Stephan Bridger

Chrome Browser annoyingly reformats code blocks occasionally when using the translate feature. For example, if you translate a Chinese web page to English—if there are code blocks, it may also parse and reformat them, making them harder to read. Here's a workaround via Chrome DevTools Console. Run this before translating a web page: // browser console hack to prevent chrome from mucking // with code blocks whenever a page is translated, // e.g. translating a chinese page to english document.querySelectorAll('pre, code').forEach(block => { block.style.whiteSpace = 'pre-wrap'; block.setAttribute('translate', 'no'); });

Why are there sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, yet twenty-four hours in a day? The answer is because modern timekeeping derives from the base-60 number system. It is believed that Sumerians of Mesopotamia used their phalanges to count. They counted increments of 12 with one hand's four fingers, each of which has three bones, and tracked them with the other hand's five fingers: 12, 24, 36, 48, 60. Early civilization calendars were often lunisolar, based on the phases of the moon—roughly aware of the sun's yearly 365-day orbit. Though they were somewhat imprecise, many resembled the 12-month calendar we know today. Ancient calendars, however, would often have extra days or months periodically added for alignment purposes. The Sumerians had no tradition for referring to the length of time we call a "week," nor did they identify months. They simply observed months and years. Later, the Babylonians would put forth the notion of the "week,...

In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton turns familiar ideas upside down and urges us to see truth in paradox. Chesterton says that, for example, artists like and enjoy their own limitations, precisely because they are defined by those limitations. Constraints themselves are a kind of source from which creativity springs. But one of the most interesting sections of Orthodoxy is when Chesterton begins to remark more directly about religion. Chesterton notes that Christianity is one of the only religions in which the idea of "God" is not an omnipotent force—on the contrary, God is represented in a trinity—including one branch in which God himself is human in the form of Christ. He describes the crucifixion of Christ, pointing out that Christianity is paradoxically one of the only religions in which God himself briefly becomes an atheist. All moral reform must start in the active not the passive will. Here again we reach the same substantial conclusion. In so far as we desire the...

In various programming languages, it is possible to inline code. For example, with C++, one can use design patterns or keywords like extern, static, or inline to suggest to the compiler that code should be inlined. Non-inlined code can generate extra, unnecessary function calls, as well as calls to the global offset table (GOT) or procedure linkage table (PLT). Inlining can reduce runtime overhead and eliminate function call indirection, though it may increase code size due to duplication, since it must be copied across all translation units where it is used. Consider the following non-inlined code: int g; int foo() { return g; } int bar() { g = 1; foo(); return g; } If we compile the code like so with gcc -O3 -Wall -fPIC -m32 , we can observe in the assembly that indeed, this code was not inlined. There are still explicit function calls, and extra calls to the GOT and PLT. However, it's important to note that at higher optimization levels lik...

Lists are appealing because they give structure to otherwise unwieldy information. Information security people frequently repeat the adage that defenders "think in lists" and hackers think in graphs. But a graph is just a list of lists. And it seems obvious that this useful observation extends far beyond the domain of computer security. The reason lists and graphs are powerful is because they provide us a fair idea of what concepts are all about. Lists are tools, just like metaphors. They can let us quickly organize data and view ideas from various vantage points, which is both useful and efficient. The brain has a natural tendency to think in lists. The brain has only a small bag of tricks, like pattern matching and repetition, and it can augment the feedback loop of consciousness in various ways—experimenting with the information it receives from the world in tandem with repeated experimentation. An example is the history of paleontology, where every few hundred yea...

Today, while updating Windows virtual machines for Patch Tuesday, I found myself re-reading Ben Franklin's autobiography. Two fun excerpts: At my first admission into this printing-house I took to working at press, imagining I felt a want of the bodily exercise I had been us'd to in America, where presswork is mix'd with composing. I drank only water; the other workmen, near fifty in number, were great guzzlers of beer. On occasion, I carried up and down stairs a large form of types in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands. They wondered to see, from this and several instances, that the Water-American, as they called me, was stronger than themselves, who drank strong beer! We had an alehouse boy who attended always in the house to supply the workmen. My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o...

A list of things I’m grateful for: good friends, great family, continued sobriety, health, books, the internet, walks, music, not being in debt—but also discipline, silence, solitude, challenges, persistence, patience, and the ability to practice a multitude of things each and every day. I’m grateful for the freedom and peace that comes with being able to live life on my own terms, without being enslaved by emergent dynamics, irrational external expectations, or the emotional labor of navigating complex, irrational, controlling scenarios. I’m thankful for the clarity that comes from a disciplined approach to thought, where reason and evidence guide decisions, allowing for a deeper understanding of nature and a steady path through uncertainty. Alright. Maybe I'm just joking about that last paragraph. What I actually meant to say is that I'm grateful for my irrationality and foolishness. I mean, they're a major factor in why I don't just give up. I never learned how...

The definition of metaphor is: “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.” On my other blog, I shared a thought about metaphors: Metaphors are cool because they let you reason about a domain of knowledge by using tools that were originally intended for a different domain. Metaphors are useful! A related but distinctly different concept from a metaphor is the concept of metonymy . The primary difference is that a metaphor draws a similarity between objects—that is, the relation is vertical. On the other hand, a metonym draws a link between objects that are contiguous but not similar—that is, the relation is horizontal. The sentence “When I eat raw habanero peppers, they set my mouth on fire” is a metaphor , while the sentence "A new Oval Office has been elected" is a metonym . In the first sentence, "peppers" and "fire" draw a similarity to one another, e.g., ...