I imagine the conversation between a University and potential student going like this:

1    I'd like to get qualified in a subject.

Four years.

1    Woah there, I haven't told you what I want to learn yet.

Doesn't matter. Everything takes four years to learn.

1    Really?  *Everything*? Art and medicine? …

People have parroted that old cyber-security phrase - 'depends on the threat model' - so often, so quickly, and so vacuously, that I find my toes curling at the sound of it. But after a run-in with the mods on Reddit's /r/privacy, some noteworthy gaffs came up which made the old phrase feel new.

It started with …

"News sources are biased", and "everyone lives in a bubble", we all hear constantly (or perhaps that's just my bubble). But what would a non-biased news source look like?

Taking a strict middle-ground gives immediately ridiculous conclusions. Perhaps the UK's food banks suggest some problem, but not …

I'll miss pens when they go. I like how they feel. I like that handwriting is almost impossible to fake. I like that when I receive a letter, I can tell who sent it just from how they write the address. But it all has to go.

Pens have some advantages over computers. One can generally access a pen-record faster - just …

I wake, and enter my algorithm-free RSS feed. It is perfect and pure.

I see a list (in the order I select) of everyone I want to follow. YouTube channels show up just like everything else, and I see only the name. With a quick shortcut-key, I tell the computer I want to watch the video later.

Onto the next feed, I find …

I felt so very bored with learning in high school that WWII was bad.

The lesson plan, as far as I remember, was this:

• War happened, it was bad.
• It was bad the war happened.
• Nazis did a war, which was bad.
• Nazis did it because of racism, which is also bad.
• (English class) Poetry about how the war was bad
• 11 Million …

About a quarter of the time I say I'm Scottish, someone mentions how beautiful the nature there is, and how much they'd like to visit.

Putting aside that they might just be saying this as a conversation piece, and putting our 'autistic caps' on, the idea's baffling.

I've travelled a reasonable chunk of the planet, and …

The Fediverse has just suffered from an all-out spam attack from some script kiddies, and the moralizing tones I've heard from some people tell me that some people have the wrong attitude about cybersecurity, and the internet.

The only right attitude is that of a chess player.

Chess Strategies

Every few decades, …

Be Rich or be Poor, but Don't Work

Working a side job during University lowers grades, a student should be rich in order to get the best grades, get a good time from clubs, and get the best results.

If you can't be rich, best to be poor, and try to scrape by without work; minimize socializing, don't go to university …

Reading Plato's various Dialogues, I've come across a few very strange choices from the translators.

Firstly, a pig could be dedicated as a 'sacrifice' to a god. I've read that people would then eat the 'sacrifice', and initially thought this was a cop-out - if you eat the meal, then you're not really sacrificing …