3 private links
Would you like to know if you’ve gained weight? If you’re annoying, or too talkative, or not as smart as you think? If you’re doing something, literally anything, the wrong way? Just ask a German and they will tell you immediately. Germans do not do this to hurt your feelings. There isn’t even a single long word in German for “hurt feelings,” they just translate the English directly (verletzte Gefühle), and everyone knows that direct translation from the English is how Germans demonstrate their disdain. There is, however, a common and beloved expression for an individual who makes a big show of having hurt feelings, and that is beleidigte Leberwurst, or a perennially “insulted liver sausage,” because hurt fee-fees are for weak non-German babies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442998
This was surprisingly awesome.
There's a "battleship" like game in Zelda that is "required" (I guess) to be won three times in quick succession for a complete speedrun. Trying to get three wins in a row is too slow, so they developed a method that uses knowledge of the random number generator to find the answers.
The method is, as I understand it:
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The seed for the RNG is fixed (RNG is Whichmann-Hill with a seed of 100,100,100, apparently)
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The RNG is used throughout the game and is called upwards of 5.5M times before they get to the "battleship" challenge, so there's a bell curve distribution on what state the RNG is in by the time the player arrives at the challenge
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The bell curve is too wide to effectively be used to narrow the search down initially, so a few "battleship" games are played (and lost) to guess the state of the RNG
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From the last step, this narrows the search down to a few "key states" of the RNG, each with their own bell curve distribution of what state the RNG is when next used to create the random mini-game
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A new distribution 'heat map' of possible ship positions is generated so players can have an increased probability of solving the puzzle
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Each subsequent guess and/or win give more information about the RNG state to effectively narrow down the search
The key point here is that the RNG is used throughout the game, with an unknown number of calls in between when it's being called for the Zelda mini-game they're trying to win.
Since the method is out of game (as in, not reading memory from the game, using only input from the player out-of-game), it's allowed in speed-runs, much like consulting a web-site with a tech-map or other quick calculations to help the player in game.
I'm no expert but this sounds almost verbatim what cryptoanalysts do to break some encryption protocols with known seed states or other 'side band' information.
automx2 is the next generation of automx. It is a complete rewrite making setup and configuration simple.
automx2: Email client configuration made easy
automx2 makes configuring a mail account easy. It unites methods for automated mailbox configuration from Apple (mobileconfig), Microsoft (autodiscover) and Mozilla (autoconfig) in one tool. automx2 is successor to automx. It has been designed to be easier to setup, easier to configure and easier to use.
Documentation
automx2 comes with documentation that explains how automated mail account configuration works, how automx2 works and how you install and configure automx2.
All documentation is stored in the doc subdirectory. You can read it file by file using a text reader or all files as one if you point your browser to automx2.html.
About automx2
The project is hosted on GitLab. Please use the project’s issue tracker if you find bugs. If you have questions or want to discuss usage and other topics, join us on the automx-users mailing list.
automx2 was written by Ralph Seichter for sys4 AG.