if anyone is reading this in the distant future please recontextualise my current form or whatever
i've always known the game as 'paper scissors rock'. makes a lot more sense to order the name that way since it's iambic and you say the name out loud while playing the game
if breaking a mirror causes bad luck, an unbroken mirror should bring good luck
a sentence shouldn't end with a single character word. that could be a clue to rule out the liber primus being read backwards
proof of wasted time, left as an exercise for the reader
made a script to find rot13 pairs that i realised had been made before after i figured out what to call it
i should also make this use sqlite instead of text files maybe just for practice (of course still rendering each page to static html)
it would be nice if windows supported copy/pasting images with transparency
i would like to make a list of interesting wikipedia pages including quotes from the articles. reading wikipedia has unfortunately become a significant hobby of mine
i should i should
i should maybe upload the runic vigenere solver for liber primus and also the other scuffed javascript solving/bigram analysis attempts from years ago
i should make a book n games review page
nevertheless it is good and adorable
i think the open source stuff needs like a change in fundamental values to consider emergent harm
that's the real problem and it's sensible for an individual to not care about protecting their privacy because it really doesn't matter
open sourcers are right to see the consequences that arise and have intuitive objections to centralisation, and the direction they act helps to solve the problems
it's usually tragedy of the commons and/or exploitation in a bigger way than they identify though, which isn't modelled well by the sum of individual 'digital rights' violations
that was always the weakest part of the pitch, at this point it's almost like a charity grift slogan
and i think more than 'digital rights' will be necessary to solve the problems the internet faces
the 'devs are right it actually sucks a lot to read text spread out over the e n t i r e page width if i'm honest
gwern.net might be the best site design though it's a bit over the top
thinking about a design with a text column and a column for other content like images and the index
but it wouldn't be great to have the images in the wrong place
maybe the newspapery block images thing is the best
i have been thinking about the unsolved cicada 3301 liber primus puzzle lately. i was never involved in solving the original puzzle, but years ago i spent a while trying to solve the liber primus
there are two notable properties of the unsolved sections that the rest of the liber primus does not possess:
1) unexpectedly low repeated rune bigram frequency
2) the DJV-BEI (AE) repeated sequence
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the first property proves for certain, in my opinion, that the method for encyphering each character involves the previous character in some way
there is no frequency pattern observed if you consider any other 'bigrams' of paired letters (i, i + 2) or (i, i + 3), etc., the pattern is only seen in the case of (i, i + 1)
though, we don't know what exactly about the previous character is being considered
it could be:
a) the previous plaintext character
b) the previous character in ciphertext (like a rolling cipher)
c) some other variable that is updated by each character (also a rolling cipher)
a) and b) are interesting possibilities, c) seems arbitrary and equivalent to b)
the main difference between a) and both b)/c) is that if only the previous plaintext character is considered, the plaintext input to the cipher is limited to two characters
if a rolling cipher is used, every plaintext character so far is involved as an input, though chaos compounds
while visually it seems that only the previous character has an influence, it seems perfectly possible to me that a rolling cipher is used and other potential patterns are obscured by the small amount of ciphertext and non-randomness in the plaintext
in the past i investigated and was satisfied that word/line breaks aren't involved in the distribution of repeated rune bigrams
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the second property suggests to me that the cipher had an unintentional case of the same output resulting from the same two three-letter words repeated at different positions in the plaintext
this could result from a 'previous plaintext character' cipher if the rune before the D was the same in each case, but in the case of a rolling cipher it would be a 1/29 stroke of luck
it bothers me a great amount that one of the DJV-BEIs is at the end of the unsolved section. this could actually be a coincidence, but i don't know
i would be more satisfied, too, if one of them was at the start of the section instead of the end. it makes me wonder if decoding the ciphertext backwards or in some strange way may be necessary
i tried to theorise about the specific position of each DJV-BEI in the past but got nowhere. i will note that i feel it's slightly convenient and if there was one fewer runes in the second half of the unsolved section that would become extremely convenient. might rehash this later
i do not think any of the ciphertext is redundant, the word/line breaks and other images/codes admist the ciphertext clearly suggest meaning
i should make a word frequency table from the previous solved runeglish sections and possibly guess what DJV-BEI could be. two words appearing together twice is at least *something*
we must also not discount the possibility of a stream cipher, since a stream of the totients of the prime numbers is used in 56.jpg
however, the DJV-BEI repeats suggest to me that if a stream cipher is used, it must repeat at some point. this becomes less likely the longer we propose the stream to be. i don't think it's possible that a long/infinite stream was used, it would be too convenient for the stream to line up with identical words in the plaintext
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i am most interested in coming up with ciphers and looking at the bigram patterns that result. i won't tire myself out trying to find a solution to the puzzle
i should add images later. in time i may make a full page dedicated to the puzzle
but what if i could just use nano instead?
edit: this works. wow, i hate vim and am a complete moron
i'd like to come up with my own version of what each tarot card signifies before spoiling myself on the common interpretation
and perhaps the common interpretation can be 'modernised' some to keep up with recent developments in the social sciences
there's probably enough here, including that which i have not blogged on publicly, to justify an index page of some kind. i've always felt i shouldn't make one just for one or two curios, every empty picture frame would be a reminder of the thousand abandoned projects
i'll make it when i get around to it
i'll tend to my little garden now
turning the soil
watering the flowers
progress is made even when i'm not here
some more experimentation with webgl, domain colouring complex functions
the magnitude contour lines are on a natural log scale, which seems to look best
the axes are from -5 to 5
i dream of So There's This Thing Called Context, a quote database where the origin of each quote is unclear
showcasing memetic innovations at their most absurd
there's no point in trying to categorise the intent of the author, but you can try if you want. maybe you'll gain some perspective
i find this fun and have been harvesting quotes for a while now, but i think the idea needs to be developed further before others will understand
progress
oh, stockfish already seems to value each of the pieces, that's interesting on its own i guess
NNUE derived piece values:
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| r | n | b | q | k | b | n | r |
| -8.00 | -6.75 | -6.98 | -13.6 | | -7.03 | -6.77 | -8.04 |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| p | p | p | p | p | p | p | p |
| -0.83 | -1.40 | -1.44 | -1.63 | -1.48 | -2.06 | -1.85 | -0.83 |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| P | P | P | P | P | P | P | P |
| +0.62 | +1.19 | +1.13 | +1.17 | +1.20 | +1.55 | +1.44 | +0.50 |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| R | N | B | Q | K | B | N | R |
| +7.81 | +6.17 | +6.68 | +11.4 | | +6.63 | +6.14 | +7.60 |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
i was a little surprised that the f-pawn is scored higher than the central pawns, but it makes sense since it has an important defensive function even though you don't usually want to move it. the g-pawn worth more than the center pawns though? weird
i guess if you value a piece you don't want to move it, and playing g4 is risky because you allow Qh4? not really sure how they got a neural model to help with chess since i thought it wasn't very good at those kinds of problems
it's intuitive that the minor pieces are worth more in the opening, but i didn't expect it to be by that much