The Nineteenth Byte - 2023-06-12

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Seggan

00:54

> Learning your first language is the toughest. After that, it becomes "how do I do this in [language]" vs "wtf is a string".

source

why is this so true

lyxal

> Until you need to use C and you still have to ask "wtf is a string"

Seggan

idea: a language that compiles to github actions

The Above Idea™ has been copyrighted by Seggan Industries™ (All Rights Reserved™)

lyxal

@lyxal also idea: a language where you have to ask "wtf isn't a string"

no rights reserved :p

Seggan

(my idea is a bad one anyway; you can write actions in quite a few languages)

@lyxal JS

emanresu A

01:16

@lyxal tcl?

Unrelated String

01:38

and probably most shell languages

7 hours later…

PlaceReporter99

08:14

@Seggan copyright proof?

@Seggan YAML already exists

2 hours later…

Simd

09:46

possibly stupid question but how I can visualise LabColor(lab_l=65.0,lab_a=95.0,lab_b=119.0) ?

I just want to see what color it is

wolframalpha.com/input?i=LabColor%2865.0%2C95.0%2C119.0%29 does it!

Unrelated String

nice

Simd

but super confusing. How can it be pure red??

Unrelated String

lab is wacky like that

Simd

It does seem to be!

Unrelated String

i think it goes slightly outside what rgb is considered to be defined as doing maybe

not that there's some perfect standard for how rgb comes out

2

Simd

09:56

yes it does. If you convert it to rgb you get something invalid!

I mean using the python module to do that

Unrelated String

nice lmao

PlaceReporter99

10:26

it isn’t. Wolfram alpha says there are minute parts of yellow and blue:

10 parts of (red) + 1×10^-15 parts of (yellow) + 1×10^-15 parts of (blue)

Simd

intriguing!

Neil

10:52

@PlaceReporter99 problem is, it "converted" it to RGB first, and ended up with LabColor(54.29,80.81,69.89)

PlaceReporter99

11:26

I don’t understand this

Neil

11:42

well, it gave you a colour photo of a lab, what did you expect?

4

PlaceReporter99

12:08

@Neil but it gave me a lab, not a Lab.

Simd

12:34

@PlaceReporter99 maybe that's its name too?

sit Lab, sit!

Bbrk24

@UnrelatedString Yeah, if you've seen that curved color diagram, RGB can only ever cover a triangle within it

Usually (as depicted here) the red and blue are defined as the bottom corners of this diagram

Simd

@Bbrk24 so where is my value on there?

Bbrk24

WolframAlpha actually draws it

If you scroll down to "Chromaticity diagram location"

Simd

12:52

that's pretty cool. Now I want to be able to do it in a free language :)

Seggan

@PlaceReporter99 it's obviously a joke

@PlaceReporter99 but it's so hard to use

Bbrk24

YAML > JSON for things like this, if nothing else because comments

I also like the bulleted list form for arrays

The one place that YAML sucks is that there's like seventy ways to do multiline strings (not exaggerating)

Okay 63, I was close

5481

A: How do I break a string in YAML over multiple lines?

There are 5 6 NINE (or 63*, depending how you count) different ways to write multi-line strings in YAML. TL;DR Use > most of the time: interior line breaks are stripped out, although you get one at the end: key: > Your long string here. Use | if you want those linebreaks to be preser...

Bbrk24

13:20

Things I like about YAML:
- Comments
- Unquoted keys
- Bullet-style arrays
Things I dislike about YAML:
- Everything about how it handles strings

Neil

13:48

@Bbrk24 but it's still drawing the RGB value though, isn't it?

Razetime

@noodleman oh, there's a new strike.

isee

Neil

ugh, why does Firefox developer tools autocomplete trans to translate instead of transform?

PlaceReporter99

14:07

@Neil because translate is more commonly used?

@Seggan does seggan industries have a GitHub repo or org?

Seggan

14:45

No

Seggan Industries was a joke

@Bbrk24 noyaml.com

Bbrk24

15:09

I got the Swift compiler to segfault

The repro is stupidly short

protocol P {
  associatedtype T
  var x: T { get set }
}

func foo(w: inout any P) -> Any {
    let value = w.x
    return value
}

1 hour later…

DLosc

16:30

@RydwolfPrograms ... I don't, tho

Rydwolf Programs

17:30

oh right, you just get a cursed URI

But web-safe base64 looks more ✨aesthetic✨ anyway

DLosc

@RydwolfPrograms Cursed b/c of slashes in the query string?

Rydwolf Programs

More because the +s are an encoding of spaces, but also that

DLosc

@RydwolfPrograms Huh. But I don't recall seeing any +s

Rydwolf Programs

Base64 uses + and /

If you have never gotten any +s you've either gotten lucky, or happen to be encoding data in a form where the binary pattern behind + will never show up

DLosc

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Rydwolf Programs

17:33

Really I wish there was an additional character that counted as a word character

Since web-safe base64 has a much higher chance of you being able to double-click and highlight the whole thing, but -s still sometimes show up

I suppose you could do base 63, where A through 9 are their normal 6-bit codes, and _ is the five-bit code 11111

That does make the length of the data dependent on its contents tho, which can be a security risk

Fun fact: if you were to put raw %-encoded binary in a URI parameter (avoiding escaping characters that don't need to be escaped), you'd get slightly above 4 bits per character on average

Adám

@RydwolfPrograms Base85 ftw!

Rydwolf Programs

Base85 has that problem way worse doesn't it?

It's just less wasteful of bits

Adám

Yes, but once you don't care about the problem, you just get more data.

Rydwolf Programs

I mean I guess but in a URI base85 would be counterproductive, and URIs are like the one place where base64 is still useful

Adám

We use Base85 in TryAPL.

Rydwolf Programs

17:47

Plus base85 can encode illegal states, which is a minor issue but could be a security risk

(I guess base64 can too, tho)

Adám

@RydwolfPrograms Ooh, we might actually be vulnerable to that!

Bbrk24

18:04

I got a Swift program to wholesale delete main — there’s not even a ret or ud2

godbolt.org/z/1zKsrY4jW

PlaceReporter99

18:44

@RydwolfPrograms just use unary… except the link would probably be unpasteable.

Bbrk24

19:15

URLs are limited to 8kB regardless

mousetail

19:36

That's browser specific

Rydwolf Programs

I know for sure I've gone to URIs in the megabytes

Mostly TIO-style data-in-the-# ones, and data URis

mousetail

I believe IE used to have a 8kb limit

Rydwolf Programs

@Seggan Ooh are people finally starting to not like YAML

I've always hated it for reasons I could never figure out

Seggan

^

Rydwolf Programs

Idk why people always talk about JSON like it doesn't have comments. This is America, you can do whatever you want

Just...put comments in your JSON

Even Microsoft does it

(somehow typed that as "Microsoggy" wth)

It's not like parsing JS-style comments is exactly hard

Bbrk24

19:50

npm blows up if you have comments in your package.json

Rydwolf Programs

Blow NPM up, an eye for an eye

(Nobody would complain if NPM vanished overnight)

Bbrk24

Yarn would, it relies on npm to host the packages

Rydwolf Programs

~~Or add a "comment" property that gets ignored~~

Bbrk24

The other thing I don't like about JSON is that it's impossible to line-wrap long strings

Rydwolf Programs

Does it not keep the trailing \ on a line behavior from like, every language with strings?

Chat MathJax'd >:|

Bbrk24

19:53

The opening and closing " must be on the same line in JSON

It is impossible to line wrap

mousetail

JSON is purposefully very simple in order to make it easy to parse

Rydwolf Programs

@Bbrk24 I don't think that follows the spec

user image

Bbrk24

LF is a control character, technically

Rydwolf Programs

A newline is "any codepoint" after all

Bbrk24

I suppose that doesn't exclude NEL, PSep, or LSep, but

mousetail

19:55

It's a control character

Rydwolf Programs

Oh hang on, the chart's just wrong

According to the BNF it's not "any codepoint", it's a specific set of allowed characters

user image

@mousetail A control character is still a codepoint no?

Bbrk24

That is almost any codepoint

mousetail

Any code point except control characters it says on the picture

Bbrk24

"Any codepoint except " or \ or control characters"

Rydwolf Programs

WAIT

I'm just dumb

nvm

I can't read

One complaint I have with JSON is no hex/octal/binary

mousetail

19:58

Again it's super simple

Rydwolf Programs

I also wish things like JSON and YAML (not sure if YAML has this or not) had a way to distinguish between floats and ints

Bbrk24

In some versions of YAML, 07 is a number and 08 is a string

mousetail

That one is pretty annoying, I guess that's what you get when you name something JavaScript Object Notation

Rydwolf Programs

I guess we need ES2020ON

Bbrk24

tfw your only integer type is bigint

Rydwolf Programs

20:01

I mean Python's in that category too

Bbrk24

There is uh JSON5 which supports single-quoted strings and comments, among other things

Rydwolf Programs

Please tell me the 5 isn't taken from HTML5

Okay phew

It's from ES5

Bbrk24

{
  // comments
  unquoted: 'and you can quote me on that',
  singleQuotes: 'I can use "double quotes" here',
  lineBreaks: "Look, Mom! \
No \\n's!",
  hexadecimal: 0xdecaf,
  leadingDecimalPoint: .8675309, andTrailing: 8675309.,
  positiveSign: +1,
  trailingComma: 'in objects', andIn: ['arrays',],
  "backwardsCompatible": "with JSON",
}

Rydwolf Programs

Hex but no octal or binary :|

(which were more recent than ES5 tbf)

Bbrk24

How often do you use octal on purpose? And no, chmod doesn't count

Rydwolf Programs

20:04

Well not the disgusting leading-0 version god no

The 0o one

While the only time I've actually had a good use case for it was, surprise surprise, Linux file permissions, it's still worth including

Oh I think I'm finally going to get around to setting up rto.community

It'll be a free hosting service that gives you a few gigs of RAM, a few gigs of disk, and an hour or so of CPU time a day, plus a subdomain and TLS

So e.g., you could register project.rto.community and you'd be given a small VM where you can host the server for it

Seggan

@RydwolfPrograms JSON is a serialization protocol, not for user-friendly configuration

Rydwolf Programs

Says who?

Maybe it was intended as the former (if it actually was)

But no way is that a true statement today

Seggan

I've never seen JSON for config

Rydwolf Programs

Do you live in a cave

It's like, the most common way to do config stuff

Seggan

Ig

Rydwolf Programs

20:10

Off the top of my head, NPM crates, Microsoft Terminal, New Posts/Sandbox Posts

I don't really software very much tho

Bbrk24

appsettings.json in .NET

Seggan

I meant user friendly config

sure they use json as a object storage format

Rydwolf Programs

Unless people are out there with custom front-ends for NPM...

Oh also runc, that's a big one (tho tbf it is mostly serialization since people tend to use a higher level layer like Docker)

Bbrk24

Yeah you need to write your scripts as string literals in JSON. Packages you can at least manipulate from the CLI

The simplest form of syntax highlighting for a VS code extension involves writing regexen in JSON string literals which is just. so many backslashes

Rydwolf Programs

I actually really like using runc directly, as long as I don't have to do shudders networking

user

20:13

I guess Cargo and some other things use TOML?

Rydwolf Programs

Yeah, Cargo's TOML

user

But yeah, JSON is used for literally everything

Bbrk24

SPM just uses a Swift file for configuration

user

@RydwolfPrograms I'll add settings for VS Code and VS Code-related stuff to that list

Bbrk24

TypeScript uses Microsoft's "JSONC"

user

20:14

I wish JSON itself allowed comments

Shouldn't need this JSONC thing

Bbrk24

"__comment": "Deserializer ignores this"

Seggan

@Bbrk24 Java/Kotlin mostly either use Groovy or Kotlin

Bbrk24

I have seen VS code docs honest to goodness recommend this

user

._.

I'm honestly surprised YAML isn't more popular given how much more expressive and readable it is than JSON

For user-facing stuff, that is

Serializing stuff with indentation is probably a pain

Bbrk24

It has so many footguns

user

20:16

But you can stay away from the footguns fairly easily

Bbrk24

and sixty-three ways to do multiline strings

hyper-neutrino

JSON may be more unwieldly but at least I know exactly what to expect when I write it

Bbrk24

^

Seggan

^

user

Fair enough

Bbrk24

20:17

@user What about when your IDE's syntax highlighter uses a different YAML version than the library?

user

Aren't they all at 1.2 now?

Seggan

not kubernetes

Bbrk24

VS Code's syntax highlighter still shows no as a boolean

user

:|

Rydwolf Programs

YAML's also ugly

user

20:18

No.

Seggan

@user i heard a quote somewhere that goes smth like "people will abuse every feature" even if you dont

Bbrk24

I've heard one footgun (not in YAML) described as "more gun than foot"

user

I'm gonna be pedantic and point out that footguns are guns that love blowing feet off, not some combination of feet and guns, so all or most footguns are more gun than foot :P

Bbrk24

Context: C++ -fno-exceptions / /EHa is meaningless if you don't also recompile your copy of the standard library with it first

Rydwolf Programs

teehee I just found a big problem

Spin up a Docker container

Make an empty file called .wh.mnt

Then docker commit the container and spin up a container of the image it results in

mnt is gone

Lemme try it with bin

Bbrk24

20:24

Wait what

Rydwolf Programs

user image

heehe

Bbrk24

That seems like a uh bug

Rydwolf Programs

@Bbrk24 Prefixing .wh. is how OCI containers indicate a whiteout

Bbrk24

ah

Rydwolf Programs

So if you create a file that starts with .wh., it tricks Docker into thinking it was deleted

(or actually, it probably tricks runc)

I really hate that part of the OCI spec so much

Bbrk24

20:26

Ronald's universal number kounter? /ref

Rydwolf Programs

Like it is entirely possible that a .wh.-prefixed file could show up in the wild

And there's no way to escape a .wh.

overlay2 is at least slightly less cursed, and uses a 0/0 block device for its file whiteouts

Bbrk24

1. .wh.home 2. ??? 3. Profit

You could probably find a vulnerability in some software because of this

Rydwolf Programs

I mean I guess there's not too many ways this could be a security risk, but it still feels like it shouldn't be possible

This is a really inexcusable flaw in the OCI spec tho

Bbrk24

Maybe not a security risk, but a DoS risk at least

Rydwolf Programs

You should definitely be able to escape the .wh., which would allow Docker to properly do so when commiting the container's filesystem into a layer.tar

An even worse version of this would be if you could create an overlay2 whiteout in Docker, but unfortunately it's able to stop you

Bbrk24

20:33

How bad is .wh.tmp?

Will mktmp just die?

Rydwolf Programs

Looks like it

But like, of all the dirs to hit that's probably the most subtle when you can just nuke /bin or /usr

This isn't super likely to be exploitable since you have to:
1. Have permissions to create a file in the parent directory of the file/dir you want to delete
and
2. The container has to be saved as an image then spun up again

Ooh I wonder if you can do this with a Dockerfile

That might create a more risky scenario, depending on how docker build actually works

(Opinion: Filesystems and file archival formats should have dedicated support for potentially nested filesystem layers, with whiteouts)

Bbrk24

20:49

Wait how is it already almost 5

Rydwolf Programs

Conservation of boredom. With the Reddit strike, tons of people are currently bored, so us non-Reddit-users will have time pass slightly faster

5

Seggan

@Bbrk24 conversely, with a very exciting event coming up for me, for me time feels ssssstttttttrrrrreeeeeetttttcccchhhhheeeeeddddd

caird coinheringaahin g

Oh man, I had that recently :/

Combo itt with timezones and it gets even more annoying

Seggan

@cairdcoinheringaahing speed up or slow down?

caird coinheringaahin g

Slow down

Was waiting to hear if I got into my uni for my year abroad, and between US dates and US timezones, it seemed to take wayyy longer than it should have

(I did get in, btw :D)

Rydwolf Programs

20:59

Nice!

2 hours later…

caird coinheringaahin g

23:24

I've now visited the site for over 2000 days :D

noodle man

23:47

nice

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Jun '2312

The Nineteenth Byte

The Nineteenth Byte: General discussion for codegolf.stackexc...

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