Today on “the Netherlands are weird”: I live in an apartment tower in a world-major city, a few blocks from the core of Business Skyscrapers. I just looked out the window and saw several horses frolicking in the woods across the street.
Notices by abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Saturday, 03-Feb-2024 20:26:30 JST abadidea
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Saturday, 03-Feb-2024 10:26:54 JST abadidea
@vriesk ada lovelace christ
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Saturday, 03-Feb-2024 10:00:51 JST abadidea
@C222 aaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Saturday, 03-Feb-2024 09:58:08 JST abadidea
Also if you don’t know what a float is (because you’re not a programmer or have only worked with very high level languages that try to conceal these details) then my horror makes no sense so I will break it down for you
If you declare a number value to be a float, that is telling the computer two things:
first, that the value is allowed to be fractional and not just whole numbers (integers). This means that if someone reports that the fleet gained 2.3 planes or lost 0.01 planes, the computer would be like yeah, sure, that makes sense, let me write that down.
second, doing math with fractions is much more computationally complicated than whole numbers. Telling the computer a value is a “float” is explicitly telling it that you want it to use the fastest methods it has available to do the math, even if they’re not 100% accurate down to the smallest fraction of a fraction. You are saying it’s okay to lose track of a hundredth of a plane here or there as long as you count the planes really fast.
The intended use of floats is things like video game graphics: you can’t tell if the height of the enemy is 6.200002 meters or 6.2 meters exactly, and letting the computer not worry about the difference makes the calculations much faster. You should never, ever use floats for things like money, because over the course of many successive adds and subtracts, entire cents or dimes will just pop in and out of existence. Or, like, some unspecified fraction of a plane, which is probably not what you want.
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2024 16:27:46 JST abadidea
A few times I have told the anecdote that the singly most baffling thing I ever saw in a code review — not the most insecure, just the most “how could a real programmer have written this? how could this ever make sense?” thing — was simply a C++ variable “number_of_trucks” … declared as float. Unambiguously referring to real physical trucks in a fleet.
Reader, it’s been over ten years and I am blowing the gods damn whistle. I had edited that story to protect the guilty: the variable was named number_of_planes. It was shipped by a company whose name begins with “B” and rhymes with “GOING out of business.”
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2024 09:19:56 JST abadidea
I cannot emphasize this enough: if you are having a panic attack about the general state of your life - academics, your job, your relationship with anyone - and it's 9 pm or later, GO TO BED. Don't @ me with your special case objection that willfully misses the point, go the fuck to bed and consider what if anything needs to be done when well-rested and well-fed
I have had more personal crises than is advisable to admit to and so have many of my friends, I guarantee this is coming from extensive experience
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2024 09:19:52 JST abadidea
I do a lot of online community crisis resolution and 50% of it can be resolved by asking the party in crisis what timezone they’re in and then kindly but firmly telling them to go to bed
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Saturday, 27-Jan-2024 22:51:26 JST abadidea
I am 35 and I am intensely jealous of the 6yo girl I just saw with the most awesome virtual pet I've ever seen. It was inside a little jewelry box, and when you open it there's a persistence-of-vision hologram display (made with a bar of leds that waves back and forth rapidly). She physically petted the hologram with her fingertip and it made a happy sound and displayed a heart
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Friday, 26-Jan-2024 22:16:18 JST abadidea
also as sincere advice to anyone who wants to make a career of infosec, half the trick is just being willing and able to absorb entire new fields of domain-specific information as you go, because the thorniest problems are in the most specialized components
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Friday, 26-Jan-2024 22:15:32 JST abadidea
I had a customer come in like “hey I know we usually come to you with low-level C code but today we have an HTML5 application” and I had to learn so much about JWTs so fast
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Thursday, 25-Jan-2024 10:31:13 JST abadidea
Scammers! I am autistic. If you send me a DM that just says “hey” I am overwhelmed with dread at the prospect of figuring out what your neurotypical @#$ wants from me. Please send a clear introductory message that states your intent is to get me to download and run the malware, WITH the link, all in ONE message. Thank you!
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Monday, 22-Jan-2024 15:20:06 JST abadidea
everyone wants to romanticize the idea of living in the heart of a dense medieval city but the reality is I can’t get out my own front door to go get a coffee without being bowled over by the duke’s carriage or the Flame Pharaoh or a steamboat or some godsdamn ELVES on a QUEST who get offended when the locals don’t speak Sindarin
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Thursday, 11-Jan-2024 04:31:16 JST abadidea
looking for childhood friends:
everquest player Mixelplex, guild Sun Blade, server Fennin Ro
Mary Caitlin McF., moved from Virginia to Latvia when she was 10, went to college in Finland
I keep wondering where they ended up in life (it's me, Melissa from Virginia)
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 17:16:31 JST abadidea
this is a distribution map of honeybees, I find the fuck-no hole in the middle hilarious
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Saturday, 06-Jan-2024 19:14:50 JST abadidea
Smuggling news from xitter: it’s been conclusively proven that Tommy Tallerico did not write a single one of the songs he took credit for in Sonic and the Black Knight https://twitter.com/sonicmusicfacts/status/1742978857232380222
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Friday, 05-Jan-2024 22:21:28 JST abadidea
it’s pretty funny to be talking to a company who’s like “our service contains region locked content, when security testing it just use a vpn to fool it like everyone else does”
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Thursday, 04-Jan-2024 22:50:13 JST abadidea
@eloy yeah, but for the record the background radiation here is a very well known security firm’s xitter got popped last night, and I feel the takeaway is “it’s pretty much impossible to keep those things safe from targeted attacks” and not “wow security firms don’t even know how to set a good password”
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2023 23:30:35 JST abadidea
you can use computers every day for thirty years and still be utterly blown away by new error messages you cannot even begin to comprehend
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2023 06:17:16 JST abadidea
me: oh I wonder what Seel says in Chinese
me … … …
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abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2023 06:17:15 JST abadidea
this isn’t even the funniest localization of Seel; in pokemon red/blue, NPCs you aren’t supposed to be able to talk to have a default dialog of “!”, but someone took the time to localize that to “¡!” in Spanish