>>After first publishing this article a helpful commenter let me know Logitech released the MX Ergo S in late 2024, with quieter switches, USB-C, and a $20 price increase.
Been there before. 2 min of research could have saved hours (obviously fun project regardless). The thing is to do the research at the initial idea and then AGAIN before starting the project.
Might not load if you’re in Ukraine and the location of the server you’re trying to access is in Russia. Blocked on the country level. Works very well for me, I can easily distinguish someone trying to pretend they are in the EU, while being in Russia. Have no idea whether this is the case, but it does not load for me either.
As I’ve stated, have no idea if that’s the case. Might have been slashdotted. Having a .eu domain and Russian host are two different separate things, as you might knew. I was talking about the latter.
Kids aren't going to pay for a VPN, even if they had the option to. They're going to Google "Free VPN" and download the first option which will probably add their device into a "UK residential proxy" botnet. Everyone is getting something out of it, the state of UK cybersecurity is weakened further, and no money is changing hands, good luck stopping that.
It's the same thing that happens every time the government tries to ban something that customers actually want. You get a black market, criminals make more money than ever and use it to fund other crimes and the banned thing continues to be available but now the suppliers don't have to follow other laws because then the customers can't object when they're both doing something illegal.
What stops anyone from just mining it? Cryptocurrency mining may or may not be profitable at any given time, but it doesn't matter that you're spending $7 to mine $5 worth of cryptocurrency if you're willing to pay the $7 to get the VPN.
Meh, perhaps now, but there is an easy pipeline of work (mostly menial, Turk type tasks) for crypto that runs right past KYC. Cash for crypto is also surprisingly easy to find, again bypassing most KYC.
I'm not sure most kids would jump through this many hoops. I don't know what will happen in the future, but I'm having trouble foreseeing a future where a sizeable majority of kids have cryptocurrency wallets. They'll probably just find a friend who has a VPN from parents who don't care or who don't know what it's being used for.
I didn't have a debit card until I went to university :P I _think_ having a card at 11 is rare, but not sure. Also maybe gen z/etc are getting cards earlier? Also not sure if parents who do get their kids cards at a young age aren't also checking their statements. Not sure if there's any data on this.
In the UK, "GoHenry" is an app that is targeted at parents as a way to give your kids pocket money, and comes with a debit card option. Their target age range is 6-18.
Revolut also offers accounts from age 6.
Parents would get notifications, but I suspect most parents won't be technically inclined enough to have an issue with a well argued child pointing out they need that VPN to access a game server or region locked content that their parents don't object to.
That said, I'd suspect most kids looking to circumvent these blocks will just install a free VPN.
Wasn't particularly rare when I was in middle school and would've been odd not to in secondary. Bet it's only more common now.
There's also non-bank pre-pay cash cards such as Henry I think one's called, so parent loads it up with pocket money or whatever and I think gets more control/oversight than actual banks probably offer even on dedicated children's accounts.
Memento is a United States National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP)–funded project aimed at making Web-archived content more readily discoverable and accessible to the public.
3 images explaining the importance of lightfastness
1 image explaining the measurement process
1 image linking to another article diving much deeper into the methodology
1 image linking to another article on a different color pencil concern (layering)
1 image representing each brand-line's lightfastness
Every single one of those images seemed relevant to the concept presented and clarified something that would have been difficult to articulate succinctly in writing. For example, the "how was this measured" is a lot easier to understand once you've seen the grid of squares before and after than it would be to try and articulate the fading of colors in small squares in text.
There's LOTS of individual images on specific brands, but given their wild degree of variance, I think it's really useful to perceptually see what's going on with each one.
I'm curious, where do you feel the images were "spammy"? It's a conclusion I heartily disagree with, but would love to understand.
I think gennarro is reacting to the very SEO-friendly organization of the article. Every content farm produces articles with this kind of flow, often with Wikipedia-style tables of contents at the beginning. But they do it because it’s very similar to the structure an actually informative article would take! So we can’t tell for sure whether the author adopted an SEO-friendly structure for her informative and original content, or if her content just happens to be a good model of the style that content farms have chosen to imitate.
Accelerated testing (6hrs/day) is standard practice in materials science - it compresses years of normal exposure into months while maintaining relative degradation patterns. Fixatives might alter results by adding UV inhibitors, but most artists want to know worst-case baseline performance.
Although someone will challenge me on that, I'm 100% sure that large chunks of the text are AI-generated. That said, the website itself has been around at least since 2017 (the text just wasn't as verbose - e.g., https://sarahrenaeclark.com/diy-gift-bag/).
So, I suspect it's legit. It's a case of an author leaning on a crutch for writing, but we're here to judge the results, not the phasing.
First, it just reads that way. It's the default style if you ask ChatGPT to write a couple of paragraphs that explain why lightfastness is important.
Second, while I know there are reasons to be skeptical about AI text checkers, the author's earlier (less verbose) style doesn't get flagged at all, while the style in more recent articles gets classified as heavily AI-assisted.
> First, it just reads that way. It's the default style if you ask ChatGPT to write a couple of paragraphs that explain why lightfastness is important.
It doesn't read that way to me, and I've read lots of ChatGPT text. We've come to opposite conclusions, I'm curious what qualities you are identifying/keying off of?
In our studies of ChatGPT's grammatical style (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107), it really loves past and present participial phrases (2-5x more usage than humans). I didn't see any here in a glance through the lightfastness section, though I didn't try running the whole article through spaCy to check. In any case it doesn't trip my mental ChatGPT detector either; it reads more like classic SEO writing you'd see all over blogs in the 20-teens.
edit: yeah, ran it through our style feature tagger and nothing jumps out. Low rate of nominalizations (ChatGPT loves those), only a few present participles, "that" as subject at a usual rate, usual number of adverbs, etc. (See table 3 of the paper.) No contractions, which is unusual for normal human writing but common when assuming a more formal tone. I think the author has just affected a particular style, perhaps deliberately.
Tangent, but I'm curious about how your style feature tagger got "no contractions" when the article is full of them. Just in the first couple of paras we have it's, that's, I've, I'd...
Probably because the article uses the Unicode right single quotation mark instead of apostrophes, due to some automated smart-quote machinery. I'll have to adjust the tagger to handle those.
