Yeah, I hate that. Forcing me to input special characters makes my password slightly less secure. Of course I’ll include them by default, but now an attacker can eliminate all passwords without special characters. Most people just put the number 1 or a period at the end of their existing, frequently re-used password anyway. Or capitalize the first or last letter. So it doesn’t make it really harder to crack dumb passwords.

It’s like we’ve optimized passwords to be hard for humans to remember, but easy for humans to guess!

Well, you can create your own job, if you like. It’s not for everyone, but it is flexible – there’s no employer looking to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of your hours. I can describe a little bit what that would look like in case it’s helpful.

I think most businesses at their core have one of a limited set of problems. For the people I encounter, it’s either content, marketing, sales, or customer service. Even though I operate a tech company, the problem is almost never technology (probably there’s a lesson somewhere in that). Sales and customer service often don’t leave you much downtime if it’s a busy company, so let’s ignore them.

Marketing: A lot of businesses just need someone reliable to set up Google Adwords and stuff. You won’t make a fortune, but it’s easy to learn how to do, and once it’s set up there is very little maintenance. We’re not talking Coca Cola here – small businesses that need some help getting local search traffic by paying for search ads. One of my clients just hired someone to do exactly that, who walked into their business and just outright suggested it – although they’ve been pretty awful at it to be honest. Anyway, the bar is pretty low and Google wants you to do this so there’s tons of learning material out there.

You can identify customers by walking down the street and searching for every small business, and seeing which ones are hard to find.

Content: Businesses that sell online often need a bunch of product photography and website updates that they don’t have time to do. Often this is non-technical work – there’s a UI you add the photo and description to, then press ‘update’. Often their business profile isn’t set up right on google maps and stuff and they need help fixing it.

Content can also be copy writing, video reviews, social content… but honestly I find all of these harder sells than just “your website is out of date, want to pay me a small fee to fix it, then keep it current?”.

Put together a list of services and print it out so you look organized. Don’t worry about looking like a fool – it’s OK to look like a fool sometimes, as long as you also sometimes succeed.

Try to avoid charging minimum wage. Start with a more moderate cost and work downward if you need to. The customers that pay the least, typically demand the most. I’d structure it as a setup fee and then a fixed amount per month, paid quarterly in advance, for maintenance. Send them a report of what you did every month (google adwords makes this easy).

I’ve got a couple of people I do this for and I bill 250$ a month, paid quarterly in advance, for 10 hours a month. You might earn less than this at the start and that’s OK – I’m just volunteering a data point. It’s not rocket surgery, it’s boring stuff, but it keeps my bills paid while I harass bigger clients to pay theirs.

Sure. You can either increase the dictionary of possible words, or increase the number of words or both. Eventually it will become unwieldy. I don’t bother with passphrases though.

I generate passwords of sufficient entropy (random ASCII), store them securely (encrypted, key memorized, on dedicated hardware), and never re-use them. I don’t trust password managers unless open-source. I don’t need convenience – to some extent, it’s my job to manage other people’s secrets. Since I’m being paid, no need for shortcuts.

Dear police officers: I’m sure you’re excited to begin your journey learning all about electronic engineering and product design!

If you have any questions, drop by any time and I’ll be happy to help. I hope you find these hobbies as rewarding as I do.

Being able to chalk off the often embarrassing or cruel lessons of childhood as something personal, rather than something someone saved in video, to hound you with for the rest of your life.

OK, fair enough! I did not know that the size varied so much. I’ll probably still keep using it though – the Python-esque syntax means I don’t have to learn a bunch of stuff I don’t have the time to right now, and I’m very bad at UI, so it’s a good solution for me :)

Incidentally, a lot of my best apps are very small as well. Under 1k usually (AVR Assembly).

Ooh, study for 14 hours straight and forget to eat! That’s usually what I do. Wild times.

Well, Tunak Tunak Tun of course.

North America is insane with their internet costs.

Here in VN, I can get unlimited 4G for 40$ a year, and 100mbps symmetrical fiber for about 50$ a year. The biggest provider is the Army. Their customer service is actually pretty fast and good too!

Mine is supposed to be 100 / 100 and actually is. In Vietnam, symmetrical fiber-to-the-home is actually pretty common. I think I pay 5$ a month, or maybe a bit less.

I’m a magister, scholar, and merchant. (I own a technology company).

I never actually noticed. It’s always been like 25MB for stuff I do. Is that a lot?

Takes a huge amount of storage on my production machine to store the various libraries to produce that file, to be fair. That is a minor pain.

I think it would be a bad idea to do otherwise. Children need to learn about useful tools, and the shortcomings of those tools.

16 year old me would have had a great time getting an AI to teach me things that my teachers in school did not have expertise in. Sure, it would be wrong some of the time, but so were my teachers at that age. It would have given me such a head start on university!

For this kind of thing, I use Godot and write a quick and ugly one-off app. That way it works exactly how I imagine and I just send myself the APK over messenger and install it :P

Although it would be a joy to implement in hardware.

Nah, I saw the heating coil was the right resistance. Then, the shiny metal coating on the inside of the tube was not oxidized, so the vacuum was likely good. Nothing rattled, so a short was unlikely. It was designed for 6.3V.

So at 5V the worst that could happen was that the heater coil fizzled and died with some sad noises. Well, maybe no noises, because of the vacuum and all. Some form of sadness though, surely.

The more alarming things I’ve built over the years aren’t so much “duck and cover”. They’re more of the “spend a all day doing data analysis, then know something I probably shouldn’t” variety.

Well, I had heard of someone that got a little amplification out of them at 3.3V and a weird configuration. It was a different tube, but I figured I’d give it a go at 5V.

My tube was old and originated from a junk pile in Japan. I figured it wasn’t enough entropy to just use an unknown tube the wrong way, so I added some random scrap parts from the Soviet Union. The tube produced amplified output, but the output impedance was way too high when being used this wrong way (in other words, it couldn’t drive a speaker). So I added some completely unknown Chinese amplifier IC as a buffer.

It’s approximately pocket-sized. For a large pocket, anyway. The tube heater gets the whole thing warm. It produces hilariously distorted (but sort of cool) sound. I call it a ‘themionic pocket warmer’, arguably not so useful here in Vietnam. The audio function is secondary. I suppose if you are a half-deaf Antarctic explorer with a deep love of stovepipe hats, it would be a good hat-warmer as well. I guess that’s the target market :D

I threw some photos up at voltage.vn. It was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

It would be inaccurate to take it as a literal quote :)

This is just what I wish I could say. Small talk annoys me greatly, and in practice I want to shift conversations in deeper directions as quickly as reasonably possible. I’d much rather exchange a few thoughtful phrases with a stranger than a large volume of nonsense. “Can you tell me something important about yourself?” is maybe a little less aggressive. Anyway, my Vietnamese language skills are not good, and immigrants are rare here in Vietnam, so conversation is… necessarily direct :)

I actually do want people to prove they are worth my attention! If they haven’t learned or accomplished anything in a year (in their opinion, not mine), then I can’t talk about things I’ve done or learned without it getting awkward, and I have nothing else to talk about (I spend essentially all my time either working or studying). I just don’t have room in my life for many people, either. This isn’t their fault or mine. My wife is the same way (and we certainly skipped the small talk when we met – we went right to engineering schematics for something or other).

I’ll share a funny story that might explain a bit of my frustration – I live in Asia, so all my conversations are extremely scripted. How are you / how old are you / where were you born / are you married / do you have kids / why don’t you have kids / you must silently sit here and listen while I go on a 10-20 minute rant on why you have to have kids, or I will tell everyone how rude you are. My wife and I get stuck in this conversation constantly. Sometimes so many times in a row, that we effectively do nothing but have this conversation over and over for 3-4 hours. At family events, it’s the only conversation that happens for days. It’s like a glitch in the Matrix or something, you really have to experience it to believe it!

Of course I still have to be polite, have mostly empty conversations, and so on. It’s exhausting, and I don’t remember any of their names, because I have learned nothing about them. It’s not the lack of people (in Asia?) that makes me feel alone, it’s this.

Well, the dumbest reason I’ve seen people get murder-y for is typically fighting over inheritance.

It’s like… now there’s even more inheritance to fight over. Then also you just paid for one funeral, and now you want to pay for another?

Ah, small talk stresses me out. Why can’t people just open with “tell me something you accomplished or learned this year”?

Then we cut right to the things that matter.

I don’t have ordered lists of favorites for trivial things like colors, integers, and so on. Also no ordered list for less trivial things. No favorite songs, movies, books, historical figures, etc.

I don’t judge people (or myself) based on having or not having these lists, because that itself would be me creating a list – my favorite thing would then become not having favorite things, and that would of course be silly :D