“Cognitive amplifier?” Bullshit. It demonstrably makes people who use it stupider and more prone to believing falsehoods.

Demonstrably proven, too.

EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use.

https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/

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Any Cyber professionals think I should just go all in and minor in IT or CS? Or does spreading out a bit more sound good?

Learn programming in your own time, as there’s ample resources to learn languages common to cybersecurity (C, C++, Python, <insert instruction set here> Assembler (if reverse engineering is your thing)) outside of college/university.

Pick something that makes you different and marketable against other cybersecurity majors. Given the way the world is going, look at political science, organised crime, or even counter-terrorism, as all of these have streams, if not rivers, into and out of cybersecurity these days.

It provides a much broader context around your cybersecurity studies, other than just being a technical resource, by understanding why threat actors use technical means to attack, rather than just ‘how’ or ‘with what’. Minoring in something other than a technical discipline would broaden your career options to policy roles, among others.

All that said, the minor subject(s) you choose must interest you. Japanese would be really useful to have in a cybersecurity role as it opens doors to communicate with other cybersecurity experts in their own language, including government authorities. Such skills may be desirable by the intelligence community, though I’d be wildly speculating here.

Use your minor to help you expose niches in the discipline that can help you pivot your career, and set you apart from an ocean of dime-a-dozen cybersecurity experts who just did broad, common, technical studies.

A word of advice: Play the long game. My advice may not immediately come to fruition when you land your first paid gig, but it will definitely become a useful playing card as your career develops, providing you maintain those skills. Hell, they don’t even need to be part of your minor subjects. Learning Japanese outside of college/university will still make you marketable.

They already do.

I knew of someone who kind of did, depending on which way you look at it. Only for one question though…

He noticed that the answer to a single question, was literally written on his otherwise exam-compliant calculator a few weeks before the exam, for high school math. The question often came up in practice tests. This calculator wasn’t programmable (in the sense you could store answers).

The question?

How many kilometres in a nautical mile? Answer: 1.852.

He figured out that the numbers in the centre row of the calculator lined up exactly with the decimal fraction:

7 8 9

4 5 6

1 2 3

So he drew a line around the calculator pad to link those numbers up. None of the teachers picked it up, as it looked like graffiti.

Police on Thursday found Wilga’s abandoned Mitsubishi van about 150km from Beacon in the Karroun Hill area, which has been described as remote and inhospitable country.

The first rule of venturing into the Australian outback:

• Never, ever, abandon your vehicle.

You become extremely hard to find wandering into the Australian wilderness. Many people have died this way thinking they’ll ‘walk to the nearest help’, which may be hundreds of kilometres away, through hostile dangerous heat during the day and extreme cold during the night.

Agreed. The books are just as good as the show.

https://revolt.chat/

It’s open source too.

I’ve often heard about these legitimate fears, though why would revealing Satoshi’s real identity destabilise the bitcoin economy/make him a target?

Genuinely unsure.

I’m not going to lie, it takes a lot of soul searching.

Start with what you’re passionate about. And I mean really passionate about. What could you talk to someone about for hours, or the one thing in your world that you want to make better, and it frustrates you that it isn’t.

Each journey is highly individual, though passion is a good place to start.

I have, without a word of a lie, watched Simon’s ‘Why’ talk at least two dozen times. I still get threads of gold from it each time I watch it, because each time I do watch it I’ve had a new experience, good or bad, that reinforces why I do what I do, and why they’ll likely have to drag me out in a body bag for me to truly leave what I do.

I’m just that passionate about it. However, that passion took years to develop. Indeed I didn’t even know I’d ultimately land in the career I’m in today 5 years ago, which was very different to my career path then.

Simon Sinek’s famous ‘Why’ speech.

It reminds me why it’s important to cut through bullshit and focus on what actually matters, by keeping in touch with my ‘why’, my “why do I get out of bed in the morning, and why should anyone care”, and how to communicate that to others.

https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?subtitle=en

https://archive.is/QqwRF

Same here, still on Windows 10 though it’s desperately trying to reinstall it’s crapware removed from the image with NTLite.

Will be switching to some flavour of Linux at some point (we also use this PC for some Steam games), so I’ll check SteamOS out!

I was skeptical at first though let me tell you, Kagi is so much better. I get exact search terms, which is immensely useful as a programmer, rather than providing results for what Google thinks I want to search for. It’s also really, really nice not seeing ads as search results anymore, ad blocker or no ad blocker.

Is it as comprehensive as Google search? It meets about 95-96% of my needs. I still use Google very infrequently for some really obscure domain specific searches if Kagi doesn’t find anything useful, though that’s getting rarer and rarer.

It’s also easy to block AI generated sites that pop up providing just enough likeness, but really are regurgitated AI trash, or are ‘Wikipedia clones’.

I have no financial interest in Kagi, other than paying to use it. It has certainly been worth it for me.

Same here, and additionally NTLite.

Having the ability to build custom Windows installations, including ‘in-place’ editing, and the ability to update Windows without Microsoft silently reinstalling shit I don’t want or need, with NTLite’s ‘Host Update’ wizard, it has been well worth the 40€ for each version (no subscription too!)

I really don’t want to sound like an ad, though NTLite has really made Windows a decent operating system again.

It certainly notable that Windows, once all of Microsoft’s crud is stripped out, doesn’t touch the CPU at idle, whereas a fresh install of Windows without customisation always consumed 2-3% of the CPU at idle.

Same with Inkscape vs Affinity Designer.

I really wanted Inkscape to work for me, though I was constantly fighting the UI and some weird artifacting Inkscape produced exporting SVG files.

Affinity Designer was, and still is, especially since their licenses are perpetual/non-subscription, well worth the price and is a dream to use.