git-remote-gcrypt is a git remote helper to push and pull from repositories encrypted with GnuPG, using a custom format. This remote helper handles URIs prefixed with gcrypt::.

Economic terms, from “absolute advantage” to “zero-sum game”, explained to you in plain English

Women are now playing a significant role in international security and foreign policy. And experts say they are changing how the international community responds to military aggression.

We analysed several authenticator apps after Twitter had stopped the SMS method for 2FA. We saw many scam apps looking almost the same. They all trick users to take out a yearly subscription for $40/year. We caught four that have near identical binaries. We also caught one app that sends every scanned QR code to the developer’s Google analytics account.

Testament is an advanced automatic unittests runner for Nim tests, is used for the development of Nim itself, offers process isolation for your tests, it can generate statistics about test cases, supports multiple targets (C, C++, ObjectiveC, JavaScript, etc), simulated Dry-Runs, has logging, can generate HTML reports, skip tests from a file, and more, so can be useful to run your tests, even the most complex ones.

KanjiVG (Kanji Vector Graphics) provides vector graphics and other information about kanji used by the Japanese language. For each character, it provides an SVG file which gives the shape and direction of its strokes, as well as the stroke order. Each file is also enriched with information about the components of the character such as the radical, or the type of stroke employed.

It is very easy to create stroke order diagrams, animations, kanji dictionaries, and much more using KanjiVG. See Projects using KanjiVG for a growing list of applications of the KanjiVG data.

Russian president Vladimir Putin wants you to believe that NATO is responsible for his February 24 invasion of Ukraine—that rounds of NATO enlargement made Russia insecure, forcing Putin to lash out. This argument has two key flaws. First, NATO has been a variable and not a constant source of tension between Russia and the West. Moscow has in the past acknowledged Ukraine’s right to join NATO; the Kremlin’s complaints about the alliance spike in a clear pattern after democratic breakthroughs in the post-Soviet space. This highlights a second flaw: Since Putin fears democracy and the threat that it poses to his regime, and not expanded NATO membership, taking the latter off the table will not quell his insecurity. His declared goal of the invasion, the “denazification” of Ukraine, is a code for his real aim: antidemocratic regime change.

This analogy to lossy compression is not just a way to understand ChatGPT’s facility at repackaging information found on the Web by using different words. It’s also a way to understand the “hallucinations,” or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but—like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier—they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world. When we think about them this way, such hallucinations are anything but surprising; if a compression algorithm is designed to reconstruct text after ninety-nine per cent of the original has been discarded, we should expect that significant portions of what it generates will be entirely fabricated.

Unlike the clean OSes you'd get from Google or Apple, Samsung sells space in its devices to the highest bidder via pre-installed crapware. A company like Facebook will buy a spot on Samsung's system partition, where it can get more intrusive system permissions that aren't granted to app store apps, letting it more effectively spy on users. You'll also usually find Netflix, Microsoft Office, Spotify, Linkedin, and who knows what else. Another round of crapware will also be included if you buy a phone from a carrier, i.e., all the Verizon apps and whatever space they want to sell to third parties. The average amount users are reporting is 60GB, but crapware deals change across carriers and countries, so it will be different for everyone.

But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches … The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs—and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to.

Isn't it a good thing that we at this moment no longer have dictators in Europe who see themselves as martyrs and victims and engage in pointless wars against impossible odds?