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Uh... is this supposed to be valid standalone C?

GCC says there are a bunch of undefined symbols, first one being "R" right in the beginning:

  typedef  unsigned  char u;
  u w,X,T,D[1<<16],t[]=R,U=255;

That's defined in Makefile

That is correct. It is cheating, but the judges let a small amount of it slide, especially if you come up with an amusing enough justification. I could not get it to fit otherwise!

I'm not a judge or a competitor, but I feel like a little bit of cheating on the rules is within the spirit of the game. Especially if it a) it makes it more obfuscated and b) it wouldn't have fit otherwise.

"The best kind of correct." -No. 1.0, How Hermes Got his Groove Back, Futurama

Considering that one historical entry (winner maybe?) consisted of a source file that simply contained the character ‘c’, plus a makefile, I’d say it’s in the ball park.

> Always annoyed me that it clearly has 2 wires (power/signal + ground).

Same with "TWI" (Two-Wire Interface) , a name that Atmel (now Microchip) uses for I2C bus. There are 3 wires there (SDA, SCL, ground). Or 4, if you count power.


Nah, go straight for qmail. Give it your best try.


The usable qmail got owned by AI already, the unusable one not yet!


Not by AI, but by humans awhile ago. I think Qualys weaponized a wontfix LP64 integer overflow in it just a couple years ago?


The Calif people found a nice bug in a qmail fork(what I consider usable qmail) some weeks ago.


Right, and that fork is the only version of qmail people still run, and the bug they found was extremely funny given Bernstein's original qmail design (it was, if I remember right, a popen(3) vulnerability --- something that never would have showed up in Bernstein's code, but that's what happens when code gets abandoned, it gets picked up by people who don't really understand it). But it's hard to charge that vulnerability against the original qmail design.

(I don't think anyone should run qmail.)


Actually the original qmail still works fine.

However it has some compatibility problems with modern practices, the most significant being that it does not know TLS.

Having to use TLS is the main reason for running a qmail fork instead of the original.


"works fine" and "has some compatibility problems" is a little bit of an oxymoron... I understand what you're trying to say, but that does mean it's essentially unusable, despite "working fine".


"colorless molecules called benzoquinones"

...and then dozen of words further on:

"blue benzoquinone has the capacity to act against the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, while the red one is effective against Staphylococcus aureus."

How quaint! Blue colorless molecule is different from the red colorless molecule!


Maybe you should not omit those "dozens of words" that clearly explain what you're trying to portray as a contradiction.

> These molecules have a particular property: When they come into contact with air, they oxidize and change color. One becomes blue and the other red.


You are absolutely right.

Maybe I shouldn't. But then I have to deep-dive into yet another flagrant cheap hallucination. You see, when a molecule oxidize, it becomes a different molecule.

It is impossible for a benzoquinone to oxidize, yet remain a benzoquinone. There are just two of them [1], and the two are isomers [2]. Transforming one into another would be isomerisation, not oxidation.

Not to mention — "oxidize on contact with air" is such a pile of nonsense. Just look at those things: benzene ring with a couple of oxygens sticking from it. [1] That stuff is pretty darn stable in presence of atmospheric oxygen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzoquinone

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomer


> The cost to run these for me is less than the cost of the cheapest vps (my total requests per month stay under the free tier limit).

I don't think this is a valid argument. Free-tier VPS do exist also.

On the other hand, if you don't trust unattended-upgrades [0], and prefer to spend time poking package manager manually (while at the same time considering that time an expense) - sure, that's a strong argument in favour of using lambda.

[0] https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/how-to/software/automatic-upd...


I do not trust a free-tier VPS with my data.


How is trust model different with lambdas?


Solvinity, and Kyndryl, respectively.

That story is mentioned in the TFA.


Agree with your point overall, but ammonia in particular is a poor example.

Fish lack urea cycle, so they produce and excrete significant amounts of ammonia as part of normal metabolism.


Keeping with the YOLO spirit of the article, one can be even lazier, and do emergency R/O remount using this little thing:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/sysrq.htm...

It's technically not an unmount, but still a pretty strong guarantee OS will not corrupt the image being written.

When done, reboot has to be done from the same sysrq handler, of course.


Fluoroalkyl chemicals are only "inert and unreactive" in a relatively narrow sense of "wouldn't catch fire", "don't react with strong acids and bases", and similar.

They are plenty reactive in a sense of interacting with enzymes and other cellular machinery.


Not really accurate. These chemicals are quite unreactive. Precursors from manufacturing waste can be very reactive, but most of the problematic contamination regards the forever chemicals themselves, not precursors. This paper is probably the best scientific review of what is going on in the human body. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...

Maybe sci-hub has a copy of the full paper. Not sure.

As briefly as possible, and therefore glossing over many many details, the toxic effects are mainly due to cell membrane perturbation, cell membrane transport disruption, and binding to hydrophobic protein cavities (thus disrupting the usual function of these cavities).


Agents excel at using CLI tools with well-written "--help". So maybe consider that instead of TUI.


Yes, they do, but the premise in my comment (and this discussion) is that a TUI is being written today.


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