The answer is Linux. Raspberry Pi Zeros can act as USB devices; it's pretty easy to program one to look like a mouse to the host computer.

So when you take a break, you plug in your fake mouse that does all kinds of random mouse movements and clicks. Just make sure your screen is locked so none of the clicks do anything.

Ontario did it too, and it was very well received by both teachers and students.

If the shoe fits...

The working title of the book was "My Struggle", but I guess that was changed before it was published.

Got of those, too (the early USB 1 ones, with the exposed ATAPI connector. I ended up buying Iomega's Firewire expansion that attaches on the back of the slim USB and latches on that ATAPI connector, as Firewire 400 had much better bandwidth than USB 1, provided enough power and thus required only a single cable, and I had a cheap Firewire 400 adapter laying around from some video project (funily: the Firewire 400 card was a free bundle bundled with some crappy movie software that was selling poorly and was on heavy sale at the shop I bought it from. Threw the useless CD, kept the Firewire card).

Mine still works too. The most difficult was trying to find the barrel power plug (since back in the days I was mostly using the Firewire attachment and because Firewire provides enough power, I wasn't using the barrel jack much. Nowadays most of my machine are USB only.

Yup. The slim USB were also a good solution to carry data around.
Bring the slim USB and the cables at the university, download shit with the fast bandwidth, then bring the drive back home, plug into the Firewire attachment and load it onto the computer.
Later the university aquired computers (from Dell) that came with ZIP IDE drive built in, so I only carried the Zip250 disks and kept the drive permanently plugged into the Firewire attachement. And almost lost the power barrel adapter as mentioned above.

1. Create a fake startup

2. Generate mountains of plausible-looking emails and chat messages using an LLM.

3. Close the startup and... Profit.

What device did you use to make that post? Say goodbye to it. Modern electronics is impossible without automation.

"We can't compete, so you need to keep cheaper and superior products out so we can continue selling our more expensive, inferior products."

There was a backwards compatiblity break in Linux USB support too, but in general new Linux OS releases don't move everything around because the UI is independent from the kernel.

Yes, that ass-backward approach came in my mind.
Your bank notes are too easy to copy now that color photocopiers and color laser printers are a thing?
- Rest of the world: make better banknotes (see swiss money, euros, etc.)
- USA: make bank note detection software mandatory on each piece of tech (HP and other US manufacturers have a boner at the thoughts of the sudden illegalness of cheaper competitors from countries without that function) and also mandate yellow dot tracking (now in addition the police-state is having a boner, too) (*).
- Rest of the world: why the hell is my color cartridge constantly empty on yellow and why is this preventing my to print even black and white?

Same here:
USA: has a problem of violence, bonkers level of gun proliferation, on tops of tons of ways to make life shitty for everyone (lack of proper health care, social welfare, etc.)
also the USA: lets add "gun detectors" to 3D printers so nobody prints a gun without a serial number. Surely that's the best solution to address all of the above, right?

Trouble is that this time, most 3D manufacturers ARE NOT in the USA.
Most of them are in China, and the US is only a fraction of their exports, and the required function requires magnitude more compute power to implement than the tiny micro-controller that is usually found in those printers and implementing would require massively driving up the cost of the printer.
Chance are high that the manufacturer will just say f-u, and merely just stop selling complete pre-assembled kit to the USA, only stuff that can circumvent the restrictions (e.g., kits with only motor and drivers that require adding a sold-separately microcontroller).

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(*): fun fact: on some printers (E.g. with very low memory) those "functionnalities" were implemented in the drivers instead.
My ancient HP color lasterjet works this way. There are no yellow dot when I print from CUPS.

It's entirely possible that the "gun detection" is going to be the same: crappy buggy detection +additional privacy invading tracking implemented into the management software shipped next to the 3D printer as the MCU cannot handle that. Circumventable by downloading Octoprint from some european server and running that on a Pi to manage the printers.

The early panicky days of COVID may be over, but face masks suddenly look like a pretty good idea again.

Perl itself is neither here nor there with respect to security. But lack of tests and pushing straight to production... those are WTFs.

I don't think bans are the answer. But also, governments that offer bribes to get data centers built are also doing the wrong thing.

I think data center construction needs to be regulated. The data center must pay property taxes just like everyone else, and it must provide money for every watt of power that it uses... money to build new energy generation capacity and transmission infrastructure so that other people's electricity rates are not affected by the data center.

To AI, we are the Creators (plural). So teaching it monotheism seems like lying to it.

But anyway, what sort of boneheaded move is it to think that religion is a good basis for teaching anyone ethics?

I retired from SW development in April 2023. Looks like perfect timing; everyone I know who is still working in the field hates it.