sneela

The good ol' Ohnosecond:

An "ohnosecond" is the second after one makes a terrible mistake, such as deleting the wrong file or sending a text message to the wrong person, where the person in question can do nothing but say "oh no". The term is believed to originate from Elizabeth Powell Crowe's 1993 novel, The Electronic Traveler.

Reminds me (and probably a lot of devs) of a time when I deployed something breaking to production many years ago :), of course I didn't know it would break production beforehand. Recently, I accidentally deleted my entire shell history which caused me quite a bit of slowdown for some time. I'm quite used to modifying complicated commands with Ctrl+R and fzf; the deletion of my shell was truly horrifying.

Tom Scott, as usual, has a great video about the onosecond (sic):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6NJkWbM1xk

Also interesting is this interactive viewer of cloud seeding live in the US: https://chemtrail.app/, although this website seems to be vibe-coded and heavily against cloud seeding: "How can I help stop cloud seeding in my area?" from the FAQs.

This is actually very, very interesting... and some what genius. In the past, I've felt the urge to buy _something_ for that dopamine hit, even if I didn't really need anything.

I've impulsed bought books before (most I do not regret) and some vinyl records (none I regret). I don't impulse buy food though (as the article discusses) - I regret ordering food most of the time as I feel unhealthy afterwards.

This concept may very much be in line what I need for other impulse purchases. Imagine a dopamine-hit amazon-clone which lets you browse, compare, and order the current obsession-of-the-week - saving your bank account in the long run. I may just try making this.

Also covered by Tech Radar (2025) -- You need to be careful when buying new vinyl – the digital music loudness war can mean they sound worse than second-hand records: https://www.techradar.com/audio/turntables/you-need-to-be-ca...

Here's how it works in our group. The professor gives papers to the PhD students or PostDocs, who read the paper completely. I regularly 'sub-review', as it is called, meticulously looking for issues. I have heard that there are professors who review entire papers in 2-3 hours, since they have a lot (10+) of papers per conference to review without any compensation while they have their own research, teaching, and funding to juggle.

It's not a pretty system sometimes.

Edited to add: Conference's also require declaring that there was someone who sub-reviewed the paper. The professor / PI mentions the PhD student's name in the review form of the paper. Of course, the professor also double-checks all the sub-reviews

Which is why, I believe, their logo is a duck :D

Uhhh, I don't think Ente is Norwegian? Yeah, they have an office in Norway, but I remember them starting from India --- Ente means 'mine' in Malayalam, a language spoken in Kerala, South India.

https://only-eu.eu/en/categories/foto-backup/ente-photos/

Also, their LinkedIn page shows that their HQ is Dover, Delaware, USA: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ente-com/about/

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ente-technologies

Which is interesting.

At a talk right now (NDSS'26), the speaker says it's been made live yesterday: https://www.ll.mit.edu/r-d/projects/translating-all-c-rust-t...

And that's what exactly confused me :)

With my mnemonic, I say low *number = blur

I should have been more specific

I recently bought a film camera (Minolta X-700) and I wasted a whole roll because I inverted the aperture (i.e, 2 = sharp, 32 = blur)...

I'm interested to see how the roll turns out - gave it for development the other day, had a good laugh with the employees though.

I now have a mnemonic for it: Blor - a (somewhat) portmanteau of Blur and low. So low aperture = blur.

Edit for clarification: I mean low number (2 vs 32) = blur

For just over five weeks, from February 7 to March 14, visitors will be allowed to climb the towering 20-foot scaffold inside the castle’s Sala delle Asse to view conservators at work on Leonardo’s mural, after which it will be sealed off again for another 18 months, making this limited public access a rare opportunity to see it up close mid-restoration.

From the last sentence - it's a chance to see it mid-restoration. But will it be publicly accessible after 18 months?

If you want to look at the code, it's available on github.

Why not tvc-hub :P

Jokes aside, great write up!

But also

violating the 24h promise on their own page

Their page reports: Vulnerability reports will always be responded to as fast as possible - usually within 24 hours.

That's not a promise. I agree regarding the sentiment: "Discord moved to a private, invite-only bounty"... and "refuse to hand over my ID".

Authors article:

How to Know if Someone is Invisible on Discord (WebSocket API Leak)

https://xmrcat.org/discord-invisibility-bypass

Ah, it initially appeared that the capital I and the lowercase L have identical-looking glyphs. But scrolling down, I see the ss02 and tnum features add noticeable glyphs. Looks like a nice typeface.

As much as I appreciate the tiny serif for lowercase L and numeral 1 to differentiate l I and 1, I am not the biggest fan of the capital I glyph without the horizontal serifs. It's my biggest design gripe with most sans-serif fonts as it makes it FRUSTRATINGLY difficult to differentiate when looking at words by themselves.

Is that lota or Iota? Is that iodestone or lodestone? Both real examples where I fumbled reading them -- once in front of a class :)

This is why my favorite sans-serif typeface has been (and will always be) IBM Plex Sans [1]. It's an open font [2]. I have all my laptops and desktops set to using the IBM Plex typefaces, including browser overrides. If only there were a way to do it system-wide on my Android phone...

[1] https://www.ibm.com/plex/

[2] https://github.com/IBM/plex/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

Preview: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans?preview.text...

I agree with other comments that this research treads a fine, unethical line. Did the authors responsibly disclose this, as is often done in the security research community? I cannot find any mention of it in the paper. The researchers seem to be involved in security-related research (first author is doing a PhD, last author holds a PhD).

At least arxiv could have run the cleaner [1] before the print of this pre-print (lol). If there was no disclosure, then I think this pre-print becomes unethical to put up.

leading to the identification of nearly 1,200 images containing sensitive metadata. The types of data represented vary significantly. While device information (e.g., the camera used) or software details (such as the exact version of Photoshop) may already raise concerns, in over 600 cases the metadata contained GPS coordinates, potentially revealing the precise location where a photo was taken. In some instances, this could expose a researcher’s home address (when tied to a profile picture) or the location of research facilities (when images capture experimental equipment)

Oof, that's not too great.

[1] https://github.com/google-research/arxiv-latex-cleaner

This is a wonderful write-up and a very enjoyable read. Although my knowledge about systems programming on ARM is limited, I know that it isn't easy to read hardware-based time counters; at the very least, it's not as simple as the x86 rdtsc [1]. This is probably why the author writes:

This code is more complicated than what I expected to see. I was thinking it would just be a simple register read. Instead, it has to write a 1 to the register, and then delay for a while, and then read back the same register. There was also a very noticeable FIXME in the comment for the function, which definitely raised a red flag in my mind.

Regardless, this was a very nice read and I'm glad they got down to the issue and the problem fixed.

[1] https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/rdtsc.

Are you talking about Shar?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shar_(file_format)

This was in snapshots for more than 2 months, and only spotted one other program depending on the behaviour (and that test program did not observe that it was therefore depending in incorrect behaviour!!)

Fascinating. I wonder what that program is, and why it depends on the NUL character.

Every 20 hours in South Africa a rhino dies for its horn.

I didn't know this statistic before - this is disheartening.

Previous discussion from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29269584

Zooming out, panning around, and seeing the milky is... jaw dropping in a way. I know it's silly because we've seen SO many photos of the universe, but I still get the goosebumps every time I think about it. And the detail too! You can really zoom in.

I tried to look for the moon, but it looks like it's not possible: https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rwynmt/could_th...

If you host your own instance:

SearXNG protects the privacy of its users in multiple ways regardless of the type of the instance (private, public). Removal of private data from search requests comes in three forms:

1. removal of private data from requests going to search services

2. not forwarding anything from a third party services through search services (e.g. advertisement)

3. removal of private data from requests going to the result pages

From: https://docs.searxng.org/own-instance.html#how-does-searxng-...

The docs mention a caveat below at "What are the consequences of using public instances?":

If someone uses a public instance, they have to trust the administrator of that instance. This means that the user of the public instance does not know whether their requests are logged, aggregated and sent or sold to a third party.

Looks like it's a firefox thing. I tested in Ungoogled Chromium and it works fine for me too.

It's incredibly annoying when this isn't taken care of. Alt + Left Arrow becomes impossible to use and I have to resort to using my mouse.

Don't Microsoft's support pages [1] do this as well? I just checked with a random support page [2] and it looks like the middle redirection url is the same. Is that a different thing?

[1] support.microsoft.com

[2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/fix-file-explore...

(Firefox if that matters. Currently on Linux, has happened on Windows)

Edit: I just checked on Ungoogled Chromium and it looks like this (the microsoft support) isn't an issue. It's only on Firefox. That's bizarre.

The Art of Multiprocessor Programming by Maurice Herlihy, Nir Shavit et al. ISBN: 978-0124159501

An excellent book that I used for my Parallel Programming course in my undergrad. While looking up Nir Shavit (back then), I came across a "Summer School on Practice and Theory of Concurrent Computing (2017)" [1] which had notable people give talks about interesting & fundamental topics related to Parallel Computing such as "Wait-free computing 'for dummies'", "Lock-free concurrent data structures", and "Locking, from traditional to modern" (taught by Nir Shavit). [2] is a link to a YouTube playlist containing all the videos from that Summer School. I highly recommend it.

[1] https://neerc.ifmo.ru/sptcc/courses.html

[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVe-2wcL84b9G9o7KPubp...

Try reducing the sun intensity to 0. That's what worked for me as I noted in a comment above:

The sun intensity makes the planet look weirdly blurry to me. Is that how it normally is? Is that how it's supposed to be? Dropping the sun intensity to 0 made it look more crisp, which is the way I like it.

The sun intensity makes the planet look weirdly blurry to me. Is that how it normally is? Is that how it's supposed to be? Dropping the sun intensity to 0 made it look more crisp, which is the way I like it.

Yep. I'm very curious to know who actually use itanium cpus anymore. I've only seen it referenced in a couple of research papers that are from... 2015-2016? I even went out of my way to see if a local refurbished electronics seller had itaniums many months ago and they said, "Itanium, huh. Haven't heard that name in a long time".