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Cake day: March 20th, 2025

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  • Genetics also plays a large part in greying. I started going grey in my early 20’s. Rather than fight it, I chose to embrace it. I’m in my mid 30’s now, probably ~40% grey, and consistently get “silver fox” and “salt and pepper” types of comments. Fighting against it often leads to people spotting when you need to touch up your roots. But embracing it and styling your hair to accentuate it will make it look much more natural and attractive.


  • My office is bad about the cookie thing too. My office is split across two different buildings.

    I have worked here for several years, and we only found out a month ago that the main building has free bagels in the break room every Monday morning. The main building never bothered to tell us, because it’s donated from the local bagel shop as a “there until they’re all gone” situation. And the office drones in the main building didn’t want to share, so they just never told any of us in the secondary building.

    We only found out because the bagel shop wanted to do an event in our secondary building. The main building was extremely pushy about us making sure it went well, and offered a bunch of free shit too. We finally chatted to the bagel shop owner about how odd it was that the main building was so invested. She casually dropped the “oh that’s probably just because of all the free bagels we send y’all every week haha” type of comment.

    Did some digging, and sure enough the owner sends like a hundred bagels over to the main building every Monday morning. She always assumed that they were sharing, because it’s way too many bagels for just the primary building… But it turns out the employees over there were just hungry hippo’ing the break room table and taking like six bagels home every week.


  • Yeah, I’m a manager and I fully encourage my staff to take tips and gifts even though it’s against company policy. If a client offers a tip, I normally respond with something like “I don’t take tips, but if you and the part-timer want to to walk around the corner where there’s no security cameras, I’ll stay right here so I don’t see any money change hands.”

    The part-timers need the money more than I do anyways. $50 won’t make a huge difference to me, but could be the determining factor in whether or not the part-timer has enough gas money to get to class next week. Plus they’re the actual boots on the ground making sure the day-to-day runs smoothly. I’m just doing paperwork and hanging out in case any big issues pop up.







  • Fair warning, magic doesn’t scale well into the later levels. The way the game is programmed by default, your magic levels only change how much mana the various spells cost.

    So for instance, as your Destruction skill increases, Destruction spells cost less. But the issue with this is that it doesn’t actually adjust your damage output; It only changes how frequently you can cast the spells. But this means later enemies start to feel extremely damage-spongey, as they have more HP and better defenses, so you’re having to throw more and more spells at them.

    For other combat skills, your skill level increases the damage you do. But not the magic skills. There are mods to change that, but the vanilla experience isn’t great.




  • A honeypot is something that is intentionally left available, to alert you when it gets hit. In practice, they’re just a tool to tell security specialists when they need to start worrying; They wouldn’t be used by the average user at all.

    The goal is to build your security like layers, and ideally have all of your services behind the secure walls. Between these layers, you have honeypots. If someone gets through your first layer of security but hits the honeypot, you know someone is sniffing around, or maybe has an exploit for your outer layer that you need to research. If they get through the second layer and hit your second honeypot, you know that someone is specifically targeting you (instead of simply running automated scans) and you need to pay closer attention. Etc…

    Reinforcing the attack layer comes in two main forms, which work in tandem: Strengthening the actual layer, and reducing attack vectors. The first is focused on using strong passwords, keeping systems up to date, running something like Fail2Ban for services that are exposed, etc… The goal is for each layer of security to be robust, to reduce the chances of a bot attack actually working. Bots will simply sniff around and automatically throw shit at the wall to see if anything sticks.

    The second part is focused on identifying and mitigating attack vectors. Essentially reducing the amount of holes in the wall. It doesn’t matter how strong the wall is if it’s full of holes for your server’s various services. The goal is typically to have each layer be as solid as possible, and grant access to the layers below it. So for instance, running a VPN. The VPN gets you access to the network, without exposing services externally. In order to access your services, they need to get through the VPN first, making the VPN the primary attack vector. So you can focus on ensuring that the VPN is secure, instead of trying to spread your focus amongst a dozen different services. If it’s exposed to the open internet, it is a new potential attack vector; The strength of the wall doesn’t actually matter, if one of those services has an exploit that someone can use to get inside your network.

    Home users really only need to worry about things like compromised services, but corporate security specialists also focus on things like someone talking their way past the receptionist and into the server room, USB sticks getting “lost” around the building and plugged into random machines by curious employees, etc… All of these are attack vectors, even if they’re not digital. If you have three or four layers of security in a corporate setting and your third or fourth honeypot gets hit, you potentially have some corporate spy wrist-deep in your server room.

    For an easy example, imagine having a default password on a service, and then exposing it to the internet via port forwarding. It doesn’t matter how strong your firewall is anymore. The bot will simply sniff the service’s port, try the default credentials, and now it has control of that service.

    The better way to do it would be to reduce your attack vectors at each layer; Require the VPN to access the network via a secure connection, then have a strong password on the service so it can’t easily be compromised.


  • Exactly. This is just an attempt to redirect focus away from the other Canada/US news story. It’s Disney making a movie called Frozen, so when people google “Disney Frozen” there aren’t a ton of “Walt Disney’s head is cryogenically frozen under the castle” news articles. It’s Boris Johnson saying he likes to paint miniature bus models, so when people google “Boris Johnson Bus” they don’t get articles about his Brexit bus.

    It’s called the Dead Cat Maneuver. If you’re publicly losing an argument, throw a dead cat on the table. Suddenly, everyone is talking about the dead cat, instead of the argument you were losing.


  • Is it sad that I haven’t seen her content in like a decade, and still knew exactly who you were talking about? Like I didn’t even remember her name, but instantly went “oh yeah that one emo chick who used to be all over YouTube…”

    Did some googling, and she looks even worse than she used to. Apparently people on TikTok are worried that her body is rejecting water now, which means she’s basically in the organ failure death spiral.



  • Nah, I agree 100%. Celsius is wonderful for computers and science, but the human-tolerable range is far too small. Fahrenheit is a human-based scale, with 0-100 basically corresponding to a percentage of how much heat a person is able to/forced to hold onto. At 0, you’re not really able to hold onto any heat; you quickly reach hypothermia. At 100, you’re forced to keep nearly all of your heat, and are only able to vent trace amounts; you quickly reach hyperthermia.

    It turns out, people function best when they’re keeping 40-70% of their heat (depending on how they’re acclimatized, which is determined by how much brown fat they have), so those are the temperatures that are most comfortable for us.



  • People misunderstand the “no security through obscurity” phrase. If you build security as a chain, where the chain is only as good as the weakest link, then it’s bad. But if you build security in layers, like a castle, then it can only help. It’s OK for a layer to be weak when there are other layers behind it.

    And this is what should be sung from the hills and mountaintops. There’s some old infosec advice that you should have two or three honeypots, buried successively deeper behind your security, and only start to worry when the second or third gets hit; The first one getting hit simply means they’re sniffing around with automated port scanners and bots. They’re just throwing common vulnerabilities at the wall to see if any of them stick. The first one is usually enough for them to go “ah shit I guess I hit a honeypot. They must be looking for me now. Never mind.” The second is when you know they’re actually targeting you specifically. And the third is when you need to start considering pulling plugs.


  • Probably. American homes are typically made with lumber and foam insulation. Older homes (pre-WW2) will use lath and plaster for the interior walls, while newer (post WW2) will use drywall (gypsum board) sheets. There are two big reasons for the differences between American and European construction.

    First, Europe had the luxury of time and existing infrastructure. When people were building homes hundreds of years ago, they already had trade routes in place for things like stone. When America was being settled and people were moving west, the only things settlers had was whatever they could fit on their wagons. They weren’t carting massive quantities of quarried stone across the wilderness. And that’s assuming they even had quarried stone in the first place; There aren’t very many quarries in America, even today, because America simply doesn’t have good stone. Rome basically sits on a massive slab of marble, which is why they used so much of it in their construction. But America (with a few exceptions, like the mountains) sits on sandy clay. So if stone is incorporated into American construction, it’s usually in the form of brick (made from the aforementioned sandy clay) instead of quarried stone. But again, nobody was going to waste a ton of wagon space (and an entire team of horses to pull said wagon) to cart fucking bricks across the country. They were more focused on things like survival, and stone+mortar didn’t make the cut.

    Instead, the settlers carried tools, and then used those tools to build houses out of whatever resources were local to the area they settled in. This usually meant lumber construction, because carrying a saw and axe is much easier than carrying an entire tree. And as they moved into the more sparsely wooded areas, they changed their construction methods to match; The Great Plains used wire fences instead of solid lumber fences, because there wasn’t enough wood for solid fences. Wire was easy to carry in bulk spools, and you can make the posts out of small pieces of found lumber. When they realized cattle would push the wire fences over, they started adding barbs (literally just twists of more wire) to the wires. And that’s how barbed wire fences were invented, and became prolific throughout the area. Not because they were the best at fencing, but because they were good enough and were extremely resource-efficient for what the settlers had laying around.

    The second reason is climate. It can be difficult to get Europeans to understand the sheer destructive force of American weather patterns. My buddy from the UK came to visit, and we had a thunder+hail storm while he was here. He was hunkered down below the table, worried that the windows were all about to shatter. Meanwhile, we were just watching TV like it was no big deal. The tornado sirens hadn’t gone off yet, and the hail was only the size of pennies, so we hadn’t even started to worry about it. To us, it was just a regular storm, but my buddy said it was the worst storm he had ever encountered… We had three more storms just like it during his two week stay. Lumber construction is surprisingly good at resisting high winds, shifting foundations (from the aforementioned clay soil), earthquakes, etc… Stone will tend to crumble, while lumber will bend and flex. The lumber house sounds like it’s falling apart, but that’s just the creaking and groaning from the joints. And that’s just in regular winds; If an actual tornado comes through, anything less than solid concrete will quickly fall apart. And even the concrete isn’t a for sure thing, as the tornado may just decide to pick the entire foundation slab up.