“real” is subjective.

I guess you are saying that everyone on Lemmy is on the spectrum. That kinda tracks…

I taught myself QuickBasic as it was the only thing I knew that was related to copying C64 BASIC out of magazines. (QBasic was packaged with DOS 3.11 I think and I was able to get a full copy of QuickBasic somehow. That was about +30 years ago? Dunno. I was about 12 at the time.) I didn’t know what other languages were out there besides TurboPascal. I did learn simple Pascal, but that was a short chapter.

I actually met someone else in the area that was learning to code, and of course, we wanted to write a game. The only way to code for a mouse at the time was to write an INT33 handler, so it kicked off our interest in asm. (I still use asm for MCU stuff on occasion, but it’s limited.) I quickly diverged into writing some really nifty… eh… “boot sector code” so that kicked off my career in security.

And yeah, it’s the same phenomenon for me: I just think in terms of bits and bytes getting shifted around and I still refuse to believe in “magic”. (Slight jab at Rust coders there, but in good fun.)

Fast forward to today, I train “kids” fresh out of college as part of my job now. The first thing I do is start giving them weird tasks that require they actually understand how something like an fopen() actually works.

(Funny story. I refused to “show my work” in math class for simple f(x) problems as I viewed it as unoptimized code. Lulz. I was such an autistic dork.)

That, 200%!

When I started in computers, years ago, I transitioned from QuickBasic directly into assembly. Ever since then, I can kinda “read the Matrix” (Blond, Brunette, Redhead…) and forget about how confusing a raw binary or how a mess of a dmp looks to someone else. (To me, I really just see patterns and nothing massively complicated.)

“It’s just data.” - You would be surprised how fuzzy that statement is for some people. It’s almost exactly like telling someone who doesn’t speak any English that “the sky is blue”. It’s totally cool though! Learning about the internals of any computer is really just a very long chain of “aha moments” as many concepts aren’t intuitive.

I would look into something like Doppler instead of Vault. (I don’t trust any company acquired by IBM. They have been aquiring and enshittifying companies before there was even a name for it.)

Look into how any different solutions need their keys presented. Dumping the creds in ENV is generally fine since the keys will need to be stored and used somehow. You might need a dedicated user account to manage keys in its home folder.

This is actually a host security problem, not generally a key storage problem per se. Regardless of how you have a vault setup, my approach here is to create a single host that acts as a gateway for the rest of the credentials. (This applies to if keys are stored in “the cloud” or in a local database somewhere.)

Since you are going to using a Pi, you should focus on that being a restricted host: Only run your chosen vault solution on it. Period. Secure and patch it to the best of your ability and use very specific host firewall rules for minimum connectivity. Ie: Have one user for ssh in and limit another user account to managing vault, preferably without needing any kind of elevated access. This is actually a perfect use case for SELinux since you can put in some decent restrictions on the host for a single app (and it’s supporting apps…)

If you are paranoid enough to run a HIDS, you can turn on all the events for any type of root account actions. In theory once the host is configured, you shouldn’t need root again until you start performing patches.

I dump memory more often than you would think. It’s usually not obfuscated or encrypted in any meaningful way even though it is fairly trivial to do so.

It’s good practice to scour through any bloatware installed on windows laptops. Since bloatware is generally written by the lowest bidder, you can find all kinds of keys and phone-home urls (sometimes with all the parameters) and other weird things. Just fire up a decent hex editor and search for strings in the dump file. You don’t need to know jack about reverse engineering either.

I remember a couple of first dreams from before I was a toddler. (I have memories from a loooong time ago, actually.) My dreams at the time kinda blended with reality and I couldn’t tell the difference.

Addendum: https://youtu.be/KSTFKJqy9AQ

Mistakes are OK! (I added the word “intentional” as an afterthought to cover this contingency as the statement still remains true.)

True. It does match the profile, but I am usually not in the habit of profile diving unless I smell a troll.

Nothing better than a match in a high oxygen environment.

Intentional poor spelling.

Mostly by Indian and Vietnamese slave labor: https://www.androidauthority.com/where-are-samsung-phones-made-3251712/

That’s what you just got shown: Shove the configgy bits into Git.

You will likely have to find the configs you want to save first.

Solar panels are more efficient closer to the equator because of the most direct light from the sun. At higher or lower latitudes, there is more atmosphere for the light to pass through. The actual distance from the sun is basically irrelevant without an atmosphere. There might be a measurable difference based on distance alone but not much.

Efficiency does not generally equate to optimal power generation. There are probably hundreds of other variables that directly translate to maximum power production.

Gamers Nexus recently made a video about GPU “shrinkflation”: https://youtu.be/2tJpe3Dk7Ko

It’s a neat comparison of Nvidia GPUs over the years.

This is my opinion, but yeah. It’ll take some time.

The biggest issue is that money has moved to safer for investments. Those new investments may take time to mature and/or avoid tax penalties.

Another component is that hedge funds are likely the ones taking money out of the market in a huge way right now. Hedge funds normally specialize in short selling and there is no better time to close or massively reduce those short positions. (They have other strategies, but their main function is in their name.) They can’t close their positions rapidly, or it will trigger a faux rebound in stock prices. (Short sales are weird like that. It may be one of the reasons you see short bounces in price as a stock price is cratering.)

Unfortunately, the tarrifs are shifting investment policy against the US now from other countries. This will take years to recover from.

What will really suck is that I have always speculated that these tarrifs are just the worst kind of insider trading strategy you will ever see. If the intent was to temporarily dump stock prices for the benefit of a few, I really don’t think it’s going to work like it did during COVID. COVID didn’t force massive global policy changes against the US the same way. Even if orange man decides to reverse course and lift tarrifs tomorrow, the damage has been done and there is no reason to restore previous investments. The risk is too high.

Just thought I would add that there is nothing to be embarrassed about having a probe going where you typically wouldn’t want one. The doctors should have a very mechanical view of the human body and they shouldn’t care about anatomy. I am a huge proponent of getting a colonoscopy when needed. They can save your life. Most of all, you need them at regular intervals. Thankfully, they should be a few years apart.

I actually woke up during my last colonoscopy, to the weird feeling getting poked at from inside my body. (Get your giggles out of the way, kids.) My recovery time from anesthesia is super-quick usually, and will mention that for my next colonoscopy. I’ll be on my feet in about 10mins from when I open my eyes. The experience is always different from person to person. (I also was a serious drunk for a number of years, so operating at 25% was kinda normal, I suppose.)

Instances don’t have to be federated and instances federate and defederate from each other often enough. The goals of instances may not align, and to keep conflict low(er) it’s better if some instances cut ties.

TBH, this sounds like a technical issue between ml and nl or just a typo in the way you are posting.

While I thought it was basically an on/off switch for defederation, I suppose there could be a way to block updates from instances without fully defederating.

I am not going to get into the drama, but ml is defederated at a little higher frequency, but it’s not as high as some others. It’s because reasons, and is not relevant to this particular thread.

It’s not a horrible write-up but it doesn’t do much to simplify things. If I had to explain these concepts as close to an ELI5 as I could, I would use less words.

Photons have characteristics of both a wave and a particle. In many ways, it’s easier to think of a photon as an interaction point. As a wave propagates, any collision point could be thought of as a photon. You shake some electrons in one antenna, they create a wave through the air, the wave propagates until it hits another antenna and the photons are where that wave starts to shake another bunch of electrons.

I am not quite sure what they were trying to explain about waveform collapse, TBH. There is just a probability curve about where a photon will “exist” at a specific time. You can’t predict the location of a photon, but you can observe it. There isn’t really a physical “collapse” of anything. The probability curve “collapses” into a single point once observed. There is no probability once something is observed. It’s there or it isn’t, so the math function has “collapsed”: There isn’t a need to calculate probability at that time.

This is far from perfect, but it’s probably easier to digest. I don’t even want to know how much physics I broke with my descriptions, but I do know it’s easier to visualize.