It’s interesting that mapping random noise to characters via OCR generally produces valid perl… but I always hated how they phrased the title of this experiment since it’s obviously bullshit. Essentially, a good interesting experiment made less interesting by a sensationalist title.
Perl programs are, by definition, text. So “paint splatters are valid Perl” implies that there’s a mapping from paint splatters to text.
Do you have a suggested mapping of paint splatters to text that would be more “accurate” than OCR? And do you really think it would result in fewer valid Perl programs?
“Feeding garbage to OCR” is a really boring way of generating text. I was assuming it would be something more interesting, like creating a symbolic representation of the splatters and generating text from that. Using OCR is basically piping /dev/urandom to perl and seeing what happens. The fact that they’re valid perl programs is worth a laugh but the generation method is totally uninteresting.
I agree that a symbolic representation of the splatters would probably be more interesting. The whole point is that random character sequences are often valid Perl, though, so changing the generation method wouldn’t change that aspect.
The whole point is that random character sequences are often valid Perl
When I read the headline I also assumed “valid Perl program” meant it did something interesting. I was expecting to read an article about an interesting image to text conversion process that produced non-trivial Perl programs.
My current company’s IT team does not know what CAMM RAM is, does not recognise an nvme ssd inside a laptop, and still talk to us like we’re idiots. I hope you guys here are better than them!
The worst. Our IT is outsourced to some bottom-of-the-barrel garbage company, and they both have no idea what they are doing and work in a different timezone, so you have to wait a working day for responses like ‘did you try turning it off and on again?’. Everyone just emails the head of IT with their issues, which defeats the whole point of the system.
Same. At some point, I learned that the bottom-of-the-barrel garbage company, that does our IT support, is apparently one of the most successful IT support companies on the planet.
I guess, the way to get there, is to not actually provide IT support. You just have to get paid for it.
Yea, hire a bunch of underpaid undertrained peons to take support calls from the rest of your underpaid untrained peons. If an exec has a problem they get to bypass the helpdesk and go straight to someone that knows what they’re doing so they never see how bad things are. $$$
Hell, even Dell who came up with the standard chose to switch to soldered memory on the brand new XPS laptops instead of using their own CAMM standard ^because ^money.
My laptop and I are very real! At least my laptop, from last year (a dell as someone mentioned). I even got to know how you screw one in and out since my IT basically told me to go fuck myself when I had to upgrade my laptop.
One other project that I really love was presented at the 2021 Sigbovik: Fontemon, created by Michael Mulet. It’s a full-blown choose-your-own-adventure game in a font. Truly insane. Here’s a short video showing the basics of how it works: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY1hDQMeU3A
In 2017, I jumped ship to a new job as they were transitioning to cloud server everything. The genius CTO (who was the owners wife) pushed for it, quoting they can save a lot of money.
Then she fired half the IT staff.
Two years later and a few major security hacks/ransomware events, they had to hire even more IT folks to unfuck their cloud setup.
Not a difficult task to not secure a cloud setup. And if it’s publicly reachable, you will quickly find yourself involuntarily participating in an automated vulnerability scan.
It's great, just give your cloud servers public IPs and you get tons of completely free vulnerability scans! This life hack has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in pentesting.
I had something like this happen at a corp I once worked at. The CTO said they were going to outsource their entire datacenter and support staff to India.
I literally laughed in his face and obviously, got fired (always have 6-8 months of salary as an emergency fund, ahem-).
I won’t name the company but when half the Internet went down and a few major services? Yeah, it was that asshat driving and running between the datacenters realizing people in Bangladesh can’t do shit for you physically.
It’s like that graph: “Say we want to fuck around at a level 8, we follow this axis, and we’re going to find out at around a level 7 or 8”
I visited a company that outsourced its IT to India. We were delayed 24 hours because the guy who could whitelist our computer on their network was asleep. It was the middle of the night where he lived.
BBC series Merlin was a little like this. King Uther hated magic, Prince Arthur was kinda against it because he was told it was dangerous, but didn’t exactly hate it himself. Meanwhile Merlin took a job as a servant, doing magic-y things to protect him. Wasn’t a great series (writing), but it had enjoyable aspects.
Having a lot of seasons means it was popular enough to warrant them. Not that it’s quality. One would hope they correlate but IDK how well it actually does. You’ve got plenty of people who say the Big Bang Theory is shit and it ran for 11 seasons. As someone who watched it I’d say it was no better than average.
I say this as someone who knows little more about this show other than it exists.
If you like this then I’d recommend reading more papers published at sigbovik. Favorites include “do programming socks make you better at programing?”, “making hard drives by increasingly stupid and unworkable means” and “a formal mathematical proof that I am transgender”
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