9 is a divisor too but has the same alignment with 6 as 3 does, idk. And what the hell am I supposed to do with a charset of 512? Hello??

Listen my thought process here was that it was interesting how octal just reads a byte and converts the number to octal, same with decimal, same with hexadecimal, so like I NEEDED a bit count that wasn’t 8 and we have 1152 bits. My choices were 2, 3, 4, 6, or 8 and behold, 2 and 3 go into 6. DAMN.

Actually to backpedal—this in no way concludes it’s a stream cipher. It can still be a block cipher, I think.

Because OF COURSE it does, quarternary trigrams are LITERALLY just 6-gram binary, and that’s what we use to create the flipping base64 from the binary in the first place. No different than a hex conversion but with bigrams instead of tetragrams 🙃 so this must be a stream cipher!

It really is! I have learned a lot on classical cryptography, but only in its original form of usually standard alphabet use-cases.

Changing the character set to something like binary, hex, base64 and doing it that was is very interesting, still studying the effects.

The other factor perhaps is something ridiculous like a custom playfair on hexadecimal, requiring a base conversion to get there.

Actually… certainly something to try!

Not even passing empty string?

This thing is tricky. I found some not-too-interesting patterns (so far) with binary trigrams. It’s 1,536 bits and has plenty of factors, with 2 and 3 being primes. I’m thinking perhaps DNA sequencing encoded in binary bigrams, maybe. First step must be XOR…

This got solved tonight! I got as far as “WE HAVE WON THE GREAT BATTLE” and someone else nailed the solve.

Fun stuff!

Beautiful cover art

I cannot stand this culture. I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with it and it has put me in a place where I’ve started doubting my love for the field. I have to convince myself “I love the practice, hate *their* process.” I hit a sad place where something that used to give me energy now drains me!

It’s begging for QAAAAAAAA (testing)

Oh I didn’t see the alt text! Is it generated?

Agree I’ve seen it omitted as well, though without padding it’s more reflective of a base64 number system than base64-encoded bytes.

But that would be a ridiculously large number 😂

I think the correct evaluation is that it may not be base64 because there’s no padding at the end despite the length not being divisible by 4

I’ve got inklings of an idea to perhaps drive such innovation. Getting inspired by Bluesky a bit, honestly. Want to iron out the idea a little more and start building the future.

Imagine a world where sidewalk safety is enhanced by virtual animations. Driving will project the path onto your vision. Presentation notes will scroll through the audience. Social media can extend to posting things in physical locations. Treasure hunting!!!

It also converts physical ad space from a once clunky, static, high maintenance system to one that can dynamically display different ads based on the target viewer, and imo will generate more optimal revenue.

If #AR does take off (my bet is that it will, too much upside) there’s going to be a new marketplace of projecting ads into the real world, anchored to precise positions. This will require such spaces to be fairly blank to help with contrast.