mic_check_one_two

Another version of this is called Persistent Starting, and it works for all kinds of things. You give yourself a small milestone that is only a fraction of the total task, and allow yourself to stop after hitting that milestone.

Don’t want to wash all the piled-up dishes in the sink? Just wash two cups. After those two cups, you can stop. But chances are good that you’ll go “eh, my hands are already wet and soapy” and do a lot more than the two cups you initially set out to do.

Don’t want to clean the bathroom? Just sanitize the toilet bowl. Chances are good that you’ll go “eh, I already have the cleaning supplies” and clean a lot more.

Don’t want to mow the lawn? Just do the side yard. The front and back can wait until tomorrow. But chances are good that you’ll go “eh, I’m already dusty and sweaty, and the mower is already gassed up and ready to go. I might as well go ahead and mow the rest too.”

Persistent starting only really works long term if you follow two major rules:

1. The initial milestone shouldn’t be daunting. The biggest challenge is typically overcoming your inertia, so your goal is to minimize the amount of inertia you need to overcome. The important point is that you allow yourself a clear and direct end goal before you even start the task. Give yourself a light at the end of the tunnel, and make the tunnel reasonably short.
2. Don’t feel bad about calling it quits once you hit that milestone. Sometimes, you legitimately won’t have the time or the energy to finish all the dishes. And that’s okay, because you only set out to wash two cups. If you don’t want to continue after hitting your initial milestone, you don’t have to. Give yourself the grace to stop after you’ve reached the initial milestone you set for yourself. Because now there are two fewer cups in the sink than when you started. You can always come back and wash two more later when you have more time and/or energy.

If you always use Persistent Starting to try to tackle the entire task, then you haven’t actually followed rule 1. You’re just trying to lie to yourself in the hopes that it will make finishing the task easier. But finishing the entire task isn’t the goal. The goal is starting the task. If you know you’re lying to yourself and intend to finish the entire task, it won’t actually make starting any easier. So be sure to give yourself permission to stop after hitting that milestone, and only choose to continue if you’re in the “might as well finish it” mood.

Yeah, motherboard-level tracking is scary because even the OS won’t be able to detect it. The truly paranoid people (and security researchers) go as far as desoldering chips to ensure nothing phones home.

It’s absolutely possible to moderate. But doing so would require more payroll than the tech companies are willing to spend. So instead, they simply let CSAM ads run rampant.

If your system uses systemd, it has an etc/machine-id, which is used for a lot of different things. And changing it will break a lot of stuff, probably until you reboot. I guess you could write something to randomly shuffle it every time you reboot? But it is the go-to way for lots of programs (including browsers) to identify themselves. Which means (unless you have done the work to scramble your machine ID) you can be tracked on Linux as well.

Yeah, hex is only a few obtuse angles away from being a circle. And that means it strips into a circle surprisingly easily.

The funny part is that there’s effectively zero reason for them to do it. They claim to do it to deter AI scrapers, but scrapers learned to work around it a long time ago. So the only real reason they do it is to call attention to themselves.

Or set up Home Assistant on a dedicated VLAN for all your IoT stuff. I know that’s a few extra steps that not every router will support, but it is a way to be more privacy focused (Home Assistant is entirely self-hosted) while still maintaining a lot of the IoT functionality.

Yeah, I was going to post this if nobody else did. At least Sony was forced to acknowledge the issue and issue a patch. But then the patch was such a bad bodge (it didn’t even remove the rootkit, and introduced more vulnerabilities) that the punishment wasn’t anywhere near enough.

Adware is a form of malware. Malware is a broad term that encompasses a lot of other types of software. Adware, bloatware, spyware, etc are all forms of malware.

Like someone saying they like metal music. It’s a very broad term. What kind of metal? Thrash metal? Death metal? Black metal? Power metal? Nu metal? Prog metal? Etc…

Portable DVD players, yeah. This was literally the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline.

Ah, so ~0.909091 furlongs if we only count the play area. 1.090909 furlongs if we count the 10 yard infields.

The irony is that Buzzfeed actually had some legitimately hard-hitting investigative journalism. They had multiple Pulitzer winners on their payroll. But that shit takes time and costs money, so they used the clickbait BS to pay the bills.