truekonrads

The sound of the world…

PRNG is the answer, if you want over a set of small numbers (say a 100) to get a nice distribution of your choice , then you shouldn’t use a RNG, you should generate the desired points on the curve and then shuffle them (or use deterministic code to that effect). A true RNG can output any numbers and only over a large set of numbers the distribution would be uniform.

Vegetarian for 10+ years. Love the odd impossible burger, otherwise I don’t miss meat or fish at all - the thought doesn’t enter my mind

Why eat meat at all is the big question? Impossible and Beyond satisfy the taste and craving without the nastiness.

My few rules are: 1) What's the entropy? This helps with encrypted/compressed. You probably need to overcome this? 2) What's the context? Apps are developed in context and context suggests formats. Is it C? Then expect structs. Does it need to go over the wire? Expect run-length encodings. Python/JS - JSON/pickle. 3) There are broadly speaking only a few ways you can read data back into memory: fixed layout, run-length encoding, terminators. A great case-study is ASN.1, once you've built an ASN.1 parser by hand no file format will ever daunt you.

Cool viz. However it’s hilarious to classify living, spoken languages as “proto” - Latvian and Latgalian. It’s like: “despite there being 2M speakers you guys don’t quite qualify as proper Baltic”.

Surface devices last 6 months in tropical climate like Singapore and then something breaks.

MarkMonitor

What were the issues behind "APIM down"?

Cool debugging, but… 1) if you have very spiky loads (on the hour) and you can distribute them a little it’s obvious that this is will be good thing. 2) they had the answer all along in their telemetry Sometimes wisdom beats effort

The problem seems the sales model rather than the dongle:

1) a hardware and software solution implies that hardware will stop working at some point. Customers should understand it 2) you could sell them a new dongle every time support contract ends which is what I’ve experienced with Xways as an example. Even if you’re air gapped once a year usage data upload and new dongle seems fine. 3) why should users receive free upgrades and bug fixes? No software is bug free.

Finally there are several brand protection shops that fight fakes and work well with Shopee, Lazada, Facebook etc. It’s not five dollars but they will take these down effectively