attempting looksmaxxeuse
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especially stuff with aerospace or signal processing or RF or stuff like that....
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you know it's bad when the smoke transitions to completely laminar flow and pours out of the vents like water
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software engineers will notice half a second of latency in something that should be ~instant and will move heaven and earth to fix it, or at least to understand why; and this seems to have blown an operation that had started to install a backdoor on every Debian/Ubuntu SSH server
Plans to literally "hack the planet" foiled due to 500ms of latency that Andres instinctually investigated.
The latency was due how the malicious code parsed symbol tables in memory.
openwall.com/lists/oss-secur…
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the highway patrolman seething in rage as I zoom by in the Hopeless Tetrahedron which sports an industry-leading all-aspect radar cross section approximating that of a domestic cat; rendering radar speed measurements effectively impossible
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wont the gases created by anaerobic decomposition eventually overcome the epoxy and disassemble these accursed spheres with the gentleness of your average grenade
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Luhn's algorithm let me troll some scammers a few years back, i was getting a call every couple days; while i was on the phone once and the scammer was asking me for my card number i looked up a website that generates payment card numbers that pass Luhn but obviously aren't real
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there's air supremacy and there's "ADS-B transponder active during an airstrike" air supremacy
Very odd.
🇺🇸 AC-130J Ghostrider 18-5886 #AE6201 made many very visible flight tracks around the time it was reported that there were airstrikes occurring in Iraq.
I feel like this is unprecedented: I've never seen an aircraft likely involved carry out a sortie. Publicly.
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i didnt know there was a nuclear weapons fandom who are trying their damndest to reverse-engineer modern nuclear weapon designs based off unclassified / public-domain info
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a 24/7-open no-rules (besides no humans allowed and probably limits on energetic payload size) Unmanned Systems test area would be so fucking kino. continuous robot-on-robot hyperviolence
Unmanned system defense contracts should be determined by king-of-the-hill in a 100km^3 area near Las Vegas.
Rules:
- No humans allowed in the Box.
- Any non-nuclear system may enter
- Leader determined by controlling a randomly-determined zone
- Monthly winner gets $100M
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the creepiest device that I have yet to see in person was a system had a little circular array of white LEDs around the lens of each camera, and the LEDs made this continuous smooth spinning pattern, **specifically to entice you into looking directly at the camera lens**
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men will literally prefer being on the receiving end of a strategic bombardment campaign instead of going to therapy
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taking a clapped out Cessna or other light piston aircraft and putting in Drone flight controls and extra gas tanks and yeeting it at the enemy is an incredible strat. if they shoot it down they're getting trolled into wasting good capable missiles on garbage…and if they don't…
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eventually i needed to do something else so when they asked me for another number for the bank, i gave them an LAPD phone number, the scammers called it with great alacrity; and the fact it wasn't in fact a bank led the scammer-supervisor to insult me with words i can't type here
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attempting to charge something obviously didn't work but not in a way that made it obvious i had given him garbage, so the scammer brought in his supervisor who then proceeded to make a conference call with the credit card issuer to try and get them to authorize the transaction
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after that, the number of scam calls i got was immediately slashed; which tbh made the time on the phone line with these slimeballs absolutely worth it. but it was amazing trolling them like a fish on a line; they genuinely thought it was a legit card number until the very end
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incredible and mystifying Canadian L how the popular understood meaning of "Canadian healthcare" went from "universal healthcare but with mid waiting times" to "giving more lethal injections than China and Texas combined"
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also i think the photograph is taken from the perspective of the protected side and not the perspective of someone driving a vehicle into it -- this device isn't two lil upturned ramps, it's two giant claws that violently spear and firmly grab the front of a speeding box truck
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a year or two later i find out theres whole youtubers who make a channel out of baiting these scammers with all sorts of strats and tooling to waste their time in entertaining ways but i was just doing this because i was pissed and wanted to stop getting calls and knew about Luhn
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wet-pipe sprinklers are wild, the only thing between me and like, twenty gallons per minute of the grodiest water — indefinitely — youve ever seen is this tiny piece of liquid-filled glass, valiantly sitting between two pieces of metal holding off that water pressure
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Jack Northrop wanted to make a B-2 in the 1940s, but it turns out you need better computers and better jet engines than were around back then to make a B-2 work really good. He still tried his damndest!
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that there is money to be made in precisely optimizing the destruction of the attention span of its own people is an indictment of the western political economy imo
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the ejecta/shrapnel would be grievously fetid — if not outright toxic; Clostridium botulinum is anaerobic and tolerates pressure
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wasnt this the model of toilet that had a badly designed pressure vessel that had a chance of exploding with enough force to shatter the surrounding porcelain, driving shards into the user's back; causing a class-action lawsuit and millions of affected skibidis to be recalled
so you're telling me there exists a type of toilet that's only $300 which has wider drains and *can basically never get clogged* because it uses pressurized water instead of gravity fed but its not everywhere????????
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aw hell no they gave a language model BPD
Our solution is simple: maximizing the probability of [Sorry] tokens at every position during response generation. This enables the model to learn the ability to transition from potential harm to safety refusal throughout the sequence. [4/n]
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ignoring the part where she writes out an informal theory of computation that is recognizable as a lambda calculus (successive binding values to variables, substitutions of values into functions) and invents local value numbering—decades before Church and Turing — is uncharitable
An entire industry has been built around the idea that Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace was a great mathematician and the world's first computer programmer. Both of these claims are based on verbose notes she made to her 1843 translation of an 1842 paper by Menabrea about Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, an analog cogwheel-and-pinion computer which existed mostly on paper only (see drive.google.com/file/d/16qx…). Both claims are entirely false. Here I will address the issue of her mathematical abilities.
Dorothy Stein was the first to point out in 1985, based on reading Ada's correspondence with Mary Somerville and Augustus de Morgan that Byron's daughter appeared to have very weak mathematical abilities. She could not do simple algebra. It is easy to verify this, without resorting to her manuscripts, by actually reading her published 1843 notes to Menabrea, a step few if any people ever seem to have taken the trouble to do. After all they're very long and use a lot of symbols. Here I will address only those on the Bernoulli numbers and their supposed calculation (see Note G in the paper). But this is just the basking seal on top of the iceberg, so to speak: the whole paper is riddled with bellowing nonsense, of which more later.
Babbage had been planning to use the Bernoulli numbers (from the power series expansion for a common expression involving e^x) as an example for his engine since 1835, as he wrote to Nathaniel Bowditch that year. In his memoirs he admitted (long after the fact) that he had worked out the details of this for Ada, "to save her the trouble". We can now see how this worked.
What Babbage had given Ada was just a brief sketch, which she expanded, in her prolix style, to match her understanding of the material. The crux was that Babbage wanted to accumulate calculations of Bernoulli numbers, as you would when constructing a table, something like his earlier Difference Engine, which used cumulated finite differences to do calculations of numerical results for tables. With some simple manipulations of the power series for e^x, see attached, an expression for the next odd indexed Bernoulli number can be obtained from the preceding ones. (Similar reasoning applies to the even indexed ones.) That follows from this relationship, a linear dependency, which we will write as equation (8), see attached
A_0 + A_1*B_1 + A_3*B_3 + .... + A_(2n-1)*B_(2n-1) + B_(2n+1) = 0. (8)
where the B_i are the odd Bernoulli numbers, and the A_i are coefficients which, as Ada failed to understand, actually depend on n too and are not constants. To get an expression for B_(2n+1), use your arithmetic superpowers to deduce (8*)
B_(2n+1) = -A_0 - A_1*B_1 - A_3*B_3 - .... - A_(2n-1)*B_(2n-1)
It is a step that sorely puzzled Ada though. She felt compelled to come up with an explanation anyway. She appears to have landed the world's smallest grappling hook on the phrase "linear dependence", probably used by Babbage in conversation with her. Scanning the equations she convinced herself that this "linear dependence" must apply to the index n, which she triumphantly concluded was dependent on its distance d from 0. So she wrote down some useless tautologies about that. Since you cannot do anything with them, she left them out there and simply moved on to point out that terms not listed in (8) must be zero (!) and wrote down a tautology involving multiplication and division by one, in which she gets the (irrelevant) indexes wrong for good measure (see attached for this extraordinary gibberish). This concludes her explanation. It has stood unexamined since 1843 by people who solemnly pronounce on the evidence it shows for her advanced abilities (!)
Why didn't Babbage notice this nonsense and correct her, supplying the necessary arithmetic superpowers? Correspondence shows that once she started writing her "notes", at his suggestion, she would accept no correction, So one assumes he simply stopped reading it, or at least commenting on it. Don't dare presume to alter what I, a daughter of Byron, write! So much for that.
Not realizing that the A_i terms depend on n too had further implications. You need to recalculate them when accumulating Bernoulli numbers iteratively, a step that eluded her and which undoes much of the sort of computational "saving" that Babbage was claiming. Indeed the execution trace (for the paper only contains such traces, not programs as such) doesn't work. Indeed none of the traces given in the paper for terms involving n could ever have been produced by Babbage's machine. More on that later. And on Ada's information that one can calculate a divergent (or indeed oscillating) infinite series on a computer, term by term. And why Babbage chose to use Menabrea and less successfully, Ada, in the first place. Not to mention what Babbage meant by The Enchantress of Number (hint: it was not Ada). Do not adjust your set.
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IVY MIKE, the world's first full-scale test of a Teller-Ulam thermonuclear design, was actually a gender reveal:
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amazing that after fucking with incredibly exotic, virulently corrosive and ghastly toxic liquid propellants, propulsion engineers decided that diesel fuel (and now, natural gas) alongside oxygen was in fact good enough
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wait you can buy a used BUS for cheaper than a new car? where's the catch? maintenance/overhaul?
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Engineer in state of nature never plays Factorio, but in captivity he does, wat does this mean?
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in late 80s the US needed a target drone to properly emulate high performance Soviet supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles and ran a few programs to make some; but in early 90s, McDonnell Douglas fucking bought warhead/seeker-free Kh-31 Russian supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles
It’s difficult to overstate how unbelievably free-for-all 1990s Russia was; three dudes from Miami attempted to buy a diesel electric Soviet submarine from corrupt Navy officials and the response they got from the other end was “with missiles or without?”
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it's literally meant to trick you into looking at it; there is no other explanation
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well ok every x86_64 SSH server that uses the debian/ubuntu binary packages...so basically every debian/ubuntu server to first order
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(this is meant to protect against vehicle-ramming and VBIED attacks, by stopping a speeding truck in minimal distance with no consideration for the survival of the vehicle and/or the occupants)
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I think the barbell strategy works best; either arrive at the airport so late that your flight has already started to board and get to the gate with 10 minutes to spare — or arrive well in advance and have a good hour to roam around, look at planes, go to the outdoor terrace, etc
Whether someone enjoys airports is a 100% accurate test of whether they have the capacity to enjoy life at all
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another time some scam outfit had my name, pretended to be a US Marshal, and stayed in perfect confident character despite my attempts to throw them off. the fact i even considered they might be real made my blood boil.
when they called again, i had fun
they never called again
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Being a transsexual puts you at an inherent advantage with FPGA engineering, since you already have experience with reconfigurable hardware alongside minimizing clocking issues.
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i think it was an iris-recognition-at-a-distance system, at least based on the brand name on the cameras. absolutely creepy setup, straight up exploiting physiological reflexes to get you to make yourself vulnerable to it
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the spinny components of a medical CT scanner weigh about a thousand kilograms; it's quite literally the mass of a small car being spun around you multiple times a second (small cars don't usually pull double-digit g's though)
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who called it "giving older air defense systems to Ukraine to combat cruise missiles and one-way-attack drones (aka propeller-driven cruise missiles)" and not "HAWK to UA"?
Central Ukraine, a Ukrainian HAWK surface to air missile leaps out into the night sky, slamming into a Russian Shahed-136 attack drone.
Most HAWKs given to Ukraine are Cold War veterans, finally engaging Russian aircraft after decades of waiting.
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it would be extremely funny if someone were to build this contraption and immediately got first-striked by everyone with nukes
A method to unilaterally disable all nuclear bombs on Earth, remotely and without countermeasure:
arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0305062…
It uses a 1000 TeV muon->neutrino beam to penetrate right through the Earth and decay near fissile material, forcing it to 'fizzle' and become useless.
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the hikers might be sick or unconscious or have run out of batteries on their phone so they need to be assumed as noncooperative targets
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this is the doohickiest doohickey of the war so far and by far
A Russian UGV called “Two Majors”, named after an infamous Telegram channel that is providing funding.
Built on two hoverboards, it can carry over 100kg, giving it considerable potential as a kamikaze.
The mine it is carrying is a UDSh smoke bomb, now used for smokescreens.
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>60 km range
>fiber optic wire guided
this is incredibly goofy in at least two ways
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the RIAA took down youtube-dl's github repository with the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision; it really *is* the 90s again and apparently it's time to redo the DeCSS clusterfuck; hope there'll be shirts this time too lmfao
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they talk about testing their slop against children in a shamelessly predatory/adversarial way; with the glee of a team eagerly trialing a new missile seeker against a captured MiG on a test range to see just how lethally optimized and robustly performant the latest iteration is
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also the Canadian lethal injection method is basically the OG American lethal injection protocol but without potassium chloride (but the Canadians kept the paralytic!)
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they were spoofing their number to match a specific US Marshal and directing victims to google it to see it was "legit" (i called the legit number immediately afterwards and left a voicemail telling him that people were impersonating him to do scams), it was scary pro tbh
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might be watching one of my two checked bags (which went on an earlier flight) getting stolen in real-time *while i'm still in an airplane*; certainly a novel experience
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> looking to send satellite
> ask if the rocket is designed for orbital launch or just a converted ICBM
> they don't understand
> pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is orbital and what is ICBM
> they laugh and say "it's a good rocket"
> mate payload
> it's an ICBM
> mfw
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my favorite thing to do to RF engineers is to tell them "you know how there's reverse polarity SMA? RP-SMA? did you know they made reverse threaded SMA: RT-SMA" and hear the sort of sighs of pure despair you usually only get from software people
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pure skill issue getting air striked by a propeller plane broadcasting its position and identity and direction in real time on ADSBExchange Dot Com
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the original sentence ends with "is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable", the paragraph ends with "appreciation for firepower so profound that it bordered on the perverse"
the next 2 paragraphs are about sexualized admiration of crew-served weapon systems
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the oldest trick in the book
A trader in Turkey bought $36 million worth of copper, but then when it was delivered it turned out to just be rocks painted to look like copper bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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the forbidden kerrygold
2,000-year-old lump of butter found in Irish bog is, technically, still edible via.fox13now.com/nZIem
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I lied, I don't have netflix, take off your shoes, we're going to watch the China Lake playlists
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the use of lithium deuteride allowed the gender-reveal thermonuclear design to be small enough to fit inside a gender-reveal reentry vehicle, which are then placed on the tip of gender-reveal ballistic missiles, allowing for Multiple Independent Gender Reveals,
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Samuel Butler: In my book I invented the Thinking Machines as a cautionary tale
Alan Turing: At long last, we have created the Thinking Machines from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Thinking Machines
PSA: Frank Herbert's "Butlerian Jihad" to wipe out thinking machines is a reference to Samuel Butler's 1872 novel Erewhon, where Butler discusses the dangers to humanity posed by thinking machines
Additional historical fact, this was well known to people like George Orwell, CS Lewis, and Alan Turing, who had this to say:
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the most hilarious part wasnt in fact their reactions when i sent them a photo of a turd in a bathtub after playing them sports car rev sound youtube vids to convince them i was going to the bank
it was the fake "CBP Agent" pronouncing "marijuana" so badly i had to stifle laughs
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people post the former quote about the economics of precision guided munitions in counterinsurgency operations or stuff but the context of the quote in the original text is...rather different from the vibe people usually are going for by quoting it:
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the wildest part is that i had written out and poasted the details of the scam *months before* the US Marshals poasted to warn about this scam -- and the described procedures and phraseology are identical to what i had described! usmarshals.gov/news/press-re…
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a legislature having "Skibidi Toilet (Phonk House Version) (Music Video)" played in perfect sync on their personal screens (with 3 big screens in the front of the hall playing it — in sync too) while they watch utterly transfixed is…overflowing with Skibidi Toilet aesthetics
In St. Petersburg deputies watched an excerpt from the YouTube thrash cartoon "Skibidi Toilet": it was shown by children's ombudsman Anna Mityanina.
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