bikingbismuth

Though my Erlang skills have long atrophied, this book was my intro to functional programming and helped me understand recursion. It’s been a while since I’ve read it but I remember it being kind of funny as well as informative.

I recently took a Waymo back to my hotel in Phoenix after a few drinks and it was a really pleasant experience. It didn’t take the freeways but it navigated the surface streets pretty much perfectly. It helped that it was about 25% the cost of an Uber at that time.

Probably not in any meaningful way, but I would agree the above comment they are ethically distinct.

I know this video is humorous, but it’s also kind of touching. After watching, I started taking random measurements in my field notes book and had a really nice time.

I will eventually read through this because I have a reasonably good handle on Python/Go, but don’t have any experience with Rust. This book will help me focus on the parts of Rust that I am most interested in given my current InfoSec work.

I worked for a brand that was heavily impacted by phishing sites that used LE certs. It was annoying, but honestly I wasn’t sure what LE couple do about it. If you deny creating a cert with Gmail in the domain, people will just use something like gmall instead.

Don’t forget CAASM!

I think the implication is that if a kid buys a toy they will have something tangible that they can play and interact with, but tipping/donating to a streamer doesn't provide that.

The skilled people I know who work for the US government usually are very mission driven and/or working towards a pension. For foreign governments, people tell me they like the stability.

The sad truth is that no one is getting a promotion to staff for just maintaining a service.

I wish this wasn’t so. At a previous job I had a VP tell me that my team was like a public utility and I took that as a compliment. Later my boss explained they were saying that they only noticed my team when something was broken. Sort of explained my lack of career progression in retrospect.

This is giving me major Geth from Mass Effect vibes.

Given the massive impact that AI has had on the cultural conversation, I wonder how far away we are from a similar conversation about robots.

I enjoy reading things like this. It’s posts like this that have helped me build my command line text processing skills over the years.

If you are early in your career, I suggest you work on these types of skills. It is surprising how often I have found myself on a random box that I needed to parse application logs “by hand”. This happens to me even in fancy, K8-rich environments.

It is going to be close between my gmail (I was invited during the beta in 2004) and my bank which would have been 2002/2003 timeframe but I can’t remember for sure.

I can remember earlier accounts like deadjournal, Hotmail, something awful, but I don’t use those anymore.

It’s a bit older, but I learned a lot from “Writing idiomatic Python”. Honorable mention to “the little book of Python antipatterns” as well.

Think Python 2e changed the trajectory of my life. I took a single Java class and hated it so much I gave up on programming. A few years later as a network engineer I had a problem that seemed like it could be scripted and ended up picking up Think Python and fell in love with the language and programming in general.

I had a brief, but passionate fountain pen phase and it was great. I mainly used Pilot metropolitan, and found the world of inks to be fun to learn about. Then I had a pen leak a bunch of red ink on me on a plane somehow and fell out of love. I have since moved on to fineliners for my handwriting needs, but have considered going back and getting a fountain pen.

My personal example of this is the security company “Thycotic”. They could be greatest InfoSec company in the world, but I really hate their name. It looks like the word psychotic said with a lisp.

My current team is a hulk assembled from a few previously broken teams. Essentially no one is doing the work they were hired for and there is fairly intense resistance from other areas of the business when we try to make change.

Lesson here is to be diligent about finding out why the team you will managing exists and a bit of how it came to be during the interview process.

Thanks for the response, it gave me a grim chuckle.

Thank you for the response. I really want to avoid formal stuff like sprints and stand ups if at all possible. As a former engineer, I agree that it burdens ICs needlessly and would take up a lot of my time to manage. I am struggling with finding the balance of accountability and autonomy and how to meaningfully track that.

This is a hard reality I am learning right now.

At my previous company I had an amazing team that was very intrinsically motivated, they needed me to generally protect them from politics, participate in planning, and stay out of the way. They delivered wonderful results and saved our employer a lot of money. I would have considered myself “an engineer focused leader”.

New spot has challenged my identity a lot. I was expecting to come in and essentially do the same and it turned out the culture and people are almost completely different. My team needs a lot of performance management and cajoling to stay focused and deliver. For the first year I tried to be understanding, lead gently, and avoid awkward conversations, but I suspect my team was savvy to this and has weaponize my empathy a bit. I am now stuck in an awkward situation where I need essentially change who I am to the team and I don’t totally know how to do that gracefully.

This is 100% a problem of my own making. I am still figuring out how far I want to personally adopt a more “company focused vs person focused” mindset.

Never used mint, but if you are looking for something to help you budget and categorize your transactions, I love YNAB. I have been a user for just about 3 years and it has significantly improved my relationship with money.

At least we are protected.

Having worked in the fraud space for a large fintech, I understand that it can be hard to determine if transactions are legitimate or not. Bad actors has strong financial incentives to find any and all loopholes to move dirty money. It sucks that businesses (especially new businesses with few transactions) get swept up in algorithms and have their accounts impacted.

I get why financial companies don’t want to give out their reasoning, because it would help bad actors work the algorithms. On the other hand, it’s an awful experience to be banned when you are a legitimate user and have no recourse.

Maybe we need some sort of regulation that requires fintechs to provide an audit service where a user can have their transactions reviewed for legitimacy by a human?

Sorry y’all had to go through this.

Sadly, yes. This isn’t a statement about the death penalty, just a confirmation that gang leaders have been known to continue to operate in a leadership capacity even when incarcerated.

I am an advocate for ortholinear boards. I have used simple 4x12 split boards (Let’s Split/Levinson) since 2017 and haven’t had any pain or other issues with my wrists.

It is pretty easy to build your own now as there are hot swap PCBs that don’t require soldering.

The worst part of having a small orthro board is staring at the hundred nice looking keycaps that have no home on your board after buying a set and putting on your base 48 keys.

I’m not a professionally trained philosopher, but I have read and taken a lot of value from ancient stoic writers (Seneca in particular). I remember reading Seneca’s letters and feeling frustrated that he almost seems to get close to a denouncement of slavery, but the argument turns into more of a cosmopolitan one (in the stoic sense of the word).

Having grown up poor (but checking some privilege boxes), when I first discovered stoicism it really helped me comes to grips with an unjust world. As I have climbed the social ladder, I find that the more things/privileges I have the harder it is to be stoic. I suppose this is why I like Seneca so much. He feels like a rich dude (I’m not rich but comparatively well off) who is working on not being a bad person. A lot of what I have taken from stoicism and Buddhism are lessons on how to develop a compassionate and just mindset.

I’m fairly skeptical of reading ancient philosophy through a modern lens. This critique had a weird tone and it seems the author might be have an issue with modern proponents of pop-stoicism and a lack of impetus for collective action. I have seen a couple similar arguments going on in Buddhism around the idea of “big-tent” Buddhism and the question of whether or not Buddhism advocates for activism.

Checking 1Password, I have 283. If I include sites I keep only in my brain that is probably a touch above 300.

Essentially yes. Sometimes it also includes people who have installed “free” VPNs.

That is for the interactive chat experience. API calls are sold a la carte. Details here https://openai.com/pricing.

MacOS has a pop up that tries to identify the keyboard layout. If this screen came up when I plugged something in that wasn’t a keyboard, I would assume the device was malicious.

It is probably possible to automate the keystrokes to quickly kill this screen though.