Bank of America provides 5.25% percent cash back on each category. Get one for every category. Done. (You need to enroll to preferred rewards for that). 3% is not worth to be bothered about, nor should anyone support robinhood in the first place.
You either play that game or subside others who do, regardless of of whether you like it or not — you are still participating. Prices are already higher for everyone.
We should have some form of Faster Payments scheme, backed by the state, because cheap, reliable transaction networks are the sort of infrastructure that's good for business. At the very least, this screams "make FedNow the default payment rail". Then if people actually want to spend money that isn't theirs, let lenders build something pluggable on top, so their costs and needs are solely limited to the credit aspects, rather than skimming of of every single transfer of value.
iCloud’s HideMyEmail service generates @icloud.com addresses. Very easy, single click.
Nevertheless, I still use my personal name at lastname dot com for everything for decades and amount of spam is quite tolerable. Rarely it leaks into inbox. It’s even published on my personal web site in plain text.
Well, there is now some truth to it. For example, low quality HDMI cable will may be only good enough for low bandwidth, that would limit refresh rate, and/or color fidelity (e.g. chroma subsampling) and/or resolution.
So yea, “digital” cables are not immune to signal integrity issues, and better cables do perform better.
I understand that monster takes this to the next level of bullshit — but in principle, yes, more expensive cable cable can yield better quality. Or should I say — crappy cable can result in quality degradation
> So yea, “digital” cables are not immune to signal integrity issues, and better cables do perform better.
Better cables perform better, but not at all in the way that Monster suggests.
Gold plating and oxygen-free copper doesn't matter.
Any certified HDMI cable will operate at least to its certification, whether or not it is gold plated with triple shielded conductors.
I wish the HDMI forum would officially deprecate all older HDMI standards, so that companies like Monster couldn't advertise that their cables provide "better color, higher resolution, better sound", etc. All the cables in the store would be 8k HDMI 2.2 cables, or they wouldn't be allowed to use the HDMI trademark.
Besides interference and lying about specs, cables can be designed for durability or not.
I buy cheap cables from China. They generally work-to-spec out of the...plastic bag, but may not handle frequent plug/unplug cycles or any sort of rough treatment.
You're making me wonder about nuance. Since those ports are exclusively called HDMI, I wonder if you could call your unlicensed cable "HDMI compatible."
If your TV only supports 4k@60 HDMI 2, no need to go buy more expensive cables with specs you can't use. And even then, unless you're playing time-sensitive games, 4k@60 is probably all you need anyway.
Speaking of high quality "Monstrous Cables" and draconian legal remedies: there's K. W. Jeter's Noir (1998), a Cyberpunk novel whose detective protagonist's main job is killing copyright violators so that their still-living spinal cords may be incorporated into hi-fi system cables:
DonHopkins on Nov 10, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Electric Sheep on Ubuntu Linux 17.10
I deserve to be downvoted by the literature snobs, but if you liked Blade Runner the movie (and who in their right mind doesn't?), then you may very well enjoy K. W. Jeter's three written sequels to the MOVIE Blade Runner (not the BOOK DADOES), "Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human", "Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night", and "Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon". There is no book "Blade Runner 1" -- that's the movie.
The irony is that Philip K Dick was offered a whole lot of money to write another book entitled "Blade Runner" based on the screenplay of the movie, but he insisted on maintaining the integrity and title of his original book DADOES by re-issuing it with a reference to the (quite different) movie on the cover, instead of rewriting another book called "Blade Runner" based on the movie based on his own book. (Harrumph!) He would have made a lot more money by selling out that way, but he steadfastly refused to do it.
However, fortunately for us, after his death, his friend and fellow SF writer K. W. Jeter (who also wrote an excellent cyberpunk novel Dr. Adder which Dick loved) sold out on his behalf and wrote those three books based on the movie (which referenced famous lines like "Wake up. Time to die!").
They explore the question of what the fuck happened after they went flying off into the wilderness (that unused footage from The Shining), and whether Decker was a replicant. (Who would have guessed??!)
So even though they're not written by PKD, or directly based on his original all time great book, and not as authentic and mentally twisted as a real PKD book, they are still pretty excellent and twisted in their own right, and well worth reading. They're based on an excellent movie based on an epic book, and written by a friend and author PKD respected, who's written some other excellent books.
And while you're at it, check out Dr. Adder and K. W. Jeter's other books too! Especially Noire, for its hi-fi cables made out of the still-living spinal columns of copyright violators. (I suggest you buy a copy and don't pirate it!)
Jeter's most significant sf may lie in the thematic trilogy comprising Dr Adder (1984) – his first novel (written 1972), long left unpublished because of its sometimes turgid violence – The Glass Hammer (1985) and Death Arms (1987); Alligator Alley (1989) as by Dr Adder with Mink Mole (see Ferret) is a distant outrider to the sequence. Philip K Dick had read Dr Adder in manuscript and for years advocated it; and it is clear why. Though the novel clearly prefigures the under-soil airlessness of the best urban Cyberpunk, it even more clearly serves as a bridge between the defiant reality-testing Paranoia of Dick's characters and the doomed realpolitiking of the surrendered souls who dwell in post-1984 urban sprawls (see Cities). In each of these convoluted tales, set in a devastated Somme-like Near-Future America, Jeter's characters seem to vacillate between the sf traditions of resistance and cyberpunk quietism. In worlds like these, the intermittent flashes of sf imagery or content are unlasting consolations.
[...]
Much of his later work has consisted of Sharecrop contributions to various proprietorial worlds, including Alien Nation, Star Trek, Star Wars [for titles see Checklist]; of some interest in this output are his Ties – they are also in a sense Sequels by Another Hand – to the film Blade Runner (1982), comprising Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human (1995), Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night (1996) and Blade Runner 4: Eye & Talon (2000), and making use of some original Philip K Dick material. The sense of ebbing enthusiasm generated by these various Ties is not markedly altered by Jeter's most recent singleton, Noir (1998), a Cyberpunk novel whose detective protagonist's main job is killing copyright violators so that their still-living spinal cords may be incorporated into hi-fi system cables; the irreality of this concept, and the bad-joke names that proliferate throughout, are somewhat stiffened up by the constant interactive presence of the already dead, a Philip K Dick effect, as filtered through Jeter's own intensely florid sensibility. [JC]
I may as well go off topic from cables (but at least on topic to the post) and mention the excellent Blade Runner video game, which had a compatibility re-release and is currently on sale for a couple bucks.
Lecturing comments about what the world needs from someone who uses words like "pointless drivel" just serves to prove the poster's point. We need more writers and fewer critics.
This being raspberry pi absolves you from needing to buy a separate hardware noise generator: it has plenty of GPIO. For example, one can obtain entropy by sampling random noise generated by reverse-biasing a junction in a cheap pn transistor. Here is an example: http://holdenc.altervista.org/avalanche/. Bonus — maybe it will get you hooked on electrical engineering!
Btw, some versions of raspberry pi already have hardware random number number generator accessible at
/dev/hwrng.
How does the disconnected audio input of any random PC or thinclient compare?
I continue to find it a bit silly to see "with a raspberry pi" when people just mean "with any random linux box that doesn't need to be very powerful".
It's like listening to NPR, where every smartphone is an iPhone even if it's an Android, you know?
Electrical noise (including RF noise) is really random, as in it is impossible to predict exact value.
It does have non-flat spectrum, meaning some values are more probable than others, but that only means you need to whiten it. (A rough analogy might be a 6-sided die labeled with 1,1,1,2,3,4 - yes, number 1 is much more likely to come out. No, this does not make it "not really random", and some trivial math can produce ideal random stream out of it)
The only problem with audio input is that you may end up with non-random value - like all-zero output. But properly implemented whitener should detect this and stop outputting any value at all.
it's an often-made mistake where random generation / randomness is confused with probability distribution. Having said that, I don't know (as is in really don't know) if RF noise is unbiased; doesn't sound like it?
If you are talking about DC bias (as in, long term average of raw readings), then "unconnected audio input" is pretty likely to have it - it's easy to introduce via component tolerances, and there is no real reason to keep it exactly zero for audio purposes. But it's also pretty trivial to fix in software.
If you are talking bias in more general sense, then audio input noise is non-uniform in the frequency space, for example there is low-pass filter which filters out high input frequency, and it will affect noise values too. Good whitening algorithm is essential.
The good news however is there are many noise sources which are actually caused by quantum effects in electronic parts, and therefore completely unpredictable. Even if NSA recorded all RF noise, they still could not predict what the ADC will capture. (But they might be able to capture digital bits as they travel over the bus...)
If we were dealing with pure cosmic background radiation, or inside a Faraday cage, sure.
What I'm referring to are things like radio broadcasts, 60 Hz hum from power lines, noise put out by switching power supplies, and that sort of thing.
Just having a bias, as in your example, would be still truly random. If you knew that every tenth roll you'd get a 3, it would no longer be random. When your random number generator can be influenced by the outside world, it's no longer suitable for cryptographic use.
> That will give you RF noise, which isn't really random.
what does "really" random even mean in this context? does it actually matter?
given 3 hypothetical devices in a homelab:
a) does no specialized hardware entropy collection, and instead relies entirely on the standard Linux kernel mechanisms
b) does entropy collection based on the RF noise that you're saying isn't "really" random
c) does entropy collection based on whatever mechanism you have in mind that generates "real" randomness (hand-carving bits of entropy out of quantum foam, or whatever)
even if your threat model includes "the NSA tries to break into my homelab"...device A will almost certainly be fine, they'll have ways of getting access that are much simpler than compromising the entropy pool.
I suppose device B has a theoretical vulnerability that if the NSA had physical access to your homelab, they could monitor the RF environment, and then use that to predict what its inputs to the entropy pool were. but...that's assuming they have physical access, and can plant arbitrary equipment of their own design. at that point, they don't need to care about your entropy pool, you're already compromised.
No one puts raw bit source directly into private key, they always whiten it via some method (often entropy pool setup using strong hash/encryption functions).
That means that even if you "random inputs" are totally predictable, the random values which come out of whitener are completely distinct, and generated RSA keys have virtually zero chances of being similar.
That's arguing that you can just seen an RNG with the current time and use a PRNG as your randomness source - a whitener can't give you randomness out which isn't there to start with.
In the above, fairly extreme case, the risk should be obvious: if someone has a decent guess on what the uptime of your system is, and knows you're doing this, then the search space to crack certificates can be made accessibly small.
Like if you know see a certificate with a Valid From date of say, January 1, 2025 but you know the service definitely wasn't running on January 1, 2024, then by guessing what the PRNG is you've constrained your search space to 1704027600 through 1735650000. So the issue isn't whether the numbers you emit are distinct - it's that an adversary can make it suitably likely that they can produce colliding RSA keys themselves anyway (and remember, they get unlimited attempts at this - they only have to succeed once).
EDIT: And while you can certainly argue that they couldn't predict the exact noise environment of say, your server room, it's also not impossible to model which also might constrain the search space enough to accessible. It's not "haha! we know your every move" it's just making the problem space small enough to brute force.
I did an entropy test on my Pi5 (according to https://rob-turner.net/post/raspberrypi-hwrng), and it (7.999832 bits per byte) has about the same entropy as /dev/urandom (7.999831 bits per byte).
However, when using it directly, it's pretty slow. /dev/hwrng is 200 KB/s, /dev/urandom is 40 MB/s.
Though, maybe that doesn't matter if it's just intended to be used to add entropy to the system entropy pool.
The Raspberry Pi 4 model B can also implement a FIPS-compliant entropy source in the form of CPU Jitter Random Number Generator (JEnt)! It is listed under certificate E21 within NIST’s Entropy Source Validation Program (ESV), so it could even be used in a cryptographic module.
ESV testing for JEnt uses an oversampling rate of 3, so even if you don’t want to use the precise setup described in the certificate (maybe a different version of OS, etc), the entropy rate from this will be more than adequate.
Eh, ads can be blocked. 5% cash back on travel alone on the other hand makes it continue to be a no-brainer. (And Whole Foods if you shop there).
Everyone understands that you still pay for free shipping. That’s not the point though. If you have prime your stuff ships first. If you don’t — you pay for shipping and/or have to wait longer. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes not.
And then there is a massive list of other affiliate services prime members can use - each one another reason to use prime, if you happen to use those services.
I’m actually surprised how cheap prime is considering its value.
Is there a ceiling on cash back? Some spends $20000 travel gets $1k back vs $400 on traditional cash rewards. That would be competitive but most high rewards have caps?
The parallelism isn't part of POSIX though (AFAIK), that's an extension by whoever wrote your xargs.
If what you really mean is that it's already installed on every machine you use, fair enough. But it's not strictly portable in some standards-based sense.
It’s more a best buy than fry’s electronics.
We had a recently opened one here in the Bay Area — I went there once, having heard good things. Never again. It’s a bullshit emporium.