I asked ChatGPT to explain the code from the OP (without the header file), and it seems to have given a really good breakdown. Although I know nothing about interpreters, C, or this fucked style, so who really knows if it makes any sense at all…
> Mr. SIMMONDS asked the Minister of Transport whether he is aware that the erection of signs bearing the letter C is inadequate to differentiate between controlled and uncontrolled pedestrian crossings; and whether in the interests of public safety, he will have these two types of crossings painted upon the roadway in an unquestionably distinctive manner?
> The MINISTER of TRANSPORT (Mr.Hore-Belisha) The present arrangements are experimental, and I am watching them closely with a view to making such alterations as experience may show to be desirable in the interests of public safety.
I thought so, but then read "Zebra crossings are a type of controlled crossing" on Wikipedia. This may be a mistake (possibly in the source).
Edit: found a definition in a document by the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation. "Uncontrolled crossings do not afford pedestrians any particular priority over motorised traffic", and so it classes zebra crossings as controlled.
Millions please. The solution is to just link to the fucking thing instead of a cryptic tracking url from your mass mailing provider. But oh no, now you can’t see line go up anymore!!!
In Windows CMD you don’t even need to hit return at the end. They can just add a line break to the copied text and as soon as you paste into the command line (just a right click!), you own yourself.
I have one question though: Considering the scare-mongering about Windows 10’s EOL, this seems pretty convoluted. I thought bad guys could own your machine by automatic drive-by downloads unless you’re absolutely on the latest versions of everything. What’s with all the “please follow this step-by-step guide to getting hacked”?
I'm sure "visit a site and get exploited" happens, but... I haven't actually heard of a single concrete case outside of nation-state attacks.
What's more baffling is that I also haven't heard of any Android malware that does this, despite most phones out there having several publicly known exploits and many phones not receiving any updates.
I can't really explain it except "social engineering like this works so well and is so much simpler that nobody bothers anymore".
Would you know when it happens? It's not like the malware will throw up a giant message box telling you that you have been pwned - unless it's a cryptolocker or other extortion campaign but even then it will likely not activate immediately to evade analysis.
But yes, zero days are too valuable to waste on random targets. Doesn't mean it never happens.
Old Androids do reportedly, and from experience, get slower over time. Maybe that's just bloat in the user installed apps when they are updated. But I would not be terribly surprised if it wasn't also malware consuming resources.
Anti-Patterns You Should Avoid: overengineering for potential future requirements. Are there real-life cases where you should design with the future in mind? Yes. Are there real-life cases where DISTINCT is the best choice by whatever metric you prioritize at the time? Also yes.
I hear you. It's not all _that_ uncommon for me to query for "things with more than one instance". Although, to be fair, it's more common for me to that when grep/sort/uniqing logs on the command line.
Eh, sometimes you need a quick fix and it’s just extremely concise and readable. I’ll take an INNER JOIN over EXISTS (nice but insanely verbose) or CROSS APPLY (nice but slow) almost every time. Obviously you have to know what you’re dealing with, and I’m mostly talking about reporting, not perf critical application code.
Distinct is also easily explained to users, who are probably familiar with Excel’s “remove duplicate rows”.
It can also be great for exploring unfamiliar databases. I ask applicants to find stuff in a database they would never see by scrolling, and you’d be surprised how many don’t find it.
In any case, it depends. OP nicely guarded himself by writing “overusing”, so at that point his pro-tip is just a tautology and we are in agreement: not every use of DISTINCT is an immediate smell.
What do you mean? Here are your real alternatives for doing a semijoin (assuming ANSI SQL, no vendor extensions):
SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM t2 WHERE t2.x = t1.x );
SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE x IN ( SELECT x FROM t2 );
SELECT * FROM t1 JOIN ( SELECT DISTINCT x FROM t2 ) s1 USING (x);
Now tell me which one of these is the less verbose semijoin?
You could argue that you could fake a semijoin using
SELECT DISTINCT * FROM t1 JOIN t2 USING (x);
or
SELECT * FROM t1 JOIN t2 USING (x) GROUP BY t1.*;
but it doesn't give the same result if t1 has duplicate rows, or if there is more than one t2 matching t1. (You can try to fudge it by replacing * with something else, in which case the problem just moves around, since “duplicate rows” will mean something else.)
No, sorry, you’re certainly correct, I just meant that any subqueries are generally crazy verbose. And then you usually want additional Where clauses or even Joins in there, and it starts to stop looking like a Where clause, so I’m often happy when I can push that logic into From.
I keep telling people they’re not going to get owned just by booting a Windows 10 machine after october 14. Most people visit Google, Amazon, Youtube, Pinterest and Netflix and not much else. If you run sketchy stuff and click sketchy links, you could get owned under support, too. And if the NSA wants to spy on you specifically, Windows 11 isn’t going to stop them. The most pressing (non-compliance) reason to upgrade from Windows 10 is always just going to be that newer software versions may stop working. Perhaps most importantly games and Microsoft’s own stuff.
All software is full of security bugs, supported or not. While supported SW fixes known security bugs it also introduces new ones. Therefore it doesn't matter much, it's all vulnerable.
Security patches are also increasingly misused by the vendors to push unwanted crap.
Other security approaches are needed: firewall, updated browser + adblocker, not clicking on everything, doing research before installing stuff, etc.
You are losing against Microsoft marketing. In Europe one of the biggest electronic chains MediaMarkt (think bestbuy in its heyday) is currently running commercials targeting older audience and clearly co-financed by Microsoft. Its all about dangers of doing basic ecommerce on "old unsupported computers" and how you are going to have all of your data and identity stolen if you dont upgrade _right now_ to a new computer with Win11.
> In Europe one of the biggest electronic chains MediaMarkt (think bestbuy in its heyday) is currently running commercials targeting older audience and clearly co-financed by Microsoft
Funny how I just cleaned out a Windows 11 computer infested with malware that was used by a professional and infiltrated with an unknown vector. We think it was compromised via an ad.
A friend of mine's wife works in marketing and literally needs to run without an Ad Blocker for work. When I setup PiHole for them, had to manually set the DNS on her work computer to not block ads.
Yeah in our case this person is a professional in another industry and uses her device as an office machine... Adblockers are just not a thing they think about.
You need an up2date browser with adblocker, that's the most important thing. I guess browsers will be supported for a few more years but after that you should definitely not use Windows 10 in fear of e.g. 0days served via ads and just use a Linux distribution instead (or better yet, do it now instead of buying new hardware just for Win11 or using crude hacks and unsupported workarounds).
Unfortunately, WebSmell-o-Vision has not yet been unilaterally pushed by the dudes at Google to do this news justice, but as a croissant connaisseur I would have at least appreciated a webp of the thing instead of some random archive image. It’s a stamp, for christ’s sake.
Has there ever been any sort of even-remotely-successful smell-o-vision? We can recreate input for many of our other senses - music, visuals, touch - so why not smell?
Presumably the volatility inherent to “volatile chemicals” makes it challenging to reproduce on-demand. I’d imagine you’d need something like dozens of base compounds, alcohols and acids to create esters and carrier media, some way of protecting all of it from oxygen, a hyper-accurate mixing device that can then by hyper-cleaned between each scent, since our noses would be too sensitive to allow even a small amount of cross-contamination…and then, why stop at smell? You basically already have everything you need for taste as well. Insert some lab-grown tissues and/or fibers, and we’ve invented the Star Trek replicator!
Ish. Our level of technology is limited to mixing a small set of base compounds on demand. That gives a range of possible scents about as small as you'd think. The problem is that your sense of smell is a complex chemical detector. There are a lot of unique molecules that you can detect.
We'd have to synthesize molecules on demand to get any reasonable range of scents, basically.
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