computershit

Librefox is a drop in replacement without the antifeatures.

https://github.com/intika/Librefox

Edit: I meant Librewolf, not fox.

I live in Minneapolis proper and my car was stolen last month. Not a carjacking, I was one of the idiots that left it running to warm up. The car jacking numbers are mostly legit, I do not know if it’s “organized” though. Catalytic converters getting stolen is a much bigger deal out here right now.

We are the United States government. We don’t do that sort of thing.

The warnings might have been triggered in error, but the evidence is certainly there for masters to have been compromised. Until recently their publicly available support forum running phpBB was using the master password for customer logins.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29706579

A few HN posts from the last week regarding LastPass:

Ask HN: How did my LastPass master password get leaked?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716715

LastPass users warned their master passwords are compromised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716715

Same. If you're only telling the story to fill time then write a blog post, keep it separate from the recipe.

I loved this podcast (and all of Carlin's really). One of my granddads faught extensively in the Pacific and I really felt it when Dan described what a land invasion on mainland Japan would've looked like.

I just spent the last five minutes playing this with a huge grin on my face. Thanks for the quick trip down nostalgia lane.

It is extremely common for more enterprisey jobs, or anything dealing with finance or gov. I wouldn't expect many smaller orgs or startups on the west coast to test very much.

Most regular smokers I know just use fake piss to get around it.

Data pipeline / ETL orchestration.

Prefect: https://www.prefect.io

Dagster: https://dagster.io

I have been working a lot in this space for the last two years but especially in the last 6 months. I believe we're about to enter a phase where much more elegant and less restrictive ETL platforms or frameworks are as commonplace as modern software CICD offerings. Prefect and Dagster both stand out to me as viable replacements for Airflow.

When my daughters came home with Chromebooks provided by the school last year, I too was blown away when they had touch screen. Instant jealousy.

Adding to the list of what's already been said:

1. Passwords / Secrets management. Ensure there are no shared accounts in use, no credentials or passwords on the company wiki. Implement adoption of a password manager (LastPass if commercial, BitWarden if you can selfhost) for team and individual secrets.

2. Identify all public-facing endpoints and do an initial once over on the software that's backing them and any vulnerabilities (especially if they have anything Atlassian in their stack).

You should definitely check Matrix out: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/getting-involved

This immediately reminded me of Snackr, an RSS news ticker written in Adobe Air.

I always enjoy your videos, Jeff -- keep up the good work!

Also went thru this recently and I can empathize with you. Particularly concerning to my situation is the repeal of deduction for alimony payments (enacted in the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017, enforced beginning 2019). It really screwed primary earners over in divorces.

> If you can trust your users to have python3 in their environment, I don't see a good reason to use sh/bash instead of python

You would need to ensure said users have all the pip dependencies your python script imports as well. shell scripts don’t have that issue unless you’re calling some external program that isn’t installed.

At that point you might as well use a configuration management system.

Right up until you need to perform some intermediate templating or passing variables from one task to another, yeah, independent bash scripts will do just fine.

Having used all of the configuration management tools available, and I do mean all of them, I have found Ansible to be the most flexible, the easiest to execute arbitrarily, and the easiest to understand and package alongside applications. I would love to know what you're using that's better than Ansible and doesn't rhyme with poohbernetes.

Imagine having this in your CI build process:

  curl http://somescriptthisdudehasnocontrolof.sh | bash

I just can't.

> I think a computer should be able to solve dependencies, search for include dirs, and figure out how to run an arbitrary piece of software by now.

Again, I would assert that Ansible is not the tool for you. You want a comprehensive, dependency-mapping, auto everything detection, autoremediation tool. That doesn't exist right now, for various reasons. I don't disagree with your general direction in the least bit, in fact I appreciate your enthusiasm. However, expecting a cow when you don't see a salt lick is a tad foolhardy. I'll explain below.

> Yes, or zero-button

As someone who has been doing this shit a long, long time, I have to say when I hear someone complaining about something not being in apt I immediately note that this person has not once even dipped their toe in isolated package dependencies and versioning. Even with "teraflops of compute" at their disposal.

> Hell, when I had my first computer in the mid 1990s I had single button installs other than having to swap floppies

MS Word is not a configuration management framework.

> We're trying to build level 5 autonomus cars, which I don't think we'll get to (we'll get to level 4), but I think a computer should be able to solve dependencies, search for include dirs, and figure out how to run an arbitrary piece of software by now.

Software exists that can do this, and you most certainly could in Ansible with some fancy lookups and dynamic group_vars, but you would not know how accomplish this without reading the manual, nor do I believe that you should be able to. I believe that understanding the systems you are configuring and dictating precisely how they should be configured, in code, and automating the regular application of those configurations is exactly the best of what's available right now. That goes for Terraform + Ansible, Docker, k8s, whatever.

But while we're on the topic of autonomy, I take extreme umbrage with your analogy of cars to you, as a systems operator, wanting to consume Ansible as a configuration manager. Ansible isn't the car and you're not the driver here. Maybe somewhere between operator and driver. But the notion that you should be able to simply install this and expect it to magically detect everything that you want it to do is a gross misunderstanding of what this tool is and what exactly it does.

Again, something you would have understood if you had read just a little.

It's literally on the first page of the docs. I don't see what is so hard about this. Most of these frameworks require some research so that you understand the tool works.

As an aside, I feel such crusty syseng vibes right now. These young folk want it all point and click, apt-get, spotify me. Are you seriously a grown ass human person in the same industry as me and expecting a huge single button install of a configuration management framework? Ever consider you'd have to build a custom image (whether EC2 or docker or whatever) to support your specific environment? If you want to learn Ansible, learn it. Don't think you can just apt-get and accept defaults here. Asserting right now this is an instance where trying a little harder is required.

If you can't be bothered to either `pip install` or `docker run` perhaps Ansible is indeed not the tool for you. What's more, I would assert that "reading stuff" is required for any eng in my industry. Here is a list:

  * Ansible installation guide (https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/installation_guide/intro_installation.html#installation-guide)
  * Ansible Getting Started (https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/intro_getting_started.html)
  * the extensive Ansible core module docs (https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.9/modules/modules_by_category.html)

> I have considered building a competitor, alternative clients, and even bridges to other services like Matrix, but alas I'm stuck here.

Despite it's recent missteps, Discord has, if nothing else, provided us with an excellent technical foundation of what a modern one stop shop communications platform should look like. I'm keen to be involved at any level of a competitor.

Yeah I am leaning that direction too. Thanks for the reminder about Argo.

Aditya Pakki is an RA under Kangjie Lu.

Have you looked into Jenkins-X at all? I'm at a point where I'm starting to adopt GitOps and I'm torn between Flux and (what I consider) a far more opinionated but pretty elegant solution in JX.

Thank you for taking the time to write this and for thinking the way you do. The most common trait among successful (not necessarily wealthy) people in my opinion transcends race, creed, religion, or sex; it's persistence.