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Posts by gadzooks
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2018-12-15 at 8:32 AM UTC in Lanny_loves = faggots
Originally posted by GGG Like today when I was fucking with the modulo operator today I had to google what a remainder was.
Maybe it was the drugs
Dude, I have to google the precise definition of modulo and modulus all the damn time.
My brain retains a vague general understanding of it, that it involves dividing two numbers and a remainder, but the exact mathematical/code syntax to use the modulo operator, no matter how many times I use it (since it is pretty sparingly, albeit consistently), will always give me pause for thought.
And even returning to the topic of recursion I brought up earlier... At least I think I did in this thread...
Anyway, there are some parts of programming, or really any skillset, that you only get better at with practice, but may always sustain some degree of confusion.
Either that, or we're both dumb from all the drugs.
But the way I see it is, even if the quantity and variety of drugs I've done over the years has essentially "fried my brain", or even if I was just straight up born with a low IQ, or maybe the ADHD I talk about having all the time is a real thing, or who knows what...
Don't let thoughts like that act as barriers to learning a new skill.
You clearly demonstrated in this thread and through Kik throughout the day that are capable of learning some of the fundamentals of programming.
And if you can learn the fundamentals, you can learn anything.
Eventually, the out-of-reach-stuff becomes the new "fundamentals". -
2018-12-15 at 8:17 AM UTC in Lanny_loves = faggots
Originally posted by aldra That and the current state of the tech industry/community makes it very difficult for me to care about it at the moment
I also wanted to touch on that point too...
So, with very little (basically none-whatsoever) formal education in programming, computer science, or software development, I find myself currently in a position at a startup where my job title, at least on our company website, is "Blockchain Developer."
It's kinda surreal to me for a whole host of reasons, one of which being that I have ZERO interest in crypo-currencies.
I know what Bitcoin is - I use it to buy drugs off the deep web.
But the whole cryptocurrency fad is just, utterly uninteresting to me.
So, I generally do not lead with my job title when I meet people, because then they always wanna talk about cryptocurrencies.
Anyway, through sheer serendipitous happenstance, I kinda just fell into this job. I work primarily on software that incorporates PRIVATE/ENTERPRISE blockchain technology, and has nothing to do with crypto-currencies.
A dude I knew - friend of a friend - was looking to hire developers for a new startup, and said they needed experts in private/enterprise blockchain solutions like IBM's / The Linux Foundations' Hyperledger.
So I went and learned everything I could about it, because I need a job (I've been teaching myself programming for the past few years, mostly via Youtube video tutorials, blog posts, and a fuck ton of hobby projects). But I never had a focal point or any kind of niche.
But boy did I ever find one.
VERY few people can claim any hands-on experience, let alone any degree of expertise in private blockchain implementation.
Well, I've successfully deployed both Hyperledger Fabric AND Ethereum's Quorum private blockchains, complete with front-end functionality and everything.
So I basically just kinda slipped, fell, and landed in this niche.
I went on kind of a drunken tangent there, but it's kind of a crazy story though, ain't it?
Exactly one year ago, I was working in a call center doing CELL PHONE BILLING support for pretty much minimum wage.
Now I'm a resident subject matter expert making triple what I made before.
Life can be kinda funny like that sometimes. -
2018-12-15 at 8:03 AM UTC in Lanny_loves = faggots
Originally posted by Lanny Kinda, like technically it is a block cipher with a block size of one byte, but that's a really shitty block cipher. Also notably lacking is anything like cypher block chaining. In EBC schemes like this blocks (literally one character in this case) resolve to substitution schemes, that is two identical blocks in the cipher text are identical in the plaintext. This is terrible and like the most trivial case for cryptanalysis, especially in the case of block size 1, and you can break it with stupidly simple frequency analysis.
Yeah, it was kinda reminding me of like, pre-Turing-era cryptography. Like the kind of thing the Zodiac killer probably used.
Decipherable if you have the right keys, or lots of computing power and dedication.
Originally posted by Lanny Technically there is something going on here, which each block is being XOR'd with the (N mod <key length>)th character of the "key", the "pw" var, but this doesn't really do anything and is just cargo cult crypto because you can still do frequency analysis by guessing the key length. In fact you can actually recover the key because of this which is worse than doing nothing at all.
Tomorrow when I'm sober again I'm gonna take a closer look at it all. It kinda gives off vibes that it might have been somewhat useful to obscure some string of text for like, passing notes around in high school or something. Like it would work, but it's not exactly NSA or CIA approved.
Originally posted by Lanny It's not too dissimilar to most hashing algorithms like Sha and all that.
So just a terminological point here, but binary xoring is typically called a "bitwise" operation rather than a "bit shifting" operation, bit shifting just refers to left/right shifts.
This is distinct from SHA in that the SHA family of algorithms produce a digest such that the input is not recoverable. SHA algorithms also don't involve a secret key. This is a symmetric cipher, so like in the same family as AES or something, although it's dogshit and mentioning it in the same breath as AES feels dirty.
I have a lot more to learn about both cryptography in general, and bitwise operations more specifically. I legit couldn't even tell you off of the top of my head what the difference between XOR and NOR is.
Well, after a few minutes of (slightly inebriated) thought, I could come up with some kind of answer, although it might be completely wrong...
XOR is eXclusive, meaning 0 XOR 1 resolves to true because JUST ONE is true, but 0 XOR 0 would be false and 1 XOR 1 would be false.
Whereas NOR resolves to true if either one OR the other is true... So 0 NOR 1 is true, whereas 1 NOR 1 is also true.
I think.
I might be way off. -
2018-12-15 at 7:55 AM UTC in Lanny_loves = faggots
Originally posted by aldra Yeah I never got too deep into crypto because I just don't have the math background for it. It's definitely worth learning if you're interested, but a lot of reading if you didn't do 4 unit in high school and/or go to university.
That and the current state of the tech industry/community makes it very difficult for me to care about it at the moment
Somewhere along the line I picked up an interest in math, but I definitely did not always have it.
I honestly buy math books that are well beyond my level understanding, and just kinda dive in and try to make sense of them bit by bit.
I'm no Good Will Hunting or anything like that, I get stuck pretty easily on page 1, paragraph 1 of my copy of "Linear Algebra" or "An Introduction to Abstract Algebra", or even a book I bought recently on Graph Theory. Like, introductory books, but to complex topics.
But yeah, I find myself taking my sweet time, and sometimes straight up giving up for a little while. Teaching yourself advanced mathematics is, at least I like to believe, feasible, but it's not exactly easy.
Officially/Academically speaking, I think my highest level of math education is grade 12 math. I don't even think I successfully passed it even. -
2018-12-15 at 7:41 AM UTC in Lanny_loves = faggotsActually, I have to come clean, now that I think of it, I never wrote MD5 from scratch.
I just remember reading some MD5 algorithm code though and it kinda made more sense to me than, say, Keccak.
But I found an example of Keccak implemented in Python and just started annotating every line of it to explain to myself how it works.
But it is a long, convoluted sequence of bitshifting though. -
2018-12-15 at 7:38 AM UTC in Lanny_loves = faggots
Originally posted by aldra Choosing those specific functions is mostly a matter of coming up with an algorithm that's 'mathematically strong', then finding a way to convert it to code efficiently. You're thinking of it purely in terms of the code - it's very difficult to understand the 'why' just from that.
Keccak looks like a complicated place to start; have a look into CRC algorithms (about the simplest kinds of one-way hashes) and then older functions like MD5.
Ok yeah, MD5 I kinda get.
I was able to recreate that in Python from scratch, I think.
I'm not too familiar with CRC though.
But I will definitely check them out.
But I ended up reading the Ethereum yellow paper, and it just sent me down so many different rabbit holes.
Keccak / Sha / sponge functions were one such rabbit hole.
Like I get the idea of how Merkle trees work and all that, I've built some from scratch to learn more about them.
But the mathematical algorithms they choose, and how they choose them, I just need to know more about that. It's super fascinating to me. -
2018-12-15 at 7:35 AM UTC in Lanny_loves = faggots
Originally posted by GGG I can't wait until this stops sounding like a completely different fucking language to me.
Ok, things like sponge functions and all that are pretty advanced topics. It's not the kind of stuff you learn right out the gate.
Heck, I've known people with a bachelors in CS who couldn't tell you much about HOW things like sponge functions really work under the hood.
I've worked with people with many years of experience on me as developers that had no idea.
Computer science, just like any branch of science or field of inquiry, can have its obscure areas.
Sponge functions are probably one of them.
But what's fascinating about sponge functions and their ilk is that they are what blockchain is typically built upon (especially Ethereum).
I work with various implementations of blockchain technology for work, so that's why I have some degree of interest in one-way hashing algorithms and sponge functions and all that. -
2018-12-15 at 7:26 AM UTC in Lanny_loves = faggotsLike Keccak, I tried deconstructing it and rebuilding it from scratch (that's pretty much my go to method for learning computer science / programming stuff), but there are a LOT of bit shifting operations, and like... how the fuck do they decide on these particular values to bitshift by? I just don't get it.
Cryptography is not my strong suit. -
2018-12-15 at 7:24 AM UTC in Lanny_loves = faggots
Originally posted by aldra I wrote up how it works a long time ago but I can't find it so I assume it was on another site.
Tips:
- carat (^) in javascript is XOR. as a result, the raw pw ('default') is not the cipher, it is the value of each character in pw XOR'd by it's corresponding character in t.
for(i=0;i<pw.length;i++) c=c^t.indexOf(pw.charAt(i));
- hex values are denoted and automatically parsed. \00 or \x00 inside a string is parsed as a null character. string = '\00\00\00' fills string with 3 nulls. info. this means that each of the escapes in the variable t maps to a single (usually unprintable) character.
answer
I was pretty damn close, though, you gotta admit.
I would have kept at it too,if it weren't for those meddling kids.
But for real though, I would have eventually gotten there.
Aldra, do you know much about one-way hash functions - specifically, sponge functions?
I mentioned earlier in the thread I really want someone to explain to me, in simple, intuitive, even analogical terms (if necessary), how sponge functions work...
In fact, how does any one-way hash function work? How do you guarantee an output string of N characters every single time? -
2018-12-15 at 7:11 AM UTC in Do posts to The Mongolvoid count towards total user post count?LONGEST CAT event postponed.
One of these days, though... I'll show you all the longest cat that ever did live. -
2018-12-15 at 7:08 AM UTC in My daughter just died
Originally posted by Lanny The posts per page setting is bounded for performance reasons. Both 1 and 100 ppp would just be stupid additional load on the server.
For the record, I was mostly kidding.
Especially about 1 post per page.
Why isn't there a "Print This Thread" feature though?
Most forums have it.
But I guess on a website with as much controversial discussion as this one, maybe people shouldn't be walking around with printed copies of what goes on here. -
2018-12-15 at 7 AM UTC in How do our brains figure out how imitate sounds with our mouths?Although, upon further reflection, it might even be hardwired to some degree as well...
Or basically a combination thereof.
A very depressing, but high scientifically informative, case study tells us a lot about this particular phenomenon...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)
This poor gal was basically locked up in a room with zero interaction with anyone outside the home.
Her own parent's rarely even communicated with her.
She's apparently passed the point where a human being is even capable of learning to communicate.
Super sad.
But super informative!
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2018-12-15 at 6:56 AM UTC in How do our brains figure out how imitate sounds with our mouths?
Originally posted by HTS mirror neurons or some shit idk
I was actually about to come in here with some long winded, detailed explanation (gotta put that degree in psychology to good use somewhere), but basically, yeah.
"Mirror neurons or some shit idk."
That could be like an entire chapter of a neuroscience textbook. -
2018-12-15 at 6:45 AM UTC in My daughter just diedOk, I'm not even that much of a regular around here, and even I figured it was a troll thread from the title and username alone.
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2018-12-15 at 6:39 AM UTC in Do posts to The Mongolvoid count towards total user post count?And then you will see the LONGEST cat you will EVER see.
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2018-12-15 at 6:38 AM UTC in Do posts to The Mongolvoid count towards total user post count?But just give me a few minutes to get up and stretch, have another drink, etc.
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2018-12-15 at 6:38 AM UTC in Do posts to The Mongolvoid count towards total user post count?It seems to me like the 'yay's have it...
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2018-12-15 at 6:37 AM UTC in Do posts to The Mongolvoid count towards total user post count?Nothing? No "nay-sayers" whatsoever?
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2018-12-15 at 6:37 AM UTC in Do posts to The Mongolvoid count towards total user post count?I kinda wanna make an even longer one.
All in favor, say "yay!"... -
2018-12-15 at 6:34 AM UTC in Do posts to The Mongolvoid count towards total user post count?Now THAT is one loooooooooong cat.
