Being able to chalk off the often embarrassing or cruel lessons of childhood as something personal, rather than something someone saved in video, to hound you with for the rest of your life.
Nowadays, most people use password managers (hopefully). However, there are still some passwords that you need to memorize, like master password (for a password manager), phone lock, wifi password, etc....
Sure. You can either increase the dictionary of possible words, or increase the number of words or both. Eventually it will become unwieldy. I don’t bother with passphrases though.
I generate passwords of sufficient entropy (random ASCII), store them securely (encrypted, key memorized, on dedicated hardware), and never re-use them. I don’t trust password managers unless open-source. I don’t need convenience – to some extent, it’s my job to manage other people’s secrets. Since I’m being paid, no need for shortcuts.
Yeah, I hate that. Forcing me to input special characters makes my password slightly less secure. Of course I’ll include them by default, but now an attacker can eliminate all passwords without special characters. Most people just put the number 1 or a period at the end of their existing, frequently re-used password anyway. Or capitalize the first or last letter. So it doesn’t make it really harder to crack dumb passwords.
It’s like we’ve optimized passwords to be hard for humans to remember, but easy for humans to guess!
Mine is supposed to be 100 / 100 and actually is. In Vietnam, symmetrical fiber-to-the-home is actually pretty common. I think I pay 5$ a month, or maybe a bit less.
Well, usually competition creates more efficient prices. So I guess somehow your telecoms companies are using strategies to avoid competing somehow.
On our end, we still have quite some parts of the economy that are planned. For example, I applied for my business license according to a particular 5-year plan, and there are only certain areas of the economy I’m allowed to participate in. I can’t just one day pick up and decide that I’m going to start a butter factory or something.
The best Internet provider is literally the Army, but they weren’t granted a monopoly. The post office and three or four other major providers exist in every city. So there’s actually quite a healthy competition for customers, it seems this too was planned for. Things don’t always work out this well, but at least for Internet it worked out pretty great.
As an aside, back when there wasn’t enough money to fund State organs, they would sometimes be granted profitable businesses to stay afloat. Some bits of this are left – you can stay at a beach hotel run by the police department in at least one city. It always seemed to me a smart way to get the country out of a bad situation. This is why the Army or the Post Office are licensed to to a bunch of profitable consumer services.
I always feel awkward when asked my favorite color, song, or any other type of trivial question. I have my standard responses I remain consistent with over time, but they are only consistent lies. Are those types of questions fundamentally awkward to you too?...
I don’t have ordered lists of favorites for trivial things like colors, integers, and so on. Also no ordered list for less trivial things. No favorite songs, movies, books, historical figures, etc.
I don’t judge people (or myself) based on having or not having these lists, because that itself would be me creating a list – my favorite thing would then become not having favorite things, and that would of course be silly :D
It would be inaccurate to take it as a literal quote :)
This is just what I wish I could say. Small talk annoys me greatly, and in practice I want to shift conversations in deeper directions as quickly as reasonably possible. I’d much rather exchange a few thoughtful phrases with a stranger than a large volume of nonsense. “Can you tell me something important about yourself?” is maybe a little less aggressive. Anyway, my Vietnamese language skills are not good, and immigrants are rare here in Vietnam, so conversation is… necessarily direct :)
I actually do want people to prove they are worth my attention! If they haven’t learned or accomplished anything in a year (in their opinion, not mine), then I can’t talk about things I’ve done or learned without it getting awkward, and I have nothing else to talk about (I spend essentially all my time either working or studying). I just don’t have room in my life for many people, either. This isn’t their fault or mine. My wife is the same way (and we certainly skipped the small talk when we met – we went right to engineering schematics for something or other).
I’ll share a funny story that might explain a bit of my frustration – I live in Asia, so all my conversations are extremely scripted. How are you / how old are you / where were you born / are you married / do you have kids / why don’t you have kids / you must silently sit here and listen while I go on a 10-20 minute rant on why you have to have kids, or I will tell everyone how rude you are. My wife and I get stuck in this conversation constantly. Sometimes so many times in a row, that we effectively do nothing but have this conversation over and over for 3-4 hours. At family events, it’s the only conversation that happens for days. It’s like a glitch in the Matrix or something, you really have to experience it to believe it!
Of course I still have to be polite, have mostly empty conversations, and so on. It’s exhausting, and I don’t remember any of their names, because I have learned nothing about them. It’s not the lack of people (in Asia?) that makes me feel alone, it’s this.
I found a neat set of old ink blocks from a famous manufacturer in China. It’s technically worth a fair sum of money, I paid 8$. Also an old vacuum tube for 3$, got it working. Neither of those are useful though, just neat.
In terms of materially useful things? Well, someone taught me how to use old, no-electronics camera lenses. So I bought a used DSLR for 135$ and bought antique lenses for very cheap (again 8$ for something that was originally nearly 1k after accounting for inflation). Now I can do my own product photography, documentation, etc. and it cost me very little, but looks great! Also my vacation photos have skyrocketed in quality.
Well, I had heard of someone that got a little amplification out of them at 3.3V and a weird configuration. It was a different tube, but I figured I’d give it a go at 5V.
My tube was old and originated from a junk pile in Japan. I figured it wasn’t enough entropy to just use an unknown tube the wrong way, so I added some random scrap parts from the Soviet Union. The tube produced amplified output, but the output impedance was way too high when being used this wrong way (in other words, it couldn’t drive a speaker). So I added some completely unknown Chinese amplifier IC as a buffer.
It’s approximately pocket-sized. For a large pocket, anyway. The tube heater gets the whole thing warm. It produces hilariously distorted (but sort of cool) sound. I call it a ‘themionic pocket warmer’, arguably not so useful here in Vietnam. The audio function is secondary. I suppose if you are a half-deaf Antarctic explorer with a deep love of stovepipe hats, it would be a good hat-warmer as well. I guess that’s the target market :D
I threw some photos up at voltage.vn. It was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.
Nah, I saw the heating coil was the right resistance. Then, the shiny metal coating on the inside of the tube was not oxidized, so the vacuum was likely good. Nothing rattled, so a short was unlikely. It was designed for 6.3V.
So at 5V the worst that could happen was that the heater coil fizzled and died with some sad noises. Well, maybe no noises, because of the vacuum and all. Some form of sadness though, surely.
The more alarming things I’ve built over the years aren’t so much “duck and cover”. They’re more of the “spend a all day doing data analysis, then know something I probably shouldn’t” variety.
This article says that NASA uses 15 digits after the decimal point, which I’m counting as 16 in total, since that’s how we count significant digits in scientific notation. If you round pi to 3, that’s one significant digit, and if you round it to 1, that’s zero digits....
None of them! Numbers are a poor way to communicate with most of my clients.
On the rare exception, it depends on the number of significant digits of the measurement I (for example) multiply it with. Digits past that don’t communicate any useful information.
It’s predatory garbage – I’ve had some VCs as customers and I guarantee that if the IPO was expected to do well, they would not leave a dime on the table for contributors. Generally if you don’t know who the bag-holder in these schemes is… chances are it’s you!
I still help out people on Reddit, because a lot of foreigners don’t know how to do things in my country (e.g. find medication they need) and that’s where they ask. If it vanishes tomorrow, I don’t really care though, haha.
So I'm currently toying around with NeoCities, and decided to trial it by building your classic mid '90s Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire pastiche website.
Some of the most important elements are already in place.
Tile background? Large font? Heading in bright pink with a shadow? Unusual colour choices? Random cat gifs? Under construction gif? Check! Check! Check!
In the true spirit of the '90s DIY web, some more pages (including the links page) are coming soon.
(I'm thinking of adding a page dedicated to either Britney or a nu-metal band.)
I get this. I’m the director of a small tech company, market forces demand that I just do more work instead, but sometimes some trivial 2$ device breaks and it personally offends me.
So I re-engineer it so it’s rated for 100+ years or whatever. I get the boards made in the factory, assemble with hot-air rework, and write the firmware myself. Sometimes it costs me a week, but it produces the things I’m most happy with.
Clients just want cheap stuff done poorly by tomorrow. If you want art, you’ve got to be your own customer :(
I had this shower thought earlier and I actually wanted to post it in that community. The name I came up with was SmartWalkman, but later I realized that Walkman is Sony specific, so I doubt other companies would’ve gone for that name, but I didn’t want to let this shower thought slip so here I am now asking you guys.
Haha yeah… I couldn’t afford them either. Also the weird fancy Sony-VAIO things only in Japan.
I did eventually get a Panasonic CF-M34 though. It was a netbook before netbooks were a thing – and you could use it to hammer in a nail, then boil it it in a pot of water to clean it. Without turning it off. Then set it gently on a table, and blow the table up with dynamite – although this apparently caused a restart (someone tried it). That thing was awesome. You still spot it in movies sometimes.
Also there were those TransMeta Crusoe processors that came after them. Those were way before their time and didn’t take off. Went bankrupt. Now we do that with Intel Atom, or RISC.
What is something that 2020s kids will never get to experience?
Are you using passphrases? Is it worth it?
Nowadays, most people use password managers (hopefully). However, there are still some passwords that you need to memorize, like master password (for a password manager), phone lock, wifi password, etc....
Lemmy, what's your internet speed in mbps?
Do you have favorites or specific list preferences about trivial things like color or music?
I always feel awkward when asked my favorite color, song, or any other type of trivial question. I have my standard responses I remain consistent with over time, but they are only consistent lies. Are those types of questions fundamentally awkward to you too?...
What is the dumbest reason to kill somebody?
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What field do you work in, and how many digits of pi do you use?
This article says that NASA uses 15 digits after the decimal point, which I’m counting as 16 in total, since that’s how we count significant digits in scientific notation. If you round pi to 3, that’s one significant digit, and if you round it to 1, that’s zero digits....
If reddit were to die how do you think it will happen?
What is your socially unacceptable guilty indulgence?
Mine is plain/lightly salted Doritos/tortilla chips dipped/scraped in unsalted butter....
Huawei rises from the dead, outsells iPhone in China (arstechnica.com)
If the order of events were different, what might we be calling smartphones?
I had this shower thought earlier and I actually wanted to post it in that community. The name I came up with was SmartWalkman, but later I realized that Walkman is Sony specific, so I doubt other companies would’ve gone for that name, but I didn’t want to let this shower thought slip so here I am now asking you guys.
For those that lived under a repressive regime and now no longer do, which are the funniest jokes that would have risked your freedom (that you heard at least)?
Mine goes like that:...