August 29, 2022
What’s the shortest URL for which content is served on the internet? There are quite a few single-letter second-level domains that are used in very short URLs, such as Google’s http://g.co or Facebook’s https://m.me.
But we can go shorter than this: there’s nothing stopping TLD registry operators serving A records at the apexes of their TLD zones. For example, if Verisign (the operator of the com TLD registry) wished, they could add an A record at the apex of the com TLD zone – com would then resolve to that IP, and your browser would connect to that IP when you visited https://com.
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I’d like to preface this article by saying that it is not an authoritative guide, rather it is just me documenting my experience figuring various things out, in the hope that it’ll be useful or interesting to someone else. I assume some knowledge of Nix and containerization throughout this article.
Starting off - setting up a Go Nix flake Let’s start off by creating a Go Nix flake. I found this article which was helpful.
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The first Times crossword
Having seen several mind-blowing articles about ChatGPT’s ability (most notably this one), I wondered how ChatGPT would fare solving a cryptic crossword.
I decided to try with an easy one: a Quick Cryptic from The Times. I had a search through the Times for the Times archives to try and find one on the easier side. Eventually, I settled on Quick Cryptic 2273 by Beck, which was described as “very gentle” by the solver.
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I thought it would be interesting to see whether ChatGPT could solve some basic ciphers (Caesar, Vignere, etc.). I decided to start at the bottom, with perhaps the easiest possible cipher: rot13. I asked it to decode the rot-13 encoding of “Why did the chicken cross the road”:
So the first thing to note here is that ChatGPT is not able to solve the task, even for very small cases.
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In this post, I’m going to take a basic Nix flake and try and explain it line-by-line. My hope is that even someone who doesn’t know what Nix is might still find this post useful. Many introductions to Nix and Nix flakes begin with lot of theory – I’ve tried to avoid that here!
I’m not a Nix expert, so take this with a bit of a pinch of salt. If you notice a mistake please do let me know by making an issue at https://github.
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As a Gen-Z-er (just about), I spend too much time watching YouTube videos. This means I’m exposed to many adverts and video sponsorships from VPN companies (NordVPN in particular).
In many of these adverts, the supposed privacy and security benefits of using some VPN provider or another are proclaimed. (In fairness to VPN companies, they do seem to be shifting focus away from these kinds of claims in their advertising, but I still see it plenty).
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