imroot

We’ll do better next time…

…only to repeat the cycle in under a year and lay off another group in the exact same way.

I run a bug bounty program and I pay upon successful triage: while our engineering teams do have security SLA’s, it’s not fair to whomever reported the vulnerability to wait for our (sometimes broken) processes in order to be paid.

The Inter-American Development Bank loaned Panama the money for the Panama canal expansion, so, my thought is that the money that they're making might be tied up covering the notes for the expansion.

I thought that it couldn't demodulate DMR and other modes unless it had the hardware to do so. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, though.

The main reason that the infosec folks have paused the use of LLM's to generate code is copyright concerns: who "owns" the code that's generated, the LLM, or, the company?

Get an itinerant license. $300 bucks or so, and then you can encrypt if you use the itinerant frequency, and you don't even need frequency coordination for it.

It also comes with some of the other benefits of commercial space.

One of the amateur radio clubs I've joined pooled up and basically offers it as a service to its members.

Yes, but most companies aren’t allowing unfettered access to promoting, either.

My insider risk — a developer who attempts to extract training data, a LLM being leaked of internal data, or an employee who wants to break the prompt for competitive gain — is a lot different of a threat than allowing all of my customers a tool to query their data using LLM’s.

When I worked retail tech, I would find opportunities to go to the store to figure out what the pain points were for our hourly associates, and found time to work on getting those problems removed or reduced: happier workers equal more sales.

I had BetterHelp through my old job, and used their telemedicine feature...until they realized that I didn't live in a state that they had an "official" location in, so, they cancelled my membership (ironically enough, when I used their telemed offering, I was in a state that they had offices in, just not near me!)

...only to reactivate it again when my employer questioned why, and have them cancel it again two weeks later.

I haven't even tried to use them or look at their offerings after being de-platformed on repeat for the longest part of a year until my employer dropped them.

Accountants love the cost — you can not only save money on construction costs, you can squeeze more bodies in there…

Unfortunately the hospitality industry has had a harder time recovering from COVID -- most of the managers are fresh out of college and have little to no underlying experience in managing properties, and it's so bad that Hilton and Marriott aren't doing "brand assurance" audits (ensuring that the properties are up-to brand standards) until the end of 2024/early 2025 because hotel owners have pushed back so hard.

My SO and I stayed at a Waldorf Astoria a few weeks ago and they managed to screw up the stay so badly that we'll probably never go back to that specific location ever again -- the response that we received from the staff was so bad I was looking on LinkedIn to see if I had any friends who were still at Hilton Corporate to help me get the local property to fix their screw up (charging my credit card $10k for a $2800 stay because someone fat-fingered a $100 nightly charge into a $1000 nightly charge) because the local management just couldn't do anything.

IBM sold their retail technology division to Toshiba a few years ago.

Most of their cash register controllers can run on x86, so, it's not dependent on their hardware for the backend.

Their cash registers can run the 4690 OS or Windows/Linux/whatever, but, most choose to run the 4690 Operating System due to its security features.

I worked at IBM in their retail marketing side in the early 2000's, so, it's possible that everything I've typed here is 20+ years out of date.

Hotels are horrible for this.

This is what my itemized stay was for a single night:

2023-01-18 * Residence Inn

    expenses:travel:marriott         171.00 USD

    expenses:taxes:salestax:tx        10.26 USD

    expenses:taxes:salestax:tx:plano  11.97 USD  ; city hotel tax

    expenses:fees:recovery             1.28 USD  ; tax recovery fee

    expenses:fees:recovery             2.13 USD  ; parking recovery fee

    expenses:taxes:salestax:tx          .18 USD  ; taxes on parking recovery fee.

    assets:checking                 -196.82 USD  ; date: 1/20

A $2.13 "Parking Recovery Fee" is charged to cover the expense in building their parking garage...and then, they charge me another sales tax on top of the parking recovery fee, then charging me a recovery fee because they need to recover the credit card fees charged on the city and state sales tax items.

Resort fees are also becoming more and more common, even in hotels that shouldn't need a "resort fee" -- if I'm staying at an Embassy Suites in the middle of nowhere, Iowa, why do I need to pay a resort fee?

I worked at LANL for a few years as a contractor, building out their SCM tooling.

I loved every minute of it and, by proxy, got to see some really really interesting projects and meet some really interesting people.

Nobody at my org did, either.

Fun night when you need to reroll your credentials...at least it's nice to have a list in the CircleCI UI, but sucks when you need to make sure that you have all of the scopes available to you.

I'm working on bringing Speech to Text and some contextualization for Police/Fire/EMS Scanner projects.

I host P25 monitoring appliances that I've built and have hosted in a few different cities (that I have apartments at) and want to know if there's a fire/police/EMS call near my house without having to listen to the scanner 24/7.

I basically just want to know if it's safe to walk my dog or if I should wait 15-20 mins.

I know of a few retailers that operate on Net 270 terms for their smaller vendors (Looking at you, Home Depot) and Walmart would tell us that they would reset the 'calendar' if we would call and ask for the status of a payment.

This was 2003-2006ish, for the record.

I don't work for Southwest, but, I have friends that do.

The situation is kind of amplified by the fact that they are now doing crew scheduling by hand -- their crew scheduling system went offline at some point during this fiasco -- and because they aren't a hub and spoke style of airline, they don't have flight attendants at their hubs...so, what's happening is that flight attendants are scheduled for a "leg" of a trip, from Altoona to Boston to Columbus to Dallas to Edison. This flight attendant will be on that plane from Altoona until they wrap up in Edison. Because of this interruption, they cancel the flight from Altoona to Boston. Now, they need to find a plane (and a crew) in Boston to fly the leg from Boston to Columbus...cascading failures throughout their system. Add in phone system failures, a winter storm, and the busiest travel week of the year, and you've got what Southwest has right now.

You have crew timing out, crews that are abandoned at stations, and some folks telling people to not expect their luggage for 30+ days. Southwest has also been delaying negotiating with their ground crew (it's been three+ years since they've had a contract), so, I'm almost certain that when they got the Denver "Operational Emergency" email on the 21st, most of them said screw it and quit: every other airline has struggled to hire experienced folks and my guess is that it won't be long until they're re-employed somewhere else

They've cancelled most flights until Friday, with the exception being flight for aircraft staging, and will struggle to find open seats for their flight attendants to ride on other airlines (even if they are flying space-positive) just so they can have crew at locations for flights.

I have commented in the past that the longest hiring cycle was almost 10 months at RedHat back in 2005, and I've had it be as short as a week in the early 2010's for a TechStars backed company.

If a company doesn't have a hiring plan that doesn't end in 4-6 weeks, I'm not interested in even communicating with that company. I have no issues with trials or paid projects: I would actually prefer a trial or a paid project to starting somewhere only to find out that half the infrastructure including their MongoDB instances are running on Windows servers.

(Ironically enough, in the Medical field, it takes 12-18 months to get hired because of the due diligence involved: my significant other was shocked when I was able to go from looking to hired in less than 28 days back in 2017!)

I am in a coworking space -- not a WeWork (only because they raised my rates to almost $3500/month for a single person office) -- and it currently has a 95% vacancy rate.

In 2019, they had a 99% occupancy rate.

The most successful coworking spaces near me have a restaurant, a bar, and nice multimedia event spaces with Satellite TV -- all expenses that I don't think Regus, WeWork, or Expansive would ever spend money on.

Those spaces, that have amenities that are not things that you could get at home, have waiting lists for offices.

I worked on the retail IT side of things at Luxottica.

I don't even think that you've scratched the surface of just how prevalent Luxottica is: you've touched the retail side of things, but, you also haven't touched the manufacturing side of things (Lux has patents on the hinges used in glasses), the wholesaling side of things (Lux supplies generic and branded frames to your local optician on less-than-preferred terms), and then just the genetic beast that is their optimization efforts.

I discovered some ineffective linux and db management that was adding 15-30 minutes of closing time every night -- time where we'd have employees on the clock waiting to close the store -- and figured out why it was behaving the way that it was and fixed it so the 'point of sales' part of closing wouldn't be the hold up. Saved the company almost 13 million dollars a year in labor costs and 45 million in licensing costs when I came up with a way to replace the POS systems OS without needing a cross-ship of new hardware...and still got screwed around when it came to my hourly rate increased or getting my contract renewed...

When my girlfriend's son passed away from complications with cancer, I had flowers and cards sent from some former coworkers, but, not a single person even reached out to me until a few months later, where they asked me if I was 'ready to go back to work' after cutting my contract.

It was well known that if someone robbed a Sunglass hut, the most expensive item in the store to replace was the iPad...

I'm a ham radio guy who builds his own radios and a time nut.

For some of the designs that I'm building for clubs and amateur rocket clubs, my chip prices have gone from $3 to $60/chip. I've been able to get by with the stock of chips that I keep for repairs, but, to find chips in the price points that I generally work with (and by price point, I mean, I donate these to clubs/college rocket clubs at no cost, so, I try to keep my costs as low as my sanity/bom/weight permits), I've been finding chips that have 1/4 of the ram or 1/4 the functionality that I need, and reworking my code around the new limitations of what I can build with.

Thank the EE gods that I can get boards from China in about 3-5 days at a relatively sane price point: add in an open source pick and place system (OpenPnP) and a easy-bake reflow oven (hacked together from a freebie on craigslist) and it allows me to iterate over designs about once every two weeks or so, as long as I've got everything in stock. I've had to change my boards for the SI4467 (Sub Ghz RF Transceiver from Silicon Labs) three or four times in the last year alone. I find something that works, build another one, I'm out of stock on an item with no availability in sight on DigiKey/Mouser, so, it's botch wiring and praying that I can get it to work the way I want to until I refab my PCB, and then rinse, repeat.

If you've ever used JIRA, I'd say getting paid to use their software is beneficial for both parties...

I moved to Miami, and just didn't buy one when I moved down here.

In the rare occasion that I need to print, I'll swing by the business center in my condo building and print it out.

I've been banned from both Uber and AirBnB for reporting security vulnerabilities before they had a bug bounty program.

I'm now a Lifetime Diamond at Hilton Hotels, and use Lyft when I need to rideshare.

Their loss.

I'm surprised it wasn't at LANL, considering one of the shops in Los Alamos near the lab has this amazing hatch chile burrito that's under $8 and is 10/10 in terms of flavor.

Ironically enough, the last time I was "Courted" by google cloud to move some of our infra there (after it went public that we had raised a round), they were up front about how their "account management sucks" and that we'd have a better "customer experience" if we went through a reseller.

That...always sticks out to me, but, when dealing with the Google Education folks, there were some things that even resellers couldn't do, and I had to email people directly (via LinkedIn stalking) only to have my issue disappear a few days later with no reply.

I'm a former president and board member of a makerspace in Ohio (hive13).

We thrived on donations (a lot of donations from members who had extra to give to help support the space and help students or those who couldn't afford our membership), and didn't receive much local help.

A few years ago the hive grew to the point where we couldn't expand it any more, and we moved locations. We're still going strong. We spend money by voting on project, and even when projects aren't funded, the community finds a way to make it happen anyway.

We didn't try to run it for profit: memberships are $50/month or $100/month (if you can afford it) or $13.37 (if you're a student or can't afford it).

The hive is still on great footing, financially speaking, and it competes with maker spaces from the Cincinnati Public Library as well as a commercial makerspace in Sharonville.

Maker spaces do work, but, it takes a lot of time, effort, and quite literally blood to make them work well.

FiPay (which is one of the pieces of software you can run with Verifone terminals) can be configured to return a credit card number back, but, it's only for legacy point of sales applications that need to have a number for whatever reason.

Even after moving everything to our Verifone vault, we still had those fields in our point of sales database, even if all of the numbers were '4111 1111 1111 1111' and the expiration dates were 2099+. We would pass the "proper" things down for the receipt as text fields (AID/TID/etc) to be printed on the receipt and stored with the transaction log.

Discovered this when nobody from OneTrust showed up to our implementation meeting this morning....not a good sign for a new customer.