• 2 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Someone breaking into your password manager is a lot less likely than someone breaking into one of the dozens or even hundreds of services you probably reuse passwords on.

    Exactly. Without a password manager, every single service you have reuses your password on is a security risk, because any one of them will compromise the rest. And it has repeatedly been demonstrated that even large software companies don’t follow best practices regarding passwords. So any one of them being compromised is a risk. With a password manager, as long as it is properly encrypted and secured with a strong master password, the only point of attack will be your master password.

    It’s less about keeping all your eggs in one basket, and more about reducing attack vectors that hackers have access to. With reused passwords, every single individual service is a potential vector of attack.



  • There’s also the fact that the entire American education system is set up to teach Americans that peaceful protest is the only acceptable form of protest. History classes teach about the American revolution as if it was a fully justified break from an oppressive monarchy… And then as soon as it’s done, there’s a hard turn towards “but that was the only time violence was justified. In every other case, you’re expected to peacefully protest instead. Here, have another portrait of MLK Jr in case you forgot what he looked like.”

    The Black Panthers were barely even a footnote in my history books. There weren’t any mentions of the union riots, where factory workers threatened to drag the owners out of their offices and lynch them. Because those would show that violence is effective.


  • This feels a little bit like Brainfuck tbh.

    For what it’s worth, I can think of one thing that would make brainfuck even worse: Instead of using 8 arbitrary characters (it only uses > < + - . , ] and [ for every instruction) for the coding, use the 8 most common letters of the alphabet. Since it ignores all other characters, all of your comments would need to be done without those 8 letters.

    For example, “Hello World” in brainfuck is the following:

    ++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+<<<<-]>+>+>->>+[<]<-]>>.>---.+++++++..+++.>>.<-.<.+++.------.--------.>>+.>++.
    

    If we instead transposed those 8 instructions onto the 8 most common letters of the alphabet, it would look more like this:

    eeeeeeeeaneeeeaneeneeeneeenesssstonenentnneasostonnIntttIeeeeeeeIIeeeInnIstIsIeeeIttttttIttttttttInneIneeI
    


  • Yeah, one of my most often stated phrases at work is “you can’t make people read.”

    Error pops up, explaining exactly what the issue is and how to fix it? Oh god, let me call IT to see what I need to do. Yeah, you can’t make people read.

    Some piece of equipment or machinery has changed in some meaningful way? Management is quick to go “just hang a sign on it, letting people know the new process.” Nope, you can’t make people read. People will physically move the sign to the side, try to use the machine like they previously did, and get surprised when it doesn’t work as expected.

    Some area is unsafe due to work happening overhead? “Oh just hang signs on the doors, telling people not to come in.” No, you can’t make people read; I have seen people push their way past physical barriers with big “do not enter” signs, just to ask if we’re open. How about we lock the doors, and disable the keyways on all the doors (except one, where we have physical barriers to entry) until the work is completed?

    The floor is freshly painted? People will walk past six different “do not enter - wet paint” signs and physically push past stanchions or barriers, and then act surprised when their shoes stick to the floor.





  • Yeah, Gnome is like the Apple of the Linux world. The devs have the same kind of “we know better than you do” mentality towards design. The issue tracker is a lot of “hey the OS won’t let me do [edge-case scenario that an OS should be able to do, but which most users won’t bother with]” followed by the devs going “Gnome isn’t designed to support [edge-case scenario]. Bug report closed.” Like the devs have a very “it’s not a bug; It’s a feature” mentality, and anyone who runs into that bug must be using the OS “wrong”.





  • It stores your data in plaintext, and simply uses the program to parse special formatting characters. There are no attempts at obfuscation or encryption, and it doesn’t lock you into a walled garden that refuses to play nice with other programs. The program itself is closed-source, but anyone could write an open source version to parse the same info… There just hasn’t been a good reason to do so. Even if Obsidian as a company and program ceases to exist overnight, your data is still safe on your machine and can be read by anyone who cares enough to dig into the file. Hell, you can even open it as the plaintext file and dig through it manually.


  • And here’s a reminder that if you run a Plex server, there’s an app called Prologue which turns it into a fully fledged audiobook server.

    Plex doesn’t natively support things like audiobook bookmarks in m4b files, and tries to just play them straight through like a gigantic 4 hour long music track. But Prologue does support bookmark data. Prologue simply uses Plex’s service to access the files, (because admittedly, Plex is good for letting newbies remotely access their content) and then it ignores Plex’s built-in “lol just play it like music” instructions, and actually parses the files for bookmark data.

    As someone who couldn’t get Audiobookshelf to work properly, (something about not being able to access network drives via Docker), Prologue has saved my audiobook library by allowing me to just host it via Plex instead.


  • And then there are things like poor sleep hygiene when very young can trigger a correlates with the development of ADHD later on.

    FTFY. Correlation≠Causation, especially in cases like you mentioned. It’s a chicken and egg scenario.

    Are kids getting ADHD because they didn’t sleep well? Or is poor sleep hygiene an early indicator of ADHD? Lots of people with ADHD have poor sleep hygiene, even as adults. Many will struggle with things like Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, because they get their biggest bursts of focus late at night when everyone else is asleep, the brain is releasing dopamine to keep them awake, and distractions are limited. Every single adult with ADHD has stories about getting focused on a project right before bedtime, then suddenly realizing the birds are chirping outside their window and the sun is rising.


  • Typically speaking, you’d want to cut instead of boost. Cutting is easy; You just reduce the volume. Boosting is much more complicated, because you need to “add” signal where none exists. So boosts tend to be noisy and/or outright distorted, while cuts will maintain a clean audio signal.

    Need to boost around 2KHz? Try cutting everything else instead.