chch
Joined 13 years ago
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Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Thanks for pointing that out!
This video doesn't seem to be available in the US, so you can also see it in the slow motion footage here, right on the finish line:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcxyXnPIF4o#t=2m45s
(You can see it in normal speed too, but I can feel the formation of shapes better in the slow-mo, instead of it just feeling like blinking)
Comment · 2 years ago
I always saw Pale Fire as somewhat of self-parody, which made me enjoy it more.
Seven years before Pale Fire came out, Nabokov was working on his translation of Eugene Onegin. Often, people argue that a translated novel should have no end/footnotes, because a "good translation" should read "naturally" to a reader. Nabokov disagreed, and wrote an article that included the phrase:
> "I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity." [1]
Quite a fun image, and one he took somewhat seriously, as his endnote commentary for Onegin is more than twice as long as the translation itself! [2]
So, for me personally, I can't imagine a world where he didn't reflect on his own zeal here, and realize "I think there's a novel idea in here somewhere!"
[1] "Problems in Translation: Onegin in English." Partisan Review 22, no. 4 (1955): 512.
[2] https://secondstorybooks.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/136717...
Comment · 2 years ago
Less a need, more an easter egg.
The short itself is based on the stereotypical American family sitcom;s opening credits, which would tend to show a character doing something 'representative' of their character, while showing the actor's name on screen that played that character. Without too much spoilers for the video itself, the names popping up is a pretty key aspect of the video itself. It gained a pretty good following in 2014 when it came out, and I guess someone on the YouTube UI team thought it would be a fun addition to add the text style from the video onto the video page itself. I remember being happily surprised the first time I saw it (similarly to the first time I saw someone added the Wadsworth Constant[1] as an actual feature, though that's unfortunately since been removed).
[1] A user on Reddit once posited in 2011 that the first 30% of every YouTube video was a waste, so they would just click to around the 30% mark to skip to the important part. A reply deemed this the "Wadsworth Constant", after the user, and it tumbled from there. Eventually, YouTube had an official feature where if you added ""&wadsworth=1" to a URL, it would start the video 30% in, for any video! I'd used it several times when sending instructional videos to friends who didn't need to see the intros.
Comment · 2 years ago
I happened to accidentally stumble into a plastic food store while in Osaka a few months ago. I just looked up the name, and they have a web storefront! [1]
Admittedly all in Japanese, but the top part of the side bar shows you examples of pure fake foods, then the section under the "Sale" box gets you to fake-food style accessories, like USB drives, phone cases, and hair clips. Lots of pictures there to show the variety and quality!
(Edit: Sorry if this reads like a shill, I have no affiliation, and didn't even buy anything while I was there! Just took very touristy pictures.)
[1] http://morino-sample.jp/?mode=cate&csid=0&cbid=1803129&csid=...
Comment · 2 years ago
I was actually just talking about this yesterday!
That schedule I'd read about was the Überman schedule, where you sleep 20-30 minutes six times a day. Definitely a much more extreme form than most polyphasic sleep schedules. :)
I read a series of blog posts about it, probably around the same time as you did, and found them again [1] last night. I didn't actually read through it again, but if anyone's interested in reading more about someone's firsthand experience with it, could be a good classic read.
Comment · 6 years ago
Doing a bit more deep diving into the ICU code, it looks like the source code for the Break engine (used by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) is here:
https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/blob/778d0a6d1d46faa724ea...
and then according to the LICENSE file[1], the dictionary :
# The word list in cjdict.txt are generated by combining three word lists
# listed below with further processing for compound word breaking. The
# frequency is generated with an iterative training against Google web
# corpora.
#
# * Libtabe (Chinese)
# - https://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=1519
# - Its license terms and conditions are shown below.
#
# * IPADIC (Japanese)
# - http://chasen.aist-nara.ac.jp/chasen/distribution.html
# - Its license terms and conditions are shown below.
#
[1] https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/blob/6417a3b720d8ae3643f7...
Comment · 7 years ago
Someone discovered it years ago online, and it's done a couple rounds in the media[1] as an example of an "overreaching software patent", similar to the "pop-under" patent, which patents a pop-up ad that opens after a window is closed[3].
So no personal experience, but I definitely think it's pretty frivolous; I don't imagine its ever been tested in court. :)
[1] https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1040068/microsoft-... from 2004 [2] https://www.geek.com/news/microsoft-granted-patent-covering-... from 2010 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-up_ad#Patent_controversy
Comment · 7 years ago
Just be careful about Microsoft's Patent US6748582B1; it doesn't expire for another few months. ;)
From the patent (edited down a bit):
> According to various example implementations of the invention, a task list facilitates code development by assisting developers in keeping track of and managing a variety of tasks, such as errors to be corrected, opportunities for optimization, and other user-defined tasks. As the developer edits source code, warnings and coding errors are detected and inserted as tasks in a task list. The developer can also embed keywords known as comment tokens in the code. These comment tokens are detected and used to define tasks.
> [...]
> Tasks can also be identified using tokens or keywords. These tokens or keywords typically preface comment lines in the code and may include predefined labels such as, for example, “UNDONE,” “TODO,” or “HACK,” as well as labels that are defined by the individual developer. If the source code has no syntax errors, the parser [...] determines whether any of the keywords are present in the source code[.] If so, [it] extracts the comment from the source code and uses the tag to determine the priority of the task. The task is then inserted in the task list[.] For example, if the source code contains the comment, “/TODO: Need to add copyright text/”, the parser [...] adds the task “TODO: Need to add copyright text” to the task list with a priority rating assigned to the “TODO” tag. [1]
Comment · 8 years ago
Additionally, if this flag ever goes away, the "kFormatUrlOmitTrivialSubdomains" is the internal flag for this, it seems[1], though its description says it's "Not in kFormatUrlOmitDefaults"[2].
Back when they removed the "http:" off of URLs, I used to use a hex editor to turn the kFormatUrlOmitHTTP bit flag off every time I got a new build, so I'd get the URL formatting I wanted, but eventually lost the mental wherewithal to continue the hack every week.
[1] https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/3d41e77125f3de8d72...
[2] https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/78aae16be65e409075...
Comment · 8 years ago
As anecdotal data: The Masters program I took (not in Cybersecurity) is offered online for the same price as it is in person (I did it in person). If I were to do it again today, according to its website, the program would cost a total of $37,000 (€32,5k) in tuition, not including books, etc.
Comment · 8 years ago
Agreed, the images do seem lower quality than they used to be.
I was curious, though, and chose buildings at random around the Google office in NYC, just to do a side-by-side, and even the old pictures look better:
Comment · 8 years ago
This reminds me of the story of how composer John Cage was inspired to write his piece 4′33″ [1]:
'In 1951, Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than reflecting them as echoes. Such a chamber is also externally sound-proofed. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, "I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation." Cage had gone to a place where he expected total silence, and yet heard sound. "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music." The realization as he saw it of the impossibility of silence led to the composition of 4′33″.'
Comment · 8 years ago
I believe GP is talking about boten/wakiten, not dakuten :)
Comment · 8 years ago
Reminds me of a similar factoid:
Wayne and Brent Gretzky hold the National Hockey League record for most combined points by two brothers:
Wayne Gretzky with 2,857, Brent Gretzky with 4.
I don't think there were any available in my hometown (or they were too underground for me to have ever heard about!), and there wasn't much exposure to electronic music at all, so it's not an experience I'd ever considered trying to find out how to have.
Just one person's anecdote, of course, but I wonder what the balance of generation vs. location is!