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Keep personal data off of work devices

March 3, 2023

Maintain strict hardware separation between work and personal data.

While many corporations are diligent about keeping work data out of your personal devices for security reasons, the reverse is often entirely your responsibility.

When things go wrong, or your company gets into legal trouble, you want to be sure you’re not exposed to liability or exploitation. One way to help you get there is to make sure your personal data never gets onto work hardware.

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You cannot separate art from artist

February 26, 2023

You cannot separate art from artist; they flow from the same font, the same value system, the same framing, the same agenda. There is but one personality behind both of them.

You can put the art of dead artists in their historical contexts to maybe lessen their blame. But living artists in a shared culture deserve no such latitude, as their context is now.

Elevating the art endorses the artist. You can’t help doing the latter when you do the former.

The next time you get the urge to separate art from artist, ask yourself why you want to do that.

Chances are you want to continue enjoying the art despite it being made by a despicable person.

Chances are you don’t want to be held responsible for elevating a terrible human being, even as you continue to reward them by consuming their work.

Chances are you’re doing it because you don’t want to stop the flow of your entertainment.

Chances are it’s just a euphemism for selfishness.

Withholding user security behind a paywall is unethical

February 18, 2023

Walling off user-centered security measures behind a subscription paywall is unethical, and will ultimately tarnish your brand as your users get their accounts compromised at greater rates.

I remember using Evernote back in the 2000s, and learning that they will use SSL only if you pay; otherwise they sent your notes in plaintext over http. I found their attitude so offensive that I quit their product completely rather than give them my money.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080701051037/http://www.evernote.com/about/premium/

Evernote Premium | Evernote Corporation

There's nothing wrong with having a free Evernote account, but sometimes it just isn't enough. Sounds like Evernote Premium is exactly what you need....

Twitter rescinding SMS 2FA behind a subscription (and not replacing it with an equivalent system like e-mail 2FA) is hostile and reflects how much Elon cares about their users’ security, which is not much.

Remember that compromising access to your twitter account not only gives attackers access to your timeline; it lets them access all your past DMs too.

Make time to get good

February 17, 2023

Schedule a good chunk of time to learn each day. Set aside one or two hours to purposefully learn something new. Read something; watch a lecture; and practice something you just learned.

You know it takes a lot of time to get good at something—often hundreds or thousands of hours of practice. It follows, then, that you must set aside significant time regularly to get good, or you never will.

Don’t let the busyness of your daily life rob you of your future skills.

A minivan full of magnetic tape is still fast

February 3, 2023

Abstract image of magnetic tape reel

Generated image1

Y’all heard of the old Computer Science joke: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a minivan full of magnetic tape”? I wonder if a van full of tape is still faster than broadband Internet these days.

Assuming a minivan has a cargo capacity of 4 m³ (140 ft³)…

  1. Image generated by DiffusionBee. Prompt: “Computer magnetic tape reel mounted in a minivan on the highway abstract art” 

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