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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Yup. Rand() chooses a random float value for each entry. By default I believe it’s anywhere between 0 and 1. So it may divide the first bill by .76, then the second by .23, then the third by 0.63, etc… So you’d end up with a completely garbage database because you can’t even undo it by multiplying all of the numbers by a set value.


  • It’s because Yuzu was profiting off of their development with a Patreon. Keep emulators FOSS and there’s no profits to claim.

    Also, because it’s a settlement and not a ruling, it’s not setting a precedent for future lawsuits. Courts historically put a lot of weight on legal precedent, to help make rulings consistent. If one court interprets a new case in a certain way, similar cases in the future will likely look to that first case’s ruling for guidance.

    So if one ruling had decided that emulation is illegal, then subsequent lawsuits would have been much much easier for Nintendo. Because Nintendo could basically argue “we already proved emulation is illegal in that previous case, so now we don’t need to do that part again.”





  • He was definitely odd, but even a broken clock is right twice a day; He hated what his old company has become, and at least owned up to the fact that he had a lady shit on his chest. When asked about it in interviews, he basically said something along the lines of “when you’re richer than God and have had sex with gorgeous women every day, things start to get stale and you look for more and more extreme things to get you going.”

    He also 100% predicted that he was going to be Epstein’ed in a prison cell. He was very outspoken about the fact that he wasn’t suicidal and if he was ever found to have committed suicide, that it was a hit job. He specifically tweeted something along the lines of “if I’m ever found to have hanged myself, it wasn’t a suicide. It was a whack job.” He was found dead in a prison cell, with the death ruled a suicide by hanging. Which is either prophetic (he believed the US had a bounty on him, so he was very paranoid about getting murdered with the government covering it up,) or the best troll ever.




  • Yeah, I used to work a job where I was basically on call for 6 hours at a time, but didn’t need to do much unless something broke. I’d help set things up at the top of the day then tear things down at the end. But in between, I was basically just waiting for things to break. It’s safe to say that I used the fuck out of my gaming laptop and VPN at my desk. Because I obviously didn’t want to try playing games on a company computer.

    I played a lot of single player and idle games at that job, because those are easy to walk away from at a moment’s notice. Just hit pause and you can give your full attention to whatever problem has popped up. Then once it’s resolved, you’re right back where you left off.



  • It isn’t compressible at all, really. As far as a compression algorithm is concerned, it just looks like random data.

    Imagine trying to compress a text file. Each letter normally takes 8 bits to represent. The computer looks at 8 bits at a time, and knows which character to display. Normally, the computer needs to look at all 8 bits even when those bits are “empty” simply because you have no way of marking when one letter stops and another begins. It’s all just 1’s and 0’s, so it’s not like you can insert “next letter” flags in that. But we can cut that down.

    One of the easiest ways to do this is to count all the letters, then sort them from most to least common. Then we build a tree, with each character being a fork. You start at the top of the tree, and follow it down. You go down one fork for 0 and read the letter at your current fork on a 1. So for instance, if the letters are sorted “ABCDEF…” then “0001” would be D. Now D is represented with only 4 bits, instead of 8. And after reading the 1, you return to the top of the tree and start over again. So “01000101101” would be “BDBAB”. Normally that sequence would take 40 bits to represent, (because each character would be 8 bits long,) but we just did it in 11 bits total.

    But notice that this also has the potential to produce letters that are MORE than 8 bits long. If we follow that same pattern I listed above, “I” would be 9 bits, “J” would be 10, etc… The reason we’re able to achieve compression is because we’re using the more common (shorter) letters a lot and the less common (longer) letters less.

    Encryption undoes this completely, because (as far as compression is concerned) the data is completely random. And when you look at random data without any discernible pattern, it means that counting the characters and sorting by frequency is basically a lesson in futility. All the letters will be used about the same, so even the “most frequent” characters are only more frequent by a little bit due to random chance. So now. Even if the frequency still corresponds to my earlier pattern, the number of Z’s is so close to the number of A’s that the file will end up even longer than before. Because remember, the compression only works when the most frequent characters are actually used most frequently. Since there are a lot of characters that are longer than 8 bits and those characters are being used just as much as the shorter characters our compression method fails and actually produces a file that is larger than the original.







  • Primarily a mobile user, which I’m assuming most migrants are. I like it so far, but have some minor complaints about the available apps. I was so used to Apollo, and a lot of the apps like wefwef and Mlem are frustratingly close but not quite there yet. Mlem Is missing some things like being able to zoom images, make image posts, (Correct me if I’m wrong, but Mlem doesn’t appear to be able to post anything except links) automatically fetch inbox messages, or view comment replies in threads. Wefwef seems more like Apollo so far, but it has its own quirks since it’s entirely web-based.

    That’s something that I expect to improve with time though, as the apps are all still under development. So here’s hoping that things improve.