The answer to life, the universe and everything, I guess?

Case against 255: it looks wrong in the graph :(

Case against 256: no 0 or 1 values :(

Considering how important having a 0 and 1 value is for arithmetic in general, I think 255 is better.

I saw a thumbnail on Youtube that said "GitHub is killing open source" and I think the sheer wrongness of the statement surmises the entire idea very well.

There are many things that I don't like about Github, but I think the most important one is that Github doesn't allow users to have multiple free accounts.

You can create as many accounts as you want on Reddit, have as many blogs as you want on Tumblr, and even create multiple personae on Facebook on a single account, but Github doesn't allow you to do any of that.

You can't be a "hacker" platform when you give users less control over their privacy than Facebook provides.

I assume that is a bigger problem when you consider everyone decided to stop hosting their own forum and moving all their discussion to Github issues and Github's built-in forum.

Maybe we can reach there by using integers as fixed point decimals?

It's not called artificial intelligence for nothing.

The harness is vibe-coded.

Replace journalism with AI summaries... of what?

What is the AI going to summarize once journalism is dead?

Press releases, which is what too much of what we call ‘journalism’ summarises anyway.

Why would they remove the ads from users who have proven that they would even pay for a Facebook subscription?

Imagine paying for the privilege to display an animated icon.

I blame Bethesda and their horse armor for this.

That surprised me as well.

I thought the whole point of cookies, local storage, session storage, and indexed DB were to avoid what origin private file system is doing.

You mean I could have just saved stuff as a file this whole time instead of serializing it to a string? Why didn't we just do this from the start?

It's still sandboxed and deleted when the user clears private data for the website.

The main advantage it has over things like cookies, local storage, etc. is that it provides a byte-oriented, random access API and as a result, you can use third-party libraries like SQLite that expect a file API. Which is more important now that we have tools like Emscripten and WebAssembly that let you use existing C libraries on the web. At the same time it has security guarantees such that webpages cannot write arbitrary files that will be viewed and executed by the user.

Also, in theory you could use this side-channel attack on localStorage and sessionStorage. Its only requirement is that it needs an API that writes to disk where you can measure the latency of a synchronous call, since the fingerprinting is just measuring the interference pattern between disk accesses the attacking website does vs. disk accesses that other websites do.