Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

The user friendly Chess UI! Exactly what you would expect from a GNOME Project package. But also packs some punch via the Universal Chess Interface, e.g. Stockfish just works.

Centralized system that still attempts some level of privacy.

In it, a central bank issue tokens that are stored offline in your cell phone, a bit like cash bank notes.

When you take those tokens, a corresponding amount gets removed from your bank account, a bit like cash bank notes.

When a transaction is made, tokens are put into a spent token list via central API, and cannot be double spent thereafter. The corresponding ammount is then added to the bank account of the receiver. This also means that offline transactions are not possible.

When emitting, the bank signs the token with their private key. When spending, the bank checks that signature.

How do we prevent the bank from logging which token goes to which user besides trusting that they are running the software we whink they are running? Notably, couldn't timing be used to identify that?

This vocabulary likely entered Ciro Santilli's vernacular through playing Counter-Strike when he was a teenager.

Ermm, as of February 2021, I was able to update my 2FA app token with the password alone, it did not ask for the old 2FA.

So what's the fucking point of 2FA then? An attacker with my password would be able to login by doing that!

Is it that Google trusts that particular action because I used the same phone/known IP or something like that?

Their UI is horrendous as of 2020:

I need this for OurBigBook.com!! webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/104241/can-google-analytics-track-url-fragment-in-url

They removed referrer path completely in GA4... OMG WTF are they doing!

Google has put considerable effort into custom hardware to greatly optimize its stack, in a way that is quite notable compared to other tech companies.

The best Romance of the Three Kingdoms adaptation of all time? Mind blowing.

There seems to exist a version with full Chinese + English subtitles: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_r3eWfTMDs&list=PLdAMXqGeRsOkXzuocRkBPhe5RhZ6RotGH&index=2

www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8VWVvHjskM&list=PLIj4BzSwQ-_ueXTO7EBmShk1b3lEqc5b_ official CCTV电视剧 (CCTV TV Series Channel) upload without Chinese + English subtitles.

PuntSeq is a side project led by a few University of Cambridge PhDs that aims to determine which bacteria are present in the River Cam.

In July 2019, the PuntSeq team got together with the awesome Cambridge Biomakespace, an awesome biology makerspace open to all, to create a two day science outreach activity showing their procedures.

The data collected in this experiment, together with other collection sessions done by the organizers actually led to a publication on eLife: elifesciences.org/articles/61504 "Freshwater monitoring by nanopore sequencing" by Lara Urban et al. (2021), so it is awesome to see that were are actual being part of "real science".

Ciro knows nothing about biology, but since he is very curious about it, he jumped at this opportunity, and decided to document things as well as his limited knowledge would allow.

All participants chipped in some money to help cover the experiment's costs. Ciro suspects that this activity was done partially to help crowdfund the experiment, but it was a worthy investment!

The impressions you get from the experiment as a software engineer will be:

As of 2021, last updated 2016, and python 3.5 appears to be mandatory or else:which apparently broke in 3.6: stackoverflow.com/questions/41343263/provide-classcell-example-for-python-3-6-metaclass and pyenv install fails on Ubuntu 20.10, so... fuck. Workarounds at:but am I in the mood considering that the ancient Django version would require an immediate port anyways? Repo is at Django 1.0, while newest is now already Django 3. The Rails one is broken for the same reason. Fuck 2.

The "greatest common divisor" of two integers $x$ and $y$, denoted $\text{gdc}(x,y)$ is the largest natural number that divides both of the integers.

For example, $\text{gdc}(8,12)$ is 4, because:

Unfortunately, physicists and mathematicians keep using Greek letters in their formulas, so we just have to learn them.

A helpful way to remember is to learn a bit of their history/pronunciation: Section "Historical correspondence between Latin and Greek".

To learn the greek letters if you have a base latin alphabet, you must learn the sound of each letter, and which Latin letters they correspond to.

Symbols that look like Greek letters but are not Greek letters:

Is Ciro Santilli crazy (he is, but for this point specifically), or do many/most Greek letters represent the mouth position used in the pronunciation of the letter?

A discrete 2D game on a rectangular grid: towardsdatascience.com/reinforcement-learning-implement-grid-world-from-scratch-c5963765ebff

This is analogous to many traditional board games such as chess, the concept is very natural and maps well into computer.

The downsides of gridworld games are:

One reasonable and memorable approximation excluding any fine structure is:see for example example: hydrogen 1-2 spectral line.

Hmmm, he does not know how to spell guerilla? sic? www.quora.com/What-is-the-correct-spelling-guerilla-or-guerrilla

Note to self: if you are going to commit a crime, don't publish your plans online.

Ross Ulbricht's diaries come to mind.

That's how Russian shadow library maintainers do it, they know how to crime good old Russians. Maybe there is a good thing about having dictatorships in the world that give zero fucks about American copyright laws. There will always be some random Russian academic who will implement this and not go to jail. Maybe it's even state sponsored.