Just use longer passwords?

Grab a sentence you know well.

Pick just the first letter of each word.

It will look like it's random - for example "I like my lemmy only with beans and bacon" becomes "ilmlowbab" - and it comes from a far vaster possibility space (ever possible sentence and it need not even make sense) than that of "words in the English language and derived words" so it's a lot harder to try to crack with a dictionary attack.

Also it works in everything that takes ASCII charactes (i.e. everything but numeric only pin codes).

Long time ago a friend of mine used a set of key press to generate a smiley face to put in his bios which ended up in a situation where he was not able to type in the same smiley face into the password prompt. I had to teach him to reset his bios battery to get back into the bios.

For petty services where you don't want to have to break out the password manager, try making your own mental salted hash.

Pick four long words at random. Assign each of these to the four quadrants of the alphabet.

A-F - Equipment

G-M - Triumphant

N-S - Sampling

U-Z - Fatigued

Pick one number:

4

Now, take the first letter of the service that the password is for, and that selects your quadrant word. Take the number of letters in the service and multiply it against your number. Take the last letter of the service, and on your querty keyboard, move all the way to the right of thst line to select the first symbol there. Thats your unique password thats salted with yo ur personal words and number.

Facebook = Equipment32:

Lemmy = Triumphant20{

Pizza Hut = Sampling36{

If you want more security for these petty services, use longer words, bigger number, or use some other metric, Tweak the algorithm to make it unique to you. Maybe capitalize a middle letter in your salt word based on the length of the service name. Maybe add the first letter of the colour of the service logo to the password, EG

Facebook = Equipment32:B

Lemmy = Triumphant20{T

Pizza Hut = Sampling36{R

Petty services I would consider to be anything that's not super critical, and is at a higher likelyhood of breaching my shit.

For banks, primary emails, or government services, use a more complex algorithm or a random string of chars from your password manager.

I wonder how often curse words or obscure slang are included in dictionary attacks.

Anyone who takes any kind of advice from the fucking New York Post deserves what they get.