The cursed computer iceberg meme (2021)(suricrasia.online)
suricrasia.online
The cursed computer iceberg meme (2021)
https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/
41 comments
What is interesting is what the top comment in the previous thread points out, both the collection and the iceberg are part of the same domain. The text for it is the only one that's italic and stands out a bit but not too much. It's like the whole thing is made just to sell that one.
And I gotta say congrats to them, I completely fell for it.
And I gotta say congrats to them, I completely fell for it.
There are other italicized entries. For example, OpenOffice does not print on Tuesdays and Falsehoods programmers believe about time.
It may still be a clever ad, but doesn't seem necessarily related to their font choices.
It may still be a clever ad, but doesn't seem necessarily related to their font choices.
Lots of great stuff - not sure if it's on there, but I like the story about a user complaining they couldn't send an email farther than 150 miles.
Turned out to be related to some sort of timeout (and 150 miles being around the time it would take for the timeout to fail).
I liked it because the user reporting it was debugging in an interesting way a non-technical person might, but it initially weirded out the technical person when they first tested it and saw the 150mi thing appeared to be true (before deducing why).
The story of Mel is also on there and a great (true one). Speed up loops was another fun DailyWTF one and I also liked the one about the cool cam (that saved some flight video game that was way behind schedule).
The old programmer lore stories are great.
Turned out to be related to some sort of timeout (and 150 miles being around the time it would take for the timeout to fail).
I liked it because the user reporting it was debugging in an interesting way a non-technical person might, but it initially weirded out the technical person when they first tested it and saw the 150mi thing appeared to be true (before deducing why).
The story of Mel is also on there and a great (true one). Speed up loops was another fun DailyWTF one and I also liked the one about the cool cam (that saved some flight video game that was way behind schedule).
The old programmer lore stories are great.
There was another story on the same site [1] that involves thermodynamics and signal processing. I don't think I've seen such technical sci-fi before. Anybody else have more examples to share?
[1]: https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/CSC218-Software-Precogna...
[1]: https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/CSC218-Software-Precogna...
Not quite to the same level of technical complexity, but this short story about the horrors of mind upload is formatted like a future-Wikipedia article [0]. qntm, its author, is a great source of... outsider art science fiction? His written work feels similar to the movie Primer, which was created by engineers without much formal training in filmmaking; namely, it's impressive and imaginative and well-polished, but obviously without the mien and certain stylistic elements of those who learned the "rules" of the medium by rote rather than derivation and imitation.
[0] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
[0] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
This story is one of the most horrifying things ever. I’d rather die than get mind-uploaded into a VC-backed immortality machine.
(Of course it helps that I believe that there’s an afterlife - but even if I didn’t, I’m likely to make the same choice)
(Of course it helps that I believe that there’s an afterlife - but even if I didn’t, I’m likely to make the same choice)
Greg Egan is an extreme example of math in hard sci-fi. https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html
72 Letters by Ted Chiang is a great short story with a well-developed premise. Maybe not people's typical idea of hard sci-fi, but as a fan of the genre I really enjoyed it. One of his stories became the movie Arrival.
Peter Watts is another author whose work I really enjoy. The slideshow you linked reminds me of a fictional presentation he used to have on his website on vampire biology. Can't find it though.
72 Letters by Ted Chiang is a great short story with a well-developed premise. Maybe not people's typical idea of hard sci-fi, but as a fan of the genre I really enjoyed it. One of his stories became the movie Arrival.
Peter Watts is another author whose work I really enjoy. The slideshow you linked reminds me of a fictional presentation he used to have on his website on vampire biology. Can't find it though.
This should be the page, but it requires a Flash plugin (so doesn't work for me): https://rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm
Here it is as a pdf: https://rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf
Wow! Thank you for finding that.
Thanks for linking this, I love this kind of "computer science fiction" stuff
It’s the stuff the Laundry series by Charles Stross used to be, but then it really focused on the espionage and then just general paranormal parody riffing.
For the uninformed, what’s sneaky about it?
From the comments in the linked thread:
> They doctored their hashes. See, the hashes of the story's example strings do match the hashes given in the story in their first many non-zero characters, and they do match the last ten or so characters. Someone like me who bothers to check that they're legit -- and who like me is used to not checking every character of a hash -- will be fooled. But the real hashes have extra characters in between those start and end chunks, and crucially the real hashes also start with many fewer zeros. The real hashes are the same as the story hashes but with extra characters added, balanced out with fewer zeros to start. The hashes in the story start with 22 zeros. The actual hashes that the example strings produce start with 11 zeros. That means that, effectively, the real hashes have a massively easier difficulty level. An achievable-in-reality difficulty level
> They doctored their hashes. See, the hashes of the story's example strings do match the hashes given in the story in their first many non-zero characters, and they do match the last ten or so characters. Someone like me who bothers to check that they're legit -- and who like me is used to not checking every character of a hash -- will be fooled. But the real hashes have extra characters in between those start and end chunks, and crucially the real hashes also start with many fewer zeros. The real hashes are the same as the story hashes but with extra characters added, balanced out with fewer zeros to start. The hashes in the story start with 22 zeros. The actual hashes that the example strings produce start with 11 zeros. That means that, effectively, the real hashes have a massively easier difficulty level. An achievable-in-reality difficulty level
I had a major WTF moment when I read about the basilisk collection, only to find out that the file doesn't actually exist and the article is a fiction story, SCP like. Lol. Now I kind of wish it did exist.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
My wife has complained that open office will never print on Tuesdays!?!
Made my day.
My wife has complained that open office will never print on Tuesdays!?!
Made my day.
I love bug descriptions that leave you saying "whaaaa"
Pasting an image from the clipboard on Firefox while the browser language is set to German causes the filename not to get a timestamp
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-79517
Pasting an image from the clipboard on Firefox while the browser language is set to German causes the filename not to get a timestamp
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-79517
Maintaining code written as far back as 2006, especially in PHP, I went from a phase where I thought users who complained about things like this had to be batshit crazy/stupid to where I started putting the really ludicrous user issues like this one at the top of my list. Users suck at giving repeatable steps to reproduce bugs. To my shame it probably took me about 10 years before I was able to detect the subtle differences between their universally illiterate emails that would indicate whether they'd actually tested something or not; they aren't great at explaining how or when they tested it if they even did. But I've learned the hard way that when they reference something as specific as "Tuesday", it's probably an actual error.
>> font hinting is Turing complete
TIL. But, from the Wikipedia article:
>> Although incapable of receiving input and producing output as normally understood in programming
Great. So this is why this hasn't been the subject of 0-day hacks since like 1988.
Also, about that Orson Wells thing (from the linked paper):
>>In 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air performed an infamous broadcast of War of the Worlds [12]. The broadcast begins with a brief theatri- cal introduction, followed by simulated news broadcasts describing an alien invasion of New Jersey that run for thirty-eight minutes before the first and only intermis- sion, after which the story shifts to the past tense and a fictional tone. Prior to the intermission, there is not one commercial, not one word out of character, and not one scene in the past tense to clue the listener in on the fictional nature of the broadcast. While Welles surely was not concerned with attacking digital radios in 1938, his broadcast does follow the gen- eral pattern of the attacks in this paper. His PIP in this case is the thirty-eight minute panicked broadcast, while the introduction could be considered an outer header. Listeners who miss the introduction might believe the first act to be factual, just as a digital radio which misses a preamble might interpret the PIP to be a legitimate and full packet.
So basically, because every packet protocol has headers and headers can be spoofed, and War of the Worlds was essentially a header spoof, let's call this the Orson Wells attack?
Maybe instead of the Big Scary Iceberg website, we can call it the Leonardo DiCaprio list of bad shit that could happen to you a boat?
TIL. But, from the Wikipedia article:
>> Although incapable of receiving input and producing output as normally understood in programming
Great. So this is why this hasn't been the subject of 0-day hacks since like 1988.
Also, about that Orson Wells thing (from the linked paper):
>>In 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air performed an infamous broadcast of War of the Worlds [12]. The broadcast begins with a brief theatri- cal introduction, followed by simulated news broadcasts describing an alien invasion of New Jersey that run for thirty-eight minutes before the first and only intermis- sion, after which the story shifts to the past tense and a fictional tone. Prior to the intermission, there is not one commercial, not one word out of character, and not one scene in the past tense to clue the listener in on the fictional nature of the broadcast. While Welles surely was not concerned with attacking digital radios in 1938, his broadcast does follow the gen- eral pattern of the attacks in this paper. His PIP in this case is the thirty-eight minute panicked broadcast, while the introduction could be considered an outer header. Listeners who miss the introduction might believe the first act to be factual, just as a digital radio which misses a preamble might interpret the PIP to be a legitimate and full packet.
So basically, because every packet protocol has headers and headers can be spoofed, and War of the Worlds was essentially a header spoof, let's call this the Orson Wells attack?
Maybe instead of the Big Scary Iceberg website, we can call it the Leonardo DiCaprio list of bad shit that could happen to you a boat?
Is this phenomenon related to why websockets use masking? I believe it's something to do with shitty proxies being vulnerable to being cache-poisoned when an attacker sends data down the websocket (packet in packet) which looks like HTTP traffic.
Related:
The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26766722 - April 2021 (60 comments)
The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26766722 - April 2021 (60 comments)
In some meta way, I like 00000000000000000021e800c1e8df51b22c1588e5a624bea17e9faa34b2dc4a because it's like a prototypical example of a clickbait article.
It strings you along for 20 paragraphs and 3 sections, constantly repeating itself and never quite telling what the deal is with that hash, before ending with "so actually this is just a weird coincidence and a complete non-story"...
It strings you along for 20 paragraphs and 3 sections, constantly repeating itself and never quite telling what the deal is with that hash, before ending with "so actually this is just a weird coincidence and a complete non-story"...
I clicked that one too, and I'm pretty glad it never loaded for me.
This website is incredibly good. Reminds me of qntm. https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/CSC218-Software-Precogna...
The page is great, even disregarding the fictional stuff.
I would have expected to find Cicada 3301 in there. That one still bugs one.
I would have expected to find Cicada 3301 in there. That one still bugs one.
I love the breadth that Reflections on Trusting Trust, Therac-25, and The Bitter Lesson are! But there's a lot of "X is Turing complete" and "Y is a fork/zip/parsing infinite expansion bomb" though.
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Janet Jackson Rhythm Nation needs to be on there... and maybe even just "thumb drive in the parking lot"
Here's a similar one for the C preprocessor: https://jadlevesque.github.io/PPMP-Iceberg/ (previously discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094693).
Pretty cursed stuff down there.
Pretty cursed stuff down there.
This is brilliant and a welcome repost.
As a developer with superannuated eyes and a penchant for side-by-side diffs, I am disappointed to see that the supplemental deep abyss contains “80 columns”. Damn kids with their memes and 5pt fonts shakes fist!
As a developer with superannuated eyes and a penchant for side-by-side diffs, I am disappointed to see that the supplemental deep abyss contains “80 columns”. Damn kids with their memes and 5pt fonts shakes fist!
Linking 80 columns to the size of foolscap paper several centuries ago is pretty arcane whether you like narrow lines or not.
My bad — I assumed the “80 columns” was listed in the guise of a complaint about narrow wrapping in the age of 40” widescreen displays.
I would expect to see https://yosefk.com/c++fqa/ there.
Another nice entry would be the fact that cosmic rays can flip hardware bits with sometimes drastic consequences. Unfortunately I don't have a good source link, but veritasium has a video on YouTube about it.
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Great little compilation of computer lore. Sort of like a Jargon file for the meme generations.
What I loved is that:
$ echo -en 'basilisk:0000000000:ds26ovbJzDwkVWia1tINLJZ2WXEHBvItMZRxHmYhlQd0spuvPXb6cYFJorDKkqlA' | openssl dgst -sha256 -binary | openssl dgst -sha256 (stdin)= 0000000000000000000000161b9f84a187cc21b172bf68b3cb3b78684d8e9f17
actually works, but is a little sneaky. See https://www.metafilter.com/190463/so-who-is-there-left-to-tr...
Edit2: https://github.com/blackle/Basilisk-Hunter How the examples were generated.