enthdegree

From the circles I am exposed to Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations are not seen as the most natural ones (although they are the only ones I have read because of the cool abstract paperback covers). I have heard they miss anecdotes and humor in favor of word accuracy. Characters are always "twisting their mouth" and similar. I'm looking forward to re-reading Demons in some other translation. He might have been well served by Garnett.

I love my X3. I glued its magnetic folio to the back of my Apple Wallet. It turned out perfectly, for me. Pictures below. I've read The Odyssey and several other shorter books on it and have yet to recharge it.

- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFaPCStWYAAOj6f?format=jpg&name=...

- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFaPCO8WIAASMEn?format=jpg&name=...

- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFaPCPEXgAE3O4z?format=jpg&name=...

"X are Y but Z is real." Closed tab.

I'm fatigued by this hyperbole and profanity, especially when written by an LLM. There is too much of this. Human-written or not it makes it very difficult for me to engage with. The sentiment is bad. Is building this better than building nothing?

Just because this is how things are does not it's how they should be. I'm very tired.

Your point number 3 is very irritating to read.

Does anyone have any idea what RZ67 lens was used? People have found the exact hill and from this one might be able to figure out from what perspective it was captured, thus which focal length it was shot at. I haven't found anyone who has done this, only vague, unconvincing speculation. Maybe confounders like fact that it is now covered by a vineyard and erosion long since changed the shape of the hillsides makes this impossible.

People with low social literacy need to hear more that they have low social literacy. Bad behavior is objectively bad, and just because some people have exuses doesn't make their behavior less bad.

They're coming for that stuff next

No materials on the escalator

Good Luck Babe by Chappell Roan has a chorus that is 1 bpm slower than the verse!

The details in this comment are messed up and shouldn't be taken as authoritative.

- Getting the device's BL1/BROM into download mode (where it waits for an upload of a Preloader/BL2 from outside), for these devices itself does not involve exploits. Kamakiri is an exploit in the upload process that gives an execution point at that stage.

- The BROM on Kobos (at least the old ones, P365's) don't have security enabled as far as I know. (Unless somehow they are lying to us when we ask, which there is no evidence of). They only do some integrity checks (header magic #s, checksums).

- Security on Kobos happens down the chain, starting at the Little Kernel apparently jumped to from the Preloader. I am still learning about the Clara BW's boot process.

mtkclient does not seem to correctly interpret the usb output of the device past some part of the early boot process. Really, any of those messages formatted by mtkclient are unfaithful to the intended meaning. So yes maybe it is "just a checksum step" or maybe something else entirely. Last year I collected some UART logs on the device during bootup in a zip here:

https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient/issues/1289

As far as I know, yes, it's possible. No SELinux. Kernel is a branch from 4.9.something pretty far off mainline with a few proprietary binary blob modules. As far as I know the real impediment here is lack of demand.

The latest Kobos use MediaTek SoCs with locked bootloaders. The Kobo Clara BW's MT8113, for example. As far as I know, one of the early bootloaders it, BL1, refuses to execute the next bootloader (BL2) unless its signature is valid. We can get the device into a mode where BL1 waits for upload of a BL2 via USB using an exploit called Kamakiri, but in public there is neither an exploit to get BL1 to boot an arbitrary BL2, nor an authorized BL2 image to upload. See here: https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient/issues/1332

Kobo devices have root exposed but don't let users boot their own kernels (and the kernel they ship was not compiled with kexec either).

I really don't know the reason so many devices these days don't have an unlock method. It seems predatory. Who knows where in the chain this happens... maybe it's Kobo, or maybe MediaTek won't sell you their SoCs for mass-market devices unless you lock them.

Another thing called nook? Another browser? Bad, presumptuous name. How many months will this project last?

“What is this?” I asked. “It looks like hair.” Marshall chuckled. “That’s them — the cable bacteria,” he said. “If you watch closely, you’ll see them twitching.” I stared harder. The filaments shifted.

This schmaltzy student-teacher roleplay immersion-journalism feels false and infantilizing to me. It makes me mistrustful of the text and I avoid reading essays written like it. The facts are embedded in an artificial adventure narrative as one feeds a dog a pill by hiding it in peanut butter. Why? Would the non-sensationalized, plainly framed information content be too un-stimulating for readers? Are false narratives hidden inside?

Obama chuckled. "You mean the Chaos Emeralds?"

Any pointers?

I like seeing pictures taken by my friends. I like discussing those pictures with them. Conversely I also like creating and curating my own pictures to share with like-minded friends. It is prosocial all around.

The article is appalling. To me it more effectively conveys his character than his ideas. Maybe for some people it really is hard to find a balance.

Reminds me of the old The Oatmeal infographics. Very epic mustache

Great post, "Wiener" is misspelled a few times.

I would love to be able to use GNURadio for something, I've just never found flow diagrams to be more expressive than writing procedural instructions over whatever SDR API. GNURadio's flow diagrams introduce a lot of hidden complexity that is difficult to observe and understand. For example, every arrow you draw represents a buffer and so for all but the simplest graphs this will quickly lead to difficult-to-interrogate sample over/underruns. There are workarounds for fine grained control over these buffers but they cannot be called simple (like message passing via tagged samples and flow control blocks).

They won't do anything. Every time this comes up I remember this shocking email they sent: https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/hsn7kx/onyx_usin...

In the title, how does "unique" contradict "strange?"

Yes it’s running in a terminal. GUI emacs would be nice because it can show images and rich text. People here have probably read things like this https://blog.aaronbieber.com/2016/12/29/don-t-use-terminal-e... (though the tramp criticism doesn’t apply here)

It would require further compiling an X server or Wayland, the Lucid GUI toolkit, freetype and fontconfig, a bunch of image libraries and maybe more stuff I don’t know about, plus of course all their dependencies.

It would likely take some effort to get X or Wayland to refresh the screen responsively, possibly using xdamage or Wayland protocol stuff to intelligently ask fbink to do limited refreshes.

The keyboard and touchscreen might be configurable but I haven’t done it. If it turns out to not work out of the box another option besides fighting drivers would be to be translate the event devices in /dev/input into virtual devices like efbpad kbreader does.

GUI emacs seems doable and requires, in my estimation, about “this project” again more work. The issues with the terminal version should probably be resolved before continuing. I’m unsure how much less responsive it will be than the terminal one.

Very interesting. What camera/lens/lightbox did you use and around what DPI you achieve?

Digitizing film seems to be a perennial pain point. As far as I know there is no mostly-automated option to scan multiple film formats at high resolution besides paying someone with very expensive equipment to do it for you. The obsolete equipment like those models you mentioned involves a lot of fastidious labor per-frame and is generally pretty awful.

Modern equipment has similar warts. Flatbed scanners are bad film imagers for a number of reasons, a few which you already wrote. There's a huge volume of new products coming out for scanning right now (film holders, copy stands, light panels, etc) but these setups are very inconvenient to set up or, to be charitable, demand practice and perfect technique. There's always people ready to insist they have an easy convenient time setting up their SLR scanners and capturing 1000 rolls at 9999 DPI in 2 minutes. I don't share their experience.

During the pandemic I tried to proof-of-concept a path forward without any real success:

- The first attempt involved modifying a Plustek scanner to take medium format. This ended up taking a ton of work for each medium format frame (4 captures for each of the 4 quadrants, and each of those is already slow for a single 35mm frame). Stitching these captures is tedious and flaky for images that don't have obvious sharp features.

- The other involved rigging the objective of a Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II on a Raspberry Pi HQ camera onto an Ender printhead to raster over the film with a light table. This could have worked but it had many mechanical problems I am not cut out to solve (lens mount, camera-to-film-plane alignment)

Leaving aside designing a proper optical path there are 2 killer problems:

- the problem of mechanically manipulating the negative and keeping it in focus

- the problem of stitching together partial captures with minimal human intervention

A few people seem to be working on open source backlit line-scanners but as far as I know no central path forward has emerged. I hope someone figures it out.

Pemulis’ absolutely worthless and wrong but also completely self-assured descriptions of calculus are part of his character

The author on why Foobar2000 is not open source: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,31222.msg270982.html#...

I think the writer's punchline is implied but I'm not plugged in enough to make the connection.

Microsoft's monopoly of browsers in the 90s = Apple's [?]

What goes in the box?

Edit: Smartphones. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-apple...

The author has built the following encoder:

- A genie hands the encoder the type of an iid source sequence (the function N here: [1])

- The encoder produces a representation of the source with fewer bits than what would be possible using a Shannon-efficient encoder that didn't know the type.

- You also need to know the type to decode.

The reduction in bits from Shannon's theorem is explained by the genie revealing this extra information that reduced the input sequence's entropy (also causing it to become non-iid). The collection of letter-typical sequences of specific type is indeed often going to be smaller than (entropy-rate)^(blocklength), and that is what we are seeing here. This is where the author's explanation starts to go astray:

The Shannon limit uses Stirling's approximation which is an asymptotic approximation for factorials and as such the approximation is too large for small values and becomes more accurate as the factorial size (i.e. message length and symbol count) approaches infinity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typical_set#Strongly_typical_s...

I would recommend the author read any information theory textbook, starting at the latest, at the part that covers Asymptotic Equipartition Properties. This is the crucial definition that will make the source coding theorem concrete, in my opinion.