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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • You could make an argument that not using banking apps decreases your security, since most banks use either SMS or those apps as the second factor while confirming the operations. It is true that the apps are of varying quality, but SMS is not really a serious alternative. Some banks do have apps that are limited to confirming operations, and one bank where I live did recently start accepting U2F, which is amazing news.



  • Imagine a soccer ball. The most traditional design consists of white hexagons and black pentagons. If you count them, you will find that there are 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons.

    Now imagine you tried to cover the entire Earth in the same way, using similar size hexagons and pentagons (hopefully the rules are intuitive). How many pentagons would be there? Intuitively, you would think that the number of both shapes would be similar, just like on the soccer ball. So, there would be a lot of hexagons and a lot of pentagons. But actually, along with many hexagons, you would still have exactly 12 pentagons, not one less, not one more. This comes from the Euler’s formula, and there is a nice sketch of the proof here: .