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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’ve been writing a small powershell script at work lately and as vscode now offers their AI bundled in I just tried it out of curiosity. It does a half decent job. Nothing I couldn’t write on my own, but on a simple script it saved some time as I’m a long term linux guy and just getting my toes wet with powershell so I need to dig up proper functions and syntax pretty often.

    But it also created a script which would have broken syntax and errors in it, so it still needed manual tweaking, but as long as you know what you’re doing it can be useful. And also potentially dump your company data to some learning database.


  • Is my current set up secure, assuming strong passwords were used for everything?

    Network security is a complicated beast to manage. If general public can access your services over the internet, that’s a threat you need to mitigate. Strong passwords is a good start on that, but it doesn’t take into account if there’s a flaw or bug on the service you’re running. Also if you have external users, they might reuse their passwords and leak for those might cause a threat too, specially if there’s privilege escalation bugs on the software you’re running.

    And so on, it’s a too wide field to cover in a short comment here, but when you’re building your stuff, and what is maybe the most disticntive feature on a good professional between a not so good one, is to think ahead and prepare for every imaginable scenario where something goes wrong. Every time you add a way to access your network, no matter how minuscle, think what happens if that way gets compromised and what it might mean on the very worst case.

    Maybe you want to add another access point to your network since your terrace isn’t properly covered. That’s nice to have, but now everyone around 100 meters around your house/apartment might have access to your stuff if they can break your wifi security. Maybe you set up a reverse proxy or tailscale on the stack. Now the whole internet can at least probe your stuff and try to find vulnerabilities, try to use stolen credentials and even try to social engineer their way into your stuff. Or maybe you made an mistake and left something open that shouldn’t be.

    I’m not trying to scare you off out of anything. Go ahead and play with your stuff, break things, learn how to fix them, have fun while doing it. Just remember to think ahead about worst case scenarios, weigh their risks, think ahead and then go on. Learn about DNAT, reverse proxies, VPN and network layers and whatever you come across on your adventure but keep in mind that shit will hit the fan at some point. And learn to accept that, learn from your mistakes and do better next time.




  • They could at least stop using twitter (and meta). At least here in Finland a ton of public offices, news outlets, radio channels and so on use twitter as a platform to deliver their information and, while it was a decent plan back when twitter wasn’t owned by that clown, that ship has sailed ages ago but their practises haven’t changed a bit. Government ran mastodon instance would be pretty cheap solution to this and it would quarantee that everyone had access to their information without signing up to any service at all.


  • Without any expertise, I’m going to say that minuscule amounts of radioactive nickel from your CR2032 replacements compared to wasted lithium on pretty much every battery your all current devices have plus single use LiIon-cells on e-cigs, single use toys and whatever is a pretty good improvement. In 100 years or so all that nickel is converted to copper with small amounts of radiation and heat as byproducts, in today’s technology, is pretty good.

    And the radiation is beta-negative. I’m not an nuclear physicist, but if I’m not mistaken your common 3032 cell has enough metal to shield pretty much all of the radiation. Just don’t eat them and maybe stick with li-ion on your wrist watch.


  • You are correct, this is definetly not that big of a deal right now. My license is already valid across EU. However, the process for this has been going on at the background for quite a while and the end goal is to improve road safety and have common rules in all of EU. Increased road safety is obviously a good thing and it also helps people to move around if they want to, so even if it’s not the biggest problems at hand it’s still improvement across the union.


  • Majority of European fighter jets depend on US suppliers for spare parts and maintenance for a start. Same with helicopters. Also, the Europe as a whole has problems on delivering even the most common artillery shells to Ukraine in quantities they would need.

    So, as I mentioned, our military is well capable of stopping Russian invasion at the border, but holding it on the long term requires allies and co-operation. Also, size of the population has very little to do with military capabilities, which was proven by Finns a few decades ago and currently in Ukraine.


  • Another Finnish conscript here. I didn’t vote for the guy, but he’s been pretty good on his job so far. He understands that the orange one has ‘special needs’. And this point of view has been widely reported and discussed too.

    USA, like it or not, is still a (too) big part of effective defence around here as majority of Europe has forgotten what kind of country Russia is and just left their military strenght go down the drain. Our own army is pretty capable of stopping the Russian attack should it happen, but in the long run we need allies and at least for now USA is one of them.

    So, if maintaining that relationship requires some pandering of that orange toddler, then it does. There’s bigger things in the play than showing off with national pride. I don’t like the situation either, but that’s just a part of the game and we need to play with the cards we have.

    At least so far ‘speak nicely and carry a big stick’ -approach seems to work. European stick just is not big enough at the moment that we could rely only on that. And I hope that it changes pretty soon, but it takes a while to change continent wide mindset.


  • Fair point, but basic physics has been a part of our education program for at least 60 years. Also for few years the ‘exchange priced’ or ‘market valued’ electricity has been somewhat popular and on the news, which adds up to the general understanding as if you know your stuff it means quite literal money as your bills are smaller. So, maybe ‘absolutely everyone’ is a bit of a stretch, but in general the majority of adult people understand the concept.

    And also a ton of common folk understand it at least a bit on a deeper level as basic physics is included to studies beyond elementary school regardless on what you study. Sure, not everyone understands (or cares) how 3 phase AC in here adds up to 400V or why you need to have 2,5mm² wires for 16A fuse, but it’s still pretty common that people, specially in a separate house, understand how you can only pull 2300W out of a 10A circuit or 3600W from a 16A one (10 and 16A being the most common fuses in a household in here).