During World War II, the British developed covert radar technology enabling night plane interceptions, masking it with a propaganda campaign attributing pilots' success to consuming more carrots for improved eyesight.

The author invented the neologism "Carrot Problem" to refer to this type of false excuses people use to hide the true cause to their success.

A gallery of embeddings for Stable Diffusion concepts.

A music keyboard that creates consonants for you automatically.

A visual and interactive explanation on how grokking (understanding) emerges in neuron networks.

What fascinates me is that the vast difference in neuron connectivity during memorizing and generalizing looks not unlike a human's brain in development.

Two attacks to make send traffic outside protected VPN tunnel.

1. exploit VPN's LAN direct access mechanism by spoofing fake IP for target.com
2. spoof the IP for VPN server

I reckon these methods should only affect unencrypted traffic or TLS without proper CN checks. Interestingly, this technique is used by some VPN software in China as an alternative way to selectively route traffic to VPN (to circumvent internet censorship). https://dreamacro.github.io/clash/configuration/dns.html#fake-ip

This thing amazes me when I saw it. Although I can roughly see how it may work, this still feels magical to me.

Then I realized, isn't this technique known as "inverse kinematics"?

Raku is indeed the successor of the Perl I loved :)

A clever albeit useless bash trick.

If you have two source of measurements, how can you combine them to get a more accurate measurement?

In short, you take the weighted average with the weight=1/variance.

Please also read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971975 for the missing (but important) bits.

ffmpeg cheatsheet.

A two hour long ride full of fun quirks in human languages.

A nice electronic circuit simulator tool.

A comprehensive note on functional analysis.

A really nice article on how to synchronize game state over a network with latency and high packet loss. The protocol described in the last is quite clever:

Instead of detecting packet loss after the fact and resending lost packets, we redundantly include all inputs in each UDP packet until we know for sure the other side has received them

By the way, the website seems to have a lot of worth reading articles on game development, especially networking related ones: https://gafferongames.com/

I never fully understood the concept of voicing:

• if 'b' and 'p' are really the same except for the voiceness, how can we still tell the difference in whisper?
• how can we produce 'b' unvoiced as well as unvoiced vowels, etc.
• i don't feel my lips are moving the same way when producing 'b' and 'p'

The answer: they are not exactly the same. The textbook is lying to you. See the post for more.

Interesting knowledge I learned today.

There are two ways your knife can get dull: 1) The blade wears down or 2) The blade's edge is not aligned properly.

The sharpening pole is not actually a sharpener, it's what's called a "honing steel". The tool doesn't actually sharpens the knife - its function is to re-align the blade so it's straight again.

The author wrote a program that solves Mario levels by exploring the state space with a path-finding algorithm with a guiding heuristic. This is a nice demo of how you sometimes don't need sophisticated algorithm or machine learning to tackle complex problems.

A series of courses to get your hands wet (dry?) on learning electronics. Ben Eater style.

An interactive guide on SVG path directives.

An interview of Douglas Hofstadter on recent AI development.