https://fsis.site/blog/ Recent content on fsis.site 🐴 Hugo -- gohugo.io en-US Copyright © 2020, FSi Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2021-03-05/ Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2021-03-05/ The Small Web links The Small Web is Beautiful The Small Web Against an Incredibly User-Hostile Web What is the Small Web? (TW: paywall) “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction” also, neat discussion on hackernews. I think a lot of people think they’re bakers, but you gotta realize, the moment you start sprinkling crack in the cookies, you’re not selling cookies anymore. Life stuff Lotsa things happened in February. https://fsis.site/blog/december-2020-news/ Mon, 14 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/december-2020-news/ Haven’t posted in a while, so here’s a bunch of stuff all at once! Received a letter (thanks F.), sent a letter (hopefully it arrives!). I like sending mail, maybe I should reactivate my postcrossing account (is postcrossing still a thing?). Random links! (BTW, you can follow my random links posts at the main RSS here) Super! Lonely Terminal - a bunch of disk images for PC98, the Japanese retro PC. https://fsis.site/blog/20201013173555/ Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/20201013173555/ plug-n-pwn Unfortunately Intel has placed large amounts of information about the Thunderbolt controllers and protocol under NDA, meaning that it has not been properly researched leading to a string of vulnerabilities over the years. Vt Cup Of Water, No Water, Wasp https://fsis.site/blog/2020-10-06/ Tue, 06 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2020-10-06/ This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time (11 months? omg), but here it is at last. This site/blog is now powered by Hugo. I tried to keep stuff similar to how it was before, while adding my own flair. The feed URL has been changed. I guess you know that if you’re reading this, but make sure to update your RSS reader otherwise. Also, as the sources for this site is now in plain markdown, I’ve merged them with my (previously private) notes, so now you can enjoy such masterpieces as my meat marinades and add-srt-to-mp4. https://fsis.site/blog/2020-06-19-letter-from-italy/ Tue, 09 Jun 2020 14:34:00 +0300 https://fsis.site/blog/2020-06-19-letter-from-italy/ Today I’ve finally got a letter from a friend in Italy that took more than a month to arrive. Understandable, I guess, with the quarantine affecting the post office and all that. https://fsis.site/blog/2019-11-16/ Sat, 16 Nov 2019 12:37:59 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-11-16/ Programming Laser-Based Audio Injection on Voice-Controllable Systems TL;DR: By shining the laser through the window at microphones inside smart speakers, tablets, or phones, a far away attacker can remotely send inaudible and potentially invisible commands which are then acted upon by Alexa, Portal, Google assistant or Siri. or, as they say in Russia, РЕШЕТО Text Rendering Hates You Fun quote: Also have you heard of Animated SVG Fonts? https://fsis.site/blog/2019-11-01/ Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-11-01/ Real life: happens. Me: Programming XML is almost always misused Articles Exfiltrating information using the light sensor Might not sound like much, but they mean, like, in a browser context. From JavaScript. Why Renaissance Paintings Aren’t as Green as They Used to Be TL;DR: the green pigment they used is getting less green with time. Nonviolent communication A neat idea, should probably give the book a go. https://fsis.site/blog/2019-10-13/ Sun, 13 Oct 2019 20:33:39 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-10-13/ Programming CollapseOS TL;DR: Someone is making an 8-bit OS just in case to be useful in post-collapse scenarios. With a copy of this project, a capable and creative person should be able to manage to build and install Collapse OS without external resources (i.e. internet) on a machine of her design, built from scavenged parts with low-tech tools. Don’t Look Into The Light TL;DR: https://fsis.site/blog/2019-09-30/ Mon, 30 Sep 2019 19:48:10 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-09-30/ Programming No, PHP doesn’t have closures Articles WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism What if Planet 9 is a Primordial Black Hole? What killed me was the “exact scale illustration of a 5 Earth mass black hole” The Octopus: An Alien Among Us Clickbaity quote: Yes, an octopus is objectively aware of itself and of the objects around it. It contains the information. https://fsis.site/blog/2019-09-23/ Mon, 23 Sep 2019 19:38:54 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-09-23/ …and this time the post is small-ish (and a week delayed) because I suddenly got sick (well, not suddenly, it was all because I spent a night at that The Comet is Coming concert, probably) and just started to return to the rhythm of things. Programming POS software written in QBasic, used worldwide Articles The Termination Risks of Simulation Science TL;DR: a scientist argues that it’s quite unreasanable to expect the beings running our universe’s simulation (if it indeed is one) to stop simulating it just because we’ve found out it is a simulation. https://fsis.site/blog/2019-09-08/ Sun, 08 Sep 2019 21:52:05 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-09-08/ Shorter one this time, for I was attending Moscow Music Week. It’s a festival here in Moscow, with quite a few places and performances (that, sadly, happen all at the same time) for four days straight. Due to the aforementioned happening-at-the-same-time, I was only able to attend a couple of the showcases, namely Free Jazz and Dark Jazz ones. Quite liked these (even though the Dark Jazz showcase there were three free jazz performances and only one dark-jazz one). https://fsis.site/blog/2019-09-01/ Sun, 01 Sep 2019 09:24:39 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-09-01/ Aaand back to our regularly scheduled program. Speaking of programming… Programming Rabbit holes TL;DR: how ubuntu generates its motd is weird (and pings their server once every 12 hours) Funny quote It’s quite simple. PHP was not designed. It evolved, without a predator to remove bad mutations. – The_Sly_Marbo on reddit Articles Black hole “so big it shouldn’t exist” Note: the title is quite click-baity. https://fsis.site/blog/2019-08-26/ Mon, 26 Aug 2019 17:43:50 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-08-26/ Here’s a brief log of my travels to make up for all the missed posts (as I, in fact, pledged to post once a week or so). Brutal Assault (August 7 to August 11) Brutal Assault is a yearly heavy metal festival held in fortress Josefov, near Jaromerz in Czech Republic. It is held in an old fortress that has seen WWII, WWI and many wars before that, presumably (being medieval and all that). https://fsis.site/blog/2019-08-04/ Sun, 04 Aug 2019 10:31:11 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-08-04/ Articles LightSail2 is working! A nuclear war might make crops stop growing, so we need a backup plan. TL;DR: prepping for the apocalypse but scientifically! (Won’t read the book because fuck elsevier, but it does sound interesting) Why are the prices so damn high? Mostly linking it for this tangent that almost hurts to read: The feeling is “subjective” in the sense that it occurs inside your mind, but it is “objective” in the sense that you cannot get it arbitrarily by wishing; some things produce it and some do not. https://fsis.site/blog/2019-07-27/ Sat, 27 Jul 2019 14:41:29 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-07-27/ First off, some updates: I’ve removed the Google Fonts dependency. Uses a couple of self-hosted fonts with system fallback now. Small visual updates as well. Now on to business as usual. Programming The Mutable Web, via hackernews SVG PORN NB: not actually porn, just a collection of hand-crafted SVG icons (via hackernews) Dungeon Generation in Diablo 1 TL;DR: some were heavily inspired by Rogue and the likes. https://fsis.site/blog/2019-07-21/ Sun, 21 Jul 2019 13:27:41 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-07-21/ Programming The Best Refactoring You’ve Never Heard Of TL;DR: defunctionalize the continuation! The PGP Problem TL;DR: no solution in sight (just “use signal” is not a solution). Neat quote: Take AEAD ciphers: the Rust-language Sequoia PGP defaulted to the AES-EAX AEAD mode, which is great, and nobody can read those messages because most PGP installs don’t know what EAX mode is, which is not great https://fsis.site/blog/2019-07-13/ Sat, 13 Jul 2019 11:55:19 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-07-13/ Programming Floating point routines for 6502 by Woz (direct link) A better zip bomb; NON-RECURSIVE zip-bombs that extract from 42 kB to 5.5 GB, from 10MB to 281TB, or from 46MB to 4.5PB (last one is Zip64 and not as compatible). Non-recursive means you get that amount of date in a single extract operation. Not quite useful information, but interesting nonetheless. Articles Designing the First Full-Time Human Habitat on the Moon, original press-release https://fsis.site/blog/2019-07-09/ Tue, 09 Jul 2019 18:35:52 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-07-09/ Programming Live coding a vi for CP/M, from scratch Somewhat related (and ancient), Linux on an 8-bit micro by emulating an ARM processor, no less! (slower than molasses, obviously, like, literally, hours to boot) Also related, Why 80s BASIC still matters! - this made me want to buy the book, and I probably will. Articles Inside the World’s First Long-term Storage Facility for Highly Radioactive Nuclear Waste https://fsis.site/blog/2019-06-29/ Sat, 29 Jun 2019 11:00:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-06-29/ Programming 1991: A SERVER-SIDE WEB FRAMEWORK WRITTEN IN FORTH, github BECAUSE OF COURSE Articles Don’t take notes with a laptop TL;DR: This has been told again and again, but hand-writing lecture notes makes you remember them better (and makes your hands hurt a lot) Floppycasts! TL;DR: if satisfied with absolutely terrifying quality, you can fit about 22 minutes of MP3 speech on a floppy disk, or about 30 minutes of Opus (approximately as terrifying but in a different way) https://fsis.site/blog/2019-06-16/ Sun, 16 Jun 2019 21:15:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-06-16/ Programming Next level fork bomb WARNING: it’s a fork bomb, don’t paste it anywhere! TL;DR: a fork bomb with a couple extra layers of deviousness (via bici) Articles FunKey TL;DR: TL;DR: A keychain with a bunch of emulators, some buttons and an LCD screen; like a really tiny nintendo ds Stardock and Star Control creators settle lawsuits—with mead and honey TL;DR: The kind of news headline you read first thing in the morning and do a double take https://fsis.site/blog/2019-06-12/ Wed, 12 Jun 2019 10:11:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-06-12/ Programming On Dat:// TL;DR: Dat is a distributed web network, and this post talks about building a clone of an old (and dead) mixtape-sharing website muxtape with it, called duxtape (github). Suffice it to say, I am very interested. Articles You (probably) don’t need ReCAPTCHA TL;DR: (probably) yes I myself quite liked the proof-of-work captcha concept (i.e. “mine some hashes for me if you want to comment; if you want to spam a lot, it’s ok, just mine a lot of hashes”) https://fsis.site/blog/2019-06-08/ Sat, 08 Jun 2019 11:27:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-06-08/ Programming Horrifying PDF experiments e.g. breakout Articles How to Join a Social Network in 1998 TL;DR you mail them CSV of your friends in response Ancient Egyptian Bread (unrolled here) Paradigms and priors TL;DR how science works I found two identical packs of Skittles among 468 packs TL;DR why Can we all please stop using medium? https://fsis.site/blog/2019-04-14/ Sun, 14 Apr 2019 16:39:43 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-04-14/ Programming Sorting in Japanese is hard There are four Japanese women whose names you have to sort: Junko, Atsuko, Kiyoko, and Akiko. This does not seem difficult, until they each show you how they write their names in kanji: 淳子 (Junko) 淳子 (Atsuko) 淳子 (Kiyoko) 淳子 (Akiko) AMP for email is a terrible idea TL;DR: yes. Articles Israel’s Moon lander crashed, and that’s OK https://fsis.site/blog/2019-04-09/ Tue, 09 Apr 2019 12:00:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-04-09/ Programming Water is still wet. In other news, wordpress plugin ecosystem is still trash a ball of slimy writhing unspeakable horrors. one two hackernews discussion TL;DR: If you ever used anything from these “pipdig” guys on your wordpress or blogger site, please stop asap. I personally recommend switching to Hugo instead (do as I say, not as I do; you generally don’t need the complexity of Gatsby). https://fsis.site/blog/2019-03-31/ Sun, 31 Mar 2019 12:00:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-03-31/ Programming Exercises in Emulation: Xbox 360’s FMA Instruction Articles (quote) Algorithmic recommendations […] are failing users by encouraging them to take their interests to the farthest maximum: a you like coffee; have you tried cocaine? kind of effect. Are these features necessary? What Achilles should have said to the Tortoise Garfield phones beach mystery finally solved after 35 years Procrastination Sucks — So Here’s The “Eat That Frog” Way to Powerful Productivity https://fsis.site/blog/2019-03-17/ Sun, 17 Mar 2019 12:00:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-03-17/ Programming How Doom fire was done A short and to the point tutorial. (“Doom” here refers to PSX and N64 Doom ports) Articles Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email In fact, this is what finally inspired me to do this blog How to balance full-time work with creative projects TL;DR: Find a better job, don’t think you’ll be able to do a lot anyway https://fsis.site/blog/2019-03-10/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 20:00:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-03-10/ Programming Wave Function Collapse An algorihtm that generates bitmaps that are locally similar to the input bitmap. Can be used for e.g. texture or dungeon generation. NB: Has nothing quantum or wave-functiony in it. 3d City generator that uses it Articles Speaking of quantum theory, Quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself Turns out, we’d need some new theory to describe both microscopic and macroscopic events . https://fsis.site/blog/2019-03-03/ Sun, 03 Mar 2019 17:10:24 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-03-03/ Programming Why Don’t People Use Formal Methods (because they are normally not worth the investment) Articles ETS isn’t TLS and you should not use it We Need Chrome No More How Chickens Lost Their Penises Music Wooden Shjips - Back to Land (2013) Hard psychedelic rock, very psychedelic in fact. Highly recommended. Marxthrone - A Blaze in the Western Sky https://fsis.site/blog/2019-02-24/ Sun, 24 Feb 2019 23:44:00 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-02-24/ Programming C is Not a Low-level Language All programming languages are abstractions, in some way. Even simplistic ones, like C and x86 assembly, are now quite far from the bare bones of the hardware (at least, in the x86-world) – there’s just too many layers of intermediate translations and optimizations that the CPU does by itself. RISC architectures are better in that regard, as even x86 CPUs are RISC-like internally nowadays (or so they say), so at least it’s more transparent that way. https://fsis.site/blog/2019-02-19/ Tue, 19 Feb 2019 18:14:18 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-02-19/ In this post, I will try and gather some interesting stuff I found around the internets. Event sourcing is hard. I used to work on an large product which was based on event-sourcing, and can agree on many points made by the author. It was very fun, but also a lot of pain. I guess, eventually, when the right tooling will be sourced, it will be usable… (Apache Kafka/Zamza come to mind; then again, it were these exact things that made us consider event-sourcing in the first place) https://fsis.site/blog/2019-01-26_first/ Sat, 26 Jan 2019 13:06:30 +0000 https://fsis.site/blog/2019-01-26_first/ Hello and welcome to my personal space, where I will probably post random links for, like, two people to notice. I made it using gatsby.js, and the experience was OK. In retrospect I think I should’ve used some better starter, and not try and bend the default one to my will. Oh well. This whole thing seems to be working, so yay. Here’s a list of things that I still have to do at some point: