donkeyd

I have an encrypted USB stick for things like this. It has a keyboard, so encryption is built into the device and it wipes after 10 tries (not ideal for back-up).

> Ask them which open-source libraries their SaaS uses. Ask them to show you the audits they've performed on THEIR supply chain this year. You won't get any answers.

Well, even with private cloud and on-prem these are pretty relevant questions...

I Worked with a government organization where I was part of the team on-boarding a new on-prem system. It was purchased through a tender, where on-prem was a requirement. The product was SaaS by default, but they offered an on-prem version. We pretty much got a copy of the stack of containers and docker-compose file that they used to run their SaaS offering.

While running the application, I was missing a lot of context, since logging was minimal, so I asked the company how to connect a log store to get an overview of all the sub-systems. There was no option for this (then how did they monitor their SaaS?). So I used docker to get command line in the containers and see if I can find some logs there to then get into a log store. In one of them, I noticed an error because something in the container was trying to phone home with telemetry, to a server that wasn't owned by our supplier. 'Luckily', our on-prem box didn't have an internet connection, because of the sensitivity of our data.

This was when I realized that our supplier didn't roll their own containers, but just used off the shelf stuff they didn't even audit. So who knows what their SaaS offering was leaking from these containers? I mentioned this to both internal IT architects and the supplier and nobody really seemed to care.

This is a supplier that was named 'Leader' by Forrester and got a $30M funding round last year.

Worded vaguely enough for plausible deniability, like the rest of the text on that page. She never mentions seeing or photographing a snow leopard, nor does she mention editing the photos. This page seems carefully compiled in order to achieve exactly the attention she got, while at the same time allowing her to deny any lies if the truth got out.

> Lotta Volkova artwork is definitely sordid but so is a lot of art. You don't have to like it or even look.

Exactly. I feel like art and its purpose have been lost in recent years. Art is supposed to make people think or feel. Paintings of beheadings in museums don't make people think about beheading people, nor do they make people happy. They make people think about the atrociousness of history and hopefully about not wanting to repeat it.

My (non religious) dad recently argued that music that implies rape or child abuse shouldn't be broadcast on the radio, because it's wrong. I asked whether any movie showing violence, abuse and rape should also not be played on TV or in cinema. I also explained that both are art forms and aren't depictions of things the singers or actors want to do in real life, per se (we all know there are exceptions). He argued this, however, because he heard the argument from some radio DJs.

It'll be a sad day when we ban everything we don't like to see or hear, because that's when we forget those things exist and stop doing anything against it.

What's so unsettling about that? Sure, I understand they did this to cause a bit of a stir, but it's just people carrying around dolls in a dystopian setting.

And even if there were actual babies in there, the most unsettling part is the danger of the person carrying the baby slipping in the mud and falling on top of the baby.

You can drop the 'police' from that sentence and it stays true!

Nice to see this on the front page at the same time that a negative about Tailwind article pops up. Especially since I'm currently looking at whether to start using Tailwind. It's good to read multiple, conflicting, opinions about something.

> Human creativity is softly bounded by the environments we interact with & the techniques created/(taught to us) for creating such works

Exactly this. I'm personally awful at drawing. I'm also awful at most design software. I'm really bad at bringing a concept that lives in my head into the world. I've noticed that playing with Stable Diffusion has allowed me to create things I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. It allows me to create art for projects that I otherwise would've made a lame logo for, or used some stock photography. I don't have the money to hire a skilled artist anyway, so this gives me new possibilities.

To add to this, I'd probably pay for this too, if it wasn't too expensive.

I'm a meat eater and I really prefer no meat over fake meat. A good vegetable curry, ratatouille, stew, pasta or a portobello mushroom burger really beats all of the fake meat substitutes for me. If meat becomes too expensive, I'll just cut it out completely... Until lab grown meat becomes a viable alternative. All these fake meat substitutes are just awful, to me.

One of them just got promoted quite nicely, so I guess you're right!

> focused on their core business?

What's their core business? Losing money on a platform where people can post racist comments?

Or do they have to earn money without getting sued for being used to spread CSAM and being a platform for harassment?

Because the first is very easy with 50 people. Elon can keep sinking money into it and never earn a dime (see Truth Social, they seem to be doing well!). The last is a lot more complicated and requires an ad platform, ad sales, content moderation, documentation writers, support agents, management, scrum masters, SREs, purchasing, et cetera.

IT people are really good at ignoring everything but the tech stack. Like tech is the only thing needed to run a profitable business. (It is... But not to run a 40B valued profitable business... And Twitter wasn't even profitable at all.)

You're joking, right?

For a second I was confused how Starlink requests were relevant for Twitter. Then I realized you meant 'law enforcement officer' not 'low-earth orbit'.

It's bloat to devs who just want to write code. You're kinda confirming the point I was trying to make. Anyone on that list performs an important role at a company of their scale.

I'm currently the first and sole architect on a product that was built by only devs. I really know why I exist.

SRE for the Cache Team. I feel people are overlooking that part.

There was a Twitter thread (ironically) on the front page recently where a Reddit founder explained why anyone will always suck at it. I recommend looking it up.

> The job cuts are clearly justified because of the extremely toxic "work culture"

I'm very curious in what way the stuff Elon is doing is not creating toxic work culture? >Minimum< 40 hour work week. 100% office work. Working into the night. Being fired for pushing back.

I'm not denying there may have been toxic work culture before, but I don't see how replacing it with another form of toxic work culture is to be celebrated.

Also, writing this:

> There is no active independent thought around this subject to be found. Only vitriol and bile.

And then spewing a bunch of vitriol and bile really distracts from any point you were trying to make:

> akin to witnessing a fat child throwing an epic tantrum laying flat on a mall floor

> Straight up Cartmenesque.

> clearly justified because of the extremely toxic "work culture" / cult

> because mommy didn't buy them an xbox

> I think it remains to be seen how long a bloatless twitter can last.

It's also really hard to define 'last' though. Does 'last' mean just for up-time? Does it mean up-time without a major security incident while maintaining the same DAU? Does it mean business as usual on all fronts except number of employees? We know that Twitter already had some security issues with their God Mode admin panel.

I really wonder, for example, whether no angry ex-employees still have access to critical systems or data. This is usually pretty well regulated in large organizations like twitter, but since they've lost the majority of their staff, who knows when the people looking after that left?

Good point. I know this as the Mack Truck Theory. For the project I'm working on right now, there's a couple of incredibly valuable people that would cause a pretty significant issue if they disappeared.

> The only reason people work is literally for money

Theories like Hertzberg exist for a reason and show that money isn't even close to the most important thing for people to work for. If the money is good enough, there are many other factors that are way more important. Not enough money is a reason for people to leave, getting more money is hardly ever a reason to work harder. The possibility of getting more money if they work harder is a good motivator though, once they have it that stops.

> Sure, you can run the platform with 1/10 headcount with significantly degraded user experiences (say ~98%). This is not a problem for startups but people usually have higher expectations for established companies.

This exactly. During the recent Whatsapp outage, many threads popped up on HN about how big of an issue this is in Europe, since Whatsapp is the main messaging platform in Europe. Thankfully, these outages are short and far between, so they never actually cause real issues. This is obviously costing Meta/Facebook a lot of money, but allows them to be an essential service. So essential in fact, that every major news outlet in my country sends a push message as soon as Whatsapp is down.

If Twitter wants to be a comparably important platform, they need that same stability. And Twitter, for me, is very much the best place to stay up-to-date on any current event (in near real-time). Reddit used to be pretty good with Live, but that's pretty much died (and was mostly a summary of tweets anyway). I really hope Twitter survives Elon, because I don't know of an alternative right now that has the same value in this use case.

> the article might actually persuade me that it was all bloat

First of all, how does it persuade you of that? The article touches a really small (though incredibly important for up-time) subject.

Secondly, in any large company, the majority is 'bloat'. It's security engineers, code reviews, data architecture, HR, internal audit teams, content moderators, ccrum masters and I can keep going. In a start-up many of these roles can be ignored, becaus growth > stability. In a large organization, part of the bloat helps insure a certain amount of stability that's necessary to keep an organization alive.

If a product is mature enough, like Twitter seems to be, removing engineers won't instantly crash the product. It'll happen slowly. Bugs will creep in, because less time is spent on review and over all architecture. Security issues will creep in because of about the same issues and less oversight. Then, once this causes enough issues for the product to actually crash, the right people to fix it quickly might not be there anymore. That's when fixing the issues suddenly takes a lot more time.

If the current state of affairs at Twitter keeps up, it'll probably be a slow descent into chaos. Especially with Elon pushing for new features to be implemented quickly, inevitably by people who cannot fully understand the implications of said features, because 80% of knowledge is missing.

I work at a company doing smart stuff with computers (which some would consider AI) that helps with, among others, the energy transition and getting people across the world broadband. Only about 2 out of 20 devs are actually working on the complicated algorithms. The others are working on the stuff you need to build around it to allow people to actually use the algos. On top of the algos is a pretty complicated web app, which takes most of the actual development time.

So you won't actually have to jump into a whole new career in order to contribute to these types of products. You just have to search for a company that works on a challenge you want to contribute to.

Unfortunately, you possible just need to walk more then and focus on your core muscles. I have the exact same thing and the only way to stop my back from aching is to focus on tightening my abs. Doing some basic ab and core exercises like planks, superman, etc will probably help. You need to do them correctly though and rally focus on tightening the right muscles, otherwise it'll hurt the back even more.

If you have the means, I'd probably recommend visiting a physical therapist, or a personal trainer who specializes in core strengthening.

Where do you get time for this? If I were to try this, between work, travel and chores, I'd have zero time for anything else.

This is awesome. It has killed my battery over the last couple of hours, because I couldn't stop generating new images.

> I don't have sources for the flu.

Just look at the RIVM site. It's probably higher than you specified, closer to 6-7k average per year, with massive differences.

> on average 5 people are dying per day (1825 per year)

This is a bit of a dishonest comparison. You're looking at the numbers from before the expected peak, since it's still incredibly warm in the Netherlands right now and peaks seem to happen when it gets colder. So it'll probably be closer to 4000 per year.

While that still seems less than the flu, it's important to realize that the most vulnerable people are now getting vaccinated multiple times a year for covid. A lot of people who never got a flu shot are also being vaccinated. Then there's the fact that a lot of people are still distancing more than they used to. There's more work from home, many people still stay home when they have covid, while in the past, many people prided themselves for going to work with the flu.

It's really hard to compare historic flu statistics with current covid statistics, because the way we handle covid is still very different from how we used to handle the flu. Therefore your conclusion is misguided.

Now I really don't care whether you care about covid, but at lease the interpretation of the statistics should be correct and you missed a ton of details.

[1] https://www.rivm.nl/monitoring-sterftecijfers-nederland

> China will locally eradicate it

You understand that with globalization, this makes no sense, right? It will return, again and again. Economic impact of always going into lockdown will be insane. Another reason for western companies to become less dependent on China in the long term, massive reduction in productivity in the short term.

That would just create a bidding war and wouldn't stop the arms race at all.

Also, once the rewards increase past a certain point, security researchers would have no reason to work for apple, since one big hit would mean set for life.