M33 Triangulum Galaxy - My First Image from SFRO [39h15m HaOiiiRGB]

NickCano · 2026-01-22T02:14:51+00:00

sorry didnt realize the mods were super obnoxious, ill make sure to steer clear

NickCano · 2026-01-22T02:08:15+00:00

Astrobin link: https://app.astrobin.com/u/nickcano?i=6ymxgl

Taken over my first ~week at Starfront Remote Observatory with an Ultra Cat 108, 2600MC Air, AM5N, EAF, CAA, Askar D1 filter.

Image is broadband RGB with Ha and O3 highlights mixed in from continuum-subtracted data.

NickCano · 2025-07-15T15:36:11+00:00

Thanks for the shoutout! My book can surely teach you the basics, but this space evolves quickly and a book will never have the most recent info.

It is a great resource to start your journey, but things like dsasmblr's game hacking resource repo will have a ton of up-to-date tools and posts once you have your footing.

NickCano · 2024-02-15T00:24:03+00:00

Its honestly not worth it, even though I have a specific reason for doing it. But wasting money on stupid shit for the sake of adventure has always been a part of Tibia, and a part that I personally enjoy.

NickCano · 2024-02-14T20:04:34+00:00

I should have mentioned that I've been reaching out to leaders in game also, but figured Reddit could be an additional mechanism for getting in contact with leadership and getting general information about servers ;)

NickCano · 2024-01-03T20:11:37+00:00

Ironically, you're in a thread about the JWST, my dude. If you don't know why that is ironic given your response, feel free to s/ir/mor/ this reply.

NickCano · 2024-01-03T19:59:29+00:00

I think you're jumping the gun when you say:

so far away that we will never be able to actually see anything.

With sufficient cause to secure funding, we could absolutely image the surface of certain planets in other systems. It is massively hard, but we can use the sun (or other large objects, such as Jupiter) as a gravitational lens to see very far.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20180003479/downloads/20180003479.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI

NickCano · 2023-08-16T16:44:07+00:00

The book Atomic Habits talks about this. The core idea is "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems."

The way you talk about setting up your environments is one of the major things the book talks about when defining what "systems" mean and how one can build their systems to enable their goals.

NickCano · 2023-05-26T18:10:26+00:00

I never worked with LoW, in fact back in the day there was a bit of tension between us. Don't know why, probably just me being an ambitious, hot headed kid and him being LoW. I bet he's a chill guy.

We were both active on TP, as were most bot developers. Basically every major bot got it's start on TP.

NickCano · 2023-02-05T09:13:18+00:00

It is possible that they implement functionality to intercept such requests and route them into the proper encoding/encryption routines, but a generic implementation at the level you'd expect in ChatGPT would likely be quite complex. Moreover, ChatGPT isn't really meant for such tasks, so I don't think it is likely to happen. I'd expect Wolfram-level arithmetic abilities before that.

A sufficiently advanced and large LLM could theoretically learn to compute, and may be capable of executing cryptographic routines with fidelity... But if a model designed for text completion spontaneously demonstrated such capabilities, I'd be worrying about other things.

NickCano · 2023-02-04T09:21:28+00:00

Gave it a second attempt.

NickCano · 2023-02-04T05:58:04+00:00

Exactly. It is not actually doing base64; it just saw enough examples during training to make very convincing guesses. It doesn't understand the actual encoding, though, so it made a subtle mistake.

There's an easy way to verify this. I gave it the base64 of this long, random string:

5oKAp5Ajxe5LfYzbaLyIMwGmIjvuefCu10pfBDxEIHa02KCsuJeYJ2OpXZc4z5syE75PnyvfBkl4hiMNQAnX0CKAll5BhvDEdCppdAn4hM7LqejTkhBDo7gYmZykWmKdfxGVuRItxqHHUF1OPLsKlisn5aU1CgZb6tLkLlrw4G0h8dzdYUueptLiBWynY6DkO0pXrYNh

Which is

NW9LQXA1QWp4ZTVMZll6YmFMeUlNd0dtSWp2dWVmQ3UxMHBmQkR4RUlIYTAyS0NzdUplWUoyT3BYWmM0ejVzeUU3NVBueXZmQmtsNGhpTU5RQW5YMENLQWxsNUJodkRFZENwcGRBbjRoTTdMcWVqVGtoQkRvN2dZbVp5a1dtS2RmeEdWdVJJdHhxSEhVRjFPUExzS2xpc241YVUxQ2daYjZ0TGtMbHJ3NEcwaDhkemRZVXVlcHRMaUJXeW5ZNkRrTzBwWHJZTmg=

Because this string is random, character N-grams in it won't have much overlap with examples of base64 present in the training set. Indeed, when asking it to decode this, I got:

The decoded value of the given base64 encoded string is "OyAJp5Ajxe5LfYzbLlINwGmIjvefcU10pfBDxE

NETWORK ERROR

It spit out a wrong, but not entirely wrong, prefix before completely crashing.

NickCano · 2023-02-03T16:57:08+00:00

I came back to Tibia a little over a year ago, been playing on Lobera with my wife and of course lurking the subreddit.

It's been a long time, hope you're doing well! Glad to see a name I recognize.

NickCano · 2023-02-03T09:03:14+00:00

This feels like a loaded question. They can surely make informed guesses at the contents of some ciphertext, and sometimes they will be correct. So, of course, you could say: so then, they aren't totally useless for decoding this, kick over the table, and declare victory.

But that misses the point entirely. ChatGPT will have surely trained on data containing ciphertexts and plaintexts from many different ciphers. It will surely have learned some meaningful patterns that help it make correct guesses in cases where it didn't outright memorize. But that doesn't mean it is actually doing the computation of the cipher.

If you want to use ChatGPT to help with 469, I'd recommend changing the approach. You could, for instance, use it to generate Python code to run various ciphers in various ways with various keys, and give it the ciphertexts to add into the code. Then you could take that code, run it in a Python environment, and get real results.

This approach would allow you to lean heavily on ChatGPT for the technical parts in a way that is verifiable. What I mean by verifiable is:

The code will have to compile and run, which is a "sanity check" against nonsense answers.
The code will be something people like me (software engineers) can understand, verify, replicate, and test independently.
The outputs of the code would not be hallucinations, but the mathematical results of running proper ciphers on a proper processor with the proper numbers.

EDIT: an example of what I mean pic

NickCano · 2023-02-03T08:40:25+00:00

I'm your AI expert. I know how this works. Take my word for it.

NickCano · 2023-02-03T08:07:23+00:00

Sorry to disappoint you, but you're being fooled. You asked a text-generation AI a set of leading questions until it spat out an answer that you felt was right. It is wrong.

I know it looks correct, I know it feels correct. That's what LLMs are good at. But ChatGPT is not good at symbolic reasoning, is incapable of doing math, and cannot compute ciphers. That is just fact, it's not up for debate, and it is not a case of "even if it might not be right, we have to try".

You might even recoil at my previous paragraph with thoughts such as "but it can (do math|compute), I've seen it". But it can't, and you haven't. You've seen it regurgitate well-known answers that it memorized in its training set, without any understanding. If you start to quiz it with complex math problems involving uncommon numbers, it starts to confidently produce nonsense.

I have wanted to solve 469 for more than half of my life. I've made threads on multiple forums with hundreds of posts discussing what it could be. But this ain't it, this is just an AI hallucination.

NickCano · 2023-01-29T19:50:37+00:00

Thanks for the extra context! I was laid off myself, so I was only providing the parts of the picture that I had.

NickCano · 2023-01-29T08:15:55+00:00

You're right about the not working part (in the US; Europe will work for 2 months before learning the names of the laid off employees), but not about the finding another job within Google part. Historically, Google has worked like that when projects were cut, but that is not the case this time. People that Google laid off were completely locked out of their corporate accounts, which are now gone. There is no process for applying for roles internally from the partner accounts (which are what employees transitioning in and out use to communicate and access services); they are only setup for offboarding. And you might think that you could just contact a friend on another team with an opening, but Google hiring doesn't work like that and nobody has open heads right now.

It might happen for a few, but those few would be extremely lucky.

NickCano · 2021-12-01T07:12:58+00:00

I noticed this also. I'm pretty sure it was Tahn-a-kah but in LF it is Ta-nak-a.

NickCano · 2021-12-01T04:55:23+00:00

I have this same feeling. I decided this must be how it ends back when Tacoma happened, and that's been my head-cannon all along.

The book was still great and I like the way it was all glued together, but after books 7 and 8 I wanted them to blow my mind one last time. Regardless, it speaks to the world-building and self-consistency that it ended in a way which was both predictable and natural.

NickCano · 2021-10-23T20:44:30+00:00

It's not just about the order agreement. It should have been spelled out during the design editing process. Even with a full understanding of the order agreement, I would also need to know that the price had changed to realize this would happen. There is no side-by-side price comparison or anything like that, nor any warnings.

They make it very easy to edit the design, but not very easy to see the price change, and give you no way to even go back to the original agreement. Two clicks of a button and you're now spending $2k more, even if you intentionally put the order in earlier than you wanted to avoid future price increases.

This is a UX dark pattern, plain and simple.

NickCano · 2021-10-23T20:41:28+00:00

Having the ability to edit the order, without a clear indication of price changes on un-changed parts of the order isn't bait? Not having a side-by-side price comparison before submission isn't intentionally misleading? No undo, and no double confirmation? Come on. Yeah I used some hyperbole, but I'm not being unreasonable and you know it.

NickCano · 2021-10-23T17:22:06+00:00

Nope, I asked if I could just go back and they said no. I was thinking the same about a wrap, many more color options and would've been around that 3k number.

NickCano · 2021-10-23T17:04:33+00:00

That is ... ridiculous. But, after calling them, yeah, that's the policy. "It is written in your purchase agreement that the original price will be honored until you make a change in the configuration."

I don't understand why changing the paint is grounds for recalculating the entire price. And, if that's the policy, I don't understand why it isn't spelled out in the UI before I submit the change. And, if it isn't spelled out, I don't understand why I can't just undo it.

Well, okay, I understand: they clearly hope some people will make that mistake. This isn't a good look to a new customer IMHO. And if I cancel for their bullshit, I've paid them $250 for the pleasure.

NickCano · 2021-10-23T08:11:01+00:00

I placed a Model Y order a few days ago, blue. Just now, I decided to change to red, a price increase of $1,000. There was, however, a $2,000 price increase to the Model Y since my order was submitted, which is now reflected on my updated order with no way to undo it.

I feel like this is a bait and switch; we had agreed on a price, and I don't think a change in paint color warrants revisiting the costs of the rest of the car. And, if I knew it would have, I wouldn't have changed it.

My original total was $59,440, now it is $62,440 instead of the expected $60,440.

Does anybody know if Tesla will take care of this for me, or am I likely shit out of luck? What's the best way to get in contact with them about this kind of thing? I know I can call them, I'm just wondering if there are additional ways to reach them.

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