Yup. Rand() chooses a random float value for each entry. By default I believe it’s anywhere between 0 and 1. So it may divide the first bill by .76, then the second by .23, then the third by 0.63, etc… So you’d end up with a completely garbage database because you can’t even undo it by multiplying all of the numbers by a set value.

The scheduling demand thing is referring specifically to the project manager going “we need this for an upcoming major product launch, so you need to fix this before the launch.” It feels like Microsoft cracking the whip to try getting free labor, because it is.

If they truly can’t do without it for their product launch, they can fork it and fix the bug themselves. Surely Microsoft has the resources and brainpower to do so. But the PM didn’t want to do that, because it means they’d be spending their own time and resources on it.

I actually enjoyed the story. Some of the themes and motifs were heavy handed, but that’s par for the course. Honestly, the biggest issue with the story is that players have come to expect a big plot twist. Bioshock 1’s twist hit first-time players hard, so later games have tried to replicate that. But the issue is that it only hit players hard because they never knew it was coming. They only remember it because it was truly shocking the first time you played through it.

So now players have come to expect that from the series, which means the series can’t replicate it; When players are looking for a big plot twist, you can’t really hide it anymore. Because as soon as you start foreshadowing it, players catch on. And if you’re too subtle with your signals, then players who have been looking for it will say that doesn’t make any sense.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t a huge fan of the story at first. It took me a few hours and a few quests to actually get into it. It suffers from Kingdom Hearts 2/The Witcher 3 Syndrome: The two hour long intro/tutorial is absolutely the worst part, which is a shame. The game really begins to shine once you get to Meridian, but that’s several hours in.

That copyright thing was never actually tested in court though, because they settled before the trial began. The “copyrighted keys” argument was what Nintendo originally used to bring the lawsuit, but it was never actually tested because it never went to trial. In fact, many legal experts say it likely would have been thrown out in Yuzu’s favor. But Yuzu didn’t have a legal fund, so they couldn’t afford to actually take it to court and fight it.

Yeah, the combined modem/routers are almost all garbage. You really are better off bridging it and letting your own router do the work. Because the ISP has a vested interest in giving you the cheapest router possible.

It’s easier than ever these days. The hardest part is figuring out how to configure your router to point devices to it. Because router manufacturers love to bury that setting somewhere deep. For actually setting up the pihole, it’s usually just a matter of flashing the memory card with the right image, then finding some decent block lists. But even the block lists are easy to find nowadays.

I blocked the servers with my pihole. Coincidentally, my two smart TVs are the two most blocked devices on my network. It’s not even close.

This was with only ~1 hour of TV watching, while the device in the third spot is my phone (which I had been using all day). And yet the second TV still had almost 3x as many blocked requests.

Smart TVs are fucking invasive.

Yup. They can’t take out interest-free loans to pay off their almost-interest-free loans. So now they’re scrambling to save money and build value the old fashioned way.

Was going to say the same. Windows and Linux both use “lazy” ways of deleting things, because there’s not usually a need to actually wipe the data. Overwriting the data takes a lot more time, and on an SSD it costs valuable write cycles. Instead, it simply marks the space as usable again, and removes any associations to the file that the OS had. But the data still exists on the drive, because it’s simply been marked as writeable again.

There are plenty of programs that will be able to read that “deleted” content, because (again) it still exists on the drive. If you just deleted it and haven’t used the drive a lot since then, it’s entirely possible that the data hasn’t been overwritten yet.

You need a form of secure delete, which doesn’t just mark the space is usable. A secure delete will overwrite the data with junk data. Essentially white noise 1’s and 0’s, so the data is completely gone instead of simply being marked as writeable.

It isn’t compressible at all, really. As far as a compression algorithm is concerned, it just looks like random data.

Imagine trying to compress a text file. Each letter normally takes 8 bits to represent. The computer looks at 8 bits at a time, and knows which character to display. Normally, the computer needs to look at all 8 bits even when those bits are “empty” simply because you have no way of marking when one letter stops and another begins. It’s all just 1’s and 0’s, so it’s not like you can insert “next letter” flags in that. But we can cut that down.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to count all the letters, then sort them from most to least common. Then we build a tree, with each character being a fork. You start at the top of the tree, and follow it down. You go down one fork for 0 and read the letter at your current fork on a 1. So for instance, if the letters are sorted “ABCDEF…” then “0001” would be D. Now D is represented with only 4 bits, instead of 8. And after reading the 1, you return to the top of the tree and start over again. So “01000101101” would be “BDBAB”. Normally that sequence would take 40 bits to represent, (because each character would be 8 bits long,) but we just did it in 11 bits total.

But notice that this also has the potential to produce letters that are MORE than 8 bits long. If we follow that same pattern I listed above, “I” would be 9 bits, “J” would be 10, etc… The reason we’re able to achieve compression is because we’re using the more common (shorter) letters a lot and the less common (longer) letters less.

Encryption undoes this completely, because (as far as compression is concerned) the data is completely random. And when you look at random data without any discernible pattern, it means that counting the characters and sorting by frequency is basically a lesson in futility. All the letters will be used about the same, so even the “most frequent” characters are only more frequent by a little bit due to random chance. So now. Even if the frequency still corresponds to my earlier pattern, the number of Z’s is so close to the number of A’s that the file will end up even longer than before. Because remember, the compression only works when the most frequent characters are actually used most frequently. Since there are a lot of characters that are longer than 8 bits and those characters are being used just as much as the shorter characters our compression method fails and actually produces a file that is larger than the original.

Chaotic evil is encrypting, compressing, then encrypting again.

Not only that; You have to pay for updates too. Supposedly it’s because Apple takes time to verify that the app is legit and not going to do nefarious things. So they don’t want a bad actor to get a legit app on the store, then later push an update that infects everyone with a virus.

But apparently a company did a study and realized that app testing rarely made it past the main page, with testers spending ~15-20 seconds per app. They’d basically open it and if it looked like it did what it said, they didn’t bother digging any deeper.

Sure, but that wasn’t the question. They asked how to opt out of Intel’s telemetry gathering, since that’s the topic of the article. The article just happens to also mention nvidia and AMD, since they’re competing companies with similar products.

The installer has a checkbox for CIP, which is the data collection tool. Don’t install the CIP, and it won’t collect telemetry.

Yeah, it’s estimated that each individual loses anywhere from $200-$2000 per year to wage theft. It’s absolutely rampant.

This is putting it lightly. By some estimates, it’s larger than every other form of theft combined. Literally over 51% of all theft.

It isn’t all as blatant as this, but it still happens. Timesheets getting subtlety adjusted/rounded in the employer’s favor. Not paying for breaks when they’re legally required to. Requiring employees to work through breaks, while still requiring them to clock out. Requiring employees to show up 15 minutes prior to their shift, to do a morning huddle before everyone clocks in. Mandating what employees can/can’t do during their breaks. Not properly paying for on-call time, or saying someone was only on-call when they should’ve been fully clocked in. Not paying overtime, or telling non-exempt employees that they’re exempt from OT.

The list goes on and on. When people complain about a lack of prosecution for white-collar crime, this is exactly what they’re referring to. Steal a $2 candy bar from a store, and you potentially face criminal prosecution. That same store codifies a procedure that steals $2 from every employee every time they clock in, netting the company millions of dollars throughout the course of the year? The company maybe gets a fine that is less than what it made via the theft, and the employees don’t even get back the full amount that they’re owed.

Bingo, there it is. Thanks!

You can actually buy tinted tape to dim them without completely blacking them out. So you can take your clock from “bright enough to keep your entire bedroom lit” to “just bright enough to read in the dark.”

Found out while watching Technology Connections. Bright blue monochromatic LEDs are one of his biggest pet peeves, and he mentioned the tinted tape off-hand in one of his videos.

If you’re worried about the grind, go install the Untitled Project X mod. It has an option to give exp to all party members regardless of battle participation. It eliminates the “swap everyone in to Guard for a single turn” hassle. Because by default the game forces you to either swap everyone in for a turn, or grind like hell to get everyone properly leveled.

UPX fixes a lot of the issues that the remake has, so ironically that option is buried and was only added as an afterthought. But it’s one of the biggest and most impactful changes that you can make, because it completely eliminates the need to grind. Since every member is getting exp with every battle, you aren’t forced to wait for the relevant enemies to spawn before certain characters level up.