Cyber hunt

Hello hunters !
It's been quite a while since my one, but I'm here with a new Internt Scavenger Hunt !
This one has been cooking for the past year, and this is with great pleasure that I advertise it to the community ! Without further ado, here's the link:
⠵ CYB3R HUNT ⠫
It is much more involved and narrated than the other hunts I've made, and benefits from all the feedbacks I got, so brace yourselves ! There's also a whole story line going with it, and progressing through the hunt will unfold the plot.
I hope you guys will enjoy it! Don't...

Going off-script

There is a phenomenon in society which I find quite bizarre. Upon our entry to this mortal coil, we are endowed with self-awareness, agency, and free will. Each of the 8 billion members of this human race represents a unique person, a unique worldview, and a unique agency. Yet, many of us have the same fundamental goals and strive to live the same life.

I think of such a life experiences as “following the script”. Society lays down for us a framework for living out our lives. Everyone deviates from the script to some extent, but most people hit the important beats. In Western society, these beats are...

Forty years of programming

The forbidden topics

There are forbidden topics in the hacker community. One is sternly reprimanded for bringing them up, by their peers, their leaders, and the community at large. In private, one can expect threats and intimidation; in public, outcry and censorship. The forbidden topics are enforced by the moderators of our spaces, taken off of forums, purged from chat rooms, and cleaned up from GitHub issues and mailing lists; the ban-hammers fall swiftly and resolutely. My last article to touch these subjects was removed from Hacker News by the moderators within 30 minutes and landed several death threats in my inbox. The forbidden topics, when raised, are met with a...

Exploring Command-line space time

HAL в 4000 байт

«HAL 4000» – исполняемая программа для Windows размером ровно 4000 байт. Лучшая работа в номинации 4 kb intro фестиваля Chaos Constructions 2017, второе место в чартах портала pouet.net. «HAL 4000» попала в плейлист Best of Demoscene 2017 наряду с работами Farbrausch, Fairlight, Conspiracy, Alcatraz, Byterapers, обсуждалась на вебинаре анимационной студии, демонстрировалась на различных фестивалях.

Необычная история создания этой работы изложена ниже.

Don’t share commented-out code

Hyprland is a toxic community

Hyprland is an open source Wayland compositor based on wlroots, a project I started back in 2017 to make it easier to build good Wayland compositors. It’s a project which is loved by its users for its emphasis on customization and “eye candy” – beautiful graphics and animations, each configuration tailored to the unique look and feel imagined by the user who creates it. It’s a very exciting project!

Unfortunately, the effect is spoilt by an incredibly toxic and hateful community. I cannot recommend Hyprland to anyone who is not prepared to steer well clear of its community spaces. Imagine a high school boys’ locker room come to life...

XDG_CONFIG_HOME as ~/etc

What's your opinion on the following config:
Code:export XDG_DATA_HOME=~/share
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=~/etc
export XDG_STATE_HOME=~/local/state
export XDG_CACHE_HOME=~/var/cache
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=~/var/run
Make a lot of sense I believe.

AI crap

There is a machine learning bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by machine learning. But it will probably be crappier, not better.

Contrary to the AI doomer’s expectations, the world isn’t going to go down in flames any faster thanks to AI. Contemporary advances in machine learning aren’t really getting us any closer to AGI, and as Randall Monroe pointed out back in 2018:

What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots. LLMs are a pretty good advance over Markov...