Viewing profile — nathanmcrae

Laser trackers (used for metrology) can also use spiral search to find retroreflectors. Although I believe newer models generate a flash of infrared and find them via bright spots …

Side question, but does anyone know why specifically 2^-32 is the target floor for attacker success (in footnote 3)? I found another mention of the 2^-32 target in [0], but I'm not…

I have used this for throwing together some models for 3D printing. I've found it very intuitive, though I'm not sure how ergonomic it would be for complex assemblies. I really lik…

Aside, but it's pretty neat that the author has been semi-regularly posting on their blog for over 20 years.

In particular, the Order-of-Magnitude section might be interesting: https://nathanmcrae.name/order-of-magnitude/

https://nathanmcrae.name/

I would also toss differential evolution in the ring as a widely applicable and easy to implement technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_evolution

How do you go about positively demonstrating such a system is air-gapped?

Aeronautical charts have incredible information density. https://skyvector.com/ for zoomable charts

No, 600 megatons (~E12 kg) is closer. There are E10 humans and we weigh E2 kg. More precisely: 6E1 kg * 8E9 = 5.6E11

I've run Nextcloud for years primarily for webdav file sync and calendar+contacts. It pretty much just works. That's not to say there isn't any jank, but it's mostly if you try the…

Even though this isn't a fully-fledged industrial system, I like the thought they put into those aspects. Particularly, I want to make a homebrew PLC myself someday and the 24V IO …

The reason you would trust and FPGA more than a SoC is because putting in backdoors in an FPGA is much harder. If an FPGA is backdoored to the point where any soft core (whose layo…

What packages would you recommend for this kind of usage?

I think pen-and-paper one-time pads are an underestimated tool for private communication. Granted they are cumbersome and limited, but they provide almost perfect secrecy and bypas…

Some others have mentioned SomaFM and the Apollo missions separately, but SomaFM has a station that combines ambient music and the Apollo mission audio: https://somafm.com/missionc…

I'm currently doing this and personally I believe the dates and names approach is best (depending on your goals). The theory is that if you have a solid grasp of the coarse details…

I think people should seriously consider using something like passphrase2pgp [0] in addition to a hardware key like this. That way you can have a brain key (hopefully generated wit…

This is exactly the kind of thing I hope LLM chatbots will be genuinely useful for. Though, how often do you find it completely hallucinating endpoints / parameters etc. ?

I find a good way to link together ideas is to have them easily at hand i.e. memorized. Having a motivating problem is probably a better way to do this, but I've found that motivat…

For me it was lambda calculus. I remember in high-school going through the motions of beta-reduction but having no idea what it meant. Much later I think I finally saw an implement…