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akpa1

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Hi there!

Proprietor of https://www.akpain.net

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www.bbc.co.uk 3mo ago

Amazon to end support for older Kindles

akpa1
10pts7
www.bbc.co.uk 1y ago

Apple's encryption row with UK should not be secret, court rules

akpa1
7pts0
www.bbc.com 1y ago

Schools to trial social media blackout scheme

akpa1
1pts0
www.akpain.net 1y ago

Overengineering a Way to Cheat at an Exam

akpa1
3pts0
www.akpain.net 1y ago

Shedding Extra Complexity and Shipping Side Projects

akpa1
2pts0
www.bbc.com 1y ago

How Gen Z became so nihilistic about money

akpa1
25pts58
www.akpain.net 2y ago

Playing with Certificate Transparency

akpa1
1pts0
www.bbc.co.uk 3y ago

War crimes evidence erased by social media platforms

akpa1
15pts1
spacetraders.io 3y ago

SpaceTraders: A multiplayer game built on a free web API

akpa1
273pts56
www.tdpain.net 3y ago

I tracked everything I read on the internet for a year

akpa1
250pts117
www.youtube.com 3y ago

History's worst software error weaponized a radiation machine [video]

akpa1
3pts0
fearoflanding.com 3y ago

Post-Pandemic Mystery at Heathrow

akpa1
12pts1
neurosciencenews.com 3y ago

Random Acts of Kindness Make a Bigger Splash Than Expected

akpa1
1pts0
www.tdpain.net 3y ago

Offloading Work to GitHub Actions

akpa1
1pts0
www.amusingplanet.com 4y ago

The Pneumatic Clocks of Paris

akpa1
121pts39
www.theguardian.com 4y ago

‘You only have one shot’: how film cameras won over a younger generation

akpa1
3pts2
www.bleepingcomputer.com 4y ago

GitHub can now auto-block commits containing API keys, auth tokens

akpa1
1pts0
www.bleepingcomputer.com 4y ago

Let's Encrypt is revoking lots of SSL certificates in two days

akpa1
5pts0
about.sourcegraph.com 5y ago

How not to break a search engine

akpa1
57pts17
about.sourcegraph.com 5y ago

How not to break a search engine

akpa1
2pts0

That sounds like a dream.

My (also UK-based) university has been working on a new student records management project for years that's been incredibly ill-fated. It's destined to replace all their current systems and the first module module was meant to launch last year, except it thoroughly failed testing and nobody has heard anything about it since.

No idea how long it'll take to pull through. I don't believe it's an in-house effort.

My feed reader works by running once a day, at roughly the same time every day, and sending me an email of all of the things it's not seen before. Because of this I've not actually been able to get any output from the Youtube feeds for months because they always seem to be going down at about the same time of day. I didn't realise it was "only" intermittent.

I do find it a little bit funny that there's a quote in the article that says "A Kindle is a text device! There is no need for updates." and yet it runs an entire Linux installation.

I got my ADHD diagnosis privately (mostly because of the length of the NHS waiting lists, and I'm currently waiting on a NHS RTC provider to transfer my care there) and I pay the trade price plus pharmacy markup (so ~£40/mo) for my medication, for whatever it's worth as comparison.

Definitely not cheap (I would prefer the £9.90 NHS prescription fee) but I get the feeling that it's cheaper than I would pay elsewhere in the world anyway.

Sizing chaos 5 months ago

There is the fundamental thing of skeletal structure and build though - people naturally are entirely different shapes, regardless of fat or excess weight, wich is what the comment is mostly referring to in my eyes.

I'm built very tall and very spindly, so there are certain body shapes that I will never have (or want, but that's a different question) purely from the point of view that my body just isn't the right base shape to produce them.

I've been getting some of these these to my wildcard domain - I've had sign-up messages sent to diddy@<domain> and epstein@<domain>, which is... odd. And no, I can't say I've ever used those addresses.

ChatGPT Health 7 months ago

Medicated, diagnosed ADHD-haver speaking.

Unmanaged ADHD is dangerous, and incredibly detrimental to people's lives, but the level of such may not be entirely apparent to somebody until after they receive treatment. I think the attitude of being against medication for neurological issues where that is recommended by medical professionals (including where that for something perceived to not be detrimental enough) is, to say the least, risky.

I would perhaps encourage you to do some reading into the real-world ways ADHD affects people's lives beyond just what medical websites say.

To answer your questions, though:

* Medication vs coffee: yes, I don't notice any effect from caffeine

* Meds weakening over time: nope

* Medication cost: so worth it (£45/mo for the drugs alone in the UK) because I was increasingly not able to adapt or cope and continuing to try to do so may well have destroyed me

I really don't like this sentiment:

"Because I can get an answer from an LLM (which does need to be verified) in less than a minute versus the hours or days I would have to wait to get a toxic and potentially useless reply on stackoverflow. They should really downsize or just kill the company it’s a relic of the past and most developers won’t miss it."

To me, the value of StackOverflow is not in the ability to ask new questions, it's as a huge archive of questions that have already answered. Sure, new questions might be falling off and it might be decreasing in relevance, but that in no way means that a massively resource-intensive LLM regurgitating paragraphs of semi-duplicated text is better enough to justify canning it. (There's also the matter of all the other StackExchange sites, I have no idea what the state of the world is on those but I imagine they also have value in themselves.)

To this day, I find almost all of my low-level questions are still readily answered by StackOverflow, and it holds lots of discussion on higher-level questions that I find useful.

Does StackOverflow have an attitude problem? Absolutely. It is fair to say that most developers won't miss it? No.

Yeah, mine is also a little bit ridiculous. I think Spotify encourages a certain overconsumption of music; for me, the things on my liked list are not necessarily things that I value equally.

I buy things that I either already know or have discovered on Spotify and that I enjoy enough that I want to own, so I amass a collection of favourites over time. I would never buy everything I've ever liked on Spotify, but that is also because my personal goal is not to become entirely independent of Spotify. The goal is to be a bit more intentional, to have a bit more autonomy, and to avoid good things vanishing into the inky blackness of distribution rights being withdrawn.

I do enjoy the Spotify Wrapped stuff, but after moving partially to selfhosting Navidrome for a growing collection of rips and DRM-free purchases, I've been scrobbling everything (including Spotify) to Last.fm, which has a similar end-of-year round-up. It's pretty good, got mine a couple of days ago.

I love that it's possible to boot a raw Linux kernel this way; I only learned about it very recently when working on a university project. It makes me want to fiddle around with it more and really understand the nuts and bolts of a modern Linux system and work out what actually is responsible for what and, crucially, when it happens.

I see the contradiction there!

The bit about the "aims of the module" comes from its aims to get people thinking in a certain way about security, something I definitely already had. But that doesn't mean it had nothing to teach me - it was quite a while ago that I took it, but one exercise about the nuances of the setuid bit and how misconfigurations could be exploited stands out as something I doubt I'd have come across otherwise. There was also plenty of content on cryptography and basic binary reverse engineering/attacks that I'd not seen before.

My level of ability and knowledge isn't consistent - some places I'd dug into more, and some less. With tech, there's always a more detail to be explored and more learning to be done, even in areas I'm familiar with.

(I wrote the article)

The professor did take this very well, as it happened - he asked me to come along to one of his office hours to discuss how I did it and what I might do to prevent it, among other things. The quote "if you can exploit it like this, you're not really the target audience and you've already achieved the aims of the module" from the article is basically something he said to me word-for-word in that chat - in the end, it almost seemed like he was hoping someone would go after the implementation itself!

(I wrote this article)

This makes me think of a system that just got replaced where I work - multiple hundreds of temporary workers being tracked through their setup and onboarding processes through one massive Excel spreadsheet, saved on a shared Teams group that everyone edited at once. It was held together with prayers, fickle filters, custom views and loose validation rules and I hated it the whole time it was active. We'd frequently have to make sure to remove rows from it and put them in an archive spreadsheet to keep the main one performant enough to function - but that split made it difficult to sift through data when someone had an issue. Not to mention that records routinely went missing or got overlooked.

It's now a SharePoint database - I don't know what I think of that, but at least it was built for the job and has some solid integrations with other systems in it that make life easier.

Ohhhh, this felt so familiar. Listening to music while mindlessly scrolling and waiting for... something. Yikes. I really don't think I like technology any more.

The fact that Fastmail work like this, are transparent about what they're up to and how they're storing my email and the fact that they're making logical decisions and have been doing so for quite a long time is exactly the reason I practically trip over myself to pay them for my email. Big fan of Fastmail.