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21 votes
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Is a career change towards cybersecurity viable for someone with an accountancy background?
Sorry if this isn't the best place to ask. IT and cybersecurity-focused communities over on Reddit aren't exactly the most welcoming places for such questions, and reading the r/ITCareerQuestions...
Sorry if this isn't the best place to ask. IT and cybersecurity-focused communities over on Reddit aren't exactly the most welcoming places for such questions, and reading the r/ITCareerQuestions wiki has made me seriously question if I'm being sold false promises of working in a sector that actually has a low demand for workers. Then again, that wiki page seems more geared towards the US job market.
Two weeks ago, I responded to an Instagram ad advertising cybersecurity courses, because the job market is horrible here in the UK right now, and after some setbacks with my ACCA studies, I am seriously considering just giving up on trying to get into chartered accountancy because that path is closing many more doors for me. A course advisor rang me asking about the reasons I showed interest in the ad, then we had a long discussion about any questions I had, what the sector is apparently like, etc.
Some of the claims seem too good to be true, i.e. that it's an industry where you can afford to be picky, jobs outnumber people by almost 3 to 1, most jobs are remote, the provider boasts a 90%+ employment rate, I don't need programming experience, the most complex thing I'd be doing is running command prompt/powershell commands and scripts.
The firm itself seems legitimate. They offer CompTIA, Microsoft, Cisco, AWS and EC-Council certifications, have good review scores on Trustpilot, are a registered training provider and limited company in the UK, and are supposedly an assured service provider with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC.) The courses they mentioned to me in their syllabus supposedly come to £4k and would take about six months.
- Am I right to be wary about what this training provider are offering?
- Do you require extensive programming knowledge or a computer science background to work in cybersecurity in any capacity? A friend with an IT background has told me that Python is useful in his field.
- Is the reality of IT and cybersecurity jobs in the UK (or in the West) far different from what has been painted to me?
24 votes -
The state of American men is — not so good
42 votes -
Learning to Be Me (1990)
23 votes -
Some AI music I generated
12 votes -
Piano key dimensions are a math puzzle
Piano keys are familiar and easy enough to draw if you're not trying to be exact, but if you want label the dimensions with their exact measurements (like in a CAD drawing), it turns into a math...
Piano keys are familiar and easy enough to draw if you're not trying to be exact, but if you want label the dimensions with their exact measurements (like in a CAD drawing), it turns into a math puzzle. The problem comes from the groups of two and three black keys.
This article explains it like this:
If you've ever looked closely at a piano keyboard you may have
noticed that the widths of the white keys are not all the same
at the back ends (where they pass between the black keys). Of
course, if you think about it for a minute, it's clear they
couldn't possibly all be the same width, assuming the black keys
are all identical (with non-zero width) and the white keys all
have equal widths at the front ends, because the only simultaneous
solution of 3W=3w+2b and 4W=4w+3b is with b=0.To unpack that a bit: in that equation, 'W' is the width of each white key at the front (which should all be the same), 'w' is the width of a white key at the back, and 'b' is the width of a black key.) The first equation is for the group of two black keys (separating C, D, and E) and the second equation is for the three black keys separating F through B.
Since it's mathematically impossible, a constraint needs to be relaxed. The article describes ways to make the white keys have slightly different widths at the back.
If we set c=e=(W-5B/8) and a=b=d=f=g=(W-3B/4) we have a maximum
discrepancy of only B/8, and quite a few actual pianos use this
pattern as well. However, the absolute optimum arrangement is to
set c=d=e=(W-2B/3) and f=g=a=b=(W-3B/4), which gives a maximum
discrepancy of just B/12. This pattern is used on many keyboards,
e.g. the Roland PC-100.When actually building a musical instrument (instead of just drawing the keyboard), there is a further constraint, described in this article:
The black keys on a piano keyboard, instead of always being centered on the dividing line between the two white keys they lie between, are spaced so that the twelve keys which make up an octave are spaced equally as they enter the internal mechanism of the instrument.
But this means that the "key caps" for the white keys should be slightly off-center compared to whatever rod or lever they're attached to. The author speculates about how to divide this up using various units.
(They seem quite annoying to 3D print.)
19 votes -
Pebble Flow review - A towable RV made for electric vehicles - Fully integrated battery, motor, solar, and software
13 votes -
US aerospace company Beta Technologies' electric plane, ALIA CTOL, has completed a 200 kilometre journey between Sønderborg and Copenhagen airports
14 votes -
The robot sculptors of Italy
12 votes -
JetStream - An online school for weather
23 votes -
'I can't drink the water' - life next to a US data centre
26 votes -
How algorithms, alpha males and tradwives are winning the war for kids’ minds
46 votes -
China's tech giant claims 1,800-mile range for new solid-state electric vehicle battery
26 votes -
China's emissions may now be falling
29 votes -
‘Dune: Part Three’ gets official title, will include sequences shot with IMAX cameras
33 votes -
The EU wants to decrypt your private data by 2030
50 votes -
Nobody has a personality anymore. We are products with labels.
32 votes -
Exploring the dangers of AI in mental health care
15 votes -
Online mathematics programs may benefit most the kids who need it least
22 votes -
Apple overhauls EU App Store rules following penalty
32 votes -
Gaming on a medical device
11 votes -
The internet as a giant Skinner box
22 votes -
ASCII Moon: View and cycle through the Moon's phases, rendered in ASCII art
18 votes -
'Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers to influence automated review
29 votes -
These police officers in Denmark are tackling crime by playing online games with kids
8 votes -
Nichelle Nichols Space Camp for teen girls to open in 2026
32 votes -
Alerts fatigue, or would that be journalism fatigue?
13 votes -
Share the contents of an old file you've got lying around
Share some digital clutter from one of your hard drives -- something from a LONG time ago. For example: a to-do list, poetry, a script you wrote, a PowerPoint presentation, etc. Give us the date...
Share some digital clutter from one of your hard drives -- something from a LONG time ago. For example: a to-do list, poetry, a script you wrote, a PowerPoint presentation, etc.
Give us the date the file was created/modified.
And, if you so choose, give us context on the file (but if you'd rather let it speak for itself, feel free!).
41 votes -
Can AI-generated photos be art?
24 votes -
Give footnotes the boot
16 votes -
AI’s ability to read and summarize is making it a useful tool for scholarship
18 votes -
An industry group representing almost all of Denmark's media outlets including broadcasters and newspapers has said it's suing ChatGPT's parent company OpenAI for using its content
13 votes -
The story behind this perfectly normal photo. Today we dive into yet another surprisingly convoluted online rabbit hole; the case of the Cooper Family Falling Body Photo and its elusive creator.
23 votes -
Denmark seeks to make spread of deepfake images illegal, citing misinformation concerns
32 votes -
CareerBuilder + Monster, which once dominated online job boards, file for bankruptcy
18 votes -
The boss of mobile gaming giant Supercell says the industry needs to take bigger risks to compete
7 votes -
Rough ride: how Uber quietly took more of driver's fare with its algorithm change
35 votes -
How does tiny Denmark defy the odds to become one of the richest nations?
7 votes -
The "standard" car charger is usually overkill
27 votes -
Walmart and Amazon are exploring issuing their own stablecoins
15 votes -
Denmark tests unmanned robotic sailboat fleet – vessels will patrol Danish and NATO waters in the Baltic and North Seas, where maritime tensions and suspected sabotage have escalated
9 votes -
Bergen in Norway has been building one of the world's most advanced trash systems, using vacuum tubes to whisk waste away
13 votes -
Before the government announced its move, Denmark's largest cities of Copenhagen and Aarhus had already announced plans to phase out Microsoft software and cloud services. Here's why.
48 votes -
Check out my ongoing project where I try to find out how accurately a LLM can predict sports outcomes
5 votes -
A literature clock
18 votes -
Food and Drug Administration clears Wildtype’s cell-cultivated salmon for US debut
13 votes -
A better way to turn solar sails
10 votes -
After eighteen years of infertility, an AI tool let a couple conceive
22 votes -
Steam finally goes native on Apple Silicon
39 votes -
Everyone in Hollywood is already using AI (and hiding it)
29 votes