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ycombiredd
Joined 244 karma
github.com/scottvr
HN @ paperclipmaximizer dot ai
- ycombiredd parentThank you, on both counts.
- It is interesting, for sure, that they are using a gmail.com email address for a role account apparently currently for which the recipient is CPT John Hutchison as of May 2025 [0] But that's not what actually inspired me to write this reply I thought some of you may enjoy reading about.
Incidentally, the dot in the local recipient part of that NSA veterinarian address brings something of a fond anecdote to mind: Since for a gmail SMTP address at delivery time, (excluding organizationally-managed Workspace addresses) "dots" do not matter in the LHS of a recipient address [1], this gmail account address (since it is in the gmail.com domain) would actually be just "nsabahrainvetclinic[at]gmail.com", and the dot seems only to be a visual cue to make its meaning clearer for the human reader/sender. But that's just a preface to my actual anecdote.
More preface: Gmail account names (the LHS) must be at least six characters in length when the account is submitted for creation. [2]
As an early adopter from the Gmail invite-only beta stage, I was able to obtain my long-held, well-known (by my peers) 7-character UNIX login name @gmail.com without issue, which consists of my five-letter first name followed immediately by a two-letter abbreviation of my lengthy Dutch surname, as had been used for years as my Unix login (and thus email address) and sometimes as my online forum handle.
In this early day of gmail, I wanted to "reserve" similar short, memorable, and tradition-preserving usernames for my children, who would soon be entering ages where having an email account would be relevant for them and I was in a position with my allotment of invites to secure such "good" addresses for them. For my daughter this worked out easily as her first name plus surname abbreviation worked out to exactly six characters. For my son, this seemed to not be possible since his given name was only three letters long, and 3+2 being 5, meant that creating a gmail account for him, following my newly-imposed family standard naming scheme seemed impossible.
So, on a hunch following a scent of there possibly being something I could exploit here (and slightly influenced by the burgeoning non-Unix-login-length character imposition corporate trend of first.last[at]domain address standardizations), hypothesizing a letter-correct gmail web front-end implementation that might allow me to spirit-violate backend behavior to achieve my goal, I followed through and successfully got my son's gmail address past the first criteria that a new account must be at least six characters by creating his address as his three letter first name, followed by a "dot", with our two-letter abbreviation of our long surname at the end; something like abc.xy@gmail.com. And my hunch paid off, for as described in [1], the dot was simply ignored at SMTP address-parsing and delivery (and mayhaps also/because at username creation/storage time, but that's just a guess; I'm unsure how/why it actually worked at a technical level since I did not work at Google), giving my son the ability to effectively have a five-letter gmail "username" in his address, in the intended "first name followed by last name two-letter short form" I had created for my progeny, simply by omitting the '.' From his username when sending him email to his gmail address! :-) (My son, sadly has since passed - RIP my sweet boy Ryk; I miss you terribly every day) and I have no idea if this technique is still exploitable in this way today.
I did later wonder if I could have done similar using the fact that "+anything" is ignored in the LHS when parsing a gmail delivery address to maybe pull off creating a three-letter username for a gmail account for my son back then, but never actually tried it when it could have been trivial to try to exploit that sort of front-end-validation vs backend implementation technique for gmail addresses. shrug
I hope y'all don't mind my little off-topic tangent and enjoy the story of this afaik little-known feat that could be pulled off, at least for a time.
[0] https://www.cusnc.navy.mil/Portals/17/NSA%20BAHRAIN%20IMPORT...
- I can't quite figure out what sort of irony the blurb at the bottom of the post is. (I'm unsure if it was intentional snark, a human typo, or an inadvertent demonstration of Haiku not being well suited for spelling and grammar checks), but either way I got a chuckle:
> Disclaimer: This post was written by a human and edited for spelling, grammer by Haiku 4.5
- I think he's saying that he (GlenTheMachine) is Glen Henshaw, "space roboticist", and (understandably) was a bit excited that a somewhat famous document contains a "law" bearing his name as attribution was posted by this water cooler. A way to get some minor attention for it in a comment thread full of like-minded users, and probably offer a genuine (and also maybe coy/tongue-in-cheek) offer to answer questions about that specific line item law.
I like that he waved from the crowd in this way, if only for the "huh. Small world" moment I had reading his comment.
- > Couldn't you send data at megabits per seconds over a mile long copper wire
Yes, but you need the bare copper wire without signaling. We operated a local ISP in the 90's and did exactly that by ordering so-called "alarm circuits" from the telco (with no dial tone) and placed a copper T1 CSU on each end. We marketed it as "metro T1" and undercut traditional T1 pricing by a huge margin with great success to the surrounding downtown area.
- Sorry, I didn't mention class names because the article explicitly did and I assumed that my aversion to the extra typing would be presumed by a reader of my comment. My mistake.
So yeah, I guess what wasn't obvious from my statement of gratitude was that I appreciate knowing that there is a more concise way of keeping track - even without CSS styling. If I make up tags, they will just inherit default styling but to my eye I can be clear about where things are closed, and where to insert things later. I was talking about the manual editing (in vim, as I mentioned), rather than any dynamic query selectors. Make more sense?
- As someone who writes html only rarely (I'm more of a "backend" guy, and even use that term loosely.. most of my webdev experience dates back to the CGI days and often the html was spat out by Perl scripts) and usually in vim, I am pleased to know there is an in-built solution outside of me properly indenting or manually counting divs. Thanks for enlightening me.
- Cool. I could have been clearer in my post; as I understand it actual NTSC circuitry used different coefficients for RGBx and RGBy values, and I didn't take time to look up the official standard. My specific pondering was based on an assumption that neither the ppm2pgm formula nor the parent's "NTSC" formula were exact equivalents to NTSC, and my "ADHD" thoughts wondered about the provenance of how each poster came to use their respective approximations. While I write this, I realize that my actual ponderings are less interesting than the responses generated because of them, so thanks everyone for your insightful responses.
- Rommety was at the helm my entire tenure at IBM. Without wanting to actively bash a former employer, I will say that reading this made me sad, and nostalgic for an IBM I never worked for.
- Interesting that the "NTSC" look you describe is essentially rounded versions of the coefficients quoted in the comment mentioning ppm2pgm. I don't know the lineage of the values you used of course, but I found it interesting nonetheless. I imagine we'll never know, but it would be cool to be able to trace the path that lead to their formula, as well as the path to you arriving at yours
- I dunno. I left around 1999, just before the EarthLink merger.
Related, while doing a quick search to see if I could learn anything about what you described I found Wikipedia quoting NYT as writing about EarthLink in 2000: "second largest Internet service provider after America Online". I guess it was around y2k when aol finally got its ISP (and this its "world's largest") designation by the world at large. :)
- Yes. I worked for the world's largest ISPs (NETCOM (#1), which merged with Mindspring (which was considered #2), which merged with EarthLink (the previous #3, then #2 to the post-NETCOM Mindspring). It was funny, in hindsight, that even though AOL had already adopted TCP/IP and integrated an "Internet Gateway" functionality and had more subscribers than even the combined #1, 2, and 3 rollup I just described, at no time did anyone in the industry actually consider AOL to be an ISP, so the "#1" in size distinction went to the companies mentioned. AOL, deserved or not, never really escaped their second class designation, which also tended to taint their users as they ventured on to the larger internet.
All that said, I still communicate with one person who maintains their aol.com email address to this day in spite of it all.
- Hah yes, I've come to unashamedly - by muscle memory since the 1990's - find myself always typing 'ps auxw[w...]', where [w...] is some arbitrary number of w's depending on how heavy my index finger feels at the moment of typing.
- After my initial thoughts of curiosity and admiration, I couldn't help but ponder how they now have to deal with a bunch of dead 30-meter tall trees in an urban area. Almost makes the landscape architect from the 60's seem a bit like a passive-aggressive practical joker. "Oh, how pretty! And this is the only time they will bloom because now they're going to... oh sh*t."
- Wait... I had to do a double take for this one.
To me, the funniest thing is the AlgoDrill leet code post being on the front page both today and ten years from now.
Subtle and hilarious.
- Is it naive of me to ask why it is being just casually accepted that a major ISP is mitm'ing TLS traffic?
- Could be. Long ago I tried to sign up for an Apple Dev account, having bought a cheap used Mac mini just for the purpose, but learned in the process that they were only allowing signups from Intel Macs and not Power PC Macs, much to my chagrin.
- It would, but it would be platform-specific and an external dependency. It was my first thought too until I started planning out it working cross-platform.
- My first guess wouldn't be routing, but traffic-shaping.
Perhaps the VPN you use is on a protocol/port that isn't outright rate-limited and since ATT can't peak inside your tunnel to see what you are doing with the bandwidth, it avoids any QoS/shaping/limiting that your non-VPN connection is subjected to.
- The author's short diversion about the hassle of using a random website for zip2iso functionality and asking about a cli tool for doing such conversion lead me to create this cross-platform python script with no external dependencies: https://github.com/scottvr/GENISO/blob/main/ZIP2ISO.py
Longer explanation in the comments of TFA, but short version is that it was mostly "vibe-coded" using Gemini3 Pro instead of having to read the ISO9660 spec, which was also impressive to me.
- You might find this a useful companion to your tool.
- Here's a Medium version if you don't like clicking PDFs.
https://medium.com/@scott.vr/part-of-your-world-e6a0d78d46b9
- I evaluated the Copyleaks copyright/plagiarism detection platform’s ability to detect phonetically and semantically equivalent text that differs orthographically from the original source using tools I made and link to in the paper.
Copyleaks’ own marketing materials cite accuracy rates above 99 % on “paraphrased and disguised” text. In contrast, our trials yielded detection rates as low as 0 %, with multiple transformed works passing undetected despite maintaining near-verbatim semantic and phonetic equivalence to the originals.
- Here's the current supported tunings:
$ gtrsnipe --list-tunings Available Tunings: - STANDARD : E4 B3 G3 D3 A2 E2 - E_FLAT : Eb4 Bb3 Gb3 Db3 Ab2 Eb2 - DROP_D : E4 B3 G3 D3 A2 D2 - D_STANDARD : D4 A3 F3 C3 G2 D2 - DROP_C : D4 A3 F3 C3 G2 C2 - OPEN_G : D4 B3 G3 D3 G2 D2 - OPEN_E : E4 B3 G#3 E3 B2 E2 - DADGAD : D4 A3 G3 D3 A2 D2 - OPEN_D : D4 A3 F#3 D3 A2 D2 - OPEN_C6 : E4 C4 G3 C3 A2 C2 - C_SHARP : C#4 F#3 B2 E2 C#2 - BASS_STANDARD : G2 D2 A1 E1 - BASS_DROP_D : G2 D2 A1 D1 - BASS_E_FLAT : Gb2 Db2 Ab1 Eb1 - SEVEN_STRING_STANDARD : E4 B3 G3 D3 A2 E2 B1 - SEVEN_STRING_DROP_A : E4 B3 G3 D3 A2 E2 A1 - BARITONE_B : B3 F#3 D3 A2 E2 B1 - BARITONE_A : A3 E3 C3 G2 D2 A1 - BARITONE_C : C4 G3 Eb3 Bb2 F2 C2 - There's quite a bit more involved in the scoring, such as string hopping, runs on the same string, etc. I invite you to run --help and look at the mapper config tunables. Ideas for improvement are welcome.
- Thanks! TBH I hadn't thought about handling repeating segments yet - in either direction. Because the tab-to-midi direction is mostly a novelty I haven't done much of it except with tabs generated by gtrsnipe, and since it doesn't handle repeats specially, I haven't had to parse any "x2" type notation, but now that you mention it I should. Thanks again.
- I hadn't heard of Strudel before but I'll look into it. Thanks!
- OP here. I need to update the readme, but running it with --help will show you all of the alternate tunings and such. The mapper algorithm is nearly 100% tunable.
As I said, I'll put this info in the README, but last night I made a medium post that shows some of this (--bass, etc).
https://medium.com/@scott.vr/about-seven-months-ago-via-hack...
- I probably need to update the documentation. Since I posted I've added many alternate tunings and it supports from four to seven strings. I'm still improving it. Thanks for checking it out.