ogurechny

It depends on applications and users (home, mobile, corporate). Some anecdotal evidence suggests that 2/3rds of user pairs can't connect without a relay server with all the tricks deployed (NAT traversal, IPv6 when available, client side port guessing for certain predictable NAT implementations), in other case it is 9 out of 10, or almost everyone. However, if you and your friend can't connect, what are the benefits of knowing that 100 other users succeeded?

That's why WebRTC supposes that the service provides some TURN relays from the start, and any commercial application comes with its own relays or uses third party infrastructure. That's why when you see any mention of “peer-to-peer” in this context, it actually means “which percent of monthly traffic on average we can offload”.

Notice that those are stats for unique data transmissions between one user and another. When data is not unique (same live video segments to many users), we can have one-to-many sharing, and the percentage of offloaded data can grow much more. Candidate selection for reliable seeding role is non-trivial, though, and it might only make sense when the swarms are big enough to contain enough peers that accept incoming connections.

As other said, quite a lot of those services exist. When they don't provide TURN servers, they have questionable utility (but can be used in the same local network). When the author does host a server for others, you obviously don't want to shove gigabytes of data into it (and the safe bandwidth limit is usually too slow for that anyway). Network connections do not seem to be the main problem, writing the client code properly, and in a way compatible with multiple browsers and unexpected events does.

If you have a non-recurrent need to transfer some data, and no server at hand, Syncthing volunteer-run relays seem to have some capacity available.

This is a repost of a repost (of another repost in certain cases). JPEG resizing and quality strongly suggests it for some images.

You can visit the (linked but not annotated) blog post to get to the original sources.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190308120957/http://blog.prese...

Most of them come from press tours for bloggers that were really fashionable 15 years ago.

Scrolling through the archives of, say, Lana Sator blog on your own would be a much better experience.

Things that need to be taught need to be taught. Reading, writing, and counting can also be kept for later. Misanthropic heralds could even say that many strata of modern society don't really need literacy, and should just be given smartphones with cameras. “Later” easily turns to “never”.

A student should be given the best examples of human art, not some watered down versions, otherwise there is a chance that people will never try to reach that level. A lot of them won't (and reading some books never was a guaranteed path to a good life anyway), but by deciding what is “good enough for the common person” you artificially limit their world on that path (thankfully, there are other paths).

Whether they realise it or not, people are shaped by their environment. A book that you don't like can still point that certain questions and ways of thinking exist. Its place can easily be taken by seemingly “more appropriate” pop cultural or pop psychological works that, unfortunately, don't reach that level in order to be as “accessible” as possible.

The problem here is the existence of “required reading” lists, and mass education in general. That institute is completely flawed, bureaucratised production process of “studying”, and only the heroic actions of individuals who have to fight it from the inside make it less dumb. A good teacher can teach why the good book is good, but where to find so many of them?

See, for example,

https://www.olgasedakova.com/Moralia/280

https://www.olgasedakova.com/ecclesia/2174

(in Russian)

https://www.olgasedakova.com/eng/Moralia/269

https://www.olgasedakova.com/eng/Moralia/264

(in English, excerpt)

International politics are fake. There is a gentleman's agreement that secret services can kill “traitors” and “enemies” anywhere as long as no one objects (or the objecting country is not important enough anyway). The hirelings get the fake documents that are perfectly known to the officials to be the token of non-diplomatic immunity, and also allow them to pretend they were once again fooled by the bad foreign state. In Skripal case, killers spent the day before waiting for some agents to appear at the location to tell them to go sightseeing somewhere else. Nothing happened = UK was OK with what they were doing. Only after the fact British officials started to create a scene, and what they were worried about most was the fact that Russian officials have sold the “special” passports to way too many “irrelevant” thugs and oligarchs who wanted to be untouchable when travelling abroad (hence the leak of the existence of those passports, and silent confirmation that they were respected by so-called free and lawful countries).

You need to understand that those “above” are dumb bureaucrats playing dumb bureaucratic games. This is how societal selection works in current historical period.

As for this case, Kadyrov (or his inner circle) is known to be emo about any critic, and has been successfully killing the Chechen refugees in Europe for decades now. Ukrainians also seem to operate freely, which is a bit ironic when you remember that Ukrainian agents were taught in the same secret military schools Russian agents graduated from, and that Ukrainian oligarchs have mansions on Côte d'Azur and similar places right next to mansions of Russian oligarchs. I sometimes worry about their travel logistics in such complex times. Poor creatures!

Some people use My Little Pony characters as avatars, some use history books characters and propaganda poster characters. It means nothing in itself, people rarely stick to what they preach.

If you think that dumb nostalgia about “good old times” and complete ignorance/acceptance of any murders if they are considered state-sanctioned is somehow different in your own country (any country at any time), you must come to conclusion that some people inherently have lesser “quality” than others based on papers that they are given at birth by this or that organisation calling itself a state. Problematic, as they say.

You look like you are completely unaware of the wave of big and small early nineties games that used flat shaded 3D renders for art, sprites, and full motion video segments. Unlike fully textured polygons, they could be rasterised quickly on older or entry level Silicon Graphics workstations (or cheaper alternatives, but with more sweat). It was one of the distinctive styles of that era.

Step 0 is missing: having a great taste. One look at the video example is enough to figure out that the author keeps things in balance and in style. Explanations of why pixel grid mismatch looks wrong, or why mismatch between texture density and geometric complexity (in both ways) looks horrible, or why smoothing does not blend with pixel art are then made in retrospect.

Some details are a bit too cool for 1993, though, and assume high frame rate (won't work that well at low fps). Smooth weapon animations with a lot of frames, tiny per-pixel effects on bullet holes and flash sprites, smooth movement and object position calculations that use precise math instead of fast rough estimates resemble Chasm: The Rift or Quake (the concept of idle animations, e. g. objects moving in the starting view of difficulty selection room, assumes that there is some performance to waste on details that make the world less empty).

There is a dozen of existing Quake ports ready to run the moment you feed them the game files, and you recommend a version re-implemented on top of Xash3D, which is a GoldSrc-compatible engine. Why?

Next step is implementing 2D sprite engine. Then 3d sprite engine. Then OpenGL commands. Then getting Crysis to run on the IBM PC.

Laws do nothing without people who believe in them (just like they believe any other idol), or profit from them, or make an excuse that they are getting paid to enforce them, therefore “it is OK”.

People should be pre-conditioned to lose their marbles at the mere idea of someone being naked, and rush to the saviours in power as a consequence. It is not universal, there are many places where people are not trained by hyper-sexualised culture to treat children as sexual objects first and foremost (of course, it's always because of some “other” maniacs “everywhere”). That does not mean that those places are “better” or “safer”, just not that crazy.

In simple terms, viewers taught how to feel by the Jerry Springer Show (and by that I mean all “respectable” globalised media together, the difference is superficial) put on the cork hats, and dictate how everyone else should act. All while being 100% sure they are “progressive”, unlike those “savages”.

Obviously, certain people really like that they can keep any international hosting company, or business in general, on a leash, and they like it to be that way forever, so it's essential that you keep supporting the hypocrisy.

People always retroactively justify anything they see as convenient and uncontroversial, stick to “everyone's opinion” (which does not exist, and is the product of their own projections).

One needs education to explain that, for example, hentai manga has little to do with realism, that character drawing styles have a long history that is only partially intertwined with lolicon wave started in the early 1980s (and that they even cross-pollinated with female-oriented manga along the way), or that the strict indecency ban (again, thanks to US) had created it in the first place (so little girls were actually used to portray proverbial 900 year old vampiresses because you could not draw those vampiresses that way).

Then we can see that any kind of image, even highly realistic, even photographs, is a deliberate set of choices made by the author, not a 1:1 copy of of “reality”. Then we can switch to the viewer side, and study how the contents of people's head define what they see, and how they react.

Here's a party trick. Japanese entertainment industry still produces a significant amount of media with young women in bikini. Weekly Young Magazine (one of the biggest manga periodicals) keeps placing idols on the front cover to this day. Ask someone about it, and listen to the expected comments about “questionable”, “seedy”, and “exploitative” nature of those (which are obviously true to a large extent). Then compare that to Western media products, global pop stars and such, and enjoy the excuses about it being completely different, “suitable for the whole family”, and “playing by the rules”.

Disapproval is only the first step. After that you can start looking the other way in certain cases. Not always in exchange for the money, just for public reverence and praise, i. e. the symbols of power.

You seem to suppose that those businesses are really independent, only focus on goals they advertise, and exist in a vacuum. I can't even imagine how many “services” they offer to governments to keep their market shares.

The non-government organisations involved in those cases are either proxies that always support local politicians, or have been deliberately created to create opaque decision making source that is outside of legal or public scrutiny. As always, the ones who decide morals for the masses are the ones you can not even criticise. Unfortunately, even if you don't have such activist group, there is always a queue of well-intentioned citizens full of dreams of getting in bed with any politician, and having their 15 minutes of fame.

So one thing is to show who is the boss. Just as a slave owner who randomly kills a couple of slaves just to make others tremble in fear, US reminds others who sets the rules of international trade. The pretext is not that important.

Another is to keep public in check. A citizen who says “Sonic and Mario BDSM Chamber game? Wow, so unbelievable”, and shrugs it off is a bad citizen. Good citizens must react as prescribed to any real or imagined horror stories, be attracted to sexual content in media (or outraged by it, which is the same thing), and always fear the dangers that exist “outside”. The more they do that, the more they ignore the real world around them, and rely on imaginary protections the system and its members provide.

As political entertainers are interested in keeping the status quo that benefits all of them, they always choose the lowest common denominator views on such topics. It does not matter what you really think about it, it matters that you do the trick when the command is given: gasp with others, murmur with others, shake your head with others, decide that it must be stopped by existing powers with others (and therefore let them decide for you).

PornHub was famously not immune to the same thing. Porn industry attacked free streaming sites to remove everything that was not actively copyrighted, and directly provided by industry. It probably cost them a lot to organise that through politicians, journalists, activists — and payment processors. Ironically, the rhetoric you might call religious was used to help porn business.

Given that general public uses social network services for electronic messaging today, and those don't even pretend they want to be interoperable, we've got parasites of a totally different class on top of the Internet infrastructure.

An article from Microsoft Systems Journal in 1993 ends with a bunch of different electronic mail addresses:

https://jacobfilipp.com/MSJ/1993-vol8/qawindows.pdf

By 1995, the “Internet” e-mail address was the only remaining one.

Before Windows Internals book we all know (called Inside Windows NT in its first editions), there was Windows Internals and other books and articles by Matt Pietrek. It starts from disassembly of WIN.COM studying the insides of DOS to figure out under which more or less common version of MS-DOS Windows is being run.

Other well known anecdotes and pieces:

https://jacobfilipp.com/msj-index/

https://web.archive.org/web/20240318233231/https://bytepoint...

Someone else was targeting it long before the Chinese.

It is a typical solution from the 90s, first steps of interactivity after hand-written HTML pages served by Apache. POST request is handled by some Perl script that rewrites the HTML page, then redirects to it or directly sends it as a reply. See the most basic frame-based chats (no Javascript, no nothing).

It only handles massive traffic if reads of those static pages are frequent, and updates are rare. When thousands of users are posting, you have to either block everyone on each write, or subdivide the required synchronisation between boards. Also, the regenerated pages might be used just a couple of times before the next rewrite happens (or not viewed at all, like far away board pages, but you still have rewrite all involved pages as a batch), and not much caching happens. In addition to that, each short comment causes multiple full long pages to be regenerated, and stored on disk. You basically get a very ineffective database with very ineffective primitives.

So usually every image board owner starts with decoupling of message posting and page updates to only regenerate pages once in a while, and process multiple edits at once, then some things stop working, as they assume each state change happens in full in multiple places, then they try to rewrite everything or switch to a real database engine.

Fidget spinners also sell.

The moral of the story seems to be missing.

This kind of visualisation is an arbitrary artistic choice, not just a function of inputs. A can of spray paint is a tool that needs to be mastered, and it's different from, say, oil paints and brush. LED strip is just another tool. You need to figure out first which movements, pulses, patterns it can produce, and what “looks good”. Those would be the strokes.

The same happens on the other side. Choosing how to interpret sound is also an artistic choice. Everyone does the audio spectrum because everyone has seen the audio spectrum, and considers it a “natural” projection to some one-dimensional form. It only seems “natural” because of all of the graphs you've seen in textbooks. The need to use log scale or smoothing when real audio is not a pure set of harmonics is how “nature” has to smuggle itself back into the abstract reasoning. Beats work for a reason: what we call “modern music” is defined by its constant use of rhythm. When you have a different kind of sound, you need to process it differently.

So the goal is to match something you hear in the audio with something nice that the LED strip does. Which is also an arbitrary artistic choice, and can only be judged as a whole. There is no rule that tone has to match specific position or specific colour. Also, people rarely look at LED strips on their own. Just like film crews, you need to take ambient environment into account, and sometimes increase contrast with light, sometimes blend everything together. Some kind of compressor/expander for dynamic range is probably needed for different environments.

Often the thing that reflects the light is more important. I'd even say that the best way to increase the complexity of that low resolution source is to combine it with some complex object instead of using just the straight line. A Christmas tree should come to mind as an example.

It is wrong to think that the goal of such projects is to figure out a perfect simple process that turns one array of values into another. Their goal is to make people feel something.

CVE-2010-2568, CVE-2015-0096, CVE-2017-8464, CVE-2026-21510... OLE/COM mess from the early '90s and internal assumption that only Microsoft code ever touches the serialised data or calls certain object methods provided some people job security for decades.

Here's another take: The idea that you can only choose between one set of desperate spying and killing fools trying to create a world where they could be totally invincible (with a swarm of lesser demons trying to make a fortune serving them) and another set of desperate spying and killing fools trying to create a world where they could be totally invincible (with a swarm of lesser demons trying to make a fortune serving them) is stupid.

Should be phrased as “Despite the ham-fisted bans, overheating DPI boxes, and propaganda (from both sides, and it is not always clear who is better at scaremongering), a lot of people learned to not give a fuck”.

Like, obviously, Instagram has been blocked for a long time, and, obviously, everyone who is obsessed with that social network keeps using it, including the rich kids of the top crooks (a.k.a. “the elites”) who can't miss a chance to drool over some dress they wore on a private concert of a Western pop star in Dubai (suspiciously never announced in media), and, obviously, the censors are making a fuss about it for the hundredth time, promising to fine anyone who does business there into oblivion to make users move to the competing local services that have been lobbying that under pretext of politically correct patriotic alignment.

I would advise everyone to familiarise yourself with tools like zapret. You'll need them sooner than you think.

I think you both are arguing about how to fight a bear with your bare hands. To win in that, you simply need to not fight with a bear.

Let's say someone made an expansion board with a cool feature: there are 5 documented I/O addresses, but accessing any other address fries the stored firmware. What would you do? No, not leaving a lot of comments in code in CAPS LOCK. No, not printing the correct hexadecimal values in red to put the message on the wall. You make a driver that only allows access to the correct addresses, and configure the rest of the system to make sure that it can only work through that driver.

Let's say there's a loading bay at the chemical plant with multiple flanges. If strong acid from the tanker is pumped into the main acid tank, everything is fine. If it is pumped into any other tank, the whole plant may explode and burn. What should be done? No, not promising that drivers will be fired, then shot by the firing squad if they make a mistake. Each connection is independently locked, and the driver only gets a single matching key.

You have wonderful programmable devices that allow you to solve non-standard problems with non-standard tools. What should be done is making a wrapper for dd that just does not allow you to do anything you don't want to happen. Even the most basic script with checks and confirmation is enough.

I've been using an old Symbian phone with the same Class Not-That-Good SD card bought back then. In the early 2010s, I copied a lot of MP3 files and ebooks there, and used the camera to take photos occasionally. Then it was no longer used for music and other needs, and the files just rested there. After about 10 years, I've decided to play some music on the phone, and these tracks had a lot of skips and rattle. Images copied from the card showed a lot of damage, too. So when someone on the internet posts how SD cards are a cheap and compact long term storage, I am not impressed. You probably need to refresh all previously stored data with each monthly backup.

It should be mentioned that the phone board often gets warm during operation or battery charging, and the temperature is stated an important harmful factor in a different comment.

So if you have some old files on an old device, and assume that they are still there because their records in the file system still look fine, you might be surprised.

Ahem.

https://ilyabirman.net/typography-layout/

It has been available for 20 years. To use combining characters (and client-side font layout and rendering), type the letter, then one of available dead keys two times (e. g. `a, AltGr+Shift+6, AltGr+Shift+6` gives â). To get the single code point (if it's available), type modifier once, then the letter (e. g. `AltGr+Shift+6, a` gives â). I've been touch typing em dashes for years, and can't imagine it any other way.

It seems that corresponding Russian installers are more up to date. You can gently nag the author to update the English version, or just take the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator, and do it your way. Be aware that certain silly applications use hard-coded keyboard shortcut handlers that bypass the system, and therefore misbehave if system layout is anything else but default US English. Windows also sometimes likes to resurrect the deleted default layout until the last process that used it exits, or something like that.

It has been said multiple times that the absence of proper typography on personal computer keyboards is just laziness, ignorance, and lack of leadership. There are no technical reasons for that — just look at keyboards for European languages.

But covers also lie. They are mass-uploaded to various services by the similar automated matching systems with cheap human agents used for decision making. Everyone just grabs and re-uploads the existing images from the image search results if they are “similar enough”. Because if it works for instant noodles, it works for books, too. Many publishers don't even bother to provide anything but a single image that is cut from the source file for the printed cover, which might be quite different from the way the book really looks.

For my language, I know I can only rely on just a couple of shops that make a photo of an actual book under regular lights for catalogues and announcements as a matter of principle. Others just add the same image file everyone else used. For the older books that had multiple revisions, it's still strictly manual interaction with second-hand book sites and old listings to figure out the exact version.

On the other hand, most services here do care about providing table of contents, even if its crowd-sourced phone snapshots of the page. International market is insane in that regard. Not only sellers on Amazon and the like ignore them (sure, they were never going to do so much manual work for all the uploaded items anyway), the publishers don't even mention what's inside on their official pages. “Selected stories. New translation by X”. Are those the same stories that were published 5 or 10 years ago under a different name or cover? Has X translated a new set of stories and (partially) refreshed the collection? Both of these things happen. It is ironic that I need to download the full scan from the pirate library to find out what is available in print. Unless, of course, some anonymous worker in some library hasn't diligently typed the whole list of works into the description, hooray for those.

Anyone who decided to make a catalogue for any decent enough library found that out on the first day.

(By “decent enough” I mean breadth. If you are strictly collecting some genre products from a small number of commercial publishers, you might be in the walled garden where everything just works.)

SBNs were introduced when, in addition to existing mass production, mass accounting and storage management for each item became possible (with computers). Outside of the centrally controlled environments they don't work well, or mean much. Sure, national authorities make enough rules about having proper ISBNs, but they do get ignored.

There are small university/gallery/collective publications that have bigger print runs than “official” books on some specific topic. There are books that are uniquely made or uniquely altered, and therefore can't share the identifier with another item. Most common example is getting an autograph — you probably want to know precisely where you've put the copy of Bible signed by the author, not just any other Bible that looks the same. Some people oppose ISBNs for political reasons, and either ignore them, or invent bogus numbers.

Then there's International aspect. Soviet Union, for example, did not use ISBNs until the very last of its years. There are still many books printed there — including complete works every scholar needs to reference — that never had any ISBNs.

Some works have been published for that last time a century ago. Some of them might had been immensely popular back in the days, but now they are forgotten. Others have been re-printed, but you've managed to get the first printed edition, a small book of then-unknown author. Those also won't have ISBNs.

So the idea itself that any book must be an interchangeable product from the batch in which each item has the same effect, and therefore can have the same identifier, is a bit narrow.

Obviously, professional librarians could instantly tell you that ISBN is merely one of the search markers, and is not the way the inventory is kept.

This is actually both.

It's not a big secret to journalists that such stories are just another kind of entertainment that never fails to attract the public. Certain people constantly work in that genre.

Readers want to be assured that something is excluded. I visit the good sunny side of the internet, and horrors are on some “darknet”. I live in the better part of the town, and horrors happen in bad districts. Me and my friends are “normal people”, never “victims”. Wars are far away. I am not responsible for anything.

Certain people's careers are made in such pandering.

So they tell a thrilling detective story, and at the same time publicly shame Facebook to make people think that more control over “important services” and more backdoors are needed. Only for serious cases, of course. You wouldn't want to support those people, would you? Good. Now show us you licence number for internet usage.

Lies upon lies upon lies.

Smaller, 6-bit code pages existed before and after that. They did not even have space for upper and lower case letters, but had control characters. Those codes directly moved the paper, switched to next punch card or cut the punched tape on the receiving end, so you would want them if you ever had to send more than a single line of text (or a block of data), which most users did.

Even smaller 5-bit Baudot code had already had special characters to shift between two sets and discard the previous character. Murray code, used for typewriter-based devices, introduced CR and LF, so they were quite frequently needed in way more than few years.