Notices by abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)

My friends drew my attention to this paper which was written by computer scientists so pure, so theoretical, so far above the sins of the empirical plane, that they ran a benchmark comparing common serialization formats in their *mind palace* and came to a conclusion which is faster https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13478

@whitequark my brain is going into dissociative shutdown to prevent me from reading this

FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHT, DADDY VS DIRE DOG #dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon

“the EU government servers are melting under the load of mastodon users going absolutely nuts with enthusiasm for civic participation” is a great problem to have 😂

good job, citizens of the European Union, y’all are really good at remembering and getting it done at the last second

am I the only one who finds "you have read your last free article" to have a threatening aura

@whitequark I suppose you of all people would divine computer science freshman year from internal reasoning without being exposed to any of it

I wonder how many distinct copies of this exact diagram I’ve encountered in my life

here's another anecdote I've translated (from 晏子春秋 "The Annals of Master Yan") that I like because it demonstrates that the idea that everyone in ancient times was deeply superstitious and ignorant of basic common sense just wasn't true.

Duke Jing went out hunting. Up in the mountains, he saw a tiger; down in the fens, he saw a snake. When he returned, he summoned Master Yan and asked: "While I was out hunting, I saw a tiger up in the mountains, and a snake down in the fens. Should I be wary of misfortune?"

Master Yan answered: "There are three misfortunes that can befall a country. The first misfortune is to have a citizen whose worthiness goes unnoticed. The second misfortune is that they are noticed, but go unemployed. The third misfortune is that they are employed, but go without promotion to high office. As for your so-called ill omen: mountains are where tigers make their dens, and snakes would rather burrow down in fens. If you peek into a tiger's den and find a tiger, how could that spell misfortune!"

#translation #localization

the more I learn about Classical Chinese the more I am convinced that almost every translation into English of any Classical Chinese document at all is terrible and utterly destructive to the goal of conveying what it means

anyway, without dunking excessively on the incomprehensible translation that drove me to make my own, here's my translation of an anecdote from "说苑 (Garden of Stories)" about how to sass your superiors in ye olde warring states:

Zhao Jianzi raised an army to attack the State of Qi, ordering that objections were punishable by death. An armored knight named Gong Lu looked to Jianzi and burst out laughing. Jianzi asked: "Sir, why are you laughing?" The knight answered "I just remembered something funny." Jianzi said, "If you can explain yourself, I won't put you to death." Gong Lu explained: "During the mulberry harvest, the married couple next door to me went out to the fields. There they saw a woman among the mulberries. The husband chased after her, but did not catch her; when he turned back, his wife was so offended that she left him. I laughed because that's so self-defeating." Jianzi said: "I am attacking one state, and losing the one I have. It's self-defeating." He gave up the campaign and went home.

And remember, kids, excessively literal translations are marking a boat to find a sword. #translation #localization

Incredible: if you voice-dictate a message about adult chuck-e-cheese alternative Dave & Busters into iMessage, it gets flagged as a potential hacking attempt by the other iMessage client and never arrives. Because the voice-to-text detects it as a known phrase with a special typography (with the "&", not "and"), but the substitution is happening at the wrong layer and so it gets encoded as a raw '&' in the message HTML rather than an '&'. The other end correctly detects malformed HTML and panics.

Presumably, you could also run into this problem with other brands such as Simon & Schuster.

https://rambo.codes/posts/2025-05-12-cracking-the-dave-and-busters-anomaly

Problem: this story game doesn't need gold as a consumable item, but excising the UI for it from the menus by mucking around in javascript not meant to be edited is a pain.

Problem: I'd like to track the comically absurd number of plummets that befall the characters in this story. (haha get it. beFALL)

Solution: The currency is now named Plummet Count. The story awards one gold every time you plummet.

#gamedev

Today I had coffee with someone visiting the Netherlands, and she commented on how green Amsterdam is compared to most North American cities, and how nice it was.

Of course, this isn't just some magic enchantment Because Europe; it's a policy choice and a cultural choice. The trees, the flowers, the canals, they're all intentionally created and actively maintained by the local government to keep them safe, pleasant, and clean. You need a culture that's willing to say "it's important to keep the environment pleasant even if that's not the most efficient thing on paper, and it's important to maintain things even if it costs money." (The Dutch are notorious complainers about spending money – but I've never known one to skimp on maintaining their house and garden.)

Before I left the US, I lived in a place that had clearly been quite a pleasant little city a hundred years ago, but had fallen into depressing disrepair and had less public transportation and accessibility than it did in Victorian times. That's the whole US, really. Because not maintaining things is free, which is "efficient." Not investing in the environment and the community's future is free, which is "efficient."

Dog in pleasant, green urban environment attached 😂

#amsterdam #urbanplanning #dogsofmastodon

Odin came with me into the Starbucks and got hand-fed whip cream by the staff for being such a good boy. #dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon

good morning I love my dog #dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon

shocking news at the Vatican as they announce a unanimous vote that Odin is the goodest boy

there's nothing wrong with being the bleeding-edge option, but we need to workshop this branding. ExcitingSSL. RollerCoaster Crypto. Thrills and Chills TLS

tangentially, I’m perplexed that someone would both name their project BoringSSL and be very willing to break API compatibility on a moment-to-moment basis. That feels like a “pick one” situation

After heartbleed in 2014, there were a lot of calls to abandon OpenSSL and support alternative libraries because it had written itself into a corner full of holes. I didn’t anticipate that 11 years later, there’d be a call to abandon OpenSSL because it’s written itself into a corner of running at 1% the performance of those very same alternative libraries https://www.haproxy.com/blog/state-of-ssl-stacks

It turns out that MrDeepFakes' sudden voluntary shutdown a few days ago was because Bellingcat was on their tail. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2025/05/07/canadian-pharmacist-linked-to-worlds-most-notorious-deepfake-porn-site/

CONTENT WARNING: this article is a dox on someone credibly accused of running a nonconsensual porn site