Hackaday Newsletter 0x65

Eternal state of deja vu [HACKADAY]( This Week in Security: GoDaddy, Joomla, and ClamAV [Read Article Now»]( Simultaneous Invention, All the Time? By [Elliot Williams]( As Tom quipped on the podcast this week, if you have an idea for a program you’d like to write, all you have to do is look around on GitHub and you’ll find it already coded up for you. (Or StackOverflow, or…) And that’s probably pretty close to true, at least for really trivial bits of code. But it hasn’t always been thus. I was in college in the mid 90s, and we had a lab of networked workstations that the physics majors could use. That’s where I learned Unix, and where I had the idea for the simplest program ever. It took the background screen color, in the days before wallpapers, and slowly random-walked it around in RGB space. This was set to be slow enough that anyone watching it intently wouldn’t notice, but fast enough that others occasionally walking by my terminal would see a different color every time. I assure you, dear reader, this was the height of wit at the time. With the late 90s came the World Wide Web and the search engine, and the world got a lot smaller. For some reason, I was looking for how to set the X terminal background color again, this time searching the Internet instead of reading up in a reference book, and I stumbled on someone who wrote nearly exactly the same random-walk background color changer. My jaw dropped! I had found my long-lost identical twin brother! Of course, I e-mailed him to let him know. He was stoked, and we shot a couple funny e-mails back and forth riffing on the bizarre coincidence, and that was that. Can you imagine this taking place today? It’s almost boringly obvious that if you search hard enough you’ll find another monkey on another typewriter writing exactly the same sentence as you. It doesn’t even bear mentioning. Heck, that’s the fundamental principle behind Codex / CoPilot – the code that you want to write has been already written so many times that it will emerge as the most statistically likely response from a giant pattern-matching, word-word completion neural net model. Indeed, stop me if you’ve read this before. From the Blog --------------------------------------------------------------- [Keebin’ with Kristina: the One Where Shift (Really) Happens]( By [Kristina Panos]( Keep up with the keyboard, courtesy of Kristina. [Read more »]( [Supercon 2022: Tap Your Rich Uncle to Fund Your Amateur Radio Dreams]( By [Dan Maloney]( An amateur radio foundation has to give away $5 million annually. Get some! [Read more »]( [All About USB-C: Replying Low-Level PD]( By [Arya Voronova]( You can''t always get the voltage you want? Sure, you can! [Read more »]( [Hackaday Podcast]( [Hackaday Podcast 207: Modular Furniture, Plastic Prosthetics, and Your Data on YouTube]( By [Hackaday Editors]( What happened last week on Hackaday? The Podcast will get you up to speed. [Read more »]( If You Missed It --------------------------------------------------------------- [Sailing on a Sea of Seven-Segment Displays]( [YouTube As Infinite File Storage]( [Let Machine Learning Code an Infinite Variety of Pong Games]( [Stair Climbing Rover Gets Up With Rocker Bogies]( [Reverse Engineering the Apple Lightning Connector]( [Testing the Raspberry Pi Debug Probe]( [Hackaday]( NEVER MISS A HACK [Share]( [Share]( [Share]( [Terms of Use]( [Privacy Policy]( [Hackaday.io]( [Hackaday.com]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update preferences]( Hackaday.com · 61 S Fair Oaks Ave Ste 200 · Pasadena, CA 91105-2270 · USA