Repost

OpenAI-powered Linux shell uses AI to Do What You Mean

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It’s like Alexa/Siri/Cortana for your terminal!

This is a basic Python shell (really, it’s a fancy wrapper over the system shell) that takes a task and asks OpenAI for what Linux bash command to run based on your description. For safety reasons, you can look at the command and cancel before actually running it.

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River

Of all the stupid uses of OpenAI’s GPT-3, this might be the most-amusing. It’s really interesting to see how close – sometimes spot-on – the algorithm comes to writing the right command when you “say what you mean”. Also, how terribly, terribly ill-advised it would be to actually use this for real.

The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme

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Blackle Mori

More awesome from Blackle Mori, whose praises I sung recently over The Basilisk Collection. This time we’re treated to a curated list of 182 articles demonstrating the “peculiarities and weirdness” of computers. Starting from relatively well-known memes like little Bobby Tables, the year 2038 problem, and how all web browsers pretend to be each other, we descend through the fast inverse square root (made famous by Quake III), falsehoods programmers believe about time (personally I’m more of a fan of …names, but then you might expect that), the EICAR test file, the “thank you for playing Wing Commander” EMM386 in-memory hack, The Basilisk Collection itself, and the GIF MD5 hashquine (which I’ve shared previously) before eventually reaching the esoteric depths of posuto and the nightmare that is Japanese postcodes…

Plus many, many things that were new to me and that I’ve loved learning about these last few days.

It’s definitely not a competition; it’s a learning opportunity wrapped up in the weirdest bits of the field. Have an explore and feed your inner computer science geek.

Wix and Their Dirty Tricks

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Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in a bizarre set of ads. They can’t even come up with original concepts for attack ads, and have tried to rip-off of Apple’s Mac vs PC ads, but tastelessly personify the WordPress community as an absent, drunken father in a therapy session.

I have a lot of empathy for whoever was forced to work on these ads, including the actors, it must have felt bad working on something that’s like Encyclopedia Britannica attacking Wikipedia. WordPress is a global movement of hundreds of thousands of volunteers and community members, coming together to make the web a better place. The code, and everything you put into it, belongs to you, and its open source license ensures that you’re in complete control, now and forever. WordPress is free, and also gives you freedom.

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Matt Mullenweg

For those that haven’t been following the relevant bits of tech social media this last week, here’s the insanity you’ve missed:

Wix start their new marketing campaign by posting headphones and a secret video link to people they clearly think are WordPress “influencers”. But the video is so confusing that people thought it was a WordPress marketing campaign against Wix, not the other way around.
Next, Wix launch their “You Deserve Better” website, attempting to riff off the old “Mac vs. PC” ads. It’s been perhaps most-charitably described as a “bewildering” attack ad, more-critically described as being insensitive and distasteful.
Wix’s Twitter and YouTube responses suddenly swing from their usual “why is your customer service so slow to respond to me?” level of negative to outright hostile. LOL.

Sure, I’m not the target audience. I’ve been a WordPress user for 15 years, and every time I visit a Wix site it annoys me when I have to permit a stack of third-party JavaScript just to load images like they’ve never heard of the <img>tag or something. Hell, I like WordPress enough that I used it as a vehicle to get a job with Automattic, a company most-famous for its WordPress hosting provision. But even putting all of that aside: this advertising campaign stinks.

How to beat Skyrim without walking

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ymfah (YouTube)

I don’t normally watch videos of other people playing video games. I’m even less inclined to watch “walkthroughs”.

This, though, isn’t a walkthrough. It’s basically the opposite of a walkthrough: this is somebody (slowly, painstakingly) playing through Skyrim: Special Edition without using any of the movement controls (WASD/left stick) whatsoever. Wait, what? How is such a thing possible?

That’s what makes the video so compelling. The creator used so many bizarre quirks and exploits to even make this crazy stupid idea work at all. Like (among many, many more):

Dragging a bucket towards yourself to “push” yourself backwards (although not upstairs unless you do some very careful pushing “under” your feet).
Doing an unarmed heavy attack to “stumble” forward a little at a time, avoiding the stamina loss by eating vegetable soup or by cancelling the attack (e.g. by switching quickselected arrows), which apparently works better if you’re overencumbered.
Mid-stumble, consuming a reagent that paralyses yourself to glitch through thin doors. Exploit a bug in dropping gear for your companion near an area-change doorway to get all of the reagent you’ll ever need.
Rush-grinding your way to the Whirlwind Sprint shout and Vampire Lord “Bats” ability so you’ve got a way to move forward quickly, then pairing them with paralysis to catapult yourself across the map.
When things get desperate, exploiting the fact that you can glitch-teleport yourself places by commanding your companion to go somewhere, quicksaving before they get there, then quickloading to appear there yourself.

This video’s just beautiful: the cumulation of what must be hundreds or thousands of person-hours of probing the “edges” of Skyrim‘s engine to discover all of the potentially exploitable bugs that make it possible.

Polyam Lingo

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Dr. Doe (Sexplanations)

Dr. Doe’s latest Sexplanations vlog is on polyamorous language, and despite being – or, perhaps, because I’m – a bit of a long-toothed polyamorist these days, fully a quarter or more of the terms she introduced were new to me! Fascinating!

Tribute to Peter Huntley

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Chris Cheek

While I was traipsing off around the countryside to commemorate the anniversary of the death of my dad, one of his former colleagues uploaded to YouTube a video that he originally produced for the UK Bus Awards Presentation Ceremony 2012.

As his son, it felt a little weird for me to be marking the occasion on what: the ninth anniversary of his death? It’s not even a nice round number. But clearly I’m not the only one whose mind drifted to my father on 19 February.

Fun fact: this photo – extracted from the video – was originally taken by me:

Peter Huntley, circa 1985, in a bus depot. — My dad’s crouching to make sure he’s in the frame, because I was less than half his height at this point. The horizon is wonky because I’m crouching too, in order to imitate him, and I’ve lost my balance. Altogether, I rate this piece of photographic art… umm: *not bad for a preschooler*?

Maybe I should be asking for royalties! Or at least, using the video as an excuse to springboard my career as a professional photographer.

YouTube ID badge showing that Chris Cheek has only one subscriber. — What kind of exposure could I get? Oh.

Well, maybe not then.

The Varieties of Intimate Relationship

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David McCandless & Laura Sullivan (Information Is Beautiful)

A slightly tongue-in-cheek (see the “serial monogamy” chain and some of the subtitles!) but moderately-complete diagram of popular varieties of relationship structure. Obviously there’s gaps – relationships are as diverse as their participants – and lots of room for refinement, but the joy of an infographic is making visible the breadth of a field, not in providing encyclopaedic comprehension of that field. I especially like the attention to detail in “connecting” often-related concepts.

Basilisk collection

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Basilisk collection

The basilisk collection (also known as the basilisk file or basilisk.txt) is a collection of over 125 million partial hash inversions of the SHA-256 cryptographic hash function. Assuming state-of-the art methods were used to compute the inversions, the entries in the collection collectively represent a proof-of-work far exceeding the computational capacity of the human race.^[1]^[2] The collection was released in parts through BitTorrent beginning in June 2018, although it was not widely reported or discussed until early 2019.^[3] On August 4th, 2019 the complete collection of 125,552,089 known hash inversions was compiled and published by CryTor, the cybersecurity lab of the University of Toronto.^[4]

The existence of the basilisk collection has had wide reaching consequences in the field of cryptography, and has been blamed for catalyzing the January 2019 Bitcoin crash.^[2]^[5]^[6]

…

Electronic Frontier Foundation cryptographer Brian Landlaw has said that “whoever made the basilisk is 30 years ahead of the NSA, and the NSA are 30 years ahead of us, so who is there left to trust?”^[35]

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Blackle Mori

This is fucking amazing, on a par with e.g. First on the Moon.

Presented in the style of an alternate-reality Wikipedia article, this piece of what the author calls “unfiction” describes the narratively believable-but-spooky (if theoretically unlikely from a technical standpoint) 2018 disclosure of evidence for a new presumed mathematical weakness in the SHA-2 hash function set. (And if that doesn’t sound like a good premise for a story to you, I don’t know what’s wrong with you! 😂)

Cryptographic weaknesses that make feasible attacks on hashing algorithms are a demonstrably real thing. But even with the benefit of the known vulnerabilities in SHA-2 (meet-in-the-middle attacks that involve up-to-halving the search space by solving from “both ends”, plus deterministic weaknesses that make it easier to find two inputs that produce the same hash so long as you choose the inputs carefully) the “article” correctly states that to produce a long list of hash inversions of the kinds described, that follow a predictable sequence, might be expected to require more computer processing power than humans have ever applied to any problem, ever.

As a piece of alternate history science fiction, this piece not only provides a technically-accurate explanation of its premises… it also does a good job of speculating what the impact on the world would have been of such an event. But my single favourite part of the piece is that it includes what superficially look like genuine examples of what a hypothetical basilisk.txt would contain. To do this, the author wrote a brute force hash finder and ran it for over a year. That’s some serious dedication. For those that were fooled by this seemingly-convincing evidence of the realism of the piece, here’s the actual results of the hash alongside the claimed ones (let this be a reminder to you that it’s not sufficient to skim-read your hash comparisons, people!):

basilisk:0000000000:ds26ovbJzDwkVWia1tINLJZ2WXEHBvItMZRxHmYhlQd0spuvPXb6cYFJorDKkqlA

claimed: 0000000000000000000000161b9f84a187cc21b172bf68b3cb3b78684d8e9f17
 actual: 00000000000161b9f84a187cc21b1752bf678bdd4d643c17b3b786684d8e9f17

basilisk:0000000001:dMHUhnoEkmLv8TSE1lnJ7nVIYM8FLYBRtzTiJCM8ziijpTj95MPptu6psZZyLBVA

claimed: 0000000000000000000000cee5fe5df2d3034fff435bb40e8651a18d69e81460
 actual: 0000000000cee5fe5df2d3034fff435bb4232f21c2efce0e8651a18d69e81460

basilisk:0000000002:aSCZwTSmH9ZtqB5gQ27mcGuKIXrghtYIoMp6aKCLvxhlf1FC5D1sZSi2SjwU9EqK

claimed: 000000000000000000000012aabd8d935757db173d5b3e7ae0f25ea4eb775402
 actual: 000000000012aabd8d935757db173d5b3ec6d38330926f7ae0f25ea4eb775402

basilisk:0000000003:oeocInD9uFwIO2x5u9myS4MKQbFW8Vl1IyqmUXHV3jVen6XCoVtuMbuB1bSDyOvE

claimed: 000000000000000000000039d50bb560770d051a3f5a2fe340c99f81e18129d1
 actual: 000000000039d50bb560770d051a3f5a2ffa2281ac3287e340c99f81e18129d1

basilisk:0000000004:m0EyKprlUmDaW9xvPgYMz2pziEUJEzuy6vsSTlMZO7lVVOYlJgJTcEvh5QVJUVnh

claimed: 00000000000000000000002ca8fc4b6396dd5b5bcf5fa80ea49967da55a8668b
 actual: 00000000002ca8fc4b6396dd5b5bcf5fa82a867d17ebc40ea49967da55a8668b

Anyway: the whole thing is amazing and you should go read it.

Review for ProtonMail Encryption Status by Morgan Larosa

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⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Does what it says on the tin! Short and sweet codebase that’s easy enough to verify personally, and doesn’t ask for any crazy permissions.

Morgan Larosa

I probably needn’t care about this validation: when I wrote a Thunderbird plugin to enhance integration with ProtonMail, I wrote it principally for myself: scratching my own itch. It was nice to see that (at time of writing) a few hundred other people have made use of the extension too, but it wasn’t essential. I’d be maintaining it regardless because I use it every day.

But it still warmed my heart to see a five-star review come in alongside a clearly-expressed justification.

Coca-Cola company trials first paper bottle

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Coca-Cola is to test a paper bottle as part of a longer-term bid to eliminate plastic from its packaging entirely.

The prototype is made by a Danish company from an extra-strong paper shell that still contains a thin plastic liner.

But the goal is to create a 100% recyclable, plastic-free bottle capable of preventing gas escaping from carbonated drinks.

The barrier must also ensure no fibres flake off into the liquid.

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BBC News

If only somebody could invent a bottle suitable for containing Coca-Cola but 100% recyclable, plastic-free, and food safe.

Oh wait… for the vast majority of its history, all Coca-Cola bottles have met this description! The original Coke bottles, back in 1899, were made of glass with a metal top. Glass is infinitely-recyclable (it’s also suitable for pressure-washing and reusing, saving even more energy, as those who receive doorstep milk deliveries already know) and we already have a recycling infrastructure for it in place. Even where new glass needs to be made from scratch, its raw ingredient is silica, one of the most abundant natural resources on the planet!

Bottle caps can be made of steel or aluminium and can be made in screw-off varieties in case you don’t have a bottle opener handy. Both steel and aluminium are highly-recyclable, and again with infrastructure already widespread. Many modern “metal” caps contain a plastic liner to ensure a good airtight fit (especially if it’s a screw cap, which are otherwise less-tight), but there are environmentally-friendly alternatives: bioplastics or cork, for example.

The worst things about glass are its fragility – which is a small price to pay – and its weight (making distribution more expensive and potentially more-polluting). But that latter can easily be overcome by distributing bottling: a network of bottling plants around the country (each bottling a variety of products, and probably locally-connected to reclamation and recycling schemes) would allow fluids to be transported in bulk – potentially even in concentrate form, further improving transport efficiency… and that’s if it isn’t just more ecologically-sound to produce Coke more-locally rather than transporting it over vast distances: it’s not like the recipe is particularly complicated.

In short: this is the stupidest environmental initiative I’ve seen yet this year.

Octave Compass

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Octave Compass

This is cool. Twist the outside dial to transpose the tonal centre of your key. Twist the inner dial to shift the mode of the scale. Turn on- or off- individual tones to shift into more-exotic modes. Use triangles to illustrate the triads of your major, minor, and sustained chords, or add the sixth or seventh with the help of a trapezoid.

The amateur music theorist in me continually struggles to visualise what and why a key is what it is. This kind of thing helps. Plus, what a cool software toy!

Loremen Podcast Simulator

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This folktale comes from The Big Book of Myths of Shropshire by Sir Colin Ogden. In 1701, a big cat died of “collick”, contracted from a dead fish.

…

This folktale is spoken of in North Yorkshire. In 1520, a witch named Nana Clayton received a bejewelled stool, said to have the power to see right from wrong, from a virgin in the inn, The Five Horses.

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Loremen Podcast Simulator

I might start using this widget to generate random background detail for fantasy roleplaying games.

Michael’s other experiments are pretty fun, too.

Stumbling

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…

I’ve been changing my relationship to being online.

Some of it is keeping in touch with friends who are fascinated by the same sorts of hybrid creations I am. Friends who build things. Friends in different professional communities. Paying attention when they mention some new discovery or avenue of interest.

Some of it is using an RSS reader to change the cadence and depth of my consumption—pulling away from the quick-hit likes of social media in favor of a space where I can run my thoughts to their logical conclusion (and then sit on them long enough to consider whether or not they’re true).

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Lucy Belwood

I wish I could get more people to see the value in the “slow Web”. The participatory Web. The creative Web. The personalised Web.

When you use an app to browse a “stream” in most social media, you’re seeing a list of posts curated to keep you watching, keep you seeing adverts, keep you on the app so that as much personal data as possible can be leeched from your behaviour. If it feels satisfying and especially if it feels addictive, the social network has done its job, but don’t be fooled: its job is not to improve social connections – it’s job is to keep you from doing anything else.

You don’t have to use the Web this way. You can subscribe to the content creators and topics that actually interest you. You can get that content on basically any device or medium you like, or across a mixture: want notifications by email? Slack? IRC? Discord? In a browser? In an app? As-it-happens or digests? You can filter for what interests you most at any given moment, save content for later, and resharing is supported thanks to an old-school invention called a “URL“. And you’ll see fewer ads and experience less misuse of your behavioural data.

Sure, there’s a learning curve. But it’s worth it. I wish I could get more people to see that.

I’m happy to see that Lucy Belwood does.

Story Time

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Channelate

When this comic (go read the full thing) came out at the tail end of last year, I thought to myself: yeah, that’s about right. I’m resharing that on my birthday in a week or so.

‘Cos I’m forty today, and I sort of had a half-baked dream that I’d throw some kind of big party and get people together. My surprise party for my thirtieth birthday party was an excellent (and much-needed) bash, and I guess I’d thought I’d try to replicate the feel of that, but a decade on (and not a surprise party… although in the end the last one wasn’t either).

But 2020’s the year that keeps on giving, so I’m postponing my party plans to… “some other time”. And so this comic really spoke to me.

Having Kids In Our Poly Triad by Sara Valta

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Sara’s back! You might remember a couple of years ago she’d shared with us a comic on her first year in a polyamory! We’re happy to have her back with a slice of life and a frank n’ real conversation about having kids in her Poly Triad relationship.

This sort of wholesome loving chat is just the thing we need for the start of 2021.

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Oh Joy Sex Toy

Start your year with a delightful comic about the author negotiating possible future children in a queer polyamorous triad, published via Oh Joy Sex Toy. Sara previously published a great polyamory-themed comic via OJST too, which is also worth a look.