Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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2 yr. ago

Not sure! However, it's possible the coin cell that keeps the BIOS settings was removed or dead. This forces the BIOS into default configuration on boot, which may have caused a boot failure if you needed some specific hardware configuration set in BIOS.

Maybe they used it as a way to control computer access, but it seems more likely that they just didn't get around to replacing the coin cell :D

The Vinegar Tasters.

Confucius, Mencius and Laozi taste vinegar from the same pot. Their perception of its quality is determined by their philosophy, and shown in their facial expressions: One sour, one bitter, one sweet. So it is with life -- even in the same situation, different people will react differently based on their outlook on life.

To me, the painting is a reminder not to fill myself with bitter or angry thoughts. There are many things wrong with the world, but these can simply be stored as facts, rather than dwelled upon and thereby passed on to others in anger.

Consider the story of the vinegar pot as an allegory for social media, perhaps.

My nature is to prioritize knowledge over happiness. That being said, I am also relatively happy right now, and was then too.

There was the whole part in the middle where I immigrated to a new country. That was properly hard. I wasn't particularly happy during the first half decade of that.

Hm, well about 40% of our population is named Nguyễn. I don't think there's an equivalent expression, but I'd choose Anh Nguyễn. In addition to being a name for both genders, 'Anh' just means something like 'sir' or 'older brother'.

In every class, try to score as high as possible on the first assignment/exam. Since less material is covered at that point, less effort is required per unit of results.

Then later in the semester, you're free to put your effort where it's most needed, instead of needing to scramble across all your classes because you need good results on the final assignments just to pass.

Also, in subjects with group work, it lets you survive a bad group, rather than failing your course because you get stuck with some maladjusted dingus. Moreover, you can use your high grades on the first assignment to leverage your way into a good group. This kind of group-work metagaming is especially important in engineering subjects, and doubly so again if the course is bell-curved.

Finally, try to do one creative thing per year and put it in a public forum, especially on a platform you control (e.g. a blog). Even small things are OK. Literally having any body of work outside of class assignments will let you crush 90% of your peers when applying to grad school, a job, a scholarship, or really just about anything with a halfway sane selection process. It's also fun (doing creative things, not crushing your peers).

I did the same thing in university. I ate, slept (usually), avoided unnecessary expenses, and focused on my grades. One day I woke up with a degree. Then another.

Then I got a job, where I largely didn't socialize and just focused on doing good work, and avoiding unnecessary expenses. Then I immigrated to another country, and kept the same habits. Then I started a company, again with the same habits.

One of the valuable things in this world is the ability to focus. There is nothing wrong with you.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Wow, I literally live in the developing world and most of the stories here are worse than mine.

All I've got is the time I did the Q2 accounting with an open head wound I didn't clearly remember getting -- although it was more scary looking than actually dangerous. I've been hospitalized for overwork a couple of times. The ceiling fell on me once, but it wasn't that heavy. Pretty mild stuff compared to a nurse or convenience store clerk in the West.

Oh, yeah. My source code is like 60% comments by weight (or more). Although I typically produce separate standalone documentation for management or semi-technical staff. You know, people who know enough to possibly break something, but not enough to fix it afterward. I find it useful when trying to train new people too.

I'm usually on the documenting side of things. If something like this starts unfolding, I produce text or HTML files anyway, they go on github/lab/whatever, and I wash my hands of what happens next.

In the end I write documentation mostly for myself. When the company can't figure things out over Discord or whatever ephemeral chat interface they use, I get called anyway.

I am a level 15 lawful-evil bureaucrat.

If it is possible at all to fill and file a form correctly, I will do so efficiently, without error, and with misplaced joy. Even if it's longer than my thesis. This is automatic and no dice roll is required. The receiving organization has to make a willpower check else approve the form without reading it in it's entirety.

Once per tax reporting period as defined by my company license (unless my company license is updated to change my legal address, in that case, the longer of the two possibilities), I can pass any standardized exam, on any topic, without study, or even knowledge of the language it's written in.

Additionally, twice a day (holidays excluded, except labor day, and Saturdays only before noon), I can rubber stamp any form using only the power of my mind and a rubber stamp.

Yeah, the best solution I've found is inflating the initial deposits with new clients (enough to cover costs for the project, but not more than that). Then if they agree, overdeliver on the work, then pursue a more collegiate arrangement in the future.

Working with Western companies can still be a pain sometimes. Many of them don't come to Asia to do things well, they come here to do things cheaply. A cheaper option than paying me, is not paying me. In reality, I have little recourse as my company doesn't have the resources for an international lawsuit. I've been burned a couple of times, but to some extent it's just the cost of doing business.

Running an honest business is even harder :(

Although catching scammers is pretty fun. There have been some pretty wild cases. Maybe I should retire and go work for law enforcement or something.

No.

Honestly running a business in Asia is like... 35% harassing people who haven't paid you. I hear it's pretty similar elsewhere but can't confirm.

A lot of the underlying scams are very low-tech. I sometimes work for VCs and get asked to investigate blockchain stuff (a lot in 2022, not so much now!). I've vetoed 100% of deals after investigation. For brevity, I'll only describe the main two type of crime I've encountered.

Embezzlement of funds raised is a common one. Most are not exactly criminal masterminds though, and you can see the project accounts being emptied steadily into exchange accounts if you're really determined.

A lot of the rest is wash trading. Usually exchanges will give you a zero-trading-fees account, and tell you that you need to maintain a minimum volume, wink wink. So most of these scammers just trade between accounts they own, to create the illusion of a sudden rise in price (coinciding with a marketing push). This you can also sometimes catch by looking at orderbook timing. Sometimes you can break their bots too. Often they hire external entities to manage this, so won't notice overnight.

Anyway, in this last case there is usually just an illusion of people making money at the top. The price spikes, but the whole orderbook is just someone trading with themselves. So if you buy in, they take your payment (and they make a little money)... but there's no one to actually sell to. You can detect this sometimes by looking for orders being placed then filled within very short time intervals. A lot of these groups make a lot less money than they claim to!

This is easier for NFTs because they are non-fungible. One way you can do this is to track which ones are owned by your company and which are something someone else bought. So you only trade the NFTs that are internally owned in a way that makes them look like they constantly increase in price. Once an NFT is sold to an external account, you cross it off the list and never buy it back, and it's magically immediately worthless.

If you mention these activities on their official channels, they will just ban you.

There's also a whole slew of regulatory compliance issues, fake legal opinions, and so on... but I'll spare you those as it is more boring to read about.

The whole blockchain space is a cesspool of inequity. Stay far away, unless you just like playing around with cryptography for fun. In that case, it's a cool toy and it's fun to build a few blockchains in an afternoon to play around with before getting bored and moving on to other technology. I have built a dozen or so blockchains and a few smart contracts to make sure I fully understand the technology before recommending my clients reject investment deals. This has (perhaps ironically) made me somewhat of an expert in the domain, albeit an unwilling one. I consider that path a career dead-end, and look forward to slowly forgetting about it.

I issued a (valid) DMCA notice to a small corporation who used the intellectual property of a colleague but did not pay them for it (they promised payment in writing, then just... didn't pay for a year or more). Their whole business website was down for a week or more as a result, as their registrar just took down their website without checking anything, and they didn't really have technical staff to resolve it.

The whole DMCA system is quite a broken mess, and is often (usually?) used unethically. However, it is possible to use correctly, even by private individuals. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it a little, that day.

The darker version is:

1. Identify someone you don't like in the organization.
2. Automate away their job by coding a script in a few hours.
3. They get laid off, the script never gets run. No one notices.

On the other side of things, don't you love systems that return "invalid password: password is not unique"?

Hm, I wonder if I could make these students more miserable by introducing a CPU that permits static operation, then clocking that with a true random number generator?

So now it has output that is deterministic from the standpoint of the CPU but nondeterministic to an outside observer. Probably wouldn't affect the O(n) notation though, come to think of it. It would be funny though.

To be honest, it's an accidental lamp. I didn't have many free GPIO pins on that ESP32 development board, so I needed to push some of the entropy bits though pins that were also assigned to an RGB LED.

The flashing light was giving me a headache, so I put a diffuser over it.

It flashes different colors wildly. Because of the nature of the underlying signal and it's varying frequency, this looks pretty cool if you put a rolling-shutter camera (like on a smartphone) really close to it.

Haha nice! These things have a funny way of happening.

I met a colleague of Paul Erdos by walking up to a complete stranger on a train and simply asking if they were a mathematician and if they knew Paul Erdos. He turned out to have a lot of lovely anecdotes to share.

I'm not sure what possessed me to specifically do that, but I probably won't do it a second time and risk losing the 100% hit rate for colleague-of-Paul-Erdos divination.