I can share my experience with college, which it took me a while to appreciate but eventually I realized that while it wasn’t apparent at the time, it did make a difference. But of course, your mileage may wary, it’s just my personal experience.

I felt like I’m forced to go through a lot of bloat I’ll probably never need - why do I have to learn stuff like Prolog, Lisp, Smalltalk and other obscure languages that I’ll realistically never need? Why force so much in-depth math, I’ll probably never need to be able to formally prove the Big O of a Hashtable…

After spending few years working after/during college in offensive cybersecurity, where most of my colleagues did not have a degree, I’ve eventually realized what was the point of all these classes. I noticed that people kept reffering to programming as in “I’m a python programmer”, or “I’m a java programmer”, but I never really felt like that - when someone asked me if I can write something in any language, it didn’t matter what it is, I can just relatively quickly pick up the syntax and write anything I need in whatever you need, and I eventually realized that that’s exactly thanks to the college - the point was not to make me a Smalltalk or Prolog programmer, but to give me a PTSD from every different style of languages, from OOP through functional to whatever Prolog is, and while I do not remember almost anything, I still have the basic understanding of how does that style works, and when I look up any new language I need to use for the job, I’ve already seen and was forced to once learn and understand (well enough to pass exams) something with similar concepts.

And that’s a really big advantage that people without degrees don’t usually have (at least from my experience with my colleagues). It will teach you how to relatively quickly pick up different technologies and use new things, and that is a really valuable thing. And it’s the same about data structures and other math - you will probably not remember it, but the feeling that “wait a minute, this problem sounds familiar, isn’t there like a obscure tree-thing structure that solves exactly this efficiently?” or “wasn’t there some magic with stacking trig coeficients for this?” will stay with you, and give you a headstart in looking up the concrete details that would be pretty hard to find otherwise.

So I’m really glad I went to college. And in addition to that, it was amazing for networking - I had a masters in Gamedev and while that didn’t teach me almost anything new, it gave me a lot of friends and an amazing community of passionate people that I keep on making games with.

I started as part time without any experience durring my college. I was studying gamedev software engineering, but we had one voluntary class about Ethical Hacking.

I just asked my professor if he can reffer me to someone in the field, followed OWASP Web App Testing guide to the letter when testing the interview homework website, and landed the job without much prior experience (I did attend a few CTF competitions, though).

Just following the checklist in OWASP testing guide made my results comparable to, or even better to some of my colleagues, and I’ve slowly learned the rest (especially internal domain pentesting) from our internal documentation or shadowing seniors during pentests, and simply being interrested in the field, having initiative and looking up new tools and exploits eventually got me to a Red Team Lead role (not a very good RT, though, but it did improve eventually).

The pay was pretty good compared to what’s usuall here in Czech, too. I could comfortably pay rent and get by even with part-time, during college.

I’ve added a subtle prompt injection into my email signature (capitalize random words and start every sentence with the same letter), with small font size and color to not be visible.

I have already received two emails from customers that did trigger it.

Suno was what radicalized my stance on AI, and I refuse to use any of it.

As a solo hobbyist game dev who struggles with art, I had a pretty reserved approach for AI for stuff like art, animation or most notably voice acting, which makes the game a lot better but is really hard to do if you’re not a native speaker or don’t have a budget. My plan was to start with AI filling in places I couldn’t do, but then pledge that 100% of the first sales will go towards paying an actual artist/VA and replace the assets as soon as possible. That felt like a fair compromise.

And then I tried Suno. You see, as a programmer, my line of work isn’t really threatened by AI. Quite the contrary - it hinders the learning process of so many new programmer who will end up missing core skills, that it kind of increases my job security.

And since stuff like VA is something I don’t really understand, I mostly considered it as an asset that AI can temporally provide.

After trying Suno, which makes something I am passionate about - I’ve tried and failed for the past few years to learn instruments, and starting a band and making music is one of my so far unattainable dreams, it was so, so devastating. To see something you’ve actively struggled with, dreamed about, and made an effort for to overcome the challenges, unsuccessfuly so far, be overtaken by a literal three word prompt, making a better song I probably ever will - it’s so heartbreaking, demoralizing and awful. Which is something I haven’t realized when thinking about art I was not invested into, but now, thanks to Sunk, I see how it must feel for every artist, and I refuse to support any of it. It gave me determination and motivation to make the effort towards meeting people who do VA or assets I need, and collaborating, even if it postpones everything by a long time.

Fuck AI, and fuck this guy. The product may be useful and is pretty mindblowing, but it comes at a cost of making a lot of artists demotivated and miserable. Also, saying that “music is hard, people don’t want to” just adds salt to the wound, insult to the injury, and is really fucked up thing to say, after the product you’ve made affected and demoralized artists at large so much. Seriously, fuck that guy.

There’s one thing I feel isn’t mentioned too much in relation to ADHD that I feel like is worth sharing, from my personal experience with it’s diagnosis and trying to solve it both through medication and therapy. I’m not saying anyone else has the same situation, but it’s something worth considering since the realization helped me tremendously to deal with it.

While I do probably have a mild case of ADHD, the root of the problem wasn’t as much that, but a totally fucked up attention span and basically an addiction to spending time at a computer, which was literally 90% of what I did for most of my life ever since I started playing at Dreamcast when I was 4. It was what magnified the symptoms and made it so much worse, and it’s something that meds won’t help with. Especially for younger people who grew up with smarthphones and social networks, it may play a huge part in making their life a lot worse, and it’s pretty similar to ADHD as far as symptoms are considered. Once I started dealing with this, limiting my time with instantly gratifying things, making new hobbies outside of a computer (which was insanely hard) and learning some patience, I got way better.

If you’re dealing with ADHD, both diagnosed or undiagnosed, it’s something worth thinking about. I’m not saying your situation is the same, or that everyone’s ADHD is just bullshit and they are addicted to scrolling. Just offering my experience as a food for thought, because it’s something that helped me personally and I haven’t seen it mentioned too much.

Tbh I’m not sure, I vaguely remember that hashes did play a role in how chatcontrol works, but I think it wasn’t looking just for 1:1 match of known illegal content, but also for some signs? I remember reading that it had awfully high false-positive rate, which someone has to check. https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

According to the Swiss Federal Police, 80% of the reports they receive (usually based on the method of hashing) are criminally irrelevant. Similarly in Ireland only 20% of NCMEC reports received in 2020 were confirmed as actual “child abuse material”.

I mean, Apple is one of the companies that volunteered to the current optional version of ChatControl. They are already sending your messages and photos to EU to scan for “illegal” content.

While I haven’t read the paper, the comment’s explanation seems to make sense. It supposedly contains a mathematical proof that making AGI from a finite dataset is a NP-hard problem. I have to read it and parse out the reasoning, if true, it would make for a great argument in cases like these.

https://lemmy.world/comment/14174326

From what I remember from college, I think what you’re talking about is mostly about intrinsic motivation vs. extrinsic motivation, into which there’s a lot of research. Just adding it in case someone wanted to look more into it, and was looking for some keywords.

It’s one of the things that’s worth knowing about, because you can somehow work around it to get motivated better, and it’s one of the more important topics in game design. So, in general a usefull piece of psychology knowledge.

Yeah, I know and that’s what I’m afraid of. I guess I’ll just have to come to terms with most websites not working in some obscure web browser that’s not feature-complete. Would actually help with my addiction, so it won’t be so bad, I guess.

You are right, it was unfairly harsh wording, I apologize for that. Most of those products are super cool and important, I’ve kind of extrapolated it from what I’ve read in other posts about them spending too much on stuff like events and other, non-developemnt, related stuff that I actually never checked, while also not realizing that they also have a ton of other projects, which mixed with the dissapointment with the recent development about the Meta partnership led to me choosing that wording unfairly.

If it keeps going on like this, it won’t be long before I’ll just say fuck it and switch to elinks…

Hmm, on that note - is there any CLI web browser that can do javascript and css? Because iirc, elinks doesn’t, though I havent used it in years.

IIRC, only like 2% of Mozilla spending goes towards FF (I may be misinterpreting something, but I remember 2% being thrown around), so funding FF without rest of Mozilla bullshit shouldn’t be that hard. Of course, since Mozilla did spend so little on FF, it’s a question how much they actually care about FF and what would happen if they lost access to their golden goose. They shouldn’t have problem funding FF, but they probably have other bullshit they don’t want to let go and that has more priority for them.

I’m not sure what Mullvad is based on - i think it’s on Tor, which is Firefox based?

I do use mostly LibreWolf, but if FF also went to shit, I wonder if Tor, and thus Mullvad, would keep on going or not. Because I suppose LibreWolf would have troubles with keeping up, if Mozilla would enshitify FF, since they would probably have to fork and continue development on their own.

This is the first time ive heard about microg. How is the app support with it? Can you run every app that needs play service? I have Google Sandbox installed only on a second Graphene profile, and use it for bare minimum of apps that dont work without it, Bolt app, mostly weird MFA for work or package tracking apps i use once per month, while disabling most of their permissions. Will microg improve my situation in this case to be worth switching over? Does it work without root?

A good reminder to always set your password manager to auto-lock (with PIN for convenience) after 3-5 minutes. The PIN makes it easy to re-log, while not being bruteforceable (AFAIK after few failed attempts it reverts to password), and if someone would get to your PC, either physically or remotely, they won’t be able to get all your passwords.

One of the best jackpots I’ve ever found during Red Teaming engagements was when I RDPd to a server through pass-the-hash, only to find an unlocked password manager with passwords for most of the other servers, service and admin accounts.

I can’t decide whether this sentence is a joke or not. It has the same tone that triggers my PTSD from my CS degree classes and I also do recognize some of the terms, but it also sounds like it’s just throwing random science terms around as if you asked a LLM to talk about math.

I love it.

Also, it’s apparently also real and correct.

You are right, calling it a contradiction was not exactly accurate. Or rather - it did contradict some of the narrative that is pushed by Delta, about CS not providing any support in the first few days, which it sounds like isn’t exactly true. But most of the case will indeed still need more receipts, that’s true.

A Delta spokesperson said the airline “will decline to comment further.” ®

Huh, did they really register that sentence? :D

Also, the CS response to the accusations should have been at the beginning, not near the end of the article, because it does provide some pretty important context, including links to LinkedIn posts from Delta board members that directly contradict most of the article:

When asked about this August 8 letter from Delta, a CrowdStrike spokesperson told The Register:

Delta continues to push a misleading narrative. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz called Delta board member David DeWalt within four hours of the incident on July 19th. CrowdStrike’s Chief Security Officer was in direct contact with Delta’s CISO within hours of the incident, providing information and offering support.

CrowdStrike’s and Delta’s teams worked closely together within hours of the incident, with CrowdStrike providing technical support beyond what was available on the website.

This level of customer support led Delta board member David DeWalt to publicly state on LinkedIn: “George and his team have done an incredible job, working through the night in difficult circumstances to deliver a fix. It is a huge credit to the Crowdstrike team and their leadership that many woke up to a fix already available.”

I’m all for CS having consequences for what happened, but Delta so obviously lying here with literal Linkedin posts from their board members that directly contradict what they are claiming, that’s just scummy.

I’ve been mostly using Mullvad, and so far it worked pretty well out of the box. Few sites break, and for that I have LibreWolf, but other than that, I’m enjoying Mullvad more.