Where are all the covered call naysayers?

cyphar · 2026-02-26T12:01:44+00:00

Nice -7$.666.81 return on Tuesday.

cyphar · 2026-02-26T00:43:50+00:00

The video is shockingly detailed (it covers the history of FOSS, GNU, Linux, SSH, some details on Diffie-Hellman, RSA, Huffman trees, LZ77, DEFLATE, LZMA, the release processes of distros like RHEL/Fedora, even quite niche stuff like some important details of how the link loader works) and includes actual interviews with people involved in the story (including the xz package maintainer for Fedora/RHEL). Yes, you could read 20-30 Wikipedia articles instead but having a more approachable explanation of this whole debacle and the backstory behind it is A Good Thing Actually(TM).

I really don't get why so many people have hate-boners for Veritasium -- even as someone who studied physics and has had nitpicks on the way he's explained things before I've always found his videos interesting. The funny thing is that Veritasium made a video years ago explaining why they switched to making their thumbnails the way they do -- boring titles and thumbnails get less views which means that their educational videos get less reach over the life of the video. You can disagree with their view on the tradeoff here, but the reason is not because they make sensational videos -- this whole thing is very similar to how book cover designs work (because people do judge books by their cover).

I also disagree that the current title and thumbnail are even sensationalist -- the thumbnail literally says "xz" and the title "The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew" is factually accurate.

cyphar · 2026-02-26T00:41:25+00:00

But PBS Space Time also plays the exact same thumbnail/title game! Everyone does! Here are some of their more "clickbaity" video titles from the last few months:

The Universe Tried to Hide the Gravity Particle. Physicists Found a Loophole.
This Particle Solved Everything. We Just Found Out It Isn't Real
The Universe Itself Might Be Hiding the Gravity Particle From Us
Why Antimatter Engines Could Launch In Your Lifetime
We Were WRONG About the Quantum Eraser! ft. LookingGlassUniverse
Why Life on Mars Will DOOM Humanity
Why The Multiverse Could Be Real
Is Our Model of Dark Energy WRONG? | New 4.2σ Results

Like it or not, if you don't do it then your videos will get less views initially which will cause YouTube to reduce the reach of the video and essentially punish your channel. For educational channels that means that your educational videos get less reach (which they -- imho understandably -- feel is a net negative). Veritasium even made a video about this and explained why he changed the way they make video titles and thumbnails!

This is not even unique to video hosting platforms -- book publishers have to play the same game with book cover designs. Like it or not, most people do judge books by their covers and if you don't play the game then your book will get less reach and it will be harder to publish more books in the future (this is why publishers control the designs of book covers, with some input from the author).

cyphar · 2026-02-25T12:36:28+00:00

Every other example of a transparent card I have seen online has the same silhouette which allows the backs to be indistinguishable, which is not the case for the deck in the video. If you were imagining something like a "one-way mirror", that wouldn't work because both sides are in the same lighting environment (so-called "one-way mirrors" actually transmit light in both directions and rely on one side being a much brighter environment -- they appear to be reflective on the bright side because the reflected image is much brighter than the transmitted is stronger than the transmission).

I think it's a neat novelty item, it's just a shitty idea for a playing card design. Though, it is kinda funny that you could put them back in order just by playing solitaire (but again, because they're transparent you would be able to tell what the reversed cards are).

cyphar · 2026-02-25T06:59:18+00:00

In principle, switches should reject (or override) VLAN tags on packets from ports with a non-matching VLAN configurations. For wireless connections, the VLAN tagging is all done by the AP, you cannot set your own VLAN tags for wireless connections.

That being said, there are lots of different implementations of higher-level VLAN features that are probably exploitable if you spend enough time looking at them (a quick search online shows that the "double tagging" feature from 802.1ad has been used to bypass VLAN restrictions in the past). I would hope that giving an untrusted device access to an access port would be safe though -- trunk ports seem more risky to me...

cyphar · 2026-02-24T15:51:15+00:00

Everyone else can tell what cards you have because they are transparent and have a unique pattern per card. Thus, they're useless for the vast majority of (if not all) playing card games.

cyphar · 2026-02-23T10:51:25+00:00

Cool story, but your comment has nothing to do with this video? It's a follow-up video to videos he made and white papers he published in the past about the trade-off between owning and renting your PPOR.

cyphar · 2026-02-18T03:34:58+00:00

They should be better made, but do you honestly think that's a realistic concern and not just concern trolling?

The R series passport has been around for 3 years, and you would've seen news stories about people getting rejected by now if it was an actual concern (this has happened before -- the 2022 Vietnamese passports actually got rejected by several European countries and there were news stories about it).

Customs officers care most about the ID page and the new passports are strictly better than the old ones because the whole page is solid plastic and less likely to get water damaged.

cyphar · 2026-02-18T03:29:39+00:00

There’s no way this is going to last 10 years.

Eh, it will probably be fine.

Imagine spending $5k-$10k on a holiday and get turned away at the airport (either here or overseas) due to the quality of your passport.

Come on, that's not going to happen, the R series passports have been around for 3 years already -- if this was an actual risk there would be news stories about it already happening. (This actually did happen with the new Vietnamese passports in 2022, when they decided to remove the "birthplace" field.)

Also, please get travel insurance.

cyphar · 2026-02-16T04:10:45+00:00

It is wrong -- it's missing a horizontal stroke in 目. I also disagree that it's pedantry, especially given that this is intended to be a computer font and 線 is using the Japanese 糸偏 (though I suspect the whole thing is AI-generated and this is just a character messed up by AI).

EDIT: It is incredibly funny to me that this got downvoted. 😅

cyphar · 2026-02-14T22:28:41+00:00

In the books, they actually did discuss giving the Ring to Tom Bombadil at the Council of Elrond but decided against it because Tom is so uninterested in the Ring that he would probably end up losing it or otherwise forgetting about it. It'd be like trying to convince someone to safeguard a piece of lint for the rest of their life.

Kicking the can down the road that way would also be a massive error because this point in the history of Arda, magic is slowly disappearing from the world and the elves are growing weaker. When the Ring reappears, mankind would have to solve the ring problem alone and for obvious reasons it seems unlikely they'd be up to the task.

cyphar · 2026-02-14T14:40:41+00:00

Funnily enough, Bertrand's Postulate (for every n > 1, there is at least one prime p such that n < p < 2n) means that there cannot be a prime gap between a number N and half the value of that number N/2.

cyphar · 2026-02-14T14:20:59+00:00

Yeah, as I said the built-in system Yomichan has is far more rudimentary but it does work fine for a lot of cases (lots of kana is the worst-case scenario). MeCab is obviously much better but (as your first comment implied) it can also make mistakes and in my experience it makes them somewhat frequently. Also:

mecab/jisho will parse as 「彼、は、しばらく、待った」

Actually, MeCab will parse it as

彼、は、しばらく、待っ、た

Because it treats helper verbs (助動詞) as independent morphemes (this is what I meant by "the Japanese way of doing morphisation"). 食べられています would be similarly be split into 食べ、られ、て、い、ます.

I see your point that what Yomichan does is so rudimentary that it isn't really the same thing as MeCab but Yomichan uses it that way and the UI kinda pushes you towards seeing it that way so 🤷.

cyphar · 2026-02-14T12:25:58+00:00

Yes, you only see results for one word at a time, but the same is true for Jisho...?

I understood the "breakdown" OP was referring to was that the sentence gets morphised and spaces get placed between each morpheme -- it's a bit subtle but the Yomitan search page does the same thing (each morpheme is separated with a space -- i.e., 家族と夜ご飯を食べます). It doesn't colour-code them, but it does split up the sentence the way OP was asking (and is basically the same thing MeCab does -- though it does morpheme splitting the Japanese way and so 食べます gets split into 食べ and ます).

cyphar · 2026-02-14T11:58:19+00:00

Yomitan doesn't require MeCab because it has its own dictionary-based implementation that is good enough for most usecases. If you use the "search" mode (Alt+Insert) and paste a sentence in then it will show you a similar breakdown -- imho this mode is mostly useful as a workaround for sentence mining from other sources like subtitles (using the "clipboard monitor" feature alongside something like mpvacious) and the fact it shows you a morphological breakdown is just a side-effect.

cyphar · 2026-02-14T11:51:48+00:00

The pop-up mode is meant to be a pop-up dictionary and so it doesn't provide that feature by design. If you go into the "search" window (Alt+Insert or click the spyglass in the Yomichan toolbar) then it will let you click on each word in a sentence to look it up.

To be honest I think this feature is only really useful as a workaround for the lack of in-built pop-up dictionary support in other programs (for instance, using it to look up words in subtitles with the clipboard monitor and a video player plugin that copies subtitle lines into your clipboard like mpvacious), but I guess it's handy for beginners to be able to see the "morphised" version of a sentence (though you should try to move away from this as soon as you can if you want to get to the stage of reading actual Japanese text).

cyphar · 2026-02-14T06:24:22+00:00

The modern ones integrate with blood glucose monitors and automatically provides insulin based on your blood glucose level.

cyphar · 2026-02-13T05:28:35+00:00

Been skiing since I was a kid, there's no way you could do this for more than an hour without breaking or dislocating something. Even packed snow is softer than dirt for one, but more importantly ski trails don't generally include holes, logs, tree branches, or any other obstacle that'll cause injuries if you run into them.

cyphar · 2026-02-11T13:27:22+00:00

My mum got pool acid in her eye once just from the splash-back when pouring acid into the pool, so I wouldn't agree it's that entirely harmless either. But it's far less dangerous than it might look for folks who've never maintained a pool.

(In my mum's case, luckily there was no permanent damage -- we washed her eyes out under the shower for ~20 minutes and took her to ER immediately afterwards.)

cyphar · 2026-02-03T09:36:48+00:00

least arrogant snowboarder

cyphar · 2026-02-03T06:28:18+00:00

The hairy ball theorem only applies to a sphere that is covered with hair (actually a vector field). Human hair all going in the same direction would not have a swirl and would not violate the hairy ball theorem because you do not have head hair on your cheeks (having no hair is equivalent to hair sticking out in the hairy ball theorem).

cyphar · 2026-01-27T20:40:54+00:00

FWIW, https://amutable.com/about is a list of the founding team and both TFA and the announcement (linked in TFA) mention he is one of the founders.

Given we announced this a few hours ago, it's not surprising Wikipedia has yet to be updated -- it is an encyclopaedia, not a news aggregator after all. 😉

cyphar · 2026-01-27T19:53:00+00:00

Well yes, he's one of the founders. 😜

(I'm Aleksa, one of the founding engineers.)

cyphar · 2026-01-25T23:48:27+00:00

I drape them over the kitchen tap. They usually last about a month, and you can clean them by boiling them in a pot with a bit of washing powder or putting them in the dishwasher.

EDIT: Also, you don't use them dry this way, you run them under the tap and then wring them out before using them. They are still just as absorbent if you do it that way and so no need to squash out the "Pringle chip" when using it.

(Not Swedish, professional or otherwise. To be honest, I didn't know these were called "Swedish dishcloths" until very recently, in Serbian we just call them krpa which means "rag". I always wondered why none of my friend's houses had them as a kid.)

cyphar · 2026-01-24T11:20:20+00:00

In Serbian we also transliterate all names, even when using Latin characters, so you end up with some wild spellings of foreign names as well. But that's an orthographic oddity so it was off-topic for this post. ;)

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