> ARM won't even talk with small ASIC fabless companies, even if they are willing to shell out big upfront costs and royalties per chip that ARM demands
[Citation needed] There's literally 0 upfront costs for a Cortex-M3 [0]
As soon as you start going more to the niche side, it gets super specific. My day jobs is RTL design, doing digital circuits, and my top 1 niche recommendation is MHRD, "a game in which you design various hardware circuits in a hardware description language."
MHRD is pretty fun. The implementation is a little janky (it's written in Java, the interface isn't accelerated, the leaderboards are a little broken), but as a game it's basically "starting with a NAND gate, build a processor from scratch, using components you've built in earlier levels". Honestly, for me, it was like a refresher of the 6 month processor design course I did in my CS degree 20 years ago.
You might find it a little simplistic given your day job, but for anyone else reading, I found it really fun.
Side note: If you like MHRD and want something a little less real world and a little more video gamey, try TIS-100, which might be the single best game on Steam.
The best one hands down was installing an ad blocker. Before that I had a few questions about "Is this thing saying I won an iPhone real? It seems to good to be true", now they don't even see it anymore.
The second is separate hardware for authentication. The bank login and wire transfer to an unknown account requires them to punch an 8 digit number on a card reader, and type back the result in the browser. This way, there can't be any full compromise.
Last one was education: snail mail scams were a thing in the past (I had no idea when they told me about it, which is quite humbling really). Draw the parallels: unless it's someone you know, they could be trying to take advantage of you.
[Citation needed] There's literally 0 upfront costs for a Cortex-M3 [0]
[0] https://developer.arm.com/products/designstart