Federated Republic of Sean @freakazoid@retro.social

While setting up Google as an IdP with Keycloak, I inadvertently set it up so I got prompted for TOTP twice when linking the Google identity to my existing account: once when authenticating against the existing account, and a second time because I configured a post-login flow to still require OTP when logging in via Google. I tried just entering the same OTP and it worked!

Doesn't TOTP require caching recent OTPs to prevent replay attacks within the window?

Has anyone else noticed that USPS seems to have suddenly become MUCH slower than at any point so far this year?

It's REALLY easy to scare law enforcement, and either provoke them into overreacting or cause them to waste a bunch of time investigating or defending against imagined threats.

I especially like how Logisim gives a good visualization of what the circuit is doing. That's no absolutely vital, but I've found it makes it a lot easier for me to keep track of what's going on, and I can track down bugs more quickly that way.

One thing I don't really need is Logisim's bundling of wires. Laying out the individual wires isn't that hard, especially if I use a bus structure.

I'm a big fan of Logisim, but it's getting a bit long in the tooth, and it's slow if you want to do larger-scale stuff. I've tried using a couple others, but they tend to be targeted at electrical engineers and have a lot more features, in particular support for analog circuits, so they have a much steeper learning curve.

Does anyone know of a simulator that can simulate relatively large digital circuits and that one can get started fairly quickly on?

The Chinese have been quietly spending their dollars buying up US assets, but if there's ever a war those will just get expropriated. So if anything it gives them an incentive to remain friendly to the US. Either way, the US retains the power.

The real danger to the US is that it becomes a pariah. People stop moving there, people start leaving for better opportunities elsewhere, and US companies have trouble doing business abroad.

The US exercises power because it has a large base of natural resources and skills, and it's able to use those to fund the world's largest military, including the world's largest navy, which it's able to use to protect trade.

This US uses its influence to provide advantages to its own companies. China does similar, though it relies more on direct subsidies, as many European countries do.

This is mercantilism.

Control of financial markets, which we also call "capital", controls the balance of power within that market, but it doesn't seem to affect national power very much.

On the international stage, trade is still what matters. The British Empire held power over its colonies despite the fact that it ran a tremendous trade deficit with them. The media don't understand trade deficits *at all*.

The difference between capitalism and mercantilism is that in capitalism power is driven by the control of capital, whereas in mercantilism power is driven by control of trade.

The Allies won WWII largely due to the US's tremendous manufacturing capacity. Today, the US is in the #2 slot, with about 10% less of global manufacturing than China, but manufacturing constitutes more than twice as much of China's total economic output as the US's.

...

When I see a "keep the Christ in Christmas" sign it doesn't make me want to raise my kids with a more Christian version of Christmas. It makes me want to do only Chanukkah with them, because the culture they've inherited from their mother is one that's genuinely under attack. Ironically, it's their mother who pushes for getting a Christmas tree every year, because she grew up in an inter-faith household.

Of course, we all know this is not true. American culture is not dying. It's changing into something that is valuable to a much larger fraction of the population, whether or not they've just arrived. The people who think they're "protecting" American culture are really just opting out of having any say in what its future looks like.

There was once a time when American culture was so powerful that people in the USSR were paying hundreds of dollars of 1980s money for blue jeans and risking arrest to listen to American music.

Now it's apparently so weak it can't even withstand the arrival in the United States itself of people who have taken huge risks to get here.

Cultures thrive because they provide something of value to people. If American culture really provides that little value, what's the point?

We've received multiple copies of the paper census packet even though we've already filled it out online. Apparently there isn't any communication between the part that handles online submission and the part that triggers the second mailing.

Which makes me wonder if we'd get counted twice if we filled out the paper forms as well.

Not what I expect from the organization that pioneered the use of punch card based tabulating machines!

Well, not really "spans", but convex slices of polygons defined by four edges: an axis-aligned top and bottom, and two edges defining the left and right sides. A triangle would create at most two of these that don't share any scanlines. A quad can have up to three, I think even if it's concave.

To feed in triangles without requiring the software to be ready as soon as a horizontal retrace happens, you could use a FIFO memory, which I just learned is a thing that exists. As you might expect, this is memory where you write data on one port and read it on another. The software could just repeatedly POKE an address or two with a pointer to the actual edge data.

Hmm, to avoid sorting, these need to be spans, not edges.

This seems like it would be pretty fun to try to implement in hardware. You wouldn't want to use a linear edge buffer because of the need to insert edges in arbitrary places as the scanline reaches them.

Or you could use a one-scanline pixel and Z buffer, which lets you avoid sorting and can also handle stuff like transparency, though that requires a different kind of sorting.

There also isn't any multiplication after the vertices are transformed and the slopes are computed; you just add the slope each time. This does require at least fixed point addition with precision well beyond a single pixel, or you can store the current X coordinate and the fractional part separately, whatever's more convenient.

If you're familiar with any non-framebuffer techniques at all, it's probably scanline rendering. There are some pretty neat algorithms. One is to sort all your polygons by their top Y coordinate in screen space, then for each scan line sort the edges of the polygons that cross the line by their X coordinate.

The cool thing is, you only have to keep track of the current crossing point, slope, and bottom Y coordinate of each edge, not its endpoints.