Иномировой агент

Unian пишет, что украинский пенсионер сбил из охотничьего ружья истребитель оккупантов:

...Валерий Федорович взял свое охотничьей ружье и открыл огонь.

Вражеский истребитель Су-34 был поражен и уничтожен.

Знаете, я думаю, он был даже не поражён, а просто-таки офигел.

Ну и, конечно, вспоминается советская классика:

Встал один и бьет с колена
Из винтовки в самолет.
Трехлинейная винтовка
На брезентовом ремне,
Да патроны с той головкой,
Что страшна стальной броне.

Екатерина Шульман уже не первый раз удивляется, что, дескать, судя по опросам, поддержка войны гораздо сильнее среди старых и пожилых, чем среди молодёжи. Что, вроде как, необычно — война дело молодых, старики стремятся жить тихо и спокойно. Я её понимаю в том смысле, что если что-то идёт не по науке — это очень странно и удивительно. Но для меня, человека, науку не знающего, с самого начала было совершенно очевидно, что именно молодёжь должна быть особенно против этой войны. По двум причинам:

1) Молодёжь любит войну, но ещё более молодёжь любит революцию. Нынешняя война с Украиной — это настолько очевидная КОНТРреволюция, такой возврат в прошлое, что ожидать от молодых поддержки — как минимум, странно.

2) Молодёжь и старикёжь находятся в принципиально разных положениях. Война захватническая, пока что почти (привет Белгороду) не вылезающая из границ соседнего государства. Когда старики думают об этой войне, они понимают, что уж они-то сами на эту войну не попадут. Если не думать, конечно, про ядерный пепел — а кому про него хочется думать; у меня вообще такое ощущение, что в него не верит никто, кроме эпатажника Невзорова. Примерно половина молодых понимают, что у них-то как раз есть прекрасные шансы на этой войне побывать лично, причём вовсе не в тех местах, где им хочется. Особенно как раз вызвавшая наибольшее удивление у Шульман категория «от 18 до 24».

Так что вот.

There were talks about how Ruskies nuclear weapons could be in a very bad shape — in particular because nuclear charges should be replaced periodically, otherwise they degrade. Also, I've heard — sorry, not an expert here — that Ukraine NPPs can, as a side effect, produce weapon-grade radioactive materials. I wonder if those things are related. What if Khuilo decided to attack Ukraine in order to get those NPPs and seize those weapon-grade matereals, because he found out he doesn't have any weapons that can be honestly called "nuclear", and needs to refresh those charges immediately?

No, that's not it, of course. That's just another attempt to find some meaning in all that. I understand that; but I still think it's worth sharing.

According to Wikipedia, Ruski military has about one million active personnel. Not all of them are involved in Ukraine war — I've heard the number 150 thousands.

Belarus military has about 60 thousands active personnel. If we assume the same proportion, it would be about 9000 additional troops, if Belarus joins the invasion.

Are they going to make a difference? Why the hell are they given so much attention? I mean, yeah, sure, it's better if they stay home, but seriously? What am I missing here?

In Soviet Union, there was this book called "Physicists joking", and it's sequel "Physicists continue joking". Some of the entries there were original, but there were a lot of funny stories or just scientific jokes there that were translated from foreign publications. Apparently, some parts were omitted from those translations. Try to guess what was omitted from this article, for example:

PICKLES AND HUMBUG: a bit of comparative logic
(Published in: The Journal of Irreproducible Results)

Pickles will kill you! Every pickle you eat brings you nearer to death. Amazingly, the "thinking man" has failed to grasp the terrifying significance of the phrase "in a pickle." Although leading horticulturists have long known that Cucumis sativus posseses an indehiscent pepo, the pickle industry continues to expand.

Pickles are associated with all major diseases of the body. Eating them breeds war and Communism. They can be related to most airline tragedies. Auto accidents are caused by pickles. There is a positive relationship between crime waves and consumption of this fruit of the cucurbit family. For example,
- Nearly all sick people have eaten pickles. The effects are obviously cumulative.
- 99.9% of all people who die from cancer have eaten pickles.
- 100% of all soldiers have eaten pickles.
- 96.8% of all Red sympathizers have eaten pickles.
- 99.7% of the people involved in air and auto accidents ate pickles within forteen days before the accident.
- 93.1% of all juvenile delinquents come from homes where pickles are served frequently.

Evidence points to the long-term effects of pickle eating:
- Of the people born in 1839 who later dined on pickles, there has been a 100% mortality.
- All pickle eaters born between 1919 and 1929 have wrinkled skin, have lost most of their teeth, have brittle bones, and have failing eyesight — if the ills of eating pickles have not already caused their death.
- Even more convincing is the report of a noted team of medical specialists: Rats force-fed 20 pounds of pickles per day for thirty days developed bulging abdomens. Their appetites for wholesome food were destroyed.

The only way to avoid the deleterious effects of pickle eating is to change eating habits. Eat orchid petal soup. Practically no one has problems from eating orchid petal soup.

Some people have this weird belief that they have to finish a book even if they don't like it. Simply because they started it. I don't believe that. I usually stop reading after becoming certain that this is not a good book.

But I made an exception recently, with the book "Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir. And the reason for this was that I love his first book, "The Martian". To give credit where credit's due, it did improve near the end, although it was too late.

I've learned about it from dastapov, who gave it five stars out of five. My own rating is two stars — not a terrible book, but a somewhat unpleasant experience.

Let me briefly discuss the problems I see with "PHM", and compare it (unfavorably) to "The Martian".

1) Stakes

Stakes are much higher in "PHM", which, on a surface, seems like a good thing. In reality, however, it's not. Stakes are high, but they are also impersonal. Saving the world is not as engaging as saving one human being. Mark Watney was trying to save himself — and later the whole Earth joined in. Dr. Grace in "PHM" tries to save the world, while accepting that he himself is not going to make it. It's specifically mentioned that he has no family, no loved ones; the only more or less personal connection he has to the world is his students — he works as a school teacher — and even they aren't really developed. Watney's story in "The Martian" was a desperate fight; Grace's story in "PHM" is a dry report.

2) Suspension of disbelief

Both "PHM" and "The Martian" present themselves as hard sci-fi. But in "The Martian" the only thing that disagreed with the real world was, basically, money. Pretty much everything was possible in the real world, if only NASA had much more money than they actually do.

I'm not saying that hard sci-fi should be like that; it's perfectly fine to invent something that doesn't — and probably can't — really exist. But "PHM" has loads of things like that. There is Astrophage — which drives the plot, and is, therefore, fine. There is the solution to Astrophage problem, discovered at the end — OK, well, it is in the same ballpark, so, I'll let it slide. But there is also xenonite, which is something impossible that isn't related to Astrophage at all. There is all the stuff surrounding Eridan. There is a long sleep, and also the rare genes that make it possible. There are just too many things that we are supposed to just accept. Neither of those things is breaking the suspension of disbelief, but, bit by bit, they erode it. And then there are some assumptions that I found impossible to accept. I mean, I can believe (with effort) that the fate of the whole world would depend on Roskosmos not messing up; but I can't believe, no matter how much I try, that in the end it would work out fine.

Another weird side-effect is that "science-ing it out" doesn't really work, since there are too many deviations from the reality. In "The Martian" that was the crux of the story; here it feels forced.

3) Flashbacks

Flashbacks are certainly a useful storytelling device, but in "PHM" it's overused to a ridiculous degree. What's more, they actually hurt the story. We are introduced to a bunch of characters, but, since Grace is alone in the story proper, we know they won't matter. We get a bunch of events, but we know what the end result is going to be. And the framing device for those flashbacks is pathetic — they are presented as the main character's memories that come back to him after a partial amnesia he suffered. Problem is, they don't affect the main character's actions; in essense, they are infodumps. And having half of your story being infodumps is not a great idea.

In "The Martian" there is really just one flashback, but it doesn't just fill the blanks; it introduces us to a bunch of characters who then show up in the main story, and play a big part in it. We learn of their respective characters, and they stay true to those characters. In "PHM" the only link between the main story and the flashbacks is Dr.Grace himself. And we don't really learn anything. There is a half-hearted attempt near the end to reveal something about Grace we didn't know before, but it doesn't really fit, and his modus operandi doesn't change after that reveal.

4) Mistakes

Normally, scientific mistakes are not a big deal. There are a few in "The Martian" as well. However, when a book is not really enaging, it's hard not to notice those mistakes, and they make the reader feel like the author didn't do his homework. One is especially jarring, since it is so fundamental: in one of the flashbacks the protagonist learns that Astrophages, after consuming 1.5 megajoules of energy, becomes 17 nanograms heavier, agreeing with E=mc² equation. He concludes from that that Astrophages convert energy to matter. But in reality anything that consumes that much energy would become that much heavier. Car battery becomes a little bit heavier when charged. A kettle becomes a little bit heavier when boiling (and loses much more matter through evaporation, but that's another story). The proper reaction to that measurement should be "of course, what's your point?"

As for non-scientific mistakes, well, at some point there is a lawsuit brought against the world-saving agency, since they are planning to send a lot of information with the astronauts, basically every bit of knowledge available, and much of it is copyrighted. The agency boss mentions that she has a preemptive pardon from the President. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think that's how it works. I don't think presidential pardon has anything to do with a civil lawsuit.

5) Point of view

In "The Martian" most of the story is told by Mark Watney. But, when necessary, the story becomes third-person, and tells us about things that Mark could not know. Those transitions are handled pretty well, with Mark not becoming suddenly aware of the things that happen elsewhere, but just continuing from where we left him. But in "PHM" Weir kinda wrote himself into a corner. Because of the chosen framing device, Grace has to be present at every event mentioned in the book. As a result, he is dragged around to various meetings and even into a courtroom for no good reason. His boss frequently mentions her desire to do everything as efficiently as possible — for a good reason — but it becomes extremely obvious that those just disrupt Grace's own work, and have no reason to exist other than to tell us what was going on before the story started. And some of them exist for no reason at all, like the aforementioned courtroom scene — it adds absolutely nothing to the story.

Sometimes the limitations of the framing device just don't allow Weir to explain things properly. Like, who is that woman in charge of the international world-saving effort? We get a throwaway line about her being put in charge by the UN, and that's it. We get no explanation about why she was chosen. It doesn't seem like she is an important politician, or a high-ranking military leader. She is just there. Explaining all of it through Grace's eyes is possible, but probably difficult, and so we are left with no explanation at all.

Bottom line. It seems to me that Andy Weir is a type of guy who works best when he works for fun. His Casey and Andy webcomic is really entertaining, and, as I mentioned once or twice, "The Martian" is a great book that was originally written for fun. "Project Hail Mary" is a book written for a paycheck, and it kinda shows.

I'm playing with a certain pet project, an iOS app. I started wondering if it's possible to handle copy-pasting from Notes.app, while preserving some formatting. Here's what I've got:

1) Using a string (as in, UIPasteboard.general.string) keeps indentation, and even checkboxes are represented normally, with [ ] for an unchecked item, and [x] for a checked one. Unfortunately, you lose even the most basic formatting, like bold/italic
2) Using RTF representation from the same pasteboard (which is inconsistent — iOS Notes.app generally adds a RTFD format, while macOS prefers RTF) doesn't even give you information about indentation. Well, not exactly: information is there, but it is in textLists property, which is not available on iOS without hacking.
3) Using HTML representation does give you some information about indentation (in form of tab positions, but whatever, they are available on iOS), and, of course, about fonts (including bold/italic stuff), but loses the checkboxes. That's right, we can't reliably figure out which boxes are checked, and which aren't.
4) Most interesting: Notes.app internal pasteboard format. It's not documented, and, probably, isn't supposed to be used by others; but that is not a reason why you shouldn't.
So, we start by getting the data:

if let data = UIPasteboard.general.data(forPasteboardType: "com.apple.notes.richtext") {

But then all we have is some binary data. Inspecting that data showed that it's a property list, in binary format. I've converted that binary list to XML format and looked at it in the text editor — it appeared to be a keyed archive. There is a standard tool for those: NSKeyedUnarchiver. There is just one problem: the whole serialized data seems to be of an internal, non-exported type ICNotePasteboardData. But there is a simple remedy for those: we can substitute one type for another. And, meditating on the XML property list, I realized that there is only one part of it that might contain something interesting. So, what it boiled down to is this:

class FakeNotesData: NSObject, NSCoding {
│   var attributedStringData: Data?
│   required init?(coder: NSCoder) {
│   │   attributedStringData = coder.decodeObject(forKey: "attributedStringData") as? Data
│   }
│   func encode(with coder: NSCoder) {
│   │   if let data = attributedStringData {coder.encode(data, forKey: "attributedStringData")}
│   }
}

let keyed = try! NSKeyedUnarchiver(forReadingFrom: data)
keyed.requiresSecureCoding = false
keyed.setClass(FakeNotesData.self, forClassName: "ICNotePasteboardData")
if let obj = keyed.decodeObject(forKey: NSKeyedArchiveRootObjectKey) as? FakeNotesData,
│  let attributedStringData = obj.attributedStringData
{

But, unfortunately, this attributedStringData is just another (smaller) chunk of binary data. However, just printing it out as a string, I've noticed immediately that part of it is just the text I copied, without any formatting or indentation. Other parts seemed to be garbage. So, I converted the whole data into a hex string and started digging deeper.

It really helped that a few years ago I worked with Google's protobuf (specifically, I worked on removing it from our system). So, it took me a while, but I realized that this binary data is nothing but a protobuf-serialized message. I've even written a simple protobuf spec for it:

message PasteInfo {
  required string str = 2; // UTF-8
  repeated ChunkInfo chunks = 5;
  repeated AttachmentInfo attachments = 6;
}
message ChunkInfo {
  required uint64 length = 1;
  optional ParagraphStyle paragraphStyle = 2;
  optional float textSize = 3;
  optional TextStyle textStyle = 5;
  optional bool isUnderlined = 6 [default = false];
  optional bool isStrikethrough = 7 [default = false];
  optional int64 baselineOffset = 8; // 1 for superscripts, -1 for subscripts; yes, they didn't use sint for that
  optional Color color = 10;
  optional Attachment attachment = 12;
}
message ParagraphStyle {
  optional ParagraphType paragraphType = 1;
  optional Alignment alignment = 2 [default = LEFT];
  optional WritingDirection writingDirection = 3 [default = LTR];
  optional uint64 listDepth = 4 [default = 0];
  optional CheckedListInfo checkedListInfo = 5;
  optional uint64 startNumberingFrom = 7; // not sure about that
}
enum TextStyle { // could be a bitmask?
  BOLD = 1;
  ITALIC = 2;
  BOLD_ITALIC = 3;
}
enum ParagraphType {
  TITLE = 0;
  HEADING = 1;
  SUBHEADING = 2;
  BULLETED = 0x64;
  DASHED = 0x65;
  NUMBERED = 0x66;
  CHECKLIST = 0x67;
}
message CheckedListInfo {
  optional bytes unknown = 1; // seems always present, with opaque 128-bit values — maybe GUIDs
  required bool isChecked = 2;
}
message Attachment {
  required string guid = 1;
  required string type = 2; // reverse domain name
}
message AttachmentInfo {
  required string guid = 2;
  optional string content = 6;
  required string type = 8; // reverse domain name
  optional fixed64 unknown_ptr = 17; // probably a pointer to somewhere inside Notes.app
  optional uint64 unknown_int = 25; // seems always present, with value 2
}
enum Alignment {
  LEFT = 0;
  CENTER = 1;
  RIGHT = 2;
  JUSTIFY = 3;
}
enum WritingDirection {
  LTR = 0;
  DEFAULT = 1;
  RTL = 2;
}
message Color {
  required float red = 1;
  required float green = 2;
  required float blue = 3;
  required float alpha = 4;
}

So, now it seems that I have all the details I wanted: indentation (as list depth), basic bold/italic formatting, and checkboxes.

Word of caution: those chunks have no respect for paragraph boundaries. I've already encountered some cases where there are several chunks within one paragraph, with random splitting points (not like there is some change there), or chunks spreading through several paragraphs that share the same formatting style (even several list items, even several numbered list items). But parsing that doesn't seem complicated.

Notes.app has a lot of features, and I'm sure this simple format misses many of those; but that's already quite interesting, I think.

There is one more sad thing about it: looks like it's impossible to reliably extract table dimensions from this. Tables are represented as attachments (with a "com.apple.notes.table" type) , so we have GUIDs, which, presumably, can be used to get information from iCloud, and we have something that looks like an internal pointer in Notes.app, but not much more.

I've just got confirmation of my bias (read: hatred) of messengers that ask for a phone number.

Specifically, Viber just told me somebody whose phone number was in my contacts changed their number.

Now, I've never ever had a Viber conversation with that person. I didn't know they had Viber in the first place. I'm pretty certain that person never thought of notifying me of their number change; I'm not sure I'm still in their contact list (maybe I am, maybe not). Why the hell did Viber tell me? While it's definitely not the case here, sometimes people change their phone number to escape an annoying caller. That's a serious breach of trust, people.

About nine months ago I've posted some pictures I've taken in Stockholm. Among them, there was this one:


And I was wondering what are those batons for. Well, today I was semi-randomly browsing and got an answer.

They forewarn the drivers that their car is too tall and won't fit in the tunnel/gate/whatever it is a few meters ahead. And that "ahead" happens to be not in the picture — probably behind me when I was taking it. So, if you drive a big truck and try to go there, you'll likely see how those batons bang on your windshield, or hear them doing the same with your carriage. Won't damage your car, like the tunnel/gate/whatever walls would.

On Wednesday I only had a plan for the evening, so, I wanted to walk around some more. Looks like pigeons are doing pretty good.


Soldiers, walking around the king's castle.


Followed by some more realistically-looking soldiers... except what's with their boots?


Walking around, I found myself at the zoo entrance. I did not expect that.


Holy family.


Somebody making a splash.


Oh, it's those guys.


Probably the nicest statue of a bear I've seen.


Live bears weren't so easy to photograph. Their place is gigantic.


Piglet and his family.


The wolf didn't mind being photographed.


Some wild goats, I guess.


I'm pretty sure that's a sloth, but I've never saw his face.


I've also bought a ticket to aquarium, and was again right to do so: apparently, they also keep monkeys there.


Sleeping lemurs.


Same lemurs, from above.


Meerkat, standing guard. Or rather sitting.


There are some more traditional animals in the aquarium too.


They don't move too much.


This guy seems mildly annoyed by all the attention.


I don't remember who those are.


A house rat has a miniature house build for her.


Looks like real love.


A tiny frog.


Some of the inhabitants love being photographed.


That meerkat guard was not alone. He was keeping others safe.


I went back to the lemurs, even though though there were some "STOP" signs on the way.


And noticed a lemur mom with a kid.


That's my best picture of the Colobus. I have no idea who those people were and how they've got inside.


That was pretty much it. The zoo is not big, and most of its territory is taken by some old Swedish houses, not animals. Naturally, I went back to bears.


That was taken from the distance, so, the quality is not great; but the bear balancing on the side of the hammock had to be photographed.


On my way back I spotted this guy.


And this one just ran past me, so, I couldn't make a decent photo. There was no barrier between us whatsoever.


I walked in the city a little more, and noticed that signs at the crossing are sometimes different: one is of a man, another of a woman.


Maybe I've spent too much time watching lemurs, but this looks to me like a winged monkey, not an eagle it's supposed to be.


Another street sign — apparently, for a horse.


It's a nice place.


So, my plan for the evening was to visit the science museum. Apparently, there is a police museum nearby.


But the science museum was kinda disappointing. The best part was the hands-on experience, where visitors can see the applications of various scientific principles. We have something like this here, and our version is better.


The other part just displays various inventions.


On my way back I walked through the area with lots of embassies of various countries. This, of course, is the nicest:


I'm not sure if it's a gargoyle or a bulldog, but it looks very serious.


And then I found what is, apparently, a pedestrian tunnel.


It's fairly long, and some parts of it look a bit strange.


To be continued...