Adversarial Mastermind

 I had this script lying around written a few years ago, of a version of Mastermind that's adversarial. It doesn't really hide a secret combination for you to find, it just pretends there is one and gives you the worst possible answer on any guess you make, i.e. the answer that would eliminate the fewest possible combination. So the hidden combination is effectively what you (partially you, there's also a bit of luck involved) force it to be through your questions.

I recently gave the old Lua script to an LLM and asked it to turn it into a website instead, here's the result after a few iterations of asking it to fix various issues and improve the usability:

https://annoyingmind.inshame.com/

It works quite well. If you are on a PC, then opening the developer tools (maybe by pressing Ctrl+Shift+I) will let you see some debugging information in the Console, like how many possible combinations there still are at any point in the game, and up to 6 examples of those possible combinations.

Colors I see you

colours.icu ("Colors I see you") is a website I quickly made to test out an idea for an animated color blindness correction filter.

Normal color blindness correction filters will simply transform the color space of an image to make it possible for color blind people to distinguish between some of the colors that they normally can't. That also means though that in the "corrected" version they are unable to distinguish between colors that they normally could and also all the colors look completely wrong.

So the idea I had was to use animation to be able to present to the person both the base image in it's correct colors, while periodically flashing a second version of the image that causes areas to become brighter or darker depending on what color they really are. For example red details flash bright while green details flash dark.

For example take this image that someone posted on reddit:

It's a tree that hasn't become fully red during autumn yet because part of it was illuminated by that lamp. To someone with protanopia this looks like this: (if I implemented my filters right)

The distinction between red and green is gone. So what the website gives you is the following image:

 

 

The animation on the website is smoother, not a bright flash like in this GIF file, so if you want to see it properly just go to colors.icu and upload something yourself.

You can see that the red parts of the image are flashing brighter while the green ones and staying dark or becoming even darker.

I am still not very confident that I did all the math right and I plan to try a slightly different way to do the correction, especially for deuteranopia.

The site can also do correction for the anomalous forms of color blindness (when people are trichromats but with slightly wrong detection for one of the colors) but because there's nothing super scientific about the website, just try all the correction modes and find the one that works best for you.

Colrobal

It's this time of the year again when I post something on my blog. :-)

This time it's a small website webpage mainly for color-blind people. It's a test. You are shown a series of pairs of squares, each square has a circle of differing color, you keep clicking on the square that you see the circle inside it bigger. When the test is done it will show you a map of your color perception like the following:

In areas of this triangle where the lines are more dense, you have more detail when distinguishing colors from each other. In areas where lines are sparse, you are having trouble distinguishing colors from one another.

Additionally you are given the option to filter any image you want through a filter that will morph the color space of the image, moving colors away from the areas of the color space that you are having less detail and into the areas where you can distinguish small differences in color. This will mess up the colors of course but the theory behind it was that it would allow someone with color-blindness to experience a bit more color detail.

There is also the option to do a reverse filter which will (again, in theory) allow others to see with less detail like the person who did the test.

Finally there is an option to show you which areas in an image have hues that belong to areas of the color space that you don't distinguish properly. The brighter, the worse you can see that color.

Just keep in mind that this tool maps not only your vision, but your screen as well. I get different triangles depending on whether I do this on my Android or on my laptop.

And finally don't forget that there is no serious science behind this, this is just me playing with colors.

Visit Colrobal.

Sexionnaire

The other day, while browsing Wikipedia, I wondered how hard it must be to have weird fetishes without being able to share them with someone or even to discuss them with your partner. So the idea that struck me was that a computer could ask both partners about their fetishes, then compare their answers and finally reveal only the common ones. So I thought I'd make a website about this. After a little brainstorming I thought that turning this into a full fledged sex questionnaire, aiming to give ideas to couples too, would be even better. So I started making Sexionnaire.

I had my girlfriend help me with the graphics and with compiling the huge questionnaire. It turns out the database is bigger than the site's code. The site is written in PHP from scratch with a little jQuery for the expanding list effects and the asynchronous requests. Anyway the site can be found at sexionnaire.com.

It doesn't need your email or anything else. You just create a questionnaire pair, you give out the proper link to your partner, you click on your link and you both start solving the questionnaires (it doesn't have to be done at the same time of course, the questionnaire links never expire). When you are done you submit your answers and you are taken to the results page. There, if your partner has also finished his/her questionnaire, you will be able to see all the common answers. There is a little twist though: only the partner that gave the least positive answers will be able to see the results. This is done to avoid cheating by checking everything just to reveal your partners answers. If you are the one that sees the answers then you will also be given a link that will help you print cards with all the common answers so that you can play a game with them (put them in a box and draw cards whenever you fell horny).

So give it a try and tell me what you think. The site is over 18 obviously (Although it contains no pictures, yet. Only links to external sites with more info.) and currently only supports heterosexual couples. I'll make a version for homosexual couples when I get a chance.

PS: The questionnaire needs more than one hour to complete but you can save your progress by clicking "Continue later" at the bottom. Just make sure you don't loose the URL, bookmark it so that you can get back later.

On intellectual property (also introducing bittit.info)

I hate almost all kinds of intellectual property. I find even the phrase "intellectual property" irrational, disgusting and childish. It reminds me of what kids do when they play: "Hey I though about being batman first, you can't be batman, it was my idea!". Owning an idea is absurd. You had an idea? Great. Use it. Keep it to yourself if you want. Or, why not, sell it. But once I understand it I don't see why it's more yours than mine. It's a part of me as much as it is a part of you. The whole human civilization has gone that far because people copied, spread and improved ideas of other people. Who are you to deny me the right to use an idea to make my life easier once I fully understand it?? The reason we have property is that if I take your car you will no longer have a car. But if I take your idea we can both use it freely so no harm is done. You'd say that harm is done actually because you could make money from it if you could enforce your patent. Well... who cares? The only reason you can now make money from an idea is the existence of an absurd law that allows you to make money from it. You can't make money from ideas in a free market. Because in a truly free market, such as the one that we will eventually reach, it will always be more expensive to enforce intellectual property laws than to break or circumvent them. People have two options:

1. Pay millions for the enforcement of laws that can hardly be enforced unless they give up many fundamental rights. For example the internet should be surveiled, police should be able to raid servers, Tor/Freenet/I2P/Bitcoin should probably be banned and encryption should be regulated (which equally stupid to regulating whispering). In return, if you ever have such an awesome idea you might be able to sell the patent rights HOPING that law enforcement will work.
2. Pay nothing for enforcement of stupid laws and have free access to every publicly known human idea or intellectual creation. You could still be able to sell ideas or intellectual creations in some cases but once it goes public, it's public.

I trully believe that any rational person would go for the second option. I think that the only reason we currently have intellectual property laws today is that governments have convinced people that it's for their own good or that they promote innovation. The truth is that people are innovative not because some law protects their intellectual creations but because that's the way their brain works. It is also true that currently mostly big corporations are profiting from patents and copyrights. Microsoft is currently making more money from Android (for which has written not a single line of code) than from Windows Mobile! Considering how big corps influence governments there is no wonder why governments favor copyrights and patents

If people realized that, they would probably preffer to stop paying for the enforcement of a practically unenforcable law and would start sharing their ideas for free, rather than pay for such laws hopping that some day they will have some awsome idea that will sell for millions IF these laws could be enforced. I don't believe people would wan't to give up their rights to whisper, encrypt, talk anonymously just to get this trivial benefit in exchange.

So if we had a totally free market somewhere, let's say in the internet or in an anonymous network like Tor. How would one be able to profit form his intellectual creations? Remember that you only control the use of your idea until you reveal it to someone else. If you trusted other people you could sell the idea to them under the terms of a contract that prohibits them from sharing that idea or creation (by creation I mean, song or movie or whatever) with other people but that wouldn't work because if one broke the contract the idea would go public and, without intellectual property laws everyone would be able to use it freely. So contracts wouldn't work if you can't 100% trust people. Even worse it wouldn't ever work in an anonymous market.

But you still control your creation until it gets to one person. So you could easily charge to release you creation for the first time. If possible you could even release your creation in steps getting paid for every bit you release. That would have the benefit that someone would be able to see what you created before paying the full amount you requested. You could even give a small part of your creation for free to start things up. That idea could at least work with music, pictures, videos, text, and, in some cases, programs. Currently I made, with help from a friend in the beggining, a site that allows you to do that with pictures. You can upload a photo, set a price for it and a starting resolution. For example let's say you got an amazing photo with a resolution of 5000x5000. You upload it and the site hosts a 100x100 version of this picture which is given for free to everyone. Now people are able to pay for the picture and the website automatically increases the resolution of the hosted picture so that everyone can get the bigger versions of the picture as payments are made for it. When the total price you set up has been payed, the picture will have reached 5000x5000 and everyone will have access to it. The site uses Bitcoins for payments and that means that the uploader receives payments directly (no fees) while the website watches for the total ammount deposited for each uploaded picture to increase the resolution accordingly. The site is free to use and you only pay to become a verified uploader (which also means that I'll have to know who you are).

The site is this: bittit.info
Υou can also access it via Tor here: ejz7kqoryhqwosbk.onion

bittit is a marketplace where copyright enforcement is irrelevant. Whether there are such laws or not, bittit works the same way. You get paid to release pictures on the public domain or you pay to make others release their pictures on the public domain. And the best part is that both can be done gradually and in a crowdsourced way.

One last thing. When I was making it I had to decide whether I should accept any kind of legal picture, including pornographic or nude pictures. Taking reddit's GoneWild into consideration I thought bittit could be useful for such pictures so I decided to alow them and put them in a separate NSFW category which is obviously not suitable for minors, or so the laws say.

QRcoder

EDIT: Google stopped prividing this API so I've taken both the website and the Autoit version down as well since they don't function anymore. If someone is interested in them for some reason just contact me.

The post about the apps I use on my Android phone will delay some more. In fact I might not even finish writing it if I find an app that creates online lists with your installed apps and allows you to publish them. I actually think I had seen one such app. Anyway, today's menu includes an online bulk QR Code generator I just made. It's written in JavaScript so you can just download the webpage and host it anywhere you want even if you don't have PHP support on your server. Mine is hosted on my Dropbox public folder for example. Right click and "view source" to see how it works. It uses Google's Chart API and jQuery.

So here it is.

I also made an executable version in AutoIt3 but I don't see any reason to upload it yet, since the JavaScript version has the same basic features.

IPic

IPic is a small site I made. More like a simple, free tracking service.
Whenever you visit it, it will provide two unique links. The first one is a link to a 1 transparent pixel PNG which you can include in any HTML or BBcode you want. The second link will show you the IP of whoever viewed that picture in the past 30 days. I had some minor problems and it deleted visits after 4 days from the statistics page (instead of 30) but I think it's be OK now.
As for the legality of the site, I don't think it's illegal, Statcounter provides the same service by using javascript but in any case it's up to use to decide whether and where to use it so do it wisely.
Finally if you don't like the huge advertisement that appears on every page just install Adblock.

Visit IPic.