Note: this post contains spoilers for one of the days of Advent of Code 2021.| siraben’s musings
Writing proofs and programs.| siraben’s musings
Admist all this talk of market making and economics, one idle evening during the summer of 2022 I wondered, “could I do arbitrage on a Minecraft server?” The answer was not only yes, but it was incredible to witness the extent to which by doing essentially nothing but trades I was able to accumulate tens of thousands in virtual currency. I’m not going to say which server this was performed on, but it should be straightforward to do the same in other economy-based servers.| siraben’s musings
ANSI escape codes. Race conditions in PNG parsing. Digital COVID-19 vaccination records. De-noising audio files and the NATO phonetic alphabet. The only thing linking all of them? A race to solve a CTF challenge and get the flag.| siraben’s musings
The problem I want to play Minecraft with my friends, and I already have a server exposed to the internet. However, my server is severely underpowered and is unable to run a Minecraft server instance. On the other hand, I have a spare beefy laptop that can easily handle the load, but port-forwarding is not possible. Both the server and the laptop are on my Tailscale network. Could I somehow leverage all of this to spin up a Minecraft server with a public IP? The answer was yes—and I was sur...| siraben’s musings
As a speaker of multiple languages, I’m often aware of how inherent habits in our speech can greatly influence the extent to which other people make sense of it. But even when you speak the same language, even a topic as simple as the weather can already bring unnecessary friction to the conversation if the speakers are using incompatible units (cough cough). Or maybe I’m just coming up with an arbitrary reason to justify this party trick. In any case, I describe a mental heuristic that g...| siraben’s musings
Nix flakes landed in Nix (as an experimental option) with the 2.4 update a few months ago, and represents a substantial change in how projects using Nix can standardize their outputs, inputs and ensure reproducibility.| siraben’s musings
Programming and mathematics have much in common, philosophically. The disciplines deal with constructions of various kinds. The constructions can get arbitrarily complex and interconnected. As a result, it’s no surprise that concepts such as overloaded notations, implicit coercions and inheritance pop up frequently in both disciplines. For instance, a field inherits the properties of a ring, which in turn inherit from Abelian groups. The symbol + can mean different things depending on if we...| siraben’s musings
This article was discussed on Hacker News.| siraben’s musings
This article was discussed on Hacker News.| siraben’s musings