He/him/they

Just a little guy interested in videogames, reading, technology and the environment.

I’m on Telegram - feel free to ask for my details :3

My other account is @OmegaMouse@feddit.uk

  • 6 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: January 4th, 2024

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  • Hm, ok. Lets say that the goal of TikTok is to be overstimulating, to catch your attention and provide bursts of dopamine. I’d argue that any form of entertainment (like books for example) aim to do the same, albeit on a less intense scale. Yes, you could say that books require patience and commitment unlike the short form content of Tiktok. But I wouldn’t say they’re opposites.

    Probably watching paint dry would be the opposite? That would require an almost meditative/zen state






  • I love coffee but nowadays I tend to drink tea a lot more. I don’t like the taste of instant coffee, and that’s all I can get at work - so I stick to tea. I also can’t handle caffeine as well as I used to, so I have decaff.

    At home I’ve got a nice coffee machine. I buy decaff beans and grind them - it’s all about the taste for me.



  • Heh, funnily enough I did pretty well back in school. But it’s been quite a while since I’ve learnt this stuff and it’s not something I ever specialised in. And when I did learn it, it was essentially just a series of facts that you had to memorise. ‘The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell’ etc. etc. So the second I passed that exam, I don’t think I ever went back to reinforce those memories.

    Hearing about genetic dominance again did give me an ‘ah, of course!’ moment. If you are able to recall everything you learnt in school (including subjects that you may not have had much interest in), then congrats on the impressive memory :)





  • Ah thanks for the useful links! Those articles are all quite fascinating. In the plaintext attacks article, I love the tactic mentioned here:

    At Bletchley Park in World War II, strenuous efforts were made to use (and even force the Germans to produce) messages with known plaintext. For example, when cribs were lacking, Bletchley Park would sometimes ask the Royal Air Force to “seed” a particular area in the North Sea with mines (a process that came to be known as gardening, by obvious reference). The Enigma messages that were soon sent out would most likely contain the name of the area or the harbour threatened by the mines



  • Ah I think of sort of get it!

    The public key is used within a function by the person sending the message, and even someone that knew the function and the public key wouldn’t be able to decrypt the message, because doing so would require knowledge of the original prime numbers which they couldn’t work out unless a computer spend years factoring the public key.

    My only other bit of confusion:

    • If someone used a public key to encrypt the message “Hello”, maybe it would spit out something like Gh5bsKjbi4
    • If someone else sent the exact same message I assume the outcome would also be identical, and therefore it would be possible by using common phrases to work out what was sent? I could type messages like Hi, Goodbye, Hola until I got to ‘Hello’ and realised it was the same output.
    • However I assume that a message like ‘Hello, how are you?’ would result in a completely different output (despite Hello appearing in both) and thus trying to work out any messages in a brute force way like this would be pointless.