I don’t get it. The key still gets declared, but it’s value is null. “name” in an empty object would return undefined, not null, correct?

(Yes, this joke whooshed, but I am curious now.)

Really? I thought they would be sitting back drinking mojitos while watching the show.

It’s easier to target a specific area or person, regardless of the provider and legalities can be ignored. Its best feature is that it’s portable and likely hard to detect because it doesn’t need to be turned on all the time. The second best feature is that training people to use it is probably really easy.

If backdoors exist or not, the setup and use would be significantly more complex. More people would be aware, there is more risk in getting caught, there will always be system logs somewhere, etc.

I wouldn’t even consider most psychedelics bad and I even consider mushrooms instrumental to my alcoholism recovery over the last few years. (There are caveats, and I’ll explain.)

The issue is some people simply cannot handle psychedelics and bad trips can do more harm than good. If someone is in a risky spot or around shitty people, that can amplify bad experiences 100x. I have had several bad trips, and it’s easy to understand why full-blown psychosis is sometimes a thing.

Heavy dosages with inexperienced users that already have issues is a recipe for disaster. Period. Having seen reality completely dissolve a few times myself, it could be a seriously traumatic experience for some people.

However, when used and dosed properly in healthy environment around people who truly care about your well-being, the benefits outweigh the risks in many cases. A person can quite literally rewire their brain and start to heal from depression, anxiety, PTSD or other types of mental health issues. I ain’t gonna lie: I thought this was absolute bullshit until I started to actively work to sort out my own issues.

The best part is that psychedelics are mostly self-regulating and a tolerance is formed lightning fast. If you are crazy enough to want to trip several days in a row, it can get super inefficient, super quick.

For the first few months of alcohol sobriety, I was going on some universe hopping adventures, having multiple breakthrough experiences and having a grand ol’ time. Then, it just slowed down. I don’t know how to say it accurately, but I found what I was looking for and was able to resolve some deep inner conflict.

I still trip on occasion, but at fractions of my previous dosages. I don’t need those deep experiences any more and I can continue my recovery at the speed of reality.

Psychedelics aren’t inherently dangerous, but they are extremely powerful and demands serious respect. Alcohol is just straight-up dangerous. There are people in my life still that are still killing themselves slowly with the stuff and it sucks to watch.

It was on old 3.5" drives a long time ago, before anything fancy was ever built into the drives. It was in a seriously rough working environment anyway, so we saw a lot of failed drives. If strange experiments didn’t work to get the things working, mainly for lulz, the next option was to see if a sledge hammer would fix the problem. Funny thing… that never worked either.

I used to take failed drives while they were powered on and kinda snap them really with a fast twisting motion in an attempt to get the arm to move or get the platters spinning.

It never worked.

Did you get bad sectors? Weird things can absolutely happen but having sectors marked as bad is on the exceptional side of weird.

Maybe? Bad cables are a thing, so it’s something to be aware of. USB latency, in rare cases, can cause problems but not so much in this application.

I haven’t looked into the exact ways that bad sectors are detected, but it probably hasn’t changed too much over the years. Needless to say, info here is just approximate.

However, marking a sector as bad generally happens at the firmware/controller level. I am guessing that a write is quickly followed by a verification, and if the controller sees an error, it will just remap that particular sector. If HDDs use any kind of parity checks per sector, a write test may not be needed.

Tools like CHKDSK likely step through each sector manually and perform read tests, or just tells the controller to perform whatever test it does on each sector.

OS level interference or bad cables are unlikely to cause the controller to mark a sector as bad, is my point. Now, if bad data gets written to disk because of a bad cable, the controller shouldn’t care. It just sees data and writes data. (That would be rare as well, but possible.)

What you will see is latency. USB can be magnitudes slower than SATA. Buffers and wait states are causing this because of the speed differences. This latency isn’t going to cause physical problems though.

My overall point is that there are several independent software and firmware layers that need to be completely broken for a SATA drive to erroneously mark a sector as bad due to a slow conversion cable. Sure, it could happen and that is why we have software that can attempt to repair bad sectors.

(I am just going into the basics, so ignore gross errors.)

It just fakes a cell tower. Because of the nature of how modern radios work, a phone will likely connect to the strongest signal it detects. The stingray acts as a “man in the middle” and relays the phone signal to an actual tower as if it was the original phone making the call. As it relays the call, the operator can listen in.

It’s akin to answering a call, making a call on another phone and then holding the two phones together.

(MITM attacks on HTTPS connections are similar, but there are some nuances with how the connection is decrypted and the re-encrypted.)

Most US Navy ships have had CIWS systems since the 70s and have had many upgrades to their tracking systems since then. The US Army adopted the LPWS (C-RAM) which is basically a portable CIWS for land use. (The Russian version of the CIWS is called a Kortik.)

It wouldn’t surprise me if there are already CIWS-type systems for commercial ships operating in hazardous zones.

I have had the pleasure of standing next to a few CIWS systems during live fire testing and it’s quite the experience.

Wut?

They can be, I suppose. However, the AI libraries that I was tinkering with seemed to all be based around Ubuntu and Nvidia. With Docker, GPU passthrough is much better under Linux and Nvidia.

WSL improved things a bit after I got an older GTX 1650. For my AMD GPU, ROCm support is (was?) garbage under Windows using either Docker or WSL. I don’t remember having much difficulty with Nvidia drivers though… I think there might have been some strange dependency problems I was able to work through though.

AMD GPU passthrough on Windows to Docker containers was a no-go. I remember that fairly clear though.

My apologies. It has been a few months since I messed with this stuff.

Tin the wire and the pin first and then touch the iron to them both quickly. They should stick fairly well without needing to add additional solder. Also, like someone else mentioned, flux can help quite a bit. (Maybe even a cupped soldering iron tip might be useful, depending on the situation.)

Learning how to solder SMD components will get you extremely familiar with how solder behaves at that scale. Let’s just say it’s significantly different than just doing basic wires and THT.

(Well, the solder doesn’t really act different, but at smaller scales it looks like it does.)

I had much better success using WSL, but I haven’t used it or even updated it in a long while. (I have been meaning to see how AMD GPU support has evolved over the last few months. Back in January’ish, AMD support was still bad.)

Anything that even is remotely Linux related is much easier to get working with WSL, btw. Almost all of my personal python stuff is running under it and it works great with VS Code

If I remember correctly from the good ol’ days, promoted sites/ads kinda stopped after the first few pages and it skipped past most of the SEO crap.

But yeah, I forgot how aggressive Google is with ads and AI now, those bastards.

It’s actually a good change, IMHO. You can just click directly on page 10 for anything that might be related to your original search.

Oops. I read the title as “menthol”, not methanol, so this article really confused me at first.

Still, I found a paper on death by menthol that was an interesting read: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4830155/ (Who knew there were hidden dangers in peppermint factories?)

There is a large collection of poorly written articles/blogs on LinkedIn, actually. They are just bad enough to be good enough for Google.

Strangely enough, LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. If Microsoft actually let Google use it as a data source, it was to sabotage Google’s AI training.

It’s been around for a while. It’s the fluff and the parlor tricks that need to die. AI has never been magic and it’s still a long way off before it’s actually intelligent.

I used to go there for school trips as a kid. It was always fun and not nearly as expensive as Disney was. Personally, I wouldn’t compare it to Disney as it’s just a completely different class of theme park and it was awesome in its own ways.

I guess the major caveat is that I haven’t been there in over 20 years, but I seriously doubt the vibe has changed too much.