Spyke

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Biden-Harris Administration Launches New Effort to Crack Down on Everyday Headaches and Hassles That Waste Americans’ Time and Money.

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They take your money in 5 seconds, but give it back in "5 to 7 business days".

This is the thing that pisses me off most. After spending hours arguing when they finally relent it will be "up to 30 business days before you see your refund". I had one company take 120 days to refund my money when my venue had to be cancelled during COVID, money that I had to pay the moment I booked.

linux

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Is there a downside to Flatpak?

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Where in America is there 20Gbps symmetrical fiber? Everywhere I know tops out at 1gbps if you are lucky that your ISP isn't shit, and lots of areas are still on slow cable.

In my area my options are 200mbps cable or 100mbps ADSL (which inexplicably costs more than the cable Internet)

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Orsom Peters: Bitwise Binary Search: Elegant and Fast

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Even in the hands of experts they can be dangerous. One of the most respected programmers at my company wrote an implementation of memory that had an off by one error when bit indexing for alignment checking.

Everything worked fine until you had 16-bit relatively aligned src and dest and happened to be targeting uncached memory.

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The Reviewer Isn't the Bottleneck

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Ideally you can do that, but even the most well designed software ends up needing a larger refactor/reorganization that will touch a large portion of the code base.

My boss likes to say "you aren't qualified to design something until you have built it once" which I do feel rings true. This inevitably leads to at least one major redesign for a significant codebase.

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Man this brings back memories of installing Fedora Core 6 at my internship. I think I jumped to F10 after we did a round of updates. I started distro-hopping after that so I missed a bunch but I really like Fedora 16s wallpaper.

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Does anybody actually use trunk based development in their company?

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My company still uses SVN, but we have almost 20 years of history in the repository, not including the autogenerated commits from when we migrated from CVS.

My department would like for us to move to git (some sub projects have) but it's important for our process to retain the history and nobody has had the time to figure out if the migration would be clean then update all of our auto-testing infrastructure (which itself is over a decade old) to use git, all while not stopping active development.

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US Department of Commerce unveils quantum-resistant encryption algorithms | IoT Now News & Reports

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One time pads aren't really feasible at scale. Getting the pad (key) to your partner securely will involve moving it in meatspace.

If you tried to send the pad with some other encryption that becomes the weak point and defeats the pad.

You can't reuse the pad for multiple transmissions or you are vulnerable to analysis attacks.

You can't compress the pad and send it with remaining space of a previous pad because the pad has to be true random numbers and won't compress well so you will always come out behind.

They are great in theory, and in practice for a few fixed short form communications in emergency situations but I don't know of any practical way they could be used generally. Your bank isn't going to ship you a hard drive of random numbers for you to securely look at your account.

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[CompSci] All regular languages can be constructed from performing operations on elementary languages?

If I can remember my theory correctly the difference between languages revolves around the machinery required to recognize the language.

Regular expressions can be recognized with just finite state machines (NFA or DFA have the same power).

Context free languages require a Push down automata. And context sensitive languages need a Turing Machine.

When looking at regular expressions as NFAs you can see the operations you mentioned.

Concat a b: is just state transition

Union a b: have an epsilon transition from the start state to an NFA for a and one into the NFA for b

Repeat a: add an epsilon transition from the accept state of a to it's own start state

With the more powerful grammars you might be able to do similar analysis on the ability to join machines together but it's been too many years since I did any formal work like that.