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SVG does not have hinting
Jul 14, 2024 · original
Using SVG for vector icons is meh. With hinting (as text): Without hinting (as SVG): Hinting is also mentioned in https://css-tricks.com/fontello-past-future-icon-font-service/ .
A Profession to Solve Problems With Software In Everyday Life
Jul 9, 2024 · original
Seeing people who have problem with software that I can solve easily yet they struggle with has made me think about ways to solve it entirely. Option A: educate everyone on the basics of information handling. Teaching this does not need actual computers. Option B: educate every software engineer on the basics of software engineering. I have a feeling that this is harder than Option A; much harder, in fact. Option C: create a new profession. This article is about Option C. So I see some have physical shops to repair hardware. What if we can do the same but with software? As information handlers, we can offer services such as looking up certain information and making that into a one-click application (making custom software), printing out maps and other info, installing OS, m.. you get the idea. Having a physical shop is important because… E-mail. It’s not made of paper. It’s like … uh … d
Data Transmission via Energy Transmission
Jul 6, 2024 · original
This idea occured to me when watching Wind Breaker , a show about people beating each other up. Wherever energy flows, you can encode info by modulating that energy. I think I may have taken this idea too seriously. A lethal amount of energy transmission for some can be communication for others. I know plants do this, but seeing it between people is kind of funny.
Thoughts on Computing and the tech industry
Jul 3, 2024 · original
The discipline of Computing is more about how to think, not who or what is thinking. The majority of people who trade software are in it because they want to make money. That’s their main motivation. It’s rare to see those who enjoy engineering and want to make money on the side. I guess this isn’t a problem. When commercialization meets passion, commercialization is not even trying. It is a problem, though, that consumers of commercial software suffer from it. I’ve observed that the technical literate and the technical illiterate lived in two different worlds. If we connect the two worlds together, the problem would be solved. This is not particularly hard to do; it requires some thinking. There is ego in the solution, which I had to deal with it myself. I don’t think I can explain the solution in text well. Hope’s that I will be able to show by example soon.
I think I understand a bit more about society
Jun 28, 2024 · original
I have observed that social stratas exist because people don’t want to move (this alone has veto power on the existence of social stratas). I have realized that poverty is artificial. The real issue lies in the fact that people cannot reach their full potential because they are resource-constrained (a.k.a. poverty). This is an unfulfilled need they want to solve - a genuine social problem. Giving people money is an instrumental goal. Maybe we can work around it? Being able to manipulate the economy is important in solving poverty, so I looked at a type of numbers related to economy . It… doesn’t feel real. I’ll look for a way to feel how money flows with little to no abstractions on top. Sucks to be me. XD
On Software Popularity And Knowledge
May 21, 2024 · original
I hear some people say, “Label your open-source project as (A)GPL or corporations will steal it from you”. For most open-source projects (those are small), this is not true. Most for-profit companies will only use projects that are successful (read: popular) or have good marketing (read: perceived popular). They don’t really care about quality. If some software’s home page has a word that matches what they think they need, they will use it; otherwise no. I think my warning will mostly fall on deaf ears for those who do not pursue knowledge. I consider the following advice to be the most valuable thing on this website: process every piece of information that you encounter you might find what you don’t know that you needed
Failing At The 100k Problem On FreeBSD
May 20, 2024 · original
I had the billiant idea of running 100k processes at once on FreeBSD. So, I tried to patch the kernel. cd /usr/src/ # patch the kernel here (see below) make buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC The patch on sys/proc.h -#define PID_MAX 99999 -#define NO_PID 100000 +#define PID_MAX (2147483647-1) +#define NO_PID (PID_MAX+1) As it turns out, the FreeBSD kernel is structured in a way that there are bitarrays keeping track of every PID possible, making this configuration not compile-able. So, I reverted to using the following script to stress test the system. #include unistd.h #include stdio.h #include sys/wait.h int main() { long int count = 0; while (1) { int pid = rfork(RFPROC|RFTHREAD); if (pid 0) break; int sig; if (pid == 0) { count += 1; if (count % 1000 == 0) printf("%ld\n", count); } else (void)wait(&sig); } return 0; } It got stuck at 12000 and froze the whole system. Changing rfork to fork
How POSIX User ID and Supplementary Group IDs are Set On Login
May 9, 2024 · original
This is usually done by the login(1) setuid executable. It looks up /etc/passwd with the username and gets the User ID and the Primary Group ID . This is the 0:0 in /etc/passwd . root:*:0:0:Superuser:/root:/usr/local/bin/fish It looks up /etc/group with the username and gets all the groups the user is in ( Supplementary Group IDs ). Then, it spawns a shell (the shell command is also read from /etc/passwd ) in a new session (kernel concept) with the User ID, Primary Group ID, Supplementary Group IDs. It also sets $USER and other environment variables. One uid can have multiple names, and one gid can have multiple names. Here’s an example from FreeBSD: /etc/passwd : root:*:0:0:Superuser:/root:/usr/local/bin/fish toor:*:0:0:Bourne-again Superuser:/root: /etc/group : wheel:*:0:root operator:*:5:root Now observe the magic: user@ed ~ doas -s -u root root@ed ~# groups wheel operator root@ed ~#
A Thought - 0
May 9, 2024 · original
I recently realized that mixing making money and sharing knowledge makes me unhappy. Even thinking about writing a book and potentially selling it makes me deeply uncomfortable. The feeling is probably given to me by birth. *flops*
Do Not Share Descriptor Table On FreeBSD
May 6, 2024 · original
First of all, “threads” are fake. They exist in dreams, but not to the FreeBSD kernel. In the kernel source code, there’s something called “process leader” or p_leader . Every process has a p_leader . Update(2024-05-20): ok, so, threads are real . They are non-standard and I’m not sure how they interact with Capsicum. Here’s all you need to know about p_leader : When a process exits, all processes having it as p_leader are sent SIGKILL . When a process tries to hold an advisory lock, it will be held by its p_leader . rfork(RFPROC|RFTHREAD) sets the new process’ p_leader to be the current process’ p_leader , otherwise, a new process starts with itself as its p_leader . Multiple processes can share a file descriptor table with rfork(2) . I’d say this is a bad idea. You don’t want the time-at-access,time-at-use bug to appear in your program. Writing secure applications on FreeBSD is easy. u
Notes On Entropic Forcing
May 6, 2024 · original
Someone introduced the concept of Causal Entropic Forces to me. One of the author’s TED talk seems to be a publicity stunt. A Python implementation by a third party explained to me how it works. The project applied entropic forcing to particle-in-a-box. I fixed it a bit to run with Python 3. The idea can be described as the following: Seeking the most diverse future. Seeking to be in a position to have the most options available. Short explanation with bad $\KaTeX$ : M: Nat \space \text{(number of steps to look ahead)} \\ S_?: State \\ S_? \cdot F_?: State \\ F_r \space \text{(each instance is a random action)}; \space {F_r}^2 = F_r \cdot F_r Given current state $S$ , propose a some actions $F_1 ... F_n$ randomly or uniformly, calculate the future state of each action $M$ steps into the future (future actions are taken randomly): $S'_i = S \cdot F_i \cdot {F_r}^M$ . Approximate
Linux: Only One New PID Namespace Per Process
May 3, 2024 · original
I have the general feeling that Linux does not like sandboxing. I was trying to write my own process supervisor with pid namespace, and, in Erlang/OTP, one supervisor can have multiple supervisors as children. On Linux though… not so easy. (Yes if the main process fork, (in child) unshare, fork, wait.) After unshare, the process can only fork once. unshare(CLONE_NEWPID); // ok fork(); // ok fork(); // ENOMEM The process cannot unshare twice. unshare(CLONE_NEWPID); // ok fork(); // ok unshare(CLONE_NEWPID); // EINVAL Run the source code yourself and see if you can overcome this limitation: https://git.envs.net/iacore/newpid-supervisor Also, as a sidenote, you need CAP_SYS_ADMIN to use unshare(CLONE_NEWPID) . This is either done with root, or, in bwrap ’s case, creating an unprivileged uid/gid sandbox that maps a subuid to 0/root. The feeling is mutual. Capsicum is good. Use capsicum.
Flat, Freeform Input Is Better Than Hierarchical Input
Apr 9, 2024 · original
I think I understand how communication software works now. Basically, What you said My reply. is better than { "reply-to": "https://example.com/xxx", "content": "My reply" } because one can do multiple replies in one message What A said My reply to A. What B said My reply to B. sighs
Multiplicity By Default
Apr 9, 2024 · original
One can have several names. One can understand several languages. One can do several things. Then why the fuck is dropdown like those a thing? Fucking hell. Give free form input or don’t touch UI ever again.
Number Of Lives Wasted Per Revenue
Apr 9, 2024 · original
After talking with an Epicurean (who want to minimize pain and maximize pleasure), I thought of this metric that measures how scrupulous any group of people make money. LREI will probably stay as an idea for some time. If you like this sort of thing, go read Matthew White’s books . Freedom is important, I guess.
Conflicts Of Interest Business Everywhere
Apr 4, 2024 · original
Conflicts of interest (COI) are underlined . A private company pays some employees at a fix rate to work , but as all beings created by nature, the employees are inherently lazy and don’t want to work. Manufactured incompetence [1] guaranteed! One way to solve this is to have the employees own shares of that company. Those companies are called co-op / cooperatives… wait… the food industry wins again! Well, that’s the only ethical way of aligning the interest of employees that I know. If the company goes public, then… COI Battle Advanced! *dumps a million dice on the floor and they go everywhere * . And then you have VC s, which, each only cares about themself. Now I have more respect for that private company whose founder only kept 1% of the company’s equity. maybe not “incompetence”, but definitely lazier than when one works on their own projects ↩︎
:is() and :where() in CSS
Mar 31, 2024 · original
While browsing web-features ’s Baseline data , I found some interesting CSS features. You can download the data and filter like so: jq '.[] | select(.status.baseline == "high") | .name' index.json First, :is() and :where() can be used like :is(.a, .b) .c . :where() has 0 specificity . I wonder if :is() , :where() , :not() , :has() can be Turing-equivalent.
What is Power
Mar 12, 2024 · original
Through some confusing interactions with predominantly male beings, I have come to the following realization. To have power is to be able to trample over others’ desires. To use power is to trample over others’ desires. Oftentimes, I gave them the power by choosing to have convenience that depend on their creations (software). Rarely, I had my desires trampled over by someone and chose to still give them power, because the convenience their stuff provide made the transaction worth it. A direct result from this realization is that I will pay more attention to the social aspect of large projects before using them. And this judgement of mine, by definition, is discrimination. I wonder if I can have freedom and convenience by not depending on others. Maybe that’s why individualism is so attractive.
Linux Character Special
Mar 9, 2024 · original
While exploring benchmarking pipe-related programs like cat /dev/zero | pv /dev/null with some friends, I found that yes /dev/null is actually quite slow. benchmark script here I looked deeper into character special files like /dev/null , and found something I haven’t heard of: /dev/aio (POSIX Asynchronous I/O). Well that’s interesting. Here is the full list of block and character special devices on Linux: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/admin-guide/devices.txt To see the a special file’s identity, run file /dev/zero /dev/zero: character special (1/5) (1/5) means major 1 minor 5 (Null byte source). I tried replacing the database of a simple program with urandom , and it fails at ftruncate (cannot truncate file). Here’s the command that I used. doas mknod -m 0666 data c 1 9 Less interesting than I wanted this to be. Update(2024-03-22): The special files stay on the filesystem for
Generic Social Pain
Mar 8, 2024 · original
Just looked into the hash tag #mutualaid on social media. Pain. The US social system sucks. The tech company most use to collect money (Paypal) also sucks. I hope humanity will remember this lesson and never found a country on slavery ever again. Oh, none of that “you can be rich if you work hard” too.

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