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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Security through obscurity is a very valid way to secure something. It shouldn’t be the only way of securing something, but it can be a valid additional layer.

    The knock sequence is a secret, just like a password. It may not be a particularly strong secret, but is is strong enough to keep out casual attackers. You’ll still need additional security, but sshd is well equipped to provide that.


  • The AI bubble produced many useful products already, many of which will remain useful even after the bubble popped.

    The term bubble is mostly about how investment money flows around. Right now you can get near infinite moneys if you include the term AI in your business plan. Many of the current startups will never produce a useful product, and after the bubble has truly popped, those who haven’t will go under.

    Amazon, ebay, booking and cisco survived the dotcom bubble, as they attracted paying users before the bubble ended. Things like github copilot, dalee, chat bots etc are genuinely useful products which have already attracted paying cusomers. Some of these products may end up being provided by competitors of the current providers, but someone will make long term money from these products.



  • As others have suggested, lactose free milk is the best option. (which is just milk with a small amount of lactase. Your body naturally makes lactase, it’s not some kind of unnatural chemical).

    However, if your GF has objections to lactase, soy milk is a great alternative. Soy milk foam is firmer than cow milk foam, but it tastes less sweet. You could add sugar to compensate, but I find I actually favor the taste over regular milk.





  • There are definitely differences between thumbdrives.

    First of all, on Amazon, ebay and the like there are flat out fake drives. You can recognize those by the extremely high capacity and low price. They will pretend to have high capacity, but then they’ll just throw away your data. To test if you’ve fallen victim to one of these, copy a very big file (e.g. a movie) onto the drive, remove the drive, reinsert it, and then try to use the file. If that doesn’t work, your drive was fake. Amazon will refund you of that happens, I dont know about ebay and others.

    Any name brand will be good enough quality for home use. If you intend to use the drive for backups, spend a bit extra. If you intend to use the drive for just moving files around, feel free to cheap out.

    Some drives offer extra security features such as fingerprint scanners. Those are not worth your money.

    Extra rugged drives may be worth it to you, but if you’re careful, you won’t need that. I have not found waterproof drives to have extra value, but that depends a lot on how you’ll treat the drive.

    In general, you can’t go wrong with SanDisk of Kingston. There are several other good brands, but I don’t want to make this list too long.




  • While the plastic gadgets are wasteful, they don’t hold a candle to all the unnecessary food packaging that’s used. Just tear apart one of your garbage bags, and see how much is food-related packaging and how much is gadgets.

    I visited the US (WV) recently, and I was appalled by how much waste goes unrecycled. At home (Europe) our family produces one bag of unrecycled waste every 2 weeks, in WV we produced 6 bags in 2 weeks, and that’s while living in European style (refillable water bottles, declining plastic bags for groceries, buying unpackaged produce, etc.).





  • In the 1930s, the Netherlands kept detailed records of ethnicity for every citizen. No one thought this was unnecessary, as ethnicity wasn’t something that could ever be used against you.

    That line of thought ended when the Germans took over in may 1940. Unfortunately those records still existed, and aided the most efficient genocide in human history. Without those records, many jews, sinti and Roma would’ve been able to deny their ancestry and evade being murdered.

    Privacy from government and corporations will one day save lives.