Nzen
Joined 13 years ago
Karma
642
Submissions
395
Member since
Apr 8
Recent submissions
Comment · 4 days ago
Popular works regularly mine the (public domain) past. Disney animated movies like Cinderella did so. Seth Grahame-Smith did so with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. and so on. That is literally the benefit of copyright expiration, that other people can utilize and transform a published work.
Comment · 4 days ago
I would be interested in reading some reporting about USAID's role in support of the CIA (or DoD intelligence?). Please recommend some that helped form your opinion.
I have, luckily, read a personal account of the logistical assistance that a USAID contractor had [0]. Doug Muir wrote about improving customs practices in Rwanda and training locals to take over for him. Improving, in this case, means standardizing inspections of trade goods to decrease holding time.
[0] https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/08/usaid-my-next-to-last-p...
Comment · 10 days ago
Their github page links to the github site. That site has up to date videos, albeit unlisted, ex https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L_J0J8-_m4
Comment · 1 month ago
I assume this person heard about keepass [0] and accesses it from multiple devices with a dropbox or icloud style service. Or doesn't access it from multiple devices. I just synchronize my password database on a slow cadence or as needed.
Comment · 1 month ago
I think that you've missed the reference [0] implicit in kelseyfrog's response. Or am I missing some reference about how japanese gardens are germaine to AI/LLM/covert-discussion ?
[0] https://iep.utm.edu/chinese-room-argument/ tl;dr a thought experiment about a non-chinese-reading person translating chinese texts solely by using proscribed rules, intended to highlight whether the translator develops some sort of understanding
Comment · 1 month ago
I can't speak to computing history in China, but Read Only Memory has books about the Japanese [0] and British [1] video game companies. MIT has published books about computing in Taiwan, Bulgaria, and China [2]. The former two are even open access, so you can download them for free.
[0] https://readonlymemory.com/products/japansoft-an-oral-histor...
[1] https://readonlymemory.com/products/britsoft-an-oral-history
[2] https://direct.mit.edu/books/search-results?f_ContentType=Bo...
Comment · 2 months ago
On the clean hand, are the trustworthy tools there for me to plunge out a big poop or wipe a bit of overspray ? I sometimes see a plunger, but don't ever bring rubber gloves and a roll of paper towel that would make me feel comfortable cleaning up a nasty toilet.
On the dirty hand, I used to see (evidence that) someone clog(ged) a one of the toilets in an office building that I shared with lawyers, once a month or so. I developed a head canon that this person acted out their dissatisfaction with the lawyer or counterparty on the rest of the building.
Comment · 2 months ago
Laurence Paulson laments a bug that fooled Ramana Kumar using both Lean proof system and the Nanoda (plugin ? library ?) into thinking that he found a counterexample to the famous Collatz Conjecture [0]. It sounds like Kumar or someone extended the Lean software to postulate that a certain style of proof is true and Kumar's larger proof hallucinated a class of numbers that enter a cycle in the Collatz sequence.
[0] https://github.com/xrchz/CollatzLean Paulson (mercifully?) did not link to Kumar's repository or paper [1]
[1] https://websim.com/@BookwormKevin/collatz-conjecture-simulat... this is a visualization of the Collatz sequence of numbers that is conjectured - but not proven - to always terminate at 1.
Paulson laments this as there are ways of building up the rules from axioms (program objects?), but it is really tedious. He recounts crafting a "system of combinators" (in 1986) that one could build on to express recursive functions.
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074771718... DOI 10.1016/S0747-7171(86)80002-5
Comment · 2 months ago
This is a pretty short post observing that some art has achieved celebrity. Consider the Mona Lisa, you probably can imagine it just from the title. When I went to the Louvre, there was a mob around the (quite small) painting of people who - like me - came to finally see what we'd already seen dozens of times before. This post ends on the idea that celebrity is not always a measure of quality, given that many great works existed (and exist) without the marketing to vault them into larger social awareness.
Comment · 3 months ago
I am of the impression that the mission is defined by having the pin ball hit the places where the blue arrow points within a set amount of time.
It's a bit of a shame that Microsoft only licensed Space Cadet Pinball from Cinematronics for Windows 95 and XP [0].
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20181221-00/?p=10...
Comment · 3 months ago
Wikipedia is written by various people, but likely someone with interest in a given topic. One or more realtors probably wrote or edited this post.
Actually, the history of edits shows that this is contested territory where people regularly remove what they term as spam links. So, while a disinterested editor might remove a link to a listicle about how to stage your home, they might leave in the breathless tone as harmless. The drive by editors probably feel that they have no more time to rewrite it than we do, given that they watch over many articles, not just this one.
Comment · 3 months ago
In 2022 [0], Jan David Nose (jdno) released a game / programming challenge called _Auto Traffic Control_ [1]. Rather than controlling airplanes with UI interactions, the simulation is a GRPC server that expects the player to construct a game client that issues flight paths.
I tried to make a game client for jdno's ATC [2]. My client was deficient, as I tried to treat the movement as a fixed interval, by only submitting flight plans that moved in cartesian directions. Only by cheating, modifying the simulator, could my greedy algorithm land any planes [3]. I suspect I was supposed to continuously model and poll the future positions of airplanes when developing a flight plan.
I suspect that I won't have much competition on the leaderboard, despite the asterisk, as jdno eventually archived the project [4]. Originally, the project was self-publication while looking for work. The Rust Foundation hired him a little while afterward.
[0] https://jdno.dev/auto-traffic-control/
[1] https://auto-traffic-control.com/
[2] https://github.com/Nzen/hircine-anise-okkoz
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czsSjy1Uqyk 1.5 minutes
[4] https://github.com/jdno/auto-traffic-control/commit/b5972dfb...
Comment · 3 months ago
Thank you [0]. I searched and all I could find was Virgin Media's Daisy [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(chatbot)
[1] https://news.virginmediao2.co.uk/o2-unveils-daisy-the-ai-gra...
Comment · 4 months ago
It feels like this list, if it focuses on individual authors is - if successful - overwhelming in scope. There are, what, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of authors ? If 1%, for argument's sake, this list would have thousands of links.
Nonetheless, I'll promote an author of both non- and fiction ebooks I've bought from, Michael W Lucas [0].
If you want to contact me, my email is in the footer of my website, which you can access from that keybase link.