I have an analog clock in my man cave. Its very steam punk in design. It is NOT accurate and is ONLY a decoration piece that gets corrected when I can spare the attention. It runs fast, if anyone cares.

Ultimately, my wife liked it, bought it for me, and put it up. Not gonna upset her over something I really don’t care about.

I was in grade school. Doing an experiment where we sliced off a section of fruit to put under a microscope.

My dumb ass, with a plastic butter knife, managed to get the worst cut my thumb has ever seen.

That thing was rough and ragged, and got infected and was a bitch to heal.

Just saying, with enough stupidity, you can really harm yourself with harmless objects, lol.

Pretty sure checking a post on their site, say for a BG3 build idea, doesn’t constitute abuse.

The powers that be sacrificed their only value, their user base, to make money quick. We’ll see how it plays out long term, but I’ve moved away from social media. My lemmy use is only on my desktop at this point, and I get precious little time at it, so most of it isn’t spent on lemmy.

Time enjoyed is not wasted.

Of course, Tik Tok isn’t my jam, so it would be a waste of time for me.

I’ve often wondered how the world would cope without 24 hour IT support.

All I know is I would love to see the chaos unfold, sadly, I think more than a few lives would end as a result so I can’t condone that for all fields.

Me too.

In high school, there was a kid who was always trying to make money. Like even then, he wanted his own business. In fact he had a couple small ones back then.

One of his endeavours was massive LAN parties. He had the capital to rent spaces, hardware, and was even able to get sponsorships.

He did not have the tech chops to do it though.

Myself, and one circle of friends were THE computer nerds of the school, but it wasn’t really seen as a negative for us - then again we did orchestrate a “free day” and got away with it by taking down the schools network from inside and one person had a loud fucking mouth, but we covered our tracks.

Anyways, we got in free to these LAN parties as long as we set up and maintained shit. Surprisingly very few problems, about once a LAN party we had to fix something. And it was useful experience.

That shit was fucking amazing. I loved it.

I got home from work. Wife works from home. She has had an ongoing tech issue I can’t really touch because it’s that companies property. But I just don’t want to hear it. At all. I’m dead inside in that regard.

It’s gotten so bad that I had an issue with my gaming rig.

I needed to reseat the RAM. Not hard, except the case is mounted on the wall as a display piece that would require moving a bunch of shit before getting a ladder and yada yada.

I just didn’t game for three days. Just could not muster the energy to care about that. I hate it.

Bounties are a bit nebulous.

Actual pen testing companies have red teams (attackers) that have a scope of what they are allowed to target, and how they go about it.

For example, just because a red teamer can get into the data center to do stuff locally doesn’t meet the scope requirement of testing their web page externally. They would be prosecuted most likely.

Pen testing companies also have lawyers, at least they should, who help negotiate scope and what is legally allowed and in what context.

Due to the secrecy needed for some tests, the security staff may not be aware a test is in place. From what I understand, generally people have some sort of paperwork on their person, or at least the contact information of someone at the company with the authority to authorize this red team pen test.

That being said, cops may still get called, you may still get arrested, and have to deal with the courts.

Or worse, some trigger happy security guard shoots you.

I’m just studying that stuff though at the moment, so take what I said with a grain of salt.

Don’t work in medical IT.

It has been literally life and death before.

Oh, well that’s totally affordable and won’t affect the consumer market at all.

Get to vantage point.

Explore actionable map points.

Go to next area.

Repeat.

Which game am I talking about? Doesn’t matter, it’s the Ubisoft formula these days and has been for a long time.

Wake me up when Ubisoft metaphorically burns to the ground, or they do something innovative.

Makes one want to sail the high seas out of principle.

Don’t forget the long winded tales of how their distant relative they never met gave them the recipe from the “old country” or some shit.

Dude, I just needed to see what temperature to set the oven to.

Restaurants absolutely shouldn’t.

However, people suck and it happens, probably more often than you would want.

With a pi hole, you’re basically setting up a DNS server that has built in abilities to stop ads.

What that means is, you can point your router (or any device really) at that DNS server (pi hole) to block ads.

Ublock is good.

Due to remote work constraints, a pi hole doesn’t play nicely with their stuff and I can’t be bothered to figure out a work around. Mostly because it’s my wife’s remote work, and their IT is hesitant to talk with me about it - I get it, I wouldn’t do that at work (I’m in IT).

So I use ublock on Firefox on both my desktop and phone, plus I run through a VPN that blocks ads and malware for everything else. The VPN is a separate use case, but that’s just an added benefit.

This makes me miss a bar I used to go to, and was the favored watering hole for most of the staff at a previous job.

It had had several owners, and it’s name changed on official paperwork every time. Locals still called it Big Tree.

Why?

It was built around a big tree that went out of the roof lol.

It was bought and demolished, the tree removed.

Nothing has been done with the lot since, and it’s been a couple years.

Damn shame.

Social engineering, arguably, is one of the harder things to learn.

It’s a collection of soft skills, and if you’ve been paying attention to rank and file tech jobs, places are looking for people with soft skills because they’re so impractical to train.

This goes down to your basic help desk tech.

Anyone with an interest in computers can sit down and learn how to analyze and exploit weakness in code. In fact, it’s a fun puzzle. Dealing with other people, let alone establishing oneself as another person and fucking SELLING that character enough to get what you need?

People write off social engineering far too quickly. It’s quick, it’s effective, and if done well, the person you exploited doesn’t even realize they’ve been tricked.

The only code I fuck with is my own. I’m not a Dev, but I write things for my convenience.

Sometimes it gets the attention of those above me, and I get some sweet sweet time off the phones, blasting whatever music I’m in the mood for through noise canceling ear buds while I add a little form to the function, so to speak.

So mostly, its a challenge to myself while working night shift, also part of why I enjoy night shift.

That’s a symptom of capitalism as a whole.

The whole perpetual growth, and being legally bound to try to provide that to shareholders, means only “safe” ideas are given any traction.

The only time any “innovative” comes out is when billionaires have a pipe dream.

However, they lack the skills or expertise (or even common sense) to execute them.

Musk had ideas, bought his way into leadership, and essentially had to be corralled by handlers while other people did the actual hard work.

Then, at the platform formally known as Twitter, with no handlers… Well, the world has seen how an unleashed Musk handles that. Spoiler: not well.

I nearly killed a group of people one night.

Full on slamming of brakes and trying to not have another sort of accident.

Roughly 3am, a major major highway, and a group of people decides to dash across.

Dark clothing. Crossed between where any lights were.

Everyone involved was very lucky in that moment.

To be fair, Tesla is owned by a South African who immigrated to Canada, then the US - and had apartheid slaves do the hard part of precious stone mining.

Much like the former cheetoh in chief, completely removed from the realities others face, and never had to deal with consequences.

It isn’t a solely American thing, though we may be the world champs at it.