I quit coffee earlier this year and traded coffee for water. I now drink about 2 gallons of water a day and my teeth have never looked better
I quit coffee earlier this year and traded coffee for water. I now drink about 2 gallons of water a day and my teeth have never looked better
I realized I was long overdue for a hardware refresh when I learned that nvme drives are /dev/nvme and not /dev/sd[x] and I realized every single computer I interacted with was pre-nvme
Having written some error messages in a godforsaken database frontend, an error message only means that something didn’t work correctly and may or may not correctly indicate what is actually wrong
The final line of the one about the VAX machine is so perfect
The biggest problem with the bubble that IT insulates themselves into is that if you don’t users will never submit tickets and will keep coming to you personally, then get mad when their high priority concern sits for a few days because you were out of office but the rest of the team got no tickets because the user decided they were better than a ticket.
If people only know how to summon you through the ancient ritual of ticket opening with sufficient information they’ll follow that ritual religiously to summon you when needed. If they know “oh just hit up Rob on teams, he’ll get you sorted” the mysticism is ruined and order is lost
Honestly I say this all partially jokingly. We do try to insulate ourselves because we know some users will try to bypass tickets if given any opportunity to do so, but there is very much value in balancing that need with accessability and visibility. So the safe option is to hide in your basement office and avoid mingling, but thats also the option that limits your ability to improve yourself and your organization
What irks me is the “technical impossibility” of raw TCP and “I must be wrong” when filling out their firewall change form.
Most commonly a port is opened to accept traffic of a specific protocol that runs overtop of TCP of UDP. I’m guessing the individual that responded might not be very good at technical communication and was just trying to question “are you sure it’s raw TCP and not just http traffic?” In order to keep the holes poked into the firewall as narrow and specific as possible
They’ve since given us a different port “close to others that we use”, for whatever reason that matters, and based their choice on some list of common protocols outside the reserved range. But not 4001.
Usually if infrastructure is assigning a port other than default it’s because that port is already in use. The actual port number you use doesn’t matter as long as it’s not a common default (which basically all ports below 1024 are)
Using ports that are close together for similar purposes can aid in memorability if that’s a need, but ultimately it doesn’t matter much if they’re not conflicting with common defaults
They opened a ticket because an arrow at the border of our UI vanished when they screen shared on Teams. Because of the red border. And they blamed our application for it.
Probably a user was complaining and needed action immediately and they didn’t have time to test a cosmetic issue in an edgecase. For minor issues I’ll open a ticket with the party I think might be responsible just to get it out of the way so I can get to higher priority stuff, and I’ll rely on that party to let me know if it’s not actually their problem. Heck it might even simply be the IT person assumed it was a misrouted ticket, since users open tickets in random queues all the time
They didn’t set up their PKI correctly and opening our webpage on specific hosts gave the typical “go back” warning. But it was our fault somehow, even though the certificate was the one they supplied us and it was valid.
If the certificate is correctly generated and valid an SSL error would indicate it was incorrectly applied to the application. I’m guessing by the inclusion in this rant that the conclusion was it was in fact a problem with the certificate, but we don’t have enough details to speculate if it was truly a mistake by the individual that generated it or just a miscommunication
Honestly it sounds like you’re too quick to bash IT and should instead be more open to dialogue. I don’t know the specifics of your workplace and communications, but if you approach challenges with other teams from an “us vs them” standpoint it’s just going to create conflict. Sometimes the easiest way to do it is to try to hop on a quick call with the person once you get to more than a couple of emails back and forth, plus then you have more social cues to avoid getting angry with eachother and can give more relevant details
WSL is interesting because it manages to simultaneously offer everything a Linux user would want while also actually capable of none of what a Linux user would need it to do. Weird compatibility issues, annoying filesystem mappings that make file manipulation a pain, etc
In a Windows environment I’ve found it honestly works better to either ssh into a Linux machine or learn the PowerShell way of doing it than to work through WSL’s quirks
no benefit over GUI alternatives
Lol nice bait
My current workplace organizes both development and infrastructure within IT which itself is a sub department of finance. I’m not saying this is the best approach because honestly it only took 1.5 layers of apathetic management to make long term planning a nonstarter
This hit too close to home. I’m now in my second forced job change in 3 years, and honestly I’m trying to make the most of it by using this job change to move to a larger city, just like how I used my last job change for a big bump in pay and benefits. It’s been a goal to move for better resources for my special needs child, but now it’s also about ensuring more resiliencey in my finances because if the next place lays me off I’ll actually have no shortage of places to work within a 30 minute commute rather than commuting an hour like I did a year and a half ago and like I’m likely to start doing again soon. This shit makes me seriously wonder how people manage to work at places for 20 or 30 years straight
Or for the political bent, we need to make layoffs more expensive and tip the balances on mergers and acquisitions to make those far harder. Force companies to pivot to meet a competitor or die
I have mixed feelings on this front. On one hand, a locked down computer encourages either extreme compliance (so no learning how to do new things) or encourages the kid to figure out a bypass which might be far worse than if they had an unmanaged computer to begin with.
Right now my oldest isn’t reading yet so I have controls primarily to enforce a time limit particularly for dopamine-heavy media apps, and to prevent how much she can accidentally do by clicking without a clue of what she’s clicking on and just clicking the colored button. I’ll play it by ear for how much control is necessary to ensure my kids can develop to be the best adults they can be. The one thing I’m not looking towards is that my oldest is only about 4 years away from the window where I’ll need to have “The Talk” with her, because many men in this world suck.
I’ve noticed how kids seem to get into far nastier dopamine drip addictions with a tablet/phone than the same kid does with a TV where there’s more friction to changing videos. I’ll probably do something like this to encourage healthier content consumption habits once mine are old enough to do more that pause/unpause the TV
As a kid I was effectively given unlimited screentime, and that definitely shaped me into adulthood for better and for worse. My wife has severe insomnia so she often sleeps until 11am, and my 4 year old always gets up around 7:30am so before she started school we setup an old phone with a managed google account with a 2.5 hour screentime limit, and a 30 minute limit for the YouTube Kids app (grandma got her hooked on YouTube of course so no putting that cat back into the bag) to encourage more enriching content (I preinstalled the PBS Kids apps, as well as a number of age-appropriate games) She’s at an age where she’s extremely impressionable and without locking things down will end up installing things by clicking ads or watching weird stuff she probably shouldn’t be watching.
In the near future my plan is to gift my 4 year old an old ewaste laptop I acquired off a friend and a Minecraft account since she’s really been getting into Minecraft when she gets to play on my or my wife’s computers, and I’ll probably play it by ear for when to raise the parental controls, but right now she’s simply not ready for unrestricted internet access. I probably won’t limit screentime on the computer other than telling her its time to do something else when she’s been on the computer for too long, but we’ll play it by ear.
My thinking was in terms of a malicious website, if it does a fake redirect to a fake bank webpage it will then be able to harvest your bank login as well, which is worse than a credit/debit card being harvested
Sounds like a good opportunity to redirect to a fake version of the bank’s website.
Honestly I think the best solution is a revokable token from your bank that you can give to a merchant. One token per merchant, make it easy to revoke as the user sees fit. If you see a charge on the token from one merchant by someone else it’s immediately obvious that token and possibly that merchant was compromised
I mean, the advice I’ve heard for one who’s threat model is “the feds are actively trying to identify me” is to have a dedicated burner computer that you do all of your illegal activities on and no other activities. Then of course on top of that avoid saving secrets onto the device and type them in manually every time (ephemeral distros like Tails are good for that)
We usually do tex-mex style tacos with flour tortillas as a semi-lazy meal but depending on how lazy we’re feeling we may or may not warm the store bought tortillas. At some point we’ll have a night we go all out with homemade tortillas and all of the fixings for really devine tacos, but until then the fanciest we usually get is mixing our own seasoning and warming the tortillas
But I can’t imagine doing a wrap in a warm tortilla. Sandwiches (which include wraps) must be cold in my mind. Probably an just autistic texture thing on my part but whatever
My wife had a forgotten bill get sent to small claims instead of actually contacting her. As soon as it hit the small claims court system she got inundated with ads from law firms offering to represent her
They say it doesn’t but my real world experience is that you have to re-register every year or three. But it definitely makes a difference in the legal spam callers at least
Short answer: they already are
Slightly longer answer: GPT models like ChatGPT are part of an experiment in “if we train the AI model on shedloads of data does it make a more powerful AI model?” and after OpenAI made such big waves every company is copying them including trying to train models similar to ChatGPT rather than trying to innovate and do more
Even longer answer: There’s tons of different AI models out there for doing tons of different things. Just look at the over 1 million models on Hugging Face (a company which operates as a repository for AI models among other services) and look at all of the different types of models you can filter for on the left.
Training an image generation model on research papers probably would make it a lot worse at generating pictures of cats, but training a model that you want to either generate or process research papers on existing research papers would probably make a very high quality model for either goal.
More to your point, there’s some neat very targeted models with smaller training sets out there like Microsoft’s PHI-3 model which is primarily trained on textbooks
As for saving the world, I’m curious what you mean by that exactly? These generative text models are great at generating text similar to their training data, and summarization models are great at summarizing text. But ultimately AI isn’t going to save the world. Once the current hype cycle dies down AI will be a better known and more widely used technology, but ultimately its just a tool in the toolbox.