You can keep your hands on the keyboard. Some people find having to move them away from their usual home place breaks their flow.
Sure there are things like an Elgato StreamDeck that you can do similar things with but they still require you to move a hand from the keyboard.
I suppose it is similar to using voice control things like Alexa. Setting a timer by hand in the kitchen isn’t exactly hard but it is so much more convenient to do it by voice if your hands are covered in raw chicken juice or the like.
My kids school puts some information that I need to see (not just "would like to see") on Instagram. Same with the sports team they play for.
I've complained to both about it but change is glacial. I'm lucky in that I know how to work around it, and I do my best to keep others who aren't so tech savvy updated about things they need to know but may have missed.
Irony is they moved most of this info from Twitter/X to Instagram.
At the expected price point it would be nice if it came with a free pied-à-terre in Kensington (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington). Just a small studio apartment, nothing special.
I sat a similar test at the start of my ADHD diagnosis (in the UK for reference).
The one I did (QbCheck) was a similar setup but you were presented with shapes on the screen, either a square or a circle, and either blue or red. All you had to do was press the spacebar when the shape on the screen was the same shape and colour as the previous one. No sound distracitons (or maybe I just had the volume muted.)
You also had to do the test on a laptop with a forward facing camera so the software could track eye movement.
I remember starting the test and thinking "This is exactly what my brain is wired for, I'm going to be awesome at this test!"
Within a minute my mind had already moved on to "I wonder how they score this test? I guess they're looking at accuracy, reaction times, how those trend over time, whether the accuracy/reactions goes up/down if they show the same shape/colour more than twice in a row?" etc...
It didn't take long for me to then get jolted into a "wait, did I just zone out a bit there and miss one?"
Then I became overly conscious of my eyes wandering around and not looking at the screen.
Then my mind moved on to "what if I'm too good at this and it means I won't get a diagnosis?"
Soon it was "When will this ever end? This must have been going on for ages!" only to find it had only been about 3 minutes.
The test took 20 minutes or so and I was mentally exhausted by the end of it.
My actual ADHD diagnosis was backed up by an 80 minute interview, basically doing the DSM-5 questions but linking it all back to childhood experiences too. I've no idea how much weight the QbCheck test had.
Glad I got the diagnosis, I've been masking both for years (diagnosed in my late 40s) but just got burnt out doing so. Medication helps but isn't perfect and since I'm probably AuDHD I find the ADHD medication amplifies some of the Autism traits and makes me into a bit of an emotional zombie, but that seems to be better than having zero motivation (aside from stress/deadlines and serious consequences).
The first time I went for a diagnosis I was made to sit the same QbCheck test, which was then used as the entire justification for why I couldn't possibly have ADHD despite every other aspect saying I did. Apparently 30 years of having to sit at a computer and do a task in order to eat and pay rent means that I can sit down for 20 minutes and do a task at a computer.
I'm still quite bitter about this because it then took me another two years to work up the motivation to go get retested (this time somewhere that doesn't use snake oil), followed by an additional year to work up the motivation to sort out coordinating with my GP to get on meds. That's three years I could have been a functioning human being.
I feel your thoughts about "what if I'm too good at this and it means I wont get diagnosed?" and "when will this ever end?" one, felt like forever - the time blindness struggle is real. I still thought I did too well until the end where they showed me.. well I missed a lot of those little dots in the quadrants or whatever it was.
> ... my understanding is that in Europe it's virtually unheard of to have an adult diagnosis.
Can't speak for the whole of the continent but UK here and I got my ADHD diagnosis a few years shy of 50 years old. Wasn't tricky at all, just a long-ish (8 month) wait for a non-private diagnosis (not full NHS but via an outsourced provider via Right-To-Choose).
When going through the DSM-5 questions (during an ~80 minute interview) I was asked to give examples from both current life experience and from childhood, and that was enough.
The traffic was separated so that anything on the public hotspot was not attributed to the private subscriber network.
Secondly for years I lived somewhere very remote so that meant that hardly anyone ever got to use my broadband connection via such a hotspot, but I got to use hundreds of other peoples hotspots when I was somewhere less isolated.
I was quite happy to opt in to this system as I benefitted hugely from it.
A bit into tinfoilhat territory but just because they don't advertise that they have an 802.11 radio doesn't mean the devices can't have one. Or an LTE/4G/5G radio.
If the user data is worth that much then I wouldn't be surprised if some manufacturers put such radios in their non-smart TVs in order to try and gather such data.
I live in a densely populated part of a large UK city and (checks `nmcli dev wifi list`) there are 14 distinct wireless networks near me that aren't mine. There's a good chance that any IOT device could find something nearby, and there's even a whole load of LoRa nodes that it could use for a very slow uplink.
AWS and Azure stress on spending limits you can set for each card... in their documentation !
Some gen AI and ML folks seem to see a way out to make things without reading any doc or scientific literature. Gen AI is a pretty clever bit of computing, but not witchcraft yet
It all comes down to where the boundary for data access is implemented, and how strictly.
If your webapp has unfettered database access then don't be surprised if it is hacked and someone can do `select * from users` and then posts that dump somewhere.
The attack surface changes if your webapp can only do a REST call to pull a single user record at a time. That way you can put some auditing in, you can put rate limiting in to detect that, etc.
Obviously the user record REST api endpoint is still vulnerable, but it's a much smaller attack surface, easier to audit, and can be monitored a lot more closely.
Yes, ultimately, there will still be a set of vulnerable humans that have access to the database servers themselves and they can always walk out of the place with an SD card hidden in a Rubik's cube but there has to be an element of trust somewhere.
The problem is that too many people put that trust boundary way too far out into the big bad Internet. Or don't even consider it at all and just rely on the fact that other targets are more appealing.
Sure there are things like an Elgato StreamDeck that you can do similar things with but they still require you to move a hand from the keyboard.
I suppose it is similar to using voice control things like Alexa. Setting a timer by hand in the kitchen isn’t exactly hard but it is so much more convenient to do it by voice if your hands are covered in raw chicken juice or the like.
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