jfalcon

People are also leaving California in droves too - to Texas where they were lured by people chasing after HGTV "Property Hunters" home prices - just to end up in another ticky-tacky neighborhood being pressured to keep up with the jones.

If the trend of telecommute is allowed to be the norm, then there is a much higher likelihood of population distribution which will bring it back to a more stoic level. But this will impact global trade which we've seen needs to be rebalanced anyhow due to the supply chain issues presented during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Scale that globally, then maybe there will be better ground to discuss "nationality" in a different light compared to our current political borders. Especially when it comes to law and powers given to a person that is allowed by a society.

Because even the UN can use some improvement.

Personally, I feel that if we can get through this moment of transition without self-destruction of humanity as we know it (such as the Ukraine/China conflicts not going nuclear), we will have entered an age of our next Renaissance where we would be much closer to some sort of "Star Trek" like utopia for mankind.

I do see this however being the bell tolling of White Anglo-Saxon heredity being removed from the throne and replaced with people with more melanin in their skin. This may not sit well with those who subscribe to racially ethnic purity ideals as what Hitler envisioned as a superior race is biologically reversed to be inferior until genetic mutations bring them back to a norm again.

But people, in general, focus too much on the actionable/measurable in time spans way to narrow to really appreciate how special it is to be: anything at all.

Generations have lived and died without being famous, being associated or related to anyone of any historical record let alone making any difference to the human condition.

However, this time - this collection of people and generations spanning over 75-100 years have seen man at both it's worse and it's best. Even better, the trend of it getting better is rising.

And the trend, is growing faster. As we've never been more connected to one another. Real information has never been more accessible.

And our connections have both deepened with one another as well as been eroded in other ways as what we value and how we approached it has changed. For some it can be scary. For others, it can't happen soon enough.

The only problem that we always have is that we'll never get to see the moment past when we die. But if the body is just a container for the soul, that shouldn't matter.

For those who don't subscribe to that, it appears in recent news that could be changing as well. Or we evolve into singularity. Or we destroy ourselves another way. The fact is that what we know is that we're not whole without others.

For us to be whole requires us to allow for it else to be everything and everywhere. And that to me sounds like reverting to being nothing at all or a return to the before life existed... and that was a long f'n time ago.

Where it has gotten difficult is filtering of dissenting opinion, finding specific information or other factors that may give reason to enable/disable something that someone may not have done normally due to herd mentality.

Remember, all the sub-prime mortgages were given high marks in being safe risks once they were packaged vehicles of debt because banks could bully their way into giving them assessments that were less than factual due to business pressures put upon them from the competition.

The real current crime is that all the debt from 2008 never was written off in any way. This in turn has had a cascading effect on the economy globally.

The best thing you should worry about right now is figuring out a budget that allows for constant savings into bellwether stocks or savings bonds THAT YOU DON'T DESTROY ON A WHIM to tap the power of COMPOUND INTEREST. Heed Warren Buffett's advice and get into the habit of saving money early along with the discipline of not touching it for any reason until you have sufficient resources to readjust the performance of whatever it was invested into.

If you don't have money working for you by collecting interest or grown by investment whether by wall street or a main street business, it will not keep up with inflation - that was learned by many in the 1980's when deregulation began eroding the financial industry.

But the real point is that you should be young and take risks now as when you are older, you won't have the time or possibly the freedom to do it without other factors being in play (job,family,responsibilities for young and old, etc..)

I'm one year shy of my big 50 now and have been online most all of my life in one form or another so I feel I'm pretty hip to both sides of the culture/counterculture that connectedness brought forward. I've learned and confirmed that usually when it comes to personal/family wealth that it's better to have a republican in office (as long as you have financial understanding on what you can control in your life) but that comes at the expense of perhaps personal safety or religious separation as usually what happens is that democrats will not only add more social programs but will also put more people in prisons due to the concept of being "tough" on crime.

It's too soon to say whether or not social/mental health programs will change the trend but one could say that the biggest changes come from social adoption towards better change. I hold up the 1950's where laws were passed to both codify and tear down major social issues and whet peoples attitudes for changing the world, after many of them went farther than any generation previous to them ever traveled - remember that most people rarely traveled more than 100 miles from the place they were born for any great length of time over the 175 years prior to this period.

You hopefully just saw some with BLM, Safe Places, Gender/Sexual Equality and also some retractions like Abortion Legalization (remember, the SCOTUS is just an equalizer - not a law maker which there was never formal legalization - just the prevention of non-legalization being enacted).

Billy Joel has a song called "We Didn't Start The Fire" for which is his least favorite song that lists off the highs and lows of the period. The only problem is that it stops at roughly 1990. It would take a whole other song to quantify what has happened since for which one could say that we still may have highs and lows but overall it's still getting better than before our great grandparents had to exist within.

Honestly, I still wish for alot of the aspects of the 1990s tried to sell like being able to develop as easily as on a NeXT workstation (without objective-c) or the entire concepts MSFT was trying to do with Active Desktop.

We see it all the time where people get excited about whatever screen is on XYZ show until you learn the reality of the screens being "Hollywood OS". Like most of the screens seen on mac computers during the 1990s, it was clear and visually functional for whatever they portrayed - like ever seen a usenet browser like shown in Mission Impossible or The Saint? Neither have I. But it would have made it a hell of a lot more user friendly. And usenet still exists!

Just saying, there is a time when less is more, but other times you need it to be just a smidge more than it is today.

Thanks to people doing DevOps burning out, it's like an ongoing joke/question as to what 'DevOps' is vs. 'SRE' when in fact it was all work that a 'Systems Engineer' performed prior to someone in middle management working with HR to justify their roles changed my title despite the work not changing a bit during their bi-annual "reorganization".

As someone who is on the hunt for a new place to land, it drives me crazy how the title doesn't match the role description and often when you interview there are times when it doesn't even match the expectations. And the depressing part is that it's difficult to even find "Systems Engineering" jobs unless it's with another industry with different skill sets all together.

But as managers are likely finding out now, most developers don't want to do Systems Engineering as it's a cross-team discipline to pull all the resources together and operate complex systems with greater proficiency (in many different metrics) and maintain service delivery (in multiple other metrics).

What has been interesting is this resurgence in people trying to figure out what "Ops" and "SE" did for developers that they have been thrown into doing and learning how little they actually knew. Partly our own fault, of course, as nobody really wants to know how the sausage is made. But they also didn't envision where our sights were set in the future once we got people doing more self-service resource and code deployment. That just getting the apps launch were just the beginning, that to deliver robust code requires metric gathering, SLA, Chaos Engineering, how to get the right metrics tracked and to look at all the signals as a organism to teach machines how to heal themselves.

But it always comes back to respecting the process while pushing forward education of the people taking part in it. Tearing down the silos while also demonstrating often the value of engineers who know everything but their app/service/code - yet is able to learn it and architect solutions.

This is why we should learn from what Ed Snowden presented as just about all of the data gathered by NSA and their contemporaries utilized the concept that encryption and security should only exist at the edge and they were capturing network traffic inter-network and intra-DC.

There were reasons why companies like Google took his whistleblowing seriously and changed their infrastructure accordingly because none of them feel safe leaving their "secret sausage recipe" exposed while still technically out of band from the customer paths.

Whether or not an application is correctly using the functionality or they try to do something sneaky like using a mute function on app to trigger a "cut audio" function on the server side of the video conference is one of the reasons why I use the speakermicrophone. That visual indicator is usually linked to the Audio Subsystem and with the speakermicrophone being a 1st tier HID device for audio purposes, makes it more likely that things are working as they should.

When it doesn't light up and I'm intentional on the mute is when I would worry.

http://web.archive.org/web/20211002154145/https://www.badmod...

---

I feel bad for him. Fighting for good security or even a better product shouldn't cost people years of their lives but as long as it doesn't come at the expense of the product's bottom line, there is little reason to compel change as it doesn't impact the bottom line which is what decides whether something is made for most big corporate outputs.

The same argument could be said about "Tech Debt" or non-UL labeled products and a myriad of other causes.

Zero fucks will be paid to anything not socially cool even if it is the responsible thing to do.

That's why we live in the world we live in now.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why the world is crap. But for the most part, it takes that "title" just to have a microphone loud enough to move the needle.

This little part of life is what I'm currently struggling with in my post-Covid decision making.

I presume all this is for a legitimate business and thus any operator will do.

However, if you get a domain within the top 4-5 TLD (the original TLD of .COM,.NET,.ORG,.EDU,.INT/.MIL/.GOV), all of these domains are ultimately belonging to US incorporated entities or governmental organizations and not any UN operated office thus is not party to the UN charter and the legal avenues afforted to it.

Operationally there is .onion that is non-organizational for the TOR network as well as .I2P for Freenet.

So it may do you well that you get both .de and .com as well as any other .tld you are willing to spend and protect for your brand name as that's what alot of scammers/spammers and marketers will try to redirect traffic into due to mistyped characters. Also for legal/public campaigns that may be counter to your business direction or your client's.

One last thing: There is the whole DNS server aspect of a machine sending out answers to your infrastructure. The domain usually has a locking mechanism that procedually protects the domain from being transferred to another provider at whim. I would spring for the anonymization to prevent social engineering attempts as well as extend your DNS records into DNSSEC to ensure to the world that every answer or call back to your DNS records are flat factual answers that are cryptographically sound. DNS is one of the few things that helps control the chaos doesn't overrun the network.

And be sure to pay your bill on a multiyear basis with reminders at the CTO/CFO level - there is usually a 30-60 day soft hold after the domain expires but it's a regular occurrence with every corporation as to whether or not they catch domains that are important to their image or brand vs. ones simply forgotten and become swiped up for ransom or other possibly unwholesome pursuit.

Cheers!

I've lived in Seattle for over 20 years now. I left Alaska because there was no tech scene and other personal pursuits weren't ending in anything with a future at the time. I managed to catch this city right as it was getting it's first dose of gentrification blotting out all those references that inspired and sustained the "grunge" scene as it had already died, was creamated by the record label and became "Alt-Rock" as told by the local radio station reference KNDD. This past year, my partner passed away and while I already had this fuzzy/warm idea of relocating out of town. So looking at the geopolitics, recent personal events and my home value that has literally exploded over the past 10+ years, I present my opinion with these optics and pragmatism.

It honestly boils down to your own goals and where you think opportunity would have a greater chance of landing or being realized.

Humans and especially hyper-nerds like HN readers are always datamining information from "the great collective" as if it's a sure thing. But that's honestly a fallacy of human nature to be "reassured" that is reinforced/exploited by cable news "commentary shows" and a form of rhetorical bias to get the dopamine fix through self-affirming data.

If you are not into the communal/rural collective, neighbor helping neighbor even if they could be MAGA-hat wearing, Ted Cruz worshipping, God/Guns/Glory rednecks that espouse every stereotype and have no problems living within their own echo chamber because they are in "'Murrica" and wonder why you aren't stepping in line with the rest of "us" sheep person OR are profoundly judea-christian religous but not a Jew, then cities maybe better just in the context of finding like-minded people. It's the same reason why swing states often have a duality of "blue cities/red rural districts".

States have different vibes, politics and laws steming from said political vibes. Whether or not city or country inside the state doesn't matter as much as "commute time vs. lifestyle-opportunity goals" in most cases. If you think you are a corner case, then test it. But this is how I'm breaking down the information.

In the city, we try to get as much done inside the localized 24 hours we have.

In the country, they are limited by nature or opportunity set by nature thus the timescale is distorted by this reality where there are hard deadlines for crop growing and harvesting which makes or breaks their bankroll. In Alaska they call it "Alaska Time" but on islands and other places, they call it "Island Time".

Surely, you could try to apply the same 24 hour logic to living rurally, but our society isn't 100% built for a 24-hour lifestyle unless you have everything from your vocation to your location tuned for it. Like working remote in Europe/Asia but live in NYC - such is almost unicorn outside such a work/life balance.

Then there is the balance itself: Why would you move to the country in the first place? Have you ever been, are you from and are you striving to return to it? Do you already have plans to be an employer or landlord? Do you understand the financial risks and capital investment needs going rural?

I finally got my parent hooked up with Starlink this year. Prior to that, they had spotty "wireless based" internet service because the local ISP didn't give two fucks as they were the only game in town due to the majors whitewashing their coverage data or groups already invested the tens of thousands of dollars to "energize" a new cable run off a feeder spur and the person at the farthest end of the span may have or may be getting reimbursed for paying the initial cost. Which is the case for most utilities - they will run you a line/feed and hook you up if you live on a private island in the middle of a ocean: if you're willing to pay for the costs involved deploying it.

But just this fact alone kept all of my siblings from spending more than a week with my rural parents due to the horrid connectivity and the mobile speed/data costs upon their cap. And a few of them are some of the first "telecommuters" on the Internet being "[Virtual] Personal Assistants" for those who need them.

Then there was this disparity between "cable/satellite" and the multiple screen/cord-cutting we've all been party to with NetFlix and Disney+. There are offerings that never will be replayed on any "traditional" service like DirectTV or Comcast. Like the many "Amazon" or "Netflix" produced movies/series. Nor do you see them being offered in DVD/BD boxsets compilations either. But, for city people, this is such a large part of the "watercooler" talk we partake in at the office when we were there. If it wasn't this, it was usually the NFL game from the weekend, amirite?

Cities - yes there is convenience due to the proximity. And you can replicate the same experience in the country if you hire a personal assistant or subscribe with those that strive to deliver similar. Really that's what the difference is: method of delivery. If we had "matter resequencing printers" such as those in Star Trek or Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age", it would be another checkbox in the relocation column of urban/rural.

But cities are the people and we make up the cities even if we strive to never interact with anyone. But beware, now that we live in personal "burbclaves" in the city, realize that reality is still very real for those without homes - hence 3rd Avenue in Seattle - TODAY. Seattle has lost what made Seattle quirky under the gentrification boom of the first two 21st century decades where the push to release was the trump card to culture and social gathering. Sure we still have festivals like Bumbershoot and NW Folklife, but even all the multitude of coffee shops have been bankrupted by Starbucks and Keurig.

So unless you fall way outside of the city stereotype of "woke liberal professional/struggling but aspiring robot" and the suburbs are still too tight , or you're tired of sharing a wall, or maybe you can't contain all your crap within 1500sf of space without getting a storage unit.... stay in the city.

If you are self-sufficient and are willing to both give and take that mindset to someone who may/maynot like the color of your skin or music, go country - but be ready to invest and spread your income around sprouting new business as they don't have money and you're not likely to buy real friendship in most places without showing your willingness to shovel shit with them. As I tell the kids now, "Not everyone can be an Astronaut, but just about everyone can use a shovel."

I suspect there will be a future need to proxy between the two networks - great opportunity for entrepreneurs, cybercriminals or governments who pry.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120505075239/http://www.sixxs....

But remember, it's feast or famine.

And the moment you need to add employees and other people to the mix, be prepared for the complaints to start as just like when you have houseguests or someone borrows your car, it's never treated the same as you would treat it.

This issue above is really the limiting factor for most entrepreneurs because we're willing to do all the hats to get it done/sold.

An employee only has vestment up to their compensation and once they figure out what their time is worth, you are screwed paying more and more.

Finding solid people willing to do the job is what we site for the cause of shuttering a 35 year old family business as it was too difficult to hire and train and retain people constantly wanting to level up, or just get their buck for least possible effort/education or not discuss/engage more connection into the business and desire to grow it along with them... as that's how businesses are built, people get invested in it.

But I do keep a consultancy up and running even if idle. The business taxes and bookkeeping if idle can be automated and take seconds to do and it's a legal functioning producer of tax deductions in just maintaining it's existence.

I've gained more connection and "side" opportunity/money just networking and being open to offer sellable good products and forward thinking services for those that want a "solution" and a confidential, personalized service for "projects" or "consultancy" that needs a experienced individual to work with them addressing concerns you wouldn't want to get a RFQ or do a parade of estimation/bidding for.

But again, it's the hustle and contact that get you gigs.. gigs that all eventually end as time is money and when it's on their time, it's not your money anymore. Remember that. :P

For instance, one interview I was having camera issues after messing with some UVC webcam switchers so I can mix it like a Twitch feed, and a request to do a meeting came in. Now sure, my bad for not being ready and testing my setup an hour or two before the meeting but we're both sitting there and while I'm trying to work out the camera issues, I'm trying to coax the interviewer into starting the meeting as both of us are there now and there are a lot of interaction to talk about prior to needing a face to face. His reluctance indicates to me that he's wanting to do exactly that trick... try to gauge my non-verbal language.

Lots of people read and watch videos on how to spot liars. The fact that a polygraph can be defeated shows you why its bullshit and that a attentive eye can be made to watch for a red flag. But the real clincher that you're supposed to do is give them rope to hang themselves on. This guy was so tight to doing it his way that he hung himself and I cancelled any further interest once he hung up with the recruiter. I have no problem finding work and we're doing him a favor not the other way around.

Now you can't bullshit a bullshitter and you can tell through extensive Q & A along with tracking the amount of time to see if someone knows/doesn't know AND someone trying to con by covering up. Which is why you NEVER EVER LIE IN AN INTERVIEW!!! Admit defeat if you don't know, nobody is perfect.

The best SE hacks are the ones that can sell you and stab you in the back. You couldn't figure that out in one call regardless. That's why it's so dangerous and even in-person will someone try to run the gambit on you. And why the weakest link in security is the human.

You need multiple people involved in a interview loop to make sure the likelihood is high that they can do the job. Most people who cannot "talk the talk" cannot even attempt to "walk the walk". Which is why you cannot use canned questions and answers that are already on the internet. It's a waste of time because nobody works tech without having access to the Internet and reference.

That said, if you have worked with peers and they all vouch for you, I wouldn't bother with the contract part, just make sure that team fit is there and that he can deal with whatever office politics are in the current org in it's current state. After all, in two years, it all could change.

Most people don't code without having reference material available because unless it's just rehashing old code all the time for the same project, you're likely adding or optimizing something about your project. Same with every other part of the infrastructure and service matrix.

It's hard to explain but the 'bro'-ism can be deeper than you may think. Let alone a cultural fit a manager may be trying to achieve - as "cult of personality" will also tend to pull out all the stops to "prove" themselves..

But without feedback from the interview loops, we just don't really know.

If we weren't, then why would be working for anyone or trading skill/our time and labor to someone else for a negotiated amount. One of which we can never purchase directly again and sadly is way disvalued in general.

But that said, if you've never worked at a Fortune 500, then you should regardless. It lends street creds that you've dealt with the corporate politics and endured the stack ranked rat race and how well you did with it.

My own questions about FB tho, that's another story. Since I'm SRE, i'm wondering: would I make a difference anymore than I have already? It's one things to say you keep the internet turned on at scale. It's completely different having done it for two(+) decades and know their place in the org chart relative to VP/SVP of your corporate division and theirs within companies with 30-100k+ people.

For those that have worked at FB, we hear the stories and we all know the problems we generate for our neighbors from gentrification as well as our peers just in enacting the will of our management chains, making "the right thing" harder to evangelize without risk or fear.

So why should anyone that's not a intern/college grad/entry level person work there that's not hooked on something special?

As everyone has said, it's just a website run on commodity gear... just at scale. Why pay the fucks to work there if you've already done annual doxing and close knife work necessary to not be at the bottom of the bell curve for the stack rank? Nobody is safe anymore unless you've made connections in college and elsewhere. An average IT career is 2 years so why do it beyond whoring and resume building?

Wargames came out in 1984. It took about 2 years for there to be a law against computer intrusion (hacking). 18 USC 1030. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

But it got most of it's teeth in the 90's. Newt and Bill pretty much ran the 90's. Along with Janet Reno and the rest of them. People may have happy memories of the 90's but for "hackers", it was a terrible time as people were passing bad laws with little info. It's only gotten marginally better over time due to people gaining better comprehension of technology - yet somehow we haven't caught up with our own privacy invasions as a whole. (ie: GDPR and data collection)

https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Popular-Communications...

Page 14 for "H.R. 2369 and The ARRL"

Let's put it this way: OKI900's and all that were around before 1992. And that phone was favoured because you could easily reprogram the ESN/NAM/MIN for cloning as well as turn it into a scanner by turning on it's speaker and had control of the frequency. It was a modder's dream to hack on. But the same could be done with Motorola phones with a few more button presses.

That was 1992.

1997: AMPS system is waning against D-AMPS and even that is getting pressure from a new standard - GSM - which is also digital and ENCRYPTED. Newt gets caught and to show what a great prick him and Bill Clinton were, they passed a law that was obsolete before it was even passed into law.

https://www.wired.com/1997/11/ears-of-the-airwaves/

---

This is why the election system, process of creating lawmakers (congress) as well as judicial system is retarded. The time lag doesn't stop the flash pan crime trends nor does it do anything to improve the situation due to the abuse of absurd laws like this one. This law is rendered null and void by technology long before it was ever enacted...

Newt Gingrich who was Speaker of the House at the time got embroiled in an incident that was recorded from a cell phone conversation. https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/01/13/tape/index.shtml

Now fast forward to a few years later with the Patriot Act and metadata controvery that Edward Snowden exposed... same shit, different day...

This coming from a Trump voter in the 206.

We don't condone anarchists who are the .001% of the 99.998 of the normal people in the PNW. Just like we don't condone 1% of the population holding control to 99% of the world's wealth as it doesn't benefit the economy and society.

You will have people with ulterior motives in any population no matter how you slice it. But one should be honest about how they group populations together.

Not all rednecks are dumb. Some build rockets and space vehicles. Get my point?

When an email is opened, the browser within the email client is told to render and that then invokes a request against a webserver hosting the tracking pixels, creative images, etc.. and that is when the tracking is marked as open in the mailflow. The email is usually modified during preparation for sending with these tracking "pixels".

But eventually I then take steps to get back to moving forward. I'm from the "Stay Hungry" camp of motivation to progress forward.

Plus there's nothing like the clock to remind you that time is wasting. The one thing that none of us can buy more of is time. We can only rent someone else's time and with varied degree of success. But since our lives are finite and the list can be long, there's motivation to continue to check things off that list before time runs out.