Notices by jn (big endian energy) (jn@boopsnoot.de)

@grunfink thank you for maintaining the manpages in addition to snac itself. i love documented software!

RE: https://vis.social/@infobeautiful/116109430224379547

@eloy look, the reverse Itanium graph!

...oO(it's called snac because it runs on gebakjes)

OH: Hackers: The Musical

(please make it happen)

@merlin @jana quoting the UNIX paper (Ritchie and Thompson, 1974) for inspiration:
> There is a ‘‘background’’ process that runs at the lowest possible priority; it is used to soak up any idle CPU time. It has been used to produce a million-digit approximation to the constant e, and other semi-infinite problems.

@dalias mpv + youtube-dl/yt-dlp works ok, in my experience
(just `mpv https://twitch,tv/foo`)

@a1ba linux 4.20 was cool

Gzip was invented in 1890 by Gezippe Compressioni, when he tried to squeeze 15 shirts and eight pairs of trousers into his suitcase.

@tillo @whitequark as far as i understand it, it should work with arbitrarily complex/secure algorithms (as long as the algorithm is known), because you can reduce the problem to one unknown byte at a time, so 256 * 256 checksum calculations at worst

@tillo @whitequark I thought about it again and came to the conclusion that the content could be recovered even if the checksum algorithm was unknown, due to how flash tends to work: Clear one bit at a time rather than one byte - if the checksum changes, it was a 1.

@domi i miss when chatbots were just markov pets you put in an IRC channel

@whitequark i think yes:

1. successively zero 0..(N-1) bytes so that 1..N bytes are unknown, save the checksums by their number of unknown bytes
2. for every k in 1..N unknown bytes, try up to 256 values for the new unknown byte until you match the corresponding checksum[k]. this byte is now known
3. solved

@whitequark "at any point" meaning at any point in time, between other operations (zeroing a byte), but the checksum is always computed over the whole block?

@domi what the hell is dependa*bot^2?

@bkuhn da hilft nur: üben, üben, üben :)

i read the name "Zbigniew" on my feed, and my first thought was "RISC-V extension"

@lanodan ooh, good one. i already had nethack but not rogue

what are the top 10 programs that any unix host should have?

@linus similarly, if programs put other runtime data in .cache, that's bad, because it violates the contract of a cache that you outlined.

i wouldn't put it past, let's say, browsers to do something silly like that

spotted at WHY2025