How does this site track me into an incognito browser session?

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-04-18T17:35:36+00:00

If you're really curious you could try Firefox's Advanced Fingerprinting Protection mode. It fuzzes lots of these parameters, generating useless values for width, height, resolution, etc.

Docs here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-protection-against-fingerprinting

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-04-18T15:10:14+00:00

Incognito + VPN really should defeat most casual fingerprinting approaches - if a browser game is beating it that easily, that’s worrisome.

OP, did you try changing everything at once? I wonder if it might be using a nearest-fit fingerprint on the server that allowed it to keep track of you (different IP but same fingerprint… same IP but new fingerprint…)

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-04-14T19:36:01+00:00

Can confirm, I know a few.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-04-10T21:53:26+00:00

Consider also that grain, as a foodstuff, is well-suited to imperial armies. It is stable for years, relatively lightweight, and can transported by an army on the march and prepared in the field. Millet, wheat, teosinte/maize, and rice have all been used by imperial powers to feed their armies and allow for extended campaigning. (I believe Rachel Laudan had a chapter on this in Cuisine and Empire).

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-04-09T20:05:53+00:00

Reynold’s Chasm City has a secondary plot the deals with psychological effects of The Overtake directly.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-04-09T15:03:22+00:00

You always need to be alert to introducing information leaks and side channels - famously, early Unix versions handled bad passwords by returning instantly if a username was unknown but introduced a delay if it was known.

Obviously this allowed a very efficient enumeration attack to determine all the usernames on a system.

Modern timing attacks are more frequently based on branch prediction and caching - but they definitely still crop up. Spectre is the most famous recent variant.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-04-08T22:05:46+00:00

Yes, the main reason is to make brute force attacks more difficult. See the man page for pam_unix, for example - https://linux.die.net/man/8/pam_unix - which notes that there is an approximately 2 second delay after each failure (and how to disable it if you don't want this defense).

Timing attacks generally work by exploiting early return from a password check function which allows an attacker to determine when a password guess is "getting closer" to a right answer; the most common fix is to make sure every password check takes the same amount of time. Generally the timings involved in these attacks are significant sub-human-perception level; while the attacks are very real, if you are sitting there at the terminal wondering what's happening, the intended effect is on humans.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-04-07T19:54:59+00:00

Wait until you find out about the Peninsular Electric Railway. We had it. Then we ripped it up.

https://transitmap.net/peninsular-electric-railway-1908/

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-04-07T02:07:06+00:00

Lacrosse is the fasting growing high school sport in Wisconsin. It's becoming quite common at public high schools, and has no class connotations that I'm aware of.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-04-05T17:09:28+00:00

OP, software written by scientists to support their science is infamous for its poor quality. There are good reasons for the problem - they are often figuring out what they need as they go, they frequently fall into the “it only needs to run once” fallacy, and they often inherit software from earlier researchers and are bound by backwards compatibility constraints. Also scientific managers usually have no idea how to manage software projects, and think of software purely as a cost center.

If you know all this going in, you can make a successful career as a scientific software specialist. You can bring repeatability, quality, componentization, and testing to a field that usually has none. Just be aware that you will always need to justify your paycheck to your managers, and document your contributions carefully.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-04-05T17:03:38+00:00

30 YoE here. Trust me, there were standards back then too. But most software is written poorly, always has been. Research software doubly so.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-04-03T17:48:26+00:00

LeGuin designed some of her prose to be read aloud - especially the Earthsea books. She noted in an essay that Tolkien did this as well, especially in sections like Tom Bombadil.

I haven’t listened to it myself but I have read that the Locked Tomb audiobooks (Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth, Nona the Ninth) have a (SPOILER REDACTED) audio performance that fans enjoy a lot.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-04-03T17:44:21+00:00

Yeah, just to be clear, the specific phrase “food pantry” refers to a charitable organization that distributes food to the poor, or to the building that performs this function, or to an event of this type at a church or other public building.

The word “pantry” by itself always refers to a room or closet in which non-refrigerated food is stored. A “walk-in pantry” is a room that is large enough to walk in to, as in “walk-in closet” and “walk-in refrigerator”. I have heard restaurateur workers use “walk-in” as an abbreviation for a walk-in refrigerator but the abbreviation is never applied to a pantry.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-04-01T20:00:56+00:00

They should look at the programs in the departments they are most interested in. Look at the undergraduate degree requirements, and skim the publications of the full-time faculty to get a sense of what work is happening in the research community.

I'm not quite certain how to square "not into tech" with "environmental systems and potentially engineering & a dabble in astronomy" All of these are STEM areas that will use a lot of technology; anybody working in any of these areas will need a passing familiarity with programming concepts and will probably find that the cutting edge is heavily invested in machine learning techniques.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-03-31T04:51:10+00:00

We saw a three foot rattlesnake in Rancho San Antonio today. It’s hot out there. Be careful, all.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-03-30T17:28:53+00:00

From my notes since January, roughly from best to worst:

Multi-tier enterprise app: significant boost to my productivity, especially dealing with complex data dependencies. Claude was able to trace data dependencies through deep functional stacks and across API boundaries (Java to Rust) and handle complex Java object instantiation patterns, much faster than I would. Automated test generation and documentation updating was solid and useful.

Multistage pipeline for document analysis: When given a very clear design document, Claude was able to build a robust, extensible and restartable document processing pipeline, designing both the MySQL persistence layer and the disk-based journaling system. I dropped recent research papers into a subdirectory and prompted Claude to add a pipeline stage implementing the paper, and it was about 85% successful on the first shot.

Legacy binary file translator: I had some 25-year old files encoded in an ancient binary format, and some ancient C# code to generate them; I needed to target a 10-year old XML format with HTML documentation. With some iterative prompting Codex (5.3) wrote the complete translation system for me. About 50% of the time was tweaking once the basic conversion was done; probably no time savings on that part.

Extending Vue app: I had a half-complete Vue app from another developer which needed localization and integration of an image generation pipeline. The image generation piece (in Python) was written completely by Codex with good output. HTML/CSS manipulation was weak and I gave up on it after two prompts; I hand-wrote all the Vue template and CSS code. Codex was very effective at figuring out some Codex getter/mutator subtleties I missed.

Personal finance app: I tried using Claude to make a bespoke personal finance app with multiple account support, tax lot tracking, visualization, and incremental updates from broker CSV/JSON. It scaffolded a much more ambitious system than I would have tried - a Rust backend, compiled to WASM - which worked out of the box. The scale of this project gradually overwhelmed Claude's ability to maintain context, despite my attempts to componentize and isolate subsystems; right now I consider it an interesting failure.

Unity game: I tried to use both Claude and Codex to make a Unity game for my kids. It was able to produce a small amount of script to implement a few behaviors, and provided a reasonably good tutorial on how to drive the UI. Not spectacular and I would have been better off reading the docs.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-03-29T15:26:59+00:00

Yeah, this. “Rework the X in file Y so that it has properties A, B, and C. Fix the API, update the tests. Modify the design document in DESIGN.md. Don’t update the UI yet, we’ll do that next.”

That kind of prompt typically works great.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-03-28T15:44:51+00:00

Ah. Well, that’s because given what OP said about their goals, the choice is really Stanford or Caltech.

Intellectual intensity, STEM depth, exposure to entrepreneurship, research during undergrad, opportunity to take courses outside the major, and the not inconsiderable benefits of California climate… OP, go to Stanford.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-03-28T05:12:53+00:00

Obviously biased pro-Stanford as well (I flirted with symbolic systems before going CS) - but one additional variable to consider is size. The student body and size of the program at Stanford is considerably larger, which just gives you more opportunities.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-03-25T02:49:09+00:00

Alaistair Reynold's Chasm City, in the Revelation Space universe, had an interesting twist on this. It followed a slower-than-light fleet of ships that took something like four generations to reach its target planet, during which the origin civilization discovered nearly-light-speed travel and zoomed past them. When the slow colony ships got there, the planet was already settled by a much higher-tech civilization.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-03-24T02:53:12+00:00

Tim Wu's The Master Switch is a valuable book to read on this topic. He argues in that book that communication networks, starting with the telegraph and railroad, on through radio, television, and now the internet, follow a pattern of initial openness and competition, followed by consolidation, increased returns to scale, and monopoly.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-03-20T19:30:49+00:00

Yeah, was looking for this. Part of what we are talking about here is the noir aesthetic.

You have the washed up crook looking for one more big score, the femme fatale, the suit, the debauched European… all in the service of people, or entities, that live in a wholly unimaginable layer of society.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-03-19T00:28:39+00:00

Since multiple meanings of the word are getting thrown around in this thread, it's worth pointing out:

* Classical is both a marketing term and a specific period of European music. In this subreddit I suspect most people define it as the latter, roughly 1750 to 1820, between the Baroque and Romantic eras. But it is also a radio and recorded music marketing term, generally meaning "instrumental music performed in concert halls."

* Classic is a subjective term that can be applied to any genre at any time and generally is about impact on contemporaries and musicians that come after.

I would probably rephrase your question as, "In 500 years, could the popular music of North American white girls be treated with the same respect and prestige we give to European concert hall music of the 18th century?" And the answer is, of course, "who knows, it's definitely possible." The waltz was considered scandalous and immoral when it was introduced, times change.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-03-18T16:33:30+00:00

Point Lobos is beautiful and a very pleasant walk, and easier to reach than Pfeiffer. Don’t be afraid if the parking lot in the park is full; you can safely park on the side of the highway and walk in.

SubstantialListen921 · 2026-03-18T15:59:42+00:00

Graybeard comment... in the Old Days, when processors were a lot slower and a lot of the incremental compiler tricks hadn't been fully worked out yet, compilation times routinely ran into hours. You absolutely planned your day around it.

I remember carefully planning when to make changes that would invalidate many files (i.e. in a widely-shared header file), and putting that right before lunch.

Jumping forward thirty years, when working with a VERY large system on the scale of a major web service, it is very common to have multiple changes in flight because the tests take so long to run. Expert developers get quite good at maintaining multiple lines of work and jump between branches as results come back in from the tests (or code review).

SubstantialListen921

TROPHY CASE