kionay

I’ve had negative line number errors in an RPA program before. That one really caught me off guard.

Hopalong from Silkfrog

OH and my greatest shame is fooling myself with it

my voicemail app wasn’t working right so I wanted to do something using the interactive voicemail options and so used my phone to call myself to operate my voicemail

when I heard “hello?” I hadn’t properly recognized my own voice and thought I might have misdialed my own number and accidentally got some stranger so I answered back “uh, hello?” and when the rest of the greeting after the pause started playing I facepalmed into next week

For a long time my voicemail was “Hello?” followed by about a 5 second pause, and then an actual “this is $name you’ve got my voicemail, leave a message thank you”

People. fucking. hated that voicemail with a passion. my own parents would get got by it, and then after not calling me for a few months get got by it all over again

I had recruiters suggest I change it because it was “unprofessional”, which I didn’t because if you can’t laugh at a prank like that I wouldn’t want to work for you I feel like there were more good-natured recruiters that found it funny, and I’d like to think it helped set the tone for the interaction better because of it

it also worked well to filter out spam calls, my speech-to-text voicemail app would out the bots when the text of the recording started mid-sentence and didn’t stop the recorded spiel

more people than not enjoyed the mild prank, and I loved it as a conversation started when calling someone back

did you go to Dim Sum Paradise?

I always do e-books, using the Libby app to checkout and the Kindle app as a reader for its features. There are loads of good books out there for me to read, so if what I want isn’t available that’s fine I’ll just find something else. Thank you for the suggestion :)

my local library doesn’t have more than the first dungeon crawler carl, and Google play only has the second so I haven’t finished the series but I love it. princess donut is the GOAT.

I read John dies at the end a few years ago and didn’t much care for it

I warn you. do not attempt to watch the movie. it is hot garbage.

if someone comes up with an alternative way to use a bunch of that infrastructure to make money, I bet they could get a lot of business when the AI bubble pops and suddenly these datacenters are desperate to find a use for themselves

from a purely mathematical standpoint, yes

from a practical engineering standpoint, no, it’s impossible

I’m pedantic as they come, but pedantry has little use in an engineering discipline, software engineering included

like, if I take a cup of water and pour it into the Pacific Ocean strictly speaking I can say I “single-handed raised the water level of the ocean” and you’d be correct in the most unhelpful way

for the code in question if the PRNG is working as expected then for all meaningful purposes it can be considered impossible

edit oh also to fight pedantry with pedantry, technically even a check that would prevent duplicates might not prevent duplicates because you could argue there’s a non-zero chance a random cosmic ray flips just the right bit at just the right moment rendering even that pure chance. anything engineered (and not pure mathematical theory) has to draw the line of plausibility somewhere because we’re engineering inside of a chaotic reality. drawing the line to say that the image above is functionally impossible is just fine.

console.time() jots down the current time, if you do that twice and put stuff in the middle you get two times and the difference between them is how long that stuff took to do

console.timeEnd() uses the last execution of console.time() as the starting point to work out how long the stuff took to do

const originalUUID = crypto.randomUUID() generates a Universally Unique IDentifier, which can be thought of as a very large very random number, by use of a pseudorandom number generator

while(stuff) evaluates the stuff for truthiness (1 + 2 = 5 would be false, 50 < 200 would be true, ‘my username starts with the letter k’ would be true) it’s typically followed by a ‘block’ of code, that is lines beginning with { and ending with }, but we don’t see that here, which means we can read while(stuff) as “keep checking if stuff is true in an endless loop, and only continue to the next line if one of the checks ends up being false”

the stuff here is creating another random UUID, and checking to see if it’s the same random number as the first one generated.

functions like this are so incredibly random that chancing upon two executions creating the same number should be practically impossible. staggeringly impossible. If so this code should never complete, as that while check would be endless, never finding a match

the image suggests that one such match was found in about 19 million milliseconds (a bit over 5 hours). this is probably faked, because the absurd unlikelihood of the same number being generated in so much as a single human lifetime, let alone a day, is laughable

the imagine is faked or something is terribly wrong with their pseudorandom number generator

hold on now, let’s not conflate “ignorance” with “willful ignorance”

having access to information and refusing to use it is clearly terrible and a clear sign of some unhealthy mindset, but being ignorant about something doesn’t automatically mean that ignorance was sought out or valued

for example, I would say I am ignorant about more things than not by sheer quantity of information in the world, but I would be glad to learn if presented the opportunity, that doesn’t make me any less ignorant

there’s nothing wrong with being ignorant, only with trying to stay ignorant

TIL braille is not one-letter-per-group all the time. In looking this up I learned that there are a lot of braille shortcuts, abbreviations, and contractions in English Braille.

neat!

A… Mourbioros? Morboros? Mouroboros?

Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson and The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Actually… actually I don’t think you’d have too hard of a time combining those two. A wildman from ancient China discovers outer space and aliens?

Ah yes, like The Tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo. A classic.

ah fuck you’re absolutely right, it’s ambiguous 🤦

The title of this post was, “What’s a recent game you’ve tried playing that isn’t worth the hype?”

14 years is hardly ‘recent’

Authority

http://dnshaiku.com/

is it ajar?