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What industry secret are you aware of that most people aren't?
  • Your security is only as good as the weakest link, which is usually people. If your password policy encourages users to stick a note to their screen then your weakest link is anyone in the office deciding to take a selfie or joining a call with their camera on. Best practices balance security with what users are actually willing to do.

  • How Dating Apps Are Squeezing More Money Out of Less People
  • According to this list it was used figuratively by Jane Austen, who I believe died more than 200 years ago. That page also claims the earliest known use is 1769, so it's probably less than 300 years in writing? It's moot either way, if you're going for an etymological argument you could go further and say literally should mean anything to do with letters or writing, from the original Latin literalis/litteralis "of or belonging to letters or writing".

  • How Dating Apps Are Squeezing More Money Out of Less People
  • Hard disagree; it's not a useful comment precisely because it's prescriptivism. It's suggesting people are incorrect because they're using a commonly accepted meaning of a word, that's just not how language works.

    Edit: Perhaps I should be clearer. The "less vs fewer" rule was invented roughly 200 years ago and doesn't actually hold true, "less" has been used this way for far longer. It's the epitome of "I want English to work this way, fuck everyone else".

  • What industry secret are you aware of that most people aren't?
  • Good luck remembering them all, also change them all every 30 days, so here are my secrets.

    Password expiry hasn't been considered best practice for a long time (must be at least a decade now?) largely because of the other points you mentioned; it leads to weak easily memorable passwords written somewhere easily accessible. Even when it was considered good 30 days would have been an unusually short time.

    Current advice is to change passwords whenever there's a chance it's been compromised, not on a schedule.

  • How Dating Apps Are Squeezing More Money Out of Less People
  • Language is defined by how it's used, if it's common for people to say "less" then that is correct. Trying to define the only "correct" usage counter to how people actually use the language is prescriptivism, which rarely changes how people actually speak. The only real use of prescriptivism is elitism.

    You clearly understood what was said, you just wanted to announce you're "better" at English.

  • Lemons(?) of Lemmy, what is something that feels so obvious to you that you just get lowkey pissed at the world for not knowing?
  • Urine isn't sterile. While it's true that paper towels are better than dryers, drying your hands (even with a dryer) is better than not drying. Washing your hands is, obviously, better than not washing your hands.

    If you don't wash your hands you're already in the worst case. It makes no sense to complain about the methods of drying available.

  • Child Advocates Back Surgeon General's Call for Tobacco-Like Warnings on Social Media
  • I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that language models are effective lie detectors, it's very widely known that LLMs have no concept of truth and hallucinate constantly.

    And that's before we even get into inherent biases and moral judgements required for any form of truth detection.

  • What do you think about my idea to help renters buy their home?
  • Now what indeed? You're still paying all the maintenance fees but now you're not generating regular income, and you're at the mercy of your government's empty home laws. Where I am I believe that's currently just paying double taxes, but it's also entirely possible for government to pass more regulations if there's a lot of unused housing they need.

  • What do you think about my idea to help renters buy their home?
  • To me that seems like a demonstration of why it would work. Allowing the people living there to buy the house from the government moved housing from the hands of government into private ownership. Allowing the people living there to buy the home from a corporate landlord will remove housing from corporate landlords, which is exactly what's needed if we want people to be able to afford housing. People buying the home they live in from their landlord won't remove council housing.

    It'll probably drive down house prices but that's kind of the point. As a private homeowner I'd lose out on some potential money if I ever moved so that's not ideal, but that's a fair "loss" if it means other people can afford somewhere to live.

  • YouTube's next move might make it virtually impossible to block ads
  • My gut reaction is that this won't work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there's a way to do that there's a way to detect ads.

    Of course, there's always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they're used; they've done similar before.

  • Somehow metal with zip zap moves rocks without touching and this isn't fiction?
  • I'm not convinced. Most magic systems in fiction have rules, meaning they can be scientifically proven and studied. Magic is simply when something falls outside your understanding of how the world works. It's all about your perspective.

    There's a part in the Lord of the Rings where Galadriel shows Sam and Frodo a scrying pool. To Galadriel it's normal, simply the way the world is. To the hobbits it's magic.

    ‘And you?’ she said, turning to Sam. ‘For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-magic?’

  • The Proud Boys are making a comeback for Trump: ‘Bad things are going to happen’
  • I still can't wrap my head around the fact there's a group who intentionally named themselves "proud boys" which somehow isn't a group for openly gay men. If they weren't a neo-fascist terrorist organisation I'd think the whole thing was a joke.

  • Top 100 Fediverse instances that are defederating from others
  • It might not necessarily be that the instances are stricter, it could also simply be that those instances are targeted more often by hate/trolls so interact with those instances more often. Admins are less likely to defederate from an instance they've never seen or heard of. I see a lot of obviously LGBT-related names in this list which likely get more hate than average.

  • World-first tooth-regrowing drug will be given to humans in September
  • This probably isn't going to be available to you then, though it is possible it paves the way for a tooth-replacement treatment. This article seems like bad science communication. The video, tweet, and website they link to all state that they're researching congenital conditions, the inquiry form linked to on the website explicitly states in English they're not considering people who lost their teeth later in life and specifically calls out articles like this one as misinformation.

    We are currently receiving a large number of inquiries that differ from the purpose of this research, which is very troubling.
    This research is a study of therapeutic drugs for people who are missing teeth due to congenital (from birth) diseases (diseases, etc.).
    This research is not aimed at restoring teeth to people who have lost their teeth due to acquired causes, as some news and social networking sites have reported.Additionally, we are not currently recruiting candidates for clinical trials (adult males).

  • Ticketmaster Hack: Data of Half a Billion Users Up for Ransom
  • The article says it's data for 560 mil users being sold at $500k USD, that puts the black-market valuation at roughly $0.0009 USD per user. Seems a little on the low end to me if they really do have credit card and payment details linked to other personal information for so many people.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)MY
    my_hat_stinks @programming.dev
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