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Category: Interesting or Cool

Making and breaking codes for fun

Making and breaking codes for fun

I loved codes as a kid. I think I checked out every book on writing codes from the local library and even took a cryptography class during my college computer science courses.

While I usually stay away from social media, some of the non-political areas are decent. Reddit has a codes forum where users post different codes that they have made or run across and try to solve them.

Links:

Generate a massive prime number in seconds

Generate a massive prime number in seconds

PurpleMind demonstrates how modern algorithms generate giant prime numbers in just seconds. The key is they don’t actually check if it is exactly prime, but can do so with very high confidence using certain properties of primes. Bonus points for the fact he gives code too.

Speaking Latin at the Vatican

Speaking Latin at the Vatican

polýMATHY tried to use his Latin to talk to random priests in the Vatican and it goes pretty well. One of my instructors did Latin translations at the Vatican.

I would would have been a barely functional novice with my Latin verbal skills (even when I was still taking classes and using it regularly). My Latin knowledge was almost exclusively read, not spoken – so it would have been rough times. I could listen to him and understand a good bit of what he was saying, but I would have struggled to respond.

Arrow Lake deep-dive

Arrow Lake deep-dive

I obviously won’t comment on the accuracy of the analysis – but I am very impressed by the work High Yield did to walk through the die and connecting what he sees with the public technical details. We’ve come a long way since the 386.

Travel Namibia

Travel Namibia

Namibia is absolutely on my list of places I want to visit.

Anton somewhere takes the almost perfect road trip through the country. During his travels, he stops by Etosha National Park and goes animal spotting by visiting several of the numerous watering holes.

You can get a similar experience by watching the 24 hour live webcam of a watering hole from Gondwana Namib Park. There really is quite an amazing amount of animals that come to the water. It’s especially interesting in mornings/evening to see the different kinds of animals that show up at different parts of the day.