2025-06-26 18:26:00
CertNexus are a vendor for professional certifications in the fields of IT, development and information security. I hold their CSC certifications (my CFR lapsed) and teach their CSC (cyber secure coder) class.
CSC-210 is a few years old, so they're now replacing it with the new CSD-110: cyber secure software developer. A few weeks ago they published the curriculum and exam blue print and this week they opened the beta-testing for the CSD-110 exam.
I have not had a chance to see their new training materials, which I assume they are still updating and making changes to. But today I sat the CSD-110 exam, to help them improve and test the new test.
In short: it was good!
I feel that these questions were well written! Some were a bit long to read, but overall the exam questions are not dry factual, but ask questions that require understanding and insight. The won't ask "what is the definition of phase X of the ATT&CK framework?", but more along the lines of "you observe X, Y and Z in your network and your team has determined that A and B. At which point in their kill chain are the attackers right now?".
With CompTIA beta exams I frequently leave large amounts of comments and feedback, pointing at bad wording or answers and questions that need improvement. With this exam I left very little feedback, meaning I really didn't see anything that wasn't good.
There was a decent diversity to the 80 questions I saw, although I would have liked to see more code and technical questions. It's called cyber secure software developer after all. But I assume that CertNexus has a large pool of questions and I simply got one particular mix of questions.
Having taken both CSC-210 and CSD-110 I will continue to stand behind this exam and training materials. I have now taught this class six times and every time the students come away feeling they learned a lot of useful new background. And as I said: I think this is honestly a good exam.
kilala.nl tags: work, studies,
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2025-06-26 18:24:00
I completely forgot to actually show the risography print I made a few weeks ago. So here we are!
My colleague Tox discovered that the "fluo orange" ink, is actually fluorescent under UV light! How cool is that?!
kilala.nl tags: creative,
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2025-06-14 16:05:00
I've been into drawing and zine making for quite a while now. When I did a small talk on zine making last year, I dove into reproduction techniques: laser printer, xerox, mimeograph, stenciling and risography. I decided then that I really want to try working with a Riso printer at least once.
Under the guidance of Justyna and Angi, the eight of us got an explanation on how the Riso printers work, we did a quick group project to trial the machine and then we were invited to work on our own projects. I'd come prepared and brought the cover of "The tale of the dubious crypto", which I'd tried to make ready for risography.
For today's workshop we got to choose between neon pink + red, or neon orange +teal. I chose the latter, doubting myself all the way. The choice didn't come out great, mostly because of the project I'd chosen and on how I'd prepared it. As Marli put it: "Is it okay to say that I hate it?". :D She's not wrong: the end result looks kinda garish. :D
But I did learn quite a few things!
Justyna and Angi told me how they use "clipping mask layers" in Illustrator, Photoshop and Procreat to easily try different colors and effects. It's demonstrated in the Risopop starter workshop booklet. Inkscape does things differently, there's no nice and easy trick with layers for this.
Thanks to Sweater Cat Designs I am learning how to do it with Inkscape though. And that's where today's big lesson comes in: my grayscale files were created by making my objects black and then messing with their opacity. Shouldn'ta done that... I should've worked with grayscale, white to black.
On to my next project, which hopefully will turn out better! If I want the gradients to turn out nicer than they did and if I want a decently easy workflow, I'm afraid I'll have to start learning a new tool instead of Inkscape.
kilala.nl tags: creative,
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2025-06-03 13:11:00
I've been a ludite on the subject of applied AI, such as LLM (large language models). Like cryptocoin and blockchain stuff, I've been avoiding the subject as I've been sceptical as to the actual value of the applied products.
Now I'm finally coming around and I've decided I need to learn how do these things work? Not as in "how can I use them?", but "what makes them tick?".
There's a few maths and programming YouTubers whose work I really appreciate, insofar that they've clarified for me how LLM work internally.
If you have no more than one hour, watch Grant Sanderson's talk where he visualizes the internal workings of LLM in general.
Then if you have days and days at your disposal:
I've learned a lot so far! I'm happily reassured that I haven't been lieing to students about the capabilities and impossibilities involving general purpose LLM and IT work.
3Blue1Brown's series on neural networks, starting with video 1 here, helped me really understand the underlying functions and concepts that show how "AI" currently works. The video series goes over the classical "recognition of handwritten numbers" example and explains in a series of videos what the neurons in a net do and how. And more importantly it clarifies why, to us humans and even the AI's creators, it's completely invisible WHY or HOW an AI comes to certain decissions. It's not transparent.
What got my rabbit holing started? A recent Computerphile video called "The forbidden AI technique". Chana Messinger goes over research by OpenAI that talks about their new LLM "deciding", or "obfuscating", or "lieing" and "getting penalized or rewarded" which had me completely confused.
Up until this week I saw LLM as purely statistical engines, looking for "the next most logical word to say". Which they indeed kind of are. But the anthropomorphization of the LLM is what got me so confused! What did they mean by reward or punishment? In retrospect, literally a trainer telling the LLM "this result was good, this result was bad". And what constitutes "lieing" or "obfuscation"? The LLM adjusting its weights, bias and parameters during training, so certain chains of words would no longer be given as output.
It's like Hagrid's "Shouldn't've said that, I should not have said that..." realization.
Now, to learn a lot more!
kilala.nl tags: work, studies,
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All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Tess Sluijter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.