Posts on Mark's Site

Agromalim 2025 - Observații și chestii interesante

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Automatizare tractoare și precision farming Spre deosebire de anul trecut am observat prezența a cel puțin patru sau cinci firme ce ofereau mecanisme prin care se putea realiza automatizarea parțială a tractoarelor. Toate sistemele aveau cam aceleași componente, ele fiind: un receiver GPS, un volan electric, un “control terminal” (practic o tabletă), sensor de înclinație și o cameră FPV (întâlnită doar la un singur sistem). Firmă Produs Precizie Viteză Sveaverken F100 Auto Steer System ±2.

Attempt at a statistical prediction of the 2026 midterms

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am currently trying to dip my toes in the field of statistics. To test myself, I will try to take a shot at predicting (or guessing) the result of the 2026 US midterms, which will take place on November 3, 2026. So my prediction will be validated in 608 days. TLDR: I predict a democrat controlled house and a republican controlled senate The reasons I think this will happen are the following:

Advent of Code 2024

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Some of my solutions to this years advent of code. December first 🇷🇴 Part 1 col1 = [3, 4, 2, 1, 3, 3] col2 = [4, 3, 9, 3, 5, 3] pairs = [] while len(col1) != 0: pairs.append([min(col1), min(col2)]) col1.pop(col1.index(min(col1))) col2.pop(col2.index(min(col2))) print(pairs) distances = list(map(lambda x: abs(x[0]-x[1]), pairs)) print(distances) Part 2 col1 = [3, 4, 2, 1, 3, 3] col2 = [4, 3, 5, 3, 9, 3] similarity = sum(map(lambda x: col2.

Bookmarklet Collection

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Bookmarklets are bookmarks that, when clicked, execute javascript on the current tab, which opens some interesting opportunities. ArchiveToday Redirect the current page to archive.today. Acts like a paywall bypasser. javascript:location.href='http://archive.today/?run=1&url='+encodeURIComponent(document.location) olx.ro land price scaper Useful when researching land price in a certain area. Opens a new tab with a table containing linked titles, location, surface area and price. Note that you must use a bookmarklet creator to compile the code for this one.

Napkin Math: Are chatbots for survey automatization worth it?

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s say you’re a company doing surveys, gathering data for politicians. Let’s do some napkin math to see if the switch to voice-based chatbots is worth it. Formula we will use to estimate operating costs: costs = rent + energy consumption + n * minimum_wage + m * (minimum_wage + something) There’s more to running a company, but the elements listed are important because they will be radicaly changed by the switch to automated chatbots:

Tiny JS Router

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

While working a personal project, I quickly created a 25 line client-side router for javascript. It works really well with van.js. // router.js export default { routes: [], add(path, cb) { this.routes.push({ path, cb }) }, listen(callback) { window.addEventListener('hashchange', () => { let url_parts = window.location.hash.substring(1).split("/").filter(e => e) this.routes.forEach(({ path, cb }) => { let path_parts = path.split("/").filter(e => e) let is_match = (url_parts.length == path_parts.length) let params = {} path_parts.

"sql.php" - my own ORM in 400 lines of PHP

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 16:08:31 +0200

sql.php is a simple “active record”-like ORM written in PHP. It’s all contained into a single file, that goes by name of “sql.php”, has an extensible type system, soft deletions, CRUD operations, and manages to do all this with three classes: \SQL\DB, \SQL\Types and \SQL\Record. I’ll start by making a short demonstration and then I’ll continue by going through the code, explaining why it does what it does and writing about future features I want to add.

The Privacy Advocates Guidebook

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

🚧 THIS ARTICLE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION 🚧 This guide provides a systematic approach to convince people that privacy is indeed important. It provides (in my opinion) convincing arguments that should work on certain types of people that each prioritise certain values. This article will pe split in two parts: Arguments and Examples. The Arguments section will contain what tactics and types of arguments you should use while conving a person, while the Examples section will list the TLDRs of privacy abuse done by governments and companies.

Browsers only allow users to make GET requests

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

🚧 MESSY WRITING AHEAD 🚧
Foreword: I began writing this article out of frustration in 2023 and only finished it in 2024. The writing is very messy and the article is a list of related thoughts and not a decisive battle plan to fix the shortcomings of the internet.

Modern browsers effectively only allow users to perform GET requests, thus forcing users to interact with forms from within documents. This single design decision shaped the way the web works and turned it into the mess that it is today. Now let me explain.

Socialist Groundhog Day

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 16:29:24 +0300

Do you know what I think about you socialists? You critique the government because it doesn’t accept your utopic ideas. You come, overthrow governments, try to implement your idealistic ideologies and fail, creating instead a more tyrannical state that the one before. And then you wake up a few decades later to say that what came before was not socialism. It’s a kind of Socialist Groundhog Day, except Bill Murray doesn’t become a better person, but he stays just as idiotic.

Visually Symmetric Words

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 21:18:21 +0300

I read a post about visually symmetric words a while back and decided to write a program to automatically find them. The code can be found on on github at mark-veres/vis-sym. I began by finding all visually symmetrical letters and ended up with this list: symmetric = ['i', 'l', 'm', 'o', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y'] I created a list that contained pairs of mirrored letters. mirrors = [('p', 'q'), ('d', 'b'), ('q', 'p'), ('b', 'd')] for s in symmetric: mirrors.

Harta cu sesizări a primăriei Arad - accesibilă prin API

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Primăria Arad a adăugat un nou serviciu la suita sa de servicii electronice. Serviciul de sesizări pe hartă lasă cetățenii să raporteze probleme legate de oraș, lăsându-i să lase o etichetă pe pagina serviciului. Sesizările cetățeniilor nu rămân neadresate, serviciul permite primăriei să se adreseze cetățenilor.

React Prop Types in Typescript

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 10:54:36 +0300

Everything must have a type in typescript. Let’s see how this would work for React props.

Democracy, by the People to blame the People

Tue, 23 May 2023 20:26:54 +0300

Democracy, a system whose shortcomings are always blamed on the voters, distracts the attentions of the masses from the elites, by making them blame and fight eachother instead of the elites who cause the shortcomings.

Read With Speed

Sun, 07 May 2023 16:17:21 +0300

I can read quite quickly, but that doesn’t mean I finish books quickly. I can stay focused for some amount of time and finish an article very quickly, but books are something else. In this article I disclose the tehniques used to leverage this ability.

Zimand Satul Zburator

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Povestiri din Zimand, satul zburător. De la centru intelectual al întregii lumi, la despărțire de pământ și în sfârșit la reîntrunire cu el. Zimandul le are pe toate și pe niciuna. Un loc unde, pentru fiecare obiect, există 1000 de copii identice și încă 1000 doar un pic alterate – unde cel mai unic lucru sunt două, dar niciodată trei, obiecte ce sunt identice până la structura atomică.

Are people looking for alternative search engines?

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 19:29:31 +0200

Apparently, many (predominantly young) people use TikTok as a search engine. Personally, I don’t use social media so I don’t see the appeal to this, but recently I started to use YCombinator’s Hacker News as a search engine.

Programatically access Arad's Digital Library

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 00:11:15 +0200

I love to use and see services that allow me to use their data in a programatical way, i.e. websites that provide APIs. APIs truly make openly available data, open. By providing an API, anyone can download your data and use it in their applications in a meaningful way.

Most Spyware is legal and you use it

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 21:14:11 +0200

Spyware is malware that aims to gather information about a person or organization and send it to another entity in a way that harms the user—for example, by violating their privacy or endangering their device’s security. Some people see this definition and find think that spyware is evil and I totally agree. But these same people will not realize the irony of their beliefs.

Snatching the "garfield.ro" domain

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I bought the “garfield.ro” domain today, it cost me only 46 RON per year. I don’t think it’s worth very much, but it’ll be a great server for my e-mail server and other chat servers I might host.

Protocol Junkie: Gopher

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Gopher is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks that was invented by Mark P. McCahill at the University of Minnesota in 1991.

"Walled garden" mentality

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I hate it when people say things like “just use X”(I’m looking at you google), it implies that you should only use tool X and that is a very toxic mentality.

New domain and hosting

Sun, 29 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I switched to a new domain(markveres.ro) from the old domain name(xoni.ro). The old domain still works, at the time I’m writing this. The new site is hosted on my Raspberry PI.

Observer Pattern in java

Sat, 25 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The observer pattern is a design pattern in wich an subject stores a list of all observers that depend on it. When the state of the subject changes, it broadcasts the change to all the observers by calling a method, specific to the observers. The advantage is the fact that observers don’t have to spam the subject to get updates.

Use javascript to console.log images

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I recently discovered this method to display images in the browser console by using console.log and some CSS.
It works by using the CSS support for console.log to set a background-image to the message. It also sets some padding to make the image visible and really, that’s it.

Database organisation with docker

Thu, 28 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

To avoid version conflicts and to not mess up my computer by accident, I have my own simple way of organizing databases. I dockerize them! There’s no reason not to do this when developing at home, because: it’s easy to do(easier than the traditional way) you can avoid messing with your computer(especially on windows) multiple database versions on the same machine I first thought of this solution after trying(and failing) to install MySQL on windows.

Graph data structure using matrices

Thu, 28 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Representing graphs with matrices. Graphs, in their simplest form, are used to show relationships between data.
We will represent relationships by creating a table that has an n number of columns and rows. Column n corresponds to row n, so that we can get the relationship between two nodes like we would access a nested array.