UK nie ma odpowiednika bazy PESEL, więc brytyjskie urzędy korzystają - za pieniądze - z… komercyjnej bazy Experiana. I dokładnie o to chodziło w całej tej kampanii brytyjskich brukowców w 2000-ch. Experian jest prywatną firmą i nie podlega żadnej demokratycznej kontroli, a na dodatek ciągle zdarzają mu się wycieki bo kto by inwestował w bezpieczeństwo IT w XXI wieku?

Skutkiem ubocznym tej prywatyzacji danych osobowych jest także trwający od dwóch lat burdel w komisjach wyborczych. Zamiast prostego komunikatu jak w EU “na wybory idę z dowodem albo paszportem”, Brytyjczycy dostają listę 20 różnych “dowodów tożsamości”, z licznymi wyjątkami - na przykład zwykła karta metra Oyster nie jest, ale karta Oyster 60+ już jest:

https://gov.uk/how-to-vote/photo-id-youll-need

Gubią się w tym i wyborcy i komisje wyborcze. No ale dla ochrony interesów prywatnych firm agregujących dane osobowe chyba warto się poświęcić 😉

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@kravietz

Jeśli dobrze rozumiem https://www.gov.uk/apply-for-photo-id-voter-authority-certificate to można dostać dokument który działa znając tylko czyjś "National Insurance Number". Czy jest to z jakiegoś powodu trudniejsze do oszukania niż wersja w której komisji możnaby podać ten numer?

whitequark, to random
@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar

latest Matrix issue: someone joined a channel I'm in and posted a message. it got bridged to IRC and Discord, but somehow I can't see it in the Matrix room itself

how is this even in principle a failure mode? how do you even begin to investigate it?

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@whitequark

How do you know that it didn't get federated directly from A to C? (Even if it did, it would still be a very weird failure mode.)

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@whitequark

I wonder what happens if A keeps changing its mind about what its signing keys are.

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@whitequark

:(

I would really like to have more Matrix debugging tooling...

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@whitequark

My very wild hypothesis is that for some reason B doesn't consider these messages (I forgot Matrix's term for nodes-in-the-room-history-dag) valid. Perhaps A changed its mind about its signing key? But I don't know why B haven't fetched them from C, trusting them because C considers them valid. I will need to reread how validity determination works, but now I need to sleep, so it has to wait until tomorrow. (I realized I don't get how you can at the same time prevent C from potentially impersonating A's users and at the same time accept nodes from C that mention a node from A that appears invalid as a parent.)

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@whitequark

If you are still curious about the mechanism of the weirdness: Can you tell how? (Did it get pushed to it? Did it fetch it? From A or from C?)

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

There is an interesting article titled "Please Don’t Share Our Links on Mastodon: Here’s Why!" about the startling load that Mastodon's mass-distributed link preview generation has on small independent webservers. But I cannot link it to you, because of a reason

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@mark @mcc

It's a terrible idea to trust that preview though.

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@mark @mcc

In the sense that someone other than your client, your own instance (both of which you kind of need to trust anyway), and the actual site that's linked to (who's the source of the content, so the preview must trust it) can manipulate it.

The site showing different contents to different users is another issue that I agree exists and can cause similar problems for malicious linked-to sites. For nonmalicious ones consider e.g. a post expressing outrage at something bbc published with a link to the "article" on bbc with a helpful "preview".

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@mark

Huh, I'm very surprised that you find this line odd (I don't think I've seen this opinion in the past). I would appreciate if you answered a question or two so that I can understand it better (but do understand if you don't wish to).

The reason I find this line very natural is that I think in terms of which node is intended to be able to speak for which entities, especially that those entities are named in a way to remind us of that relation (domain in URLs, domain/instance part of a fedi ID). Do you think that it makes more sense to keep track of a more vague trust (as in, "that node is rather trustworthy") in general, that the mapping between nodes and entities is insufficiently natural, or something else I can't easily see?

sam, to random
@sam@social.coop avatar

The bike shops I've applied to have offered the same as I was making at or better. Except one yesterday offered me less and no other benefits and then seemed shocked when I asked about healthcare. The owner seemed to care about his employees, but was also confused about not being able to find anyone. I get that bike shops as a business model just don't work in the U.S., but where do places like this expect to find workers with no rent to pay or other bills at all?

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@sam @sanedragon

Something of this shape happens in an organized fashion in larger cities in Switzerland: an association of bike users (https://www.pro-velo.ch/) organizes bike flea markets (as in, the bikes being sold aren't theirs -- they only provide organization). Apart from some amount of inspecting of the bikes for sale (I'm not sure how thorough) what they also do is get mechanics to answer sellers' questions.

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@sam @sanedragon

In addition to that, they also:

  • have mechanics to answer questions (for example, it's sometimes not obvious if a bike can take panniers),
  • try to figure out if any of the bikes are stolen beforehand,
  • deal with actually selling the bike so the seller doesn't need to be there the whole day (they just drop off the bike in the morning and pick up money or bike in the evening),
  • have some sort of setup where you can take one of the bikes for a test ride.

In general it seems to me that a large part of the reason why that feels very nice (from a buyer's perspective at least) is that they remove incentives to be dishonest, so that everyone taking part can just be calm, trusting, and assume the same of others and won't be harmed by that. On the other hand, I think that a large reason why this became a major thing (there are nonspecialized flea markets and you can buy/sell bikes there too) is in large part that it's very hassle-free for sellers.

Regarding the place, Zurich has a few squares in the city center, which tend to get used for such things (I'm actually not sure how that works formally tbh). Sadly that's probably one of the larger problems with setting something like that up in the US (or am I very off?).

To give you a order of magnitude estimate, there is one such flea market organized every month Spring-Autumn in Zurich (pop. ~700k city, ~1.5M agglo) and I'd estimate that there is a bit below 1000 bikes there ~each time.

winter, to random
@winter@translunar.academy avatar

being a medic is about 79% trying to get people to drink water and 20% trying to keep milk out of people’s eyes

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@dangerdyke @yassie_j @winter

Out of curiosity, what's the potential harm? (Is it ~biological or ~chemical?)

_thegeoff, to random
@_thegeoff@mastodon.social avatar

Finally got the time to dig in to the oscilloscope an retired electrical engineer donated to me, "you may have fun trying to get it to work".

My god...it's full of valves...

This so pretty.

At an estimate, there's maybe a total of 500 components, compare that with anything modern, which is in the millions of components when you consider valve=transistor, and chips.

A view from the other side of the open casing, several more valves and large resistors and capacitors.
A close up of one of the valves, plus a large 525 volt, 20 microfarad capacitor, dated 1968.

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@_thegeoff

Oscilloscopes from the 80s, even DSOs, are in at most tens of thousands of components range (most of it in SRAM). Mine, apart from discrete components, has 74-series TTL logic chips, some opamp-like ICs, and 8kB (or 16?) of SRAM.

robryk, to random
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

I think I nearly collided with a bat today. I was riding a bike along Sihl just north of Sihlcity (the path is between a small forested hill and a river with a highway overpass over it; it's sparsely lit with streetlamps) and saw (~single frame only, because of timing wrt my blinking) a dark concave-sided diamond shape in front of me and felt a gust of wind.

It's not that surprising, given that a bit further north friends of mine would semi-regularly notice bats over the rive (and I did once or twice), but the near collision is surprising given my very predictable motion.

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

Ah, PSA: if you do actually collide with a bat, check very thoroughly whether (a) you got scratched in any way (b) you got your face in contact with the bat. If either happened, wash the scratch/your face thoroughly and urgently visit a doctor due to the risk of rabies.

timorl, to random
@timorl@social.wuatek.is avatar

My brother needed a fourth person for a gamejam this weekend, so now I’m a game developer: https://timorl.itch.io/iks. Obviously gamejam quality, but you can burn a couple minutes. :blobfox3c:

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@timorl

I don't get what the white pipe is.

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@timorl 4? The one where you have to avoid mixing in black

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@timorl Uh... it does nothing? (I assume it's supposed to rotate stuff.) My browser's firefox, the extensions that seem potentially relevant are ublock origin and zotero connector. Nothing in the JS console, except for godot's welcome message, some complaints about audio mix rates, and a complaint about long-running stuff in a context that blocks rendering.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland? | by Anna Andersen”

Glad somebody wrote about this because it’s an objectively hilarious UX case study

(And they just announced that eleven people managed to get the requisite number of endorsements in time) https://uxdesign.cc/how-do-you-accidentally-run-for-president-of-iceland-0d71a4785a1e

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@Datterich @koteisaev @baldur

Note also the "Agnieszka" in the screenshotted list (it's a pretty common Polish first name, so I guess there is more than one Icelandic woman with it).

mcc, (edited ) to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Holy fuck I have just discovered that the phone app in Android 13 [EDIT: no; see below] vibrates when an outgoing call connects

An outgoing call

There is no way to turn this off except to disable all vibration on your phone

So you make a phone call, you put it up to your ear, and then this thing that you've put up to the side of your face vibrates intensely. It is the most deeply unpleasant, unnecessary thing. I already knew I was making a fucking phone call I pressed the button

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@mcc

I see another potential usecase: telling the user that they need to raise the volume if they hear nothing, because someone is probably trying to speak to them now. I usually set my call volume to minimum reasonable for the place I'm in and then when I call someone from a totally different location I somewhat nervously await the ringing tone so that I can adjust the volume (and when the ringing tone is late I run the whole "look at the screen to see what the problem is" dance).

robryk,
@robryk@qoto.org avatar

@mcc

That is really surprising.

Ah, and you did try replacing the dialer to no effect already. :/

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