Lawyers, accountants, and software engineers accumulate these things like you wouldn't believe. We can't tell you about current secrets, only stale ones.

I once knew that the top level password used at a corporation valued at 6 billion dollars was 'password123'. They had no backups, no VPN, and that password was used at all the high-value access points. It's since been fixed, but it was that for years.

So, in the fine tradition of using bananas for scale...

Bananas are slightly more radioactive than the background, due to potassium-40 content. So an informal unit of radiation measure in educational settings is the 'banana-equivalent-dose', which is about 0.1 microsieverts.

My particle spectrometer saw first light today, and I figure that I could use a banana to calibrate it. Then I noticed that K-40 undergoes a rare (0.001%) decay to 40Ar, emitting a positron. So not only is a banana a decent around-the-house radioisotope source, it's also an antimatter source.

Truly a remarkable and versatile fruit.

Instead of wind mills, you could have gravity mills. Pump water into a higher-altitude reservoir on low-gravity days, and let it flow down -- turning a turbine -- on high gravity days. At least electricity would be cheap.

Or if it varies by region, pump water horizontally (or let it flow slightly downward) from a high gravity region to a low one. Then pump the water upwards there, then horizontally again to the high gravity region. Then let it fall down to turn a turbine that runs all the pumps -- perpetual motion (ish)!

Predicting tides becomes hard. Everything is going to be really windy all the time, as the atmosphere expands in low-gravity regions and contracts in high gravity ones. This makes tall buildings impractical, as they would also have to be built for some maximum gravity rating on top of the constant gravity storms.

The oceans would be weird, and violent. Hurricanes might get far more powerful than what we deal with, if the right gravity conditions occur.

For any sort of civilization to emerge, gravity would have to change/vary really slowly. I don't even want to think of orbits. Kerbal Space Program would be like, really hard in that universe.

A pocketwatch manufactured in 1889. I keep it running as a memento mori: the watch may outlive the watchmaker. Build things well -- they may be all people remember you by, one day.

I also have a slide rule at my desk at most times, to remind me of false-precision.

I guess the oldest though, is a Wu Zhu coin from the Three Kingdoms period (currency is a technology, too?). I keep it to remember that all empires arise from chaos, and must return to it; that all assets eventually have no value. That the things that endure, are stranger currencies still.

AI model weights. Patches for MMOs (World of Warcraft famously used this to good effect).

I issued a (valid) DMCA notice to a small corporation who used the intellectual property of a colleague but did not pay them for it (they promised payment in writing, then just... didn't pay for a year or more). Their whole business website was down for a week or more as a result, as their registrar just took down their website without checking anything, and they didn't really have technical staff to resolve it.

The whole DMCA system is quite a broken mess, and is often (usually?) used unethically. However, it is possible to use correctly, even by private individuals. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it a little, that day.

I design electronics sometimes. Generally, people want an indicator light on their product, since it's a cheap way to show the state of a system.

The main problem is, the human eye adapts to darkness. You can still clearly see an LED in a dark room when a few microamperes pass through them, but then they are useless in brighter light in that case. There's no specific amount of current that produces light that's bright enough in a lit room, but isn't too bright in a dark room.

I can fix that by occasionally turning off the LED and measuring voltage across it (LEDs detect light in addition to emitting it), then dimming it if I'm in a dark room. However, this is quite complicated to do and requires a capable microcontroller and a pretty ninja embedded systems programmer. Most product developers I know won't think of specifically doing this.

Finally, I can save 0.1 cents (plus board space plus assembly complexity, which cost more) by connecting an LED directly to the pins of a microcontroller instead of using a resistor to limit current. Some microcontrollers specifically allow this, up to 10 or 20 milliamperes, which is enough to be too bright in some contexts already. Margins on hardware manufacture are extremely thin, so optimizing even 1 cent off a board is pretty important.

All of this together leads to a lot of LED proliferation, which I' don't like either. The stuff I build for myself often has a way to control the LED brightness, although this would be too expensive to add to a consumer product as a general rule. For small devices, there's a tilt switch inside that turns off the indicator LEDs if you turn it upside down and hold it for a few seconds. That way you can just reach over at night and fix it without fiddling for switches or controls.

Not having a Facebook profile. I've had someone initially refuse to associate with me on the basis that they couldn't investigate my life beforehand.

I just laughed and asked them how they managed to survive before the Internet (we were both old enough). We both got over the weirdness of the situation, built a robot, and were friends for a while before they moved away.

Volunteer work is my go-to answer in these situations.

I'm around 40, am always very busy with work, and I can't hold complex conversations in the language that 95% of the population of my country speaks exclusively. My personal interests are extremely technical, and unusual (bordering on arcane). So meeting new friends is a bit of a challenge for me too.

It was still a very effective way to meet awesome people of all ages, some younger, some older! I even met my wife that way.

Oh this happened to me in reverse. My workplace (a client's office, technically) dumped a bunch of stuff at my house without permission, and I did not keep it. Expected me to store boxes and boxes of financial records, for infinity years, no contract or anything. They also defaulted on money owed to me, which I had to pay taxes on, even though I received nothing. Never have I met such an arrogantly entitled company owner.

Sold it all as scrap paper. Recovered 0.005% of the money owed this way. Later their company was dissolved due to nonpayment of taxes. If they ever come back to the country, they may have heir passport withheld until they pay what's owed. Which is whatever the tax department says it is, because they have no financial records.

Oh in English -- I used to say renumerate (numerate a second time) instead of remunerate (pay someone for a thing).

When space, time, or power it requires is no longer a good trade in exchange for the task it completes.

I live in Asia, so the space something physically takes up is often the biggest cost. The footprint of my house is like 25 square meters, so if I want to keep a bunch of older computers around, I'm going to need to rent a bigger house.

My time has also grown more expensive over the years.

I rather like KDE Connect.

I've got some form of open source sensors multitool that gives me the raw data from my phone's sensors. That helps me troubleshoot other sensors at work.

Oh and while not strictly speaking an app itself, I rather like Godot. Within a day I was writing my own android apps (it uses a Python-like scripting language). Mostly stuff to send/receive UDP networking packets to test various systems. So my next favorite android app might be one I write myself ;)

That I can't do religious stuff! I don't have to believe in the religious components to participate in an event that holds meaning to you. To me it's not sacred -- all just normal words being said and ordinary matter being handled according to some rules. I do that every day at work at the direction of a different kind of "higher power" (clients) without anger or discomfort, it's really not a big deal!

I'm not angry at god for not existing, nor am I angry at all the people who believe otherwise. If the invitation to your religious event is in good faith, I'm honored to attend, and will just keep to myself or make small talk. Plus I've studied enough faiths I can probably fake it, if keeping the situation under control requires it ;)

I've discovered that in practice, many people of different faiths are not sure what to think about this position. Most are OK with it, some not (I just give them their space). With the interesting exception of Buddhists! They've always been super excited to bring me along to the pagoda somehow. No one ever tried to convert me, and the monks often speak a surprising number of languages and are interesting and well traveled. It's become a set of surprisingly wholesome memories (I immigrated to a primarily Buddhist country)!

Vietnam. I've never seen someone with a gun that wasn't army, police, or at an Olympic event. Civilians can only own shotguns, and even then under a lot of restrictions. It's quite uncommon but I've heard of companies with rubber plantations out in the middle of nowhere having one gun on site. I've only heard of it being used to kill the odd wild boar that accidentally wanders into the office building.

There are some illegal guns from time to time, but not that many. It's something I've only seen on the news.

The current situation suits me just fine -- at our population density, I'm not comfortable with gun ownership being widespread. When you put enough people in a small space, there's always someone angry nearby, always someone celebrating, being born, dying. With everything happening everywhere all at once, adding guns to the mix would not be great, I think.

Also as one of very few immigrants to Vietnam, I am already seen as a target for thieves. People imagine I must be magically very wealthy or something -- I'm not. I came here with nothing and built a company, to progress to maybe middle-class. I live in the slums quietly like a normal person.

I would be OK with the police or army running shooting ranges where you could rent a gun to practice target shooting. Maybe that already exists, for all I know. I haven't really checked. There are archery ranges though, this is good enough for me :D

On the other hand -- more or less all citizens are trained to service an assault rifle. The means disassembly, cleaning, maintenance. My wife was fastest in her university class. We just don't own guns.

Usually some form of business plan that amounts to sanctions / regulatory avoidance presented with a straight face to a panel of VCs / investors / potential partners. Then the underlying structure is a Ponzi scheme.

My strategy so far has been to ask "how is your business plan different from just doing crimes?" with a voice loud enough that people outside the meeting room can overhear -- like in some cartoon where some character says all the quiet parts loudly and the loud parts quietly.

Hopefully with time, people will stop bringing this kind of crud to the table, or at least stop inviting me to the meetings.

We live in rented honeycomb-like structures to extract maximum rental value, performing all our work in VR offices managed by social media companies. The concepts of "home" and "alone" no longer exist.

Historians rediscover the original movie Home Alone, and over the course of 16 academic papers, explore these antiquated notions. The first four papers cover the economics by which noncorporate entities have legal rights and may own land. The next four the idea that some places could be different from others, making leisure travel relevant. After that, the idea that physical goods could be owned (and therefore "stolen" by "thieves"), not only leased as a DRM-protected service.

The final four papers are just screaming.

Plain old static HTML is fine, and you can host it on a potato! Here are some design tips to keep it easy to read. None of them are objectively correct, and you are already doing some of them. They are just some suggestions as you move forward:

1. Don't use dark-on-dark fonts. Use near-black on off-white or at least something high contrast.
2. Break up content using horizontal rules <hr> and various headers <h1 to h6> You can style both of them in css. This keeps things easy to find and read.
3. Generally, do not center-align text if it is more than one line. If you need to display blocks of text side-by-side, put each in a container then left-align the text within those containers.
4. Use a bigger font than you think is strictly necessary.
5. My preference is to use sans-serif fonts. Google makes some good free ones. Sometimes I'll go back and make titles serif only.
6. Resize and compress your images. A bit higher resolution than you need but with lower quality is usually better than the reverse (for jpegs)

Primarily, that what we learn from history, is that we do not learn from history.

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.

An interesting realization was that "saving money" and "reducing waste" are often competing optimums. I live in the developing world where there people waste a lifetime sitting at home doing nothing to save money. I am one of two or three people in my neighborhood with a job -- the rest "save tons more money than I do" but don't have jobs so their real income after inflation is negative.

Anyway, I figure out what my time is worth (based on what I estimate I could earn by grabbing extra contract work). Then I don't spend my time saving money unless it saves something at least comparable to my hourly rate, or it's in a context where working would be impossible, or there's a nontangible element (e.g. repairing a thing I like a lot).

I prioritize not wasting my time first (it's the only resource I can't buy more of), and spend most of my spare effort finding ways to make more money (I regularly cram-study 2-3 hours per day for this purpose, usually tech). Then with the extra money I make, I can save 80% of my income on a good month.

When I started this habit, I made about 135 USD per month and had zero savings. Even if I saved 100% of my earnings, it still amounts to essentially nothing -- so it became obvious that the best way to save more money, was to earn more money. When I had a little money, I didn't put it in the bank -- I invested it in myself by buying tools to learn more things and provide more services to accelerate my gains.

Anyway it's not the right advice for everyone, I'm just another fool like the rest of us, but I hope it's maybe useful to someone out there.

Back in uni, my colleagues and I had something we called "default mode" -- the idea that all technology had an inherent desire to kill all humans or otherwise be as destructive to life and property as possible. "Default mode" had to be actively prevented by careful engineering -- e.g. all devices are assumed to be maximally harmful until you engineer them to be otherwise with a high degree of confidence.

We also had something we called "destructive optimization". This was essentially the elimination of an object that was so poorly fitted to it's purpose that it made it actively harder to do the intended thing. So, like smashing a tool that is so bad, that the task is easier to accomplish without it. Often, these tools would be inherited from graduating grad students on the instruction of a well-meaning supervisor. For example an overly complex and poorly documented robotic arm that has weird bugs inherent to the design, iterated on a dozen times -- less work to redo than fix!

The terms are best used in tandem, e.g. "it entered default mode, and had to be destructively optimized".

Nearly two decades later, I still think in these terms and laugh about it (while also taking them seriously). I now own an engineering company. My focus is still firmly on preventing "default mode". I also make OK money "destructively optimizing" software tools sometimes.

I think most people expect me to say something about science or engineering.

In reality, I would be happiest if I was remembered for being a worthy partner to my wife.

A lesson that took me a long time to learn, and at terrible personal cost, is that being smart doesn't matter very much. I was good at academic stuff as a kid, so tons of adults told me that was the most important thing ever, and I've come to realize that was wrong of them.

Let's say, as a fictional example, that I'm top 1% of the population in terms of some abstract measure of intelligence (IQ is an awful one, but let's not get caught up on that). If no one values time spent with people on a lower rung, not only can I not spend time with the people below me on the curve, but people higher won't spend time with me. That gives me such a tiny fraction of the population I can interact with, it's absurd! Meanwhile, people smarter than me are still common enough that I'd encounter several a day -- I'm hardly exceptional enough to be terribly important. What a lonely life that would be!

So three further lessons I've learned, and I think these are important, go something like this:

1. Intellectual challenges are not scarce. They are a dime a dozen, I can invent them myself inside my head, or pick any number of other problems online. Sometimes I can get paid to solve them, whatever. So I don't need more people to give me those. What's really valuable are the people that challenge you to grow, to become more. It doesn't take intelligence to look you in the eyes when you're being a smartass, and ask you "Do you want to be right, or helpful?".
2. Better to look for (and learn from) people who are kind and wise than who are smart. The opposite of a great truth is another great truth, the opposite of wisdom and kindness are substantially less desirable.
3. The harshest lessons in life are always when you trust the wrong person. Harsher still, is when this person was yourself. So it's wise to enter all relationships carefully -- with respect, I don't think the fact you are thinking about this beforehand is wrong, but your focus might be misplaced. I'm just a stranger on the Internet though.

Hm, sound like abuse of power to me. I'd wish for the genie to lose the ability to grant wishes. It needs to be cursed though, so I'd have to help with that.

Since it can still offer wishes, just not grant them... I'd help it learn to code. It could have a bright future as the CTO of a tech startup in the next hype cycle. I would not invest.

I wonder how many times this has already happened.

One thing you can personally do is try to cultivate friendships on both sides, and make an effort to share and appreciate the culture, history, and daily challenges of each. If we have populations that really don't want to fight, maybe that will help de-escalate things a bit.

China is my neighbor now (I immigrated to Asia). Some of their literature and history is really quite interesting! I'm not an expert, but I could make a suggestion or two if you like.

I think a key observation in my childhood, was that adults don't generally know what's best, or right, or even what's true. Intentions mattered more than some arbitrary 'correct' behavior. I figure all children work this out at some level, faster than we're willing to acknowledge :D

So I guess yeah, it is a bit weird, but that doesn't make it bad. Maybe the best we can do is suggest parents hold their children's best interests at heart, and do what's best for their specific situation.

No.

Honestly running a business in Asia is like... 35% harassing people who haven't paid you. I hear it's pretty similar elsewhere but can't confirm.

I immigrated to Vietnam. That was ok.

Visiting north America again years later was quite a shock!

I'm the only person I've ever seen on Lemmy running an instance from a nominally communist country (maybe there are others?). You can come hang out with me I guess. I'm not qualified to be a proper communist though -- I've read very little of the literature, and leave politics to the Party. Which I am not even actually a member of. I'm basically Boxer from Animal farm, but ended up happily married and with a decent standard of living instead of shipped off to the glue factory.

I'm am a mercenary science hermit though, so my instance is very quiet! There are three people on my instance, two are me and the other is a bot I wrote doing I-Ching divinations using physics.

The Vinegar Tasters.

Confucius, Mencius and Laozi taste vinegar from the same pot. Their perception of its quality is determined by their philosophy, and shown in their facial expressions: One sour, one bitter, one sweet. So it is with life -- even in the same situation, different people will react differently based on their outlook on life.

To me, the painting is a reminder not to fill myself with bitter or angry thoughts. There are many things wrong with the world, but these can simply be stored as facts, rather than dwelled upon and thereby passed on to others in anger.

Consider the story of the vinegar pot as an allegory for social media, perhaps.

The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester, specifically (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur%E2%80%93Vaidman_bomb_tester).

Next, that I can buy and program a computer for 0.30 USD that's half the size of a grain of rice (ATtiny10). There are cheaper too, but that's the one I like.

Finally, on to the horrifying: Boltzmann brains. The idea that given a reasonable interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics, and long spans of time, the most common form of brain in the universe ought to be one that forms due to random fluctuations. It exists for long enough to have exactly one thought (e.g. recall a false memory), then dissipates.

This ought to be by far the most common form of conscious mind in the Universe. In a sense, you could say it 'blows' the general case of minds.

Since you are a mind, statistically, you ought to be a Boltzmann brain. You may not be, but are unable to prove otherwise, even to yourself. So either we have some things left to learn about thermodynamics, or the most probable outcome at all times is that you cease to exist immediately after having your current thought (although I hope you don't). Sleep tight!

The officer would likely look up, tell you to get out, and go back to their work unless there was some obvious reason to arrest you.

Unless they felt like issuing a fine of some type for wasting their time.

Some ideas:

1. A fast way to dig holes, if 'soil' or 'stone' is an object.
2. Annoy physics teachers -- move in and out to drive a piston. Perpetual motion!
3. Moving day is easy.
4. Server farm.
5. Safe house.
6. Is momentum conserved? Not sure how general relativity would work. Win a Nobel Prize.
7. Building stuff in space just got a lot easier and safer. 27 cubic meters of free payload!

Not sure! However, it's possible the coin cell that keeps the BIOS settings was removed or dead. This forces the BIOS into default configuration on boot, which may have caused a boot failure if you needed some specific hardware configuration set in BIOS.

Maybe they used it as a way to control computer access, but it seems more likely that they just didn't get around to replacing the coin cell :D

You're setting them up for a lifetime of being unable to fill out online forms (because supported characters ,minimum field lengths, &c &c always seem to be implemented poorly client side or in the DB). Some required by the government or bank or airline or police. Forcing them to go through a long manual process, if it even exists.

Then staff will make a typo in the name every time, and be locked out of their own bank account / government portal / hospital records because it doesn't match their ID. It will take months to fix each time, and half the time they will make the same mistake again, or a different one.

I go through this enough as an immigrant, and my name is 4 letters long and they are all on every keyboard. Having a name foreign to your country of residence sucks.

Electronics repair and manufacture. I do this sometimes professionally -- however my special talent is doing it with none of the right tools or parts. It's mostly hilarious and not useful at work, where I need to use the right parts so you can scale to manufacture.

I once fixed a DVD drive using a gas stove. A graphics card with a tube of toothpaste and some rubber bands. A Macbook with half a cardboard box. Today I built a microphone amplifier from a broken Android development board, a IC from a particle detector, and surface-mount resistors and capacitors from a dozen different things. I could probably work as an engineer in Kerbal Space Program :D

Motorcycle helmets, and lawyers.

Most other things, I cheap out on -- for example for my professional tools, I buy a lot of good midrange Chinese brands. Usually quality is high and price is affordable. Same goes for phones, laptops, gadgets, and so on. I live near China though.

I live in Asia. It already is like that here.

No room to live, and no room to die. Hell is a kettle with a concrete sky.

A lot of the underlying scams are very low-tech. I sometimes work for VCs and get asked to investigate blockchain stuff (a lot in 2022, not so much now!). I've vetoed 100% of deals after investigation. For brevity, I'll only describe the main two type of crime I've encountered.

Embezzlement of funds raised is a common one. Most are not exactly criminal masterminds though, and you can see the project accounts being emptied steadily into exchange accounts if you're really determined.

A lot of the rest is wash trading. Usually exchanges will give you a zero-trading-fees account, and tell you that you need to maintain a minimum volume, wink wink. So most of these scammers just trade between accounts they own, to create the illusion of a sudden rise in price (coinciding with a marketing push). This you can also sometimes catch by looking at orderbook timing. Sometimes you can break their bots too. Often they hire external entities to manage this, so won't notice overnight.

Anyway, in this last case there is usually just an illusion of people making money at the top. The price spikes, but the whole orderbook is just someone trading with themselves. So if you buy in, they take your payment (and they make a little money)... but there's no one to actually sell to. You can detect this sometimes by looking for orders being placed then filled within very short time intervals. A lot of these groups make a lot less money than they claim to!

This is easier for NFTs because they are non-fungible. One way you can do this is to track which ones are owned by your company and which are something someone else bought. So you only trade the NFTs that are internally owned in a way that makes them look like they constantly increase in price. Once an NFT is sold to an external account, you cross it off the list and never buy it back, and it's magically immediately worthless.

If you mention these activities on their official channels, they will just ban you.

There's also a whole slew of regulatory compliance issues, fake legal opinions, and so on... but I'll spare you those as it is more boring to read about.

The whole blockchain space is a cesspool of inequity. Stay far away, unless you just like playing around with cryptography for fun. In that case, it's a cool toy and it's fun to build a few blockchains in an afternoon to play around with before getting bored and moving on to other technology. I have built a dozen or so blockchains and a few smart contracts to make sure I fully understand the technology before recommending my clients reject investment deals. This has (perhaps ironically) made me somewhat of an expert in the domain, albeit an unwilling one. I consider that path a career dead-end, and look forward to slowly forgetting about it.