Cheaper, sturdier, and more easily swappable than NVME while still being far faster than spinning discs.
I use them basically as independent cartridges, this one's work, that one's a couple TB of raw video files plus the associated editor project, that one has games and movies. I can confidently travel with 3-4 unprotected in my bag.
There's probably a similar cost usb-c solution these days, and I use a usb adapter if I'm not at my desktop, but in general I like the format.
Did that for a while until I invested in a NAS... at that point those early SSDs became drives for my RPi projects, which worked well enough until I gave all my RPi hardware away earlier this year... those 12+yo SSD drives still running without issue.
Phishers are working completely blind, thus any amount of info going back to the phishers is a benefit to them.
Just getting server logs from an opened link lets them know their messages aren't being quarantined and their server is reachable through the target's firewall.
The user agent and how the links are accessed give info about who is opening them
(A few every couple minutes == all good, 10 links sent to 10 different employees all opened within seconds with a non-standard user agent == you're being investigated and should burn the domain)
It's been a few years since I've done phishing engagements so details may vary with how things are done today.
But the goal is to limit any information going to the bad guys. Let them think their messages are being blocked until they go elsewhere.
*edit: That being said, phishing at least one person at a large company is not particularly hard. There's too many companies using domains indistinguishable from shady links for one thing. Limiting engagement is good, but companies also need to be prepared for the eventuality that somebody will get fooled.
I'm on year 10 of learning my second language and passed through a variety of teaching/learning methods. Intensive FSI courses, immersion including output as early as possible, self guided based heavily on reading and vocabulary, etc. While I get by mostly fine and now live in my second language, my listening is definitely my weakest skill.
Anki is probably my most beneficial single tool. Though if I were to do it over again I'd follow more or less the poster's strategy. Maybe 80% comprehensible input for listening and 20% Anki for vocab building. At least until I could watch native TV without much effort. I've played around a bit with LLMs, but still haven't found a really great use case for my study.
On the otherhand I think consistent practice (with growing difficulty) trumps technique. Whatever process keeps you motivated to practice month after month is most important.
Just kicked off my third language after reaching B2/C1ish in my second (~5 years in), we'll see what the C1 test determines this fall, and Anki has been the consistent thing that stayed through all the other learning experiments. It's amazing just investing in Anki right out the bat how much quicker I'm moving on the new language. Especially considering it's way harder as it's not like any language I know (rich declension system, etc).
GenAI also been a big helper when I run out of content. "Write me an essay involving [subject I want to learn about]. In my response after reading, any word I've written separated by a comma generate a CSV of the format "that word, english definiton"." I'll then just dump those new words into Anki.
I'm building a service that generates audio streams about subjects and vocab of your choosing, currently notebookLM based. If you have intermediate listening skills its pretty useful for deepening regular vocab and acquiring specialized jargon.
I dumped my 400 hardest recurring anki words in it and listen to the stream whenever doing chores or driving. Then sync with my deck again after a while.
Can you help me out and give it a try, you seem like the target audience and i'd value your feedback. If your target language is not available or want to upload an anki deck I can help you out.
I've added support for Lithuanian and created a stream about version control for you to try it out. Just 'select language' -> Lithuanian -> Play
If you find it useful, you can register for free and create new streams on any subject. Send me a mail on alex@longyan.io if you'd like more stream/content quota or if you want to try the Anki thing, I'll gladly set it up for you.
The most effective routine is the one you stick with for sure!
I love anki and use it for Spanish which is showing marked improvement. I do vocab and conjugation with Anki.
Then I just find other ways to immerse myself and call it a day.
- Spanish audio for sports whenever possible
- Interfaces for personal computers/devices
- Picking up the Spanish language weekly from the little box on the corner
- Listening to Spanish artists
- Reading the news in Spanish instead of English (One major benefit here is consuming far less news)
- Writing notes for work and personal projects
- Texting friends
It all really adds up over time and is definitely doable even as an adult, but it requires a ton of work, so being able to find ways to incorporate it into the activities I'm already doing is key for me on top of the more active Anki learning.
I'm at the... "the less news I consume the better" phase of my year lol so I haven't found much I visit regularly but Telemundo and AP News en Español were two good ones.
Their site will break consistently in any case. Running a site in 2024 comes with a responsibility to update regularly for a good reason.
There are more than enough forgotten kebab shop restaurant pages that are now serving malware because they never updated WordPress that an out of date certificate warning is a very good "heads up, this site hasn't been maintained in 6 years"
If we're talking hosting even a static HTML file without using a site hosting company, that already requires so much technical knowledge (Domain purchasing, DNS, purchasing a static IP from your ISP, server software which again requires vuln updates) that said person will be able to update a TLS cert without any issue.
> There are more than enough forgotten kebab shop restaurant pages that are now serving malware
[citation needed]
There are plenty of organizations that actively scan the web for "malware" (aka anything that the almighty machine learning algorithms don't like) and are more than happy to harass the website owner and hosting company until their demands are met.
Security is ultimately a social issue. Technical means are only one way to improve it and can never solve it 100%. You must never loose sight of the cost imposed by tecnological security solutions versus what improvement they actually offer.
Looks like those generic rings are supported by gadgetbridge[1] so barely any hacking needed for 100% on device processing and storage.
I have a miband I use with gadgetbridge. I'm reasonably happy with the app, and it has visibly improved over the last year (it also wins by default being opensource + the only option for keeping data private) but the watch is a bit bulky when sleeping or typing so I stopped wearing it.
I can't imagine $10 hardware will be particularly accurate, but cheap price + data control is enough to give me an excuse to play with one.
For various reasons I started to open a bank account with Mercury, before deciding to use another provider.
When I said I'd no longer be finishing the application and to please delete my passport info, first they ignored the second part.
When I replied again asking them to delete my data they replied about KYC laws and assured me the data was securely stored of course.
At that point I gave up. Maybe they could delete the data if I fought, maybe their hands were tied, maybe me fighting would end up flagging my info as a money laundering risk. But I immediately imagined exactly this leak happening.
They're not the only vendor affected that had my data, nor is this breach the first, but that's the one that stings the most.
Anecdotally I'm being swarmed by text message spam for the first time in months. I have to assume people are running through new breach data to find live numbers.
GP was never their customer, though. They started filling out the application to open an account, got past the ID verification step, and then decided not to complete the new account process.
Likely the issue is that they just didn't think of this possible case, and there's no way to delete the ID information, and the CS person didn't want to go through the extra work to find someone who could approve it and/or get it done.
IANAL, so I'm not gonna attempt to interpret it, but here's how it's phrased:
> Recordkeeping. Section 326 of the Act requires reasonable procedures for maintaining
records of the information used to verify a person's name, address, and other identifying
information. The proposed regulation sets forth recordkeeping procedures that must be included
in a bank's CIP. Under the proposal, a bank is required to maintain a record of the identifying
information provided by the customer. Where a bank relies upon a document to verify identity,
the bank must maintain a copy of the document that the bank relied on that clearly evidences the
type of document and any identifying information it may contain.6 The bank also must record
the methods and result of any additional measures undertaken to verify the identity of the
customer. Last, the bank must record the resolution of any discrepancy in the identifying
information obtained. The bank must retain all of these records for five years after the date the
account is closed.
I have to admit, I'm a bit concerned about Blender's future development.
I've been a Blender user for 15 years, I jumped on somewhere before the 2.4 redesign.
There have been some really awesome advances in Blender over the past two years. Things that really changed my typical workflow in an absolutely good way, Eevee and all of the node work for a couple amazing new additions.
They've also changed a lot of things, namely keybindings, UI, certain modifiers, that had been done in a certain way, and that I'd committed to muscle memory, for over a decade. Those changes also had the effect of breaking years worth of accumulated tutorials and bookmarks as the workflows they mentioned are not longer relevant.
It's intensely aggravating to spend 10 minutes figuring out how to do something that you used to know how to do with the flick of a wrist. Especially when you fall back to searching how to perform the action and only find 4 year old stackoverflow posts which state the old way to do it.
I've even recently taken a weekend reimplementing the old full color icons, which required a full custom compilation, due to the lack of contrast in the new uneditable monochrome replacements.
I fully admit this may just be my initial steps into the grumbly guy who doesn't like change in my software. But I can't help but compare Blender to Firefox.
Awesome tech and a great mission, sometimes aggravating UI and workflow changes, important relationships with would be rivals.
As someone who is also still on Firefox, my opinion is that loads of cash didn't necessarily turn out great for them either.
For me at least I consider my custom hacked up, modified keybindings as best they can be, Blender to be nearly feature complete for the work I do. It's awesome that it being opensource has allowed me to nudge it in the direction that works for me. Like I said though, as a long time user I am a bit concerned.
I think the biggest motivation behind the UI change is that Blender's old UI was just very non-standard (and not exactly intuitive either). Now it's close to the others, so I'll imagine there won't be any large changes until some massive shakeup (VR becoming common?) happens.
A lot of documentation being outdated definitely sucks though.
I've started with Blender after the UI changes and wouldn't have otherwise (I know, because I've tried several times).
The next x users are many more than the current y users.
Annoying the y for no reason would be stupid. But not making improvements for the x because the y were there first is a recipe for declining relevance.
This is part of my concern, as well as the potential dilution of power features. See Firefox's recent decision to stop supporting the compact styling due to low usage.
It is a topic which does have ongoing discussion within the Blender community going back a few years [1].
I was mostly treading water in my Portuguese practice for the past few years, before getting remotivated this year and making some decent progress.
I agree with many of TFA's points
> To learn a lot from reading, you need to read a lot, and for that you have to understand at least the gist of what you are looking at.
Reading was huge for me. After "speaking" the language for 5 years I finally read a full novel. I immediately noticed improvements in my writing and understanding. A few weeks later I finished reading a second novel and am now on to the third.
(I really recommend The Martian by the way, it seems like it's been translated a ton, and it's written in a mostly first person diary style so the tenses are fairly simple while being more engaging than kid's books)
after finishing first 2 novels, did you see if your writing style became more similar to the books style(not just more correct)? Some of first novels I finished when learning English was A Song of Ice and Fire series, which made me use some veery outdated lingo
My issue is that the last year or two has seen a huge amount of technical improvements that I genuinely love.
Those improvements are combined with UI and workflow changes which are big enough changes that you can't fully copy over your old defaults.
I'm still using the new versions, and some of the workflow changes are genuine improvements as well. But I can mirror the GP comment of spending an hour googling something that I knew how to do by muscle memory in an older version. With the majority of results being older than a few months and not showing the current way to do it.
*Edit: in the time I wrote this comment the GP comment appears to have been flagged (I don't recall if it said anything overly mean or anything, that may have something to do with it if so). The concern about the UI and workflow changes is real and has been brought up for a couple of years now however ([1], among others)
This is my recurring issue when I see most "changes we're making for the election" posts. Sure this seems like a good step for this election.
Fake news and the destabilization it can bring isn't just an American phenomenon though. Are they going to apply these precautions to elections in Brazil, or Myanmar?
For anyone else still confused: CVS is an American retailer that typically issues receipts with additional advertising, bad low-value coupons with paragraphs of exclusions, on the bottom of a receipt. This makes a single-item purchase result in a receipt exceed 2m in length.
There's probably a similar cost usb-c solution these days, and I use a usb adapter if I'm not at my desktop, but in general I like the format.