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Check out Sparkfun soldering tutorial.
The true game changer is this: use a brass sponge. Any cheapo one will do. Cleaning the tip often with a brass sponge will keep your iron tip nice and shiny and able to transfer heat much more effectively making soldering 10x easier.
Water sponges are terrible. Just no.
The iron doesn’t matter as much as the brass sponge. I have soldered SMT stuff with a dollar store iron just to prove the point. Although a temp controlled iron with the right tip makes things easier.
Also please don’t die from high voltages (I see you’ve read the safety stuff, good!)
Yes it can be used to steal some cars.
Banning it because it can be used to steal cars doesn’t make sense
Btw… Some folks may not realize it is a go to tool for many things.
Flipper Zero - Wikipedia Flipper Zero is a portable Tamagotchi-like multi-functional device developed for interaction with access control systems. The device is able to read, copy, and emulate RFID and NFC tags, radio remotes, iButton, and digital access keys, along with a GPIO interface.
It is a swiss army knife for RF access control systems as well as harmless, related things like remote controls.
It is used by penetration testers (information security professionals) to do myriad kinds of legit, legal work in their field.
Like any tool it can be used for good or evil. The problem isn’t the tool but the vulnerabilities in cars demonstrating shocking negligence on the part of manufacturers.
Banning the tools just gives us a false sense of security. The vulnerability still exists. It isn’t that difficult for someone to either get the tool, reproduce the tool, or make a new tool with existing parts. Meanwhile law abiding people cannot find the vulnerabilities as easily.
This mostly only serves to penalize a smallish company and protect large car manufacturers from the consequences of their negligence.
It is already illegal to steal cars. Why would criminals risking felony jail time care about whether their tools are suddenly illegal, too?
Fundamentally we as a species have lost the use of face and voice in a video to establish authenticity.
A person can spoof an email, and we have cryptographic signatures as a means of authentication.
So if I record myself saying something I could sign the video I guess (implementation TBD lol).
But what if someone else (news agency say) takes a video of someone else, how do we authenticate that?
If it’s a news agency they could sign it. Great.
But then we have the problem of incentives, too. Does the benefit of a fake outweigh the detrimental effects for said news agency?
The most damage would be to the person being videoed (reputation, loss of election, whatever). There would be less damage to the media company (“oops so sorry please stay subscribed”). You could add fines but corporate oversight is weak. And the benefit of releasing a fake would be clicks and money so a news company would be a lot more likely to pass along a fake as real.
So I guess I have no idea what we do. At the moment we are fucked. Yay.
I wonder if we will hear the outcome of the lawsuit or if it will just get settled out of court.
“the gangs knew that Google Maps sent unsuspecting tourists driving rental cars” along it, the lawsuit alleged, according to Mercury News.
…
The company finally agreed to stop Google Maps from directing people through the area albeit three weeks after the attack, which prompted the couple to seek unspecificed damages.
On the one hand yes there are high crime areas and this is one.
On the other hand, it is possible that Google routed them stupidly.
On the other hand people shouldn’t be traveling without learning a bit about the local threats and how to stay safe.
But crime is ultimately the responsibility of governments and they also have some responsibility to tourists.
I don’t think it is simply “huh this place looks sketch”. Not sure if you read the article.
The thing is, the criminals knew that Google routes rental cars along a typical route and so they ambush tourists violently along that route. For all I know the route may look fine.
Anyway, you don’t have to label neighborhoods. Just have the app route them differently…
…But wouldn’t the criminals catch onto that before long so that the new route becomes the ambush zone?
Maybe there is a solution like randomly choosing a particular path at different hours but the fewer alternate routes the less effective that will be. Criminals could simply stake out one route and wait a little longer before a victim passes by.
But is this really a mapping company’s problem to solve? Is the map app responsible for traveler security? What if you ask to be routed into or through a war zone (e.g. somewhere in Ukraine). Does the map app refuse? Warn you? Or what?
What if someone gets a paper map? Is the map maker responsible? How about the rental car employees?
Where does the responsibility of the tourist begin and end here?
If we could rethink everything from scratch we could probably easily solve that use case.
Of course the hard part is changing from what we have now to whatever better solutions exist.
Like, things would be better if suburbia wasn’t just an ocean of houses with sparse islands or shops. If every house was in a community with most of the basics reachable by foot… But how tf do we get to that?
What would you call it, unmitigated benevolence?
Ok now that I have that out of my system, let’s see…
trick /'trik/ noun
- a cunning or skillful act or scheme intended to deceive or outwit someone.
scheme /ˈskēm/ noun
- a plan or program of action
especially : a crafty or secret one
outwit /au̇t-ˈwit/ verb
- to get the better of by superior cleverness : outsmart
What we have, in the immediate wake of a massive security breach, mind you, is an attempt to benefit the company by getting the better of the customers, writ large, by altering how disputes are handled. By taking the unusual step of requiring explicit opt-out from the new TOS within a short timeframe, they make it more likely that customers will “accept” the TOS without even realizing it and be in a worse position as a result.
That qualifies as an act intended to outwit customers.
Or, to put it another way, if they had contacted customers and asked for an opt in for the new TOS, nobody would consider that an attempt to outwit.
So, yeah, this is a trick to further fuck over customers who are already victims of the company’s poor security practices.
Like you say, “AI” isn’t just LLMs and making images. We have previously seen, for example, expert systems, speech recognition, natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning, now LLM and generative art.
The earlier technologies have gone through their own hype cycles and come out the other end to be used in certain useful ways. AI has no doubt already done remarkable things in various industries. I can only imagine that will be true for LLMs some day.
I don’t think we are very close to AGI yet. Current AI like LLMs and machine vision require a lot of manual training and tuning. As far as I know, few AI technologies can learn entirely on their own and those that do are limited in scope. I’m not even sure AGI is really necessary to solve most problems. We may do AI “ala carte” for many years and one day someone will stitch a bunch of things together, et voila.
This is a bit more detailed, technical explanation:
Industry experts from Attingo, a seasoned data recovery firm that confronts faulty SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs on a weekly basis, have shed light on the intricate nature of the defects. The company has pinpointed that the resistors deployed in these drives are mismatched with the circuit boards they sit on, leading to precarious connections that under duress, break. The frailty is exacerbated by an unstable soldering material known to bubble and crack, although it is still under debate whether one or both elements are the primary catalyst for the defects.
https://ts2.space/en/analyzing-manufacturing-defects-in-premium-sandisk-ssds/
My takeaway is that skills in lighting and cinematography go a long way, so long as the camera is of a certain minimum quality. That was my experience with 35mm still cameras. I didn’t have the top of the line lenses and body but with good lighting and composition and subject, I got some decent photos at least.
Since I can’t read that on my phone…
Hello, A few months ago, the French government proposed a new law, putting the free internet in peril. But the global Mozilla community showed its power and stepped up to stop it. In a moment, we’ll share good news on our fight against this dangerous censorship, as well as next steps you can take to help. But first, here’s some context about what’s happening.
Part of the SREN bill (Projet de loi visant à sécuriser et réguler I’espace numérique’) as proposed originally would have given the government the power to censor what you can and cannot see online.
Immediately, the Mozilla community and our allies fought back. More than 80,000 supporters signed our petition and thousands of you donated to power this campaign.
And we have good news: a revised version was adopted in the French National Assembly, removing the browser-level blocking that was part of the original draft.
The amended bill is a huge improvement. And we can proudly say: This success can be credited to the Mozilla community and our allies fighting back, and the tireless advocacy work we have done for the last months.
##But This Is Still Not The Finish Line
While the National Assembly listened to the voices of the Mozilla community (Mozilla’s work was even mentioned several times during the debate!), there are several more formal steps in the legislative process.
Next up is discussion in a commission mixte paritaire (CMP): the text will be negotiated by a mix of lawmakers from the government, the National Assembly, and the Senate, in order to find a compromise.
And even if this text survives the CMP, it still won’t be quite over. The technical details will be laid out in an implementing decree.
##We need to make sure this version makes it through this next stage unchanged.
We must keep up the pressure now to make sure no lawmakers bargain and sneak browser-level blocking back into the bill - it would have disastrous implications for browsers like Firefox, not just in France, by handing over censorship tools to less democratic countries.
What you can do now: Thank you for being part of this fight. If you can afford it, please consider making a donation today to bring this campaign over the finish line. We’re at a crucial point and your contribution could tip the scale by allowing us to:
- continue to connect lawmakers with tech and policy experts to show what browser-level blocking would mean for the future of the internet; and
- prepare for a potential last minute public advertising campaign in order to mobilise more people and apply pressure on decision-makers in the Senate and government in key moments.
Very cool. Easily my favorite use for 3d printing.
Related, I think there are several sets of files for various RC cars I have run across. Would be kind of fun to download a whole (RC) car :)