cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 29 Posts
  • 141 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: January 17th, 2022
  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoThe C Programming Language@lemmy.ml•Are there better alternatives to null-terminated strings?English
    2·
    16 days ago

    CBOR uses variable-sized length prefixes. Strings zero to 23 bytes long require just one byte of overhead, after that it becomes two bytes for strings up to length 255, and 3 bytes of overhead for strings up to 65535. Above that, it requires 5 bytes of overhead, which is probably enough for strings up to at least a few hundred GB, though I didn’t test that far.

    click to see how i empirically determined those numbers

    $ python -c 'import cbor; overhead=0; print({ length:overhead for length in range(65537) if overhead < (overhead:=len(cbor.dumps("a"*length))-length) })'

    {0: 1, 24: 2, 256: 3, 65536: 5}

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoMemes@lemmy.ml•Costs Less? When That Happened?English
    6·
    18 days ago

    That pin can be found for $30 or $35 on on ebay here and here, where it is described as being from the 80s and as an “employee pin”.

    I was thinking that this might have been something aimed specifically at technology buyers in US schools in the 80s or 90s, to whom Apple offered substantial institutional discounts in a (relatively successful) effort to dominate that sector. However searching the phrase “does more costs less” i found this TV spot advertising the Quadra 605 which at $1000 was the cheapest computer Apple sold when it was introduced in October 1993 (and allegedly cheaper than something else they refer to as “PC Leading Brand” 😂). That system was sold under the LC and Performa brands up to 1996, but it was only sold as a Quadra until October 1994, so, to answer OP’s question: that slogan was in use at least sometime in that year.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Traveling to the US - How to prepareEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    They only do that if you are a threat.

    Lmao. Even CBP does not claim that. On the contrary, they say (and courts have so far agreed) that they can perform these types of border searches without any probable cause, and even without reasonable suspicion (a weaker legal standard than probable cause).

    In practice they routinely do it to people who are friends with someone (or recently interacted with someone on social media) who they think could be a threat, as well as to people who have a name similar to someone else they’re interested in for whatever reason, or if the CBP officer just feels like it - often because of what the person looks like.

    It’s nice for you that you feel confident that you won’t be subjected to this kind of thing, but you shouldn’t assume OP and other people don’t need to be prepared for it.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Pro Tip: Global eSimsEnglish
    24·
    2 months ago

    It seems to me that switching SIMs provides little privacy benefit, because carriers, data brokers, and the adversaries of privacy-desiring people whom they share data with are obviously able to correlate IMEIs (phones) with IMSIs (SIMs).

    What kind of specific privacy threats do you think are mitigated by using different SIMs in the same phone (especially the common practice of using an “anonymous” SIM in a phone where you’ve previously used a SIM linked to your name)?

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