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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Yeah, but how was that food?

    I just tried a fine dining restaurant for the first time this past weekend.

    I was just curious after watching a bunch of cooking competitions on Netflix about how good that kind of food could be so decided to find a Michelin star restaurant and give it a try.

    While the portions were small, the food was on another level. Even the “worst” of it was only that because it wasn’t amazing, but still really good.

    The food was so good that when I got home and snacked that night, it was hard to enjoy any of my usual favorite snacks because it all felt so basic after that.

    It was fancy in other regards, too. Like when my buddy went to the bathroom, someone came over and folded his cloth napkin rather than leave it bunched up on the table.

    Plus, even though the portions were tiny and we joked about whether we’d need to stop for fast-food afterwards, by the end of the 9 or so courses, I felt completely satisfied. Even the snacking I mentioned was more due to the munchies than actual hunger.

    It was expensive though. Two taster menu plus two drinks each came to about 500 CAD plus tip. And it was one of the cheaper options. There was a two Michelin star sushi place that advertised seats starting at 800 and I’m not even sure that includes any food, though I think it gets the “chef cooks what he wants” menu, which tbf would probably be way better than what I’d want anyways.

    This place only needed to be booked like a month in advance, so the place you’re talking about sounds like it’s on another level itself. Though I’m curious how much that other level translates to better food.



  • Technically, they could have. But it wouldn’t have really been Nirvana without Cobain. It was pretty much Cobain’s cult of personality. If they had tried to continue without him, it would have been another one of those bands that starkly contrasts between before and after and the comment above would have been about never knowing Nirvana in its heyday.

    Even if the continuation was good (and Dave Grohl is proof that there was enough talent for it in the rest of the band), it would have still been tainted by the lack of Cobain.






  • It’s been a while and I can’t remember which one it was that I saw, but I remember that ending coming out of nowhere. It’s like oh, there’s a ghost or something haunting the place, ok. Signs of evil or something, a person floating while sleeping, too iirc.

    Then suddenly there’s hundreds of witches or cultists surrounding them outside and it just ends!?

    Maybe it would have been scary if I was the type to buy into moral panics?

    It was just kinda creepy and then weird. Felt like “rocks fall, everyone dies” kinda energy.




  • I don’t trust them either. But I can’t not trust them unless I trust you, which I don’t.

    This feels like a variation of that two guard riddle except the warning is “both guards lie all of the time” and the two guards still don’t agree.

    Which is resolved by the riddle itself being the lie. Applying that here means we should do the opposite and not (never trust anyone).

    Now which way does that not apply?

    • sometimes trust anyone
    • never distrust anyone
    • never trust noone
    • sometimes distrust anyone
    • never distrust noone
    • sometimes trust noone
    • sometimes distrust noone

  • Yeah, I think there is a lot of potential for code analysis. There’s a limited cross section of ways malware can do interesting things, but many permutations of ways to do that.

    So look for the interesting things, like:

    • accessing other programs’ address spaces
    • reading/writing files
    • deleting/moving files
    • sending/receiving network traffic
    • os system calls and console commands
    • interacting with hardware
    • spawning new processes
    • displaying things on the screen
    • accessing timing information

    Obviously there’s legitimate uses for each of these, so that’s just the first step.

    Next, analyze the data that is being used for that:

    • what’s the source?
    • what’s the destination?
    • what kind of transformations are being applied to the data?

    Then you can watch out for things like:

    • is it systematically going through directories and doing some operation to all files? (Maybe ransomware, data scrubbing, or just maliciously deleting stuff?)
    • is it grabbing data from somewhere and sending it somewhere else on the internet? (Stealing data?)
    • is it using timing information to build data? (Timing attacks to figure out kernel data that should be hidden?)
    • is it changing OS settings/setup?

    Then generate a report of everything it is doing and see if it aligns with what the code is supposed to do. Or you could even build some kind of permissions system around that with more sophistication than the basic “can this app access files? How about the internet?”

    Computer programs can be complex, but are ultimately made up of a series of simple operations and it’s possible to build an interpreter that can do those operations and then follow everything through to see exactly what is included in the massive amount of data it sends over the network so that you can tell your file sharing program is also for some reason sending /etc/passwords to a random address or listening for something to access a sequence of closed ports and then will do x, y, z, if that ever happens. Back doors could be obvious with the right analysis tools, especially if it’s being built from source code (though I believe it’s still possible with binaries, just maybe a bit harder).


  • Is he trying to pull the Johnson power move but the best he can do is talk about someone who had a large cock? Or are these ramblings of a man sinking deeper into dementia and losing what remained of his filter and just talking about what’s on his mind? Or maybe it’s a power move by Putin and he ordered Trump to humiliate himself to show someone else that he pulls Trump’s strings? Or… Maybe a power move Trump is using to say it doesn’t matter what he says at this point since he’s intending to try to loophole his way into the presidency rather than get elected in?

    Kinda fucked that all of those seem plausible.

    Not that it wasn’t meaningless toxic bullshit when Johnson whipped his cock out to settle disagreements or do whatever the fuck he was trying to do when he did that.


  • Also when it gets boring, sometimes it can be fun to see what happens if you cause something unusual to happen.

    Ok, dinosaurs were fun for a bit, but how do they fare against meteor strikes? Hmm, these small ones keep burning up in the atmosphere. Ok, I bet THIS one won’t burn up! It will probably shake things up quite a bit in this regio–oh shit, debris from the impact is escaping orbit, that probably means it’s going to rain hot rocks for quite some time all over the planet. Dammit, it was cool when all of the land was together in one mass but I’ve cracked that apart now and they are going to end up splitting up into smaller continents now. When’s my last save state? Dammit, it’s mid Triassic, the dinosaurs were so lame back then compared to these ones today. Guess I’ll save now. I mean, they dominate the entire planet, surely they’ll come out of this ok.


  • That’s pretty smart, using it for legal documents. If the accuracy is high, it might be nice to just copy paste any tos or whatever to get the highlights in plain language (which imo should be a legal requirement of contracts in general, but especially ones written by a team of bad faith lawyers intended for people they don’t expect to read it and deliberately written to discourage reading the whole thing).



  • It wouldn’t surprise me if they were more colleagues under Putin than friends, even at the best of times.

    Like you’d figure Rudy would have brought more competence to the table if he was just trying to help his friend out. I really got the sense that he was only doing what he did in 20/21 because his back was against the wall and disobeying would have resulted in worse effects than torpedoeing his career and the legal trouble.

    And my guess for the consequences would be the release of a video that is similar to his scene in Borat 2, only without Borat rushing in to stop it.