25+ years in Cyber Security as CTO, Founder, Investor, Product Manager, Consultant, Engineer & advisor to corporations, law enforcement, government, & NGOs.
@nickdothutton
https://blog.eutopian.io/about/
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/nickhutton; my proof: https://keybase.io/nickhutton/sigs/JB-cxTwTL2fMNAt2gqnoh3QwGjI1MeabYKMvuAwP6yc ]
On the one hand, self-hosting, even at home, is more accessible than it has ever been. Hardware, software, and agents to help with setup and maintenance. While at the same time ISPs, the big email providers, and even (in the UK) government legislation makes it more difficult or risky than it has ever been. We have gained much but also lost much since the mid 1990s.
An overwhelming positivity (we're going to be successful), creativity (we are making something genuinely new), quality (this is some kind of art form), and technical excellence (we're doing things head and shoulders above current levels of advancement). As a customer... "we want the best".
I visited Psygnosis in the early days, we sold them an Internet connection. Hard to describe the kind of creative energy emanating from their building. Such talent.
The number of people who know anything of history at all, even history of their own peoples, their own country, their own family, is "very low". Absent of course the "history" that Hollywood and other popular media pumps out.
We have this sickness in the UK too. I think it may be terminal. It is some combination of regulation, not trusting anyone's initiative, mindless rule-following, "safetyism", never empowering front-line staff to make decisions, managerial tier expansion, and a few other things besides like infrastructure neglect, "financialisation", and general ignorance of the world of things, of the real, and over-reliance on the world of words, of laws, of construct on paper and not in steel and stone.
When the UK handed back HK, the Chinese who are nothing if not wiley, understood that they needed to maintain intelligence, surveillance, and some kind of institutional knowledge of the various organised crime groups, certain individuals with borderline business interests, that sort of thing. They offered the British police officers houses, stipends, and other incentives to stick around and clue-in the incoming crop of officials, domestic intelligence officers, and cutouts/go-betweens. Something of an untold story. Would make a great streaming series.
Not being able to control the endpoint, like an operator can with a mobile phone, infuriates the police and politicians here. I don't want to go "full Stallman" here but although they do not use exactly these words... the idea of a general purpose computer you own and can program bothers them. Ironically at the same time they want a tech industry and tech jobs and young people entering the workforce with "tech skills". Keep in mind though that until relatively recently they though "tech skills" was being able to us MS Word. Thankfully the RPI helped a bit with that.
I won't add much, but if this happens you must leave. Raise the risk. Document it. Document your recommendation and their decision, even if not replying or not making a decision was their decision. Tie it up with a bow on it, keep a copy, and leave.
I was experimenting with Claude Code and requested something more CPU efficient in a very small project, there were a few avenues to explore, I was interested to see what path it would take. It turned out that it seized upon something which wasn't consuming much CPU anyway and was difficult to optimise further. I learned that I'd have to be more explicit in future and direct an analysis phase and probably kick-in a few strategies for performance optimisation which it could then explore. The refund request was an amusement. It was $15 well spent on my own learning.
I don't want to be dismissive or trite, but good luck to any official who thinks the defence needs of (say) Portugal, align with the defence needs of (say) Poland. Could say the same along the N-S axis as on the E-W axis.
Ukraine was, and is still, one of the most corrupt developed countries in the world. Whether it is slightly more or slightly less corrupt than Russia I do not know. Both are Oligarchic in nature. In my opinion one of the reasons the various peace deals have not succeeded yet is because they fail to acknowledge the Oligarchic nature of both states and that they will both need to continue in that mode going forwards, probably as a frozen conflict or in a system where it is in neither interest to disrupt the balance (because it would end the corruption, pocket-lining, theft, etc). Of course for the ordinary unfortunate Ukrainian, well he/she matters little or not at all to rulers on either side.
I have recently been working on something "fun" in the terminal that mingles plain ASCII, ANSI "graphics", actual bitmaps (Sixel), and Nerdfonts in a TUI framework (Charm etc). After a week of smashing Claude's head against a wall, which is better than smashing my own, I've had to significantly alter my hopes and expectations.
FBSD user since the mid 90s. It (and BSDi) often outperformed "big UNIX" vendors, and was far ahead in terms of bang per buck... if only good server grade rack-mount x86 hardware had been available at the time we'd have made more use of it. Now I have returned to it for server workloads.
Good documentation, consistent release schedule, reliability even under extreme load.
There are perhaps 2500-3000 unique open source licenses, ranging from the half dozen most of you will know well to very obscure licenses which have come about because (for example) a research grant from a foundation with certain guiding principals indirectly paid for some of the development of some software as part of a larger research initiative. There's even a license that precludes use of the software in any military equipment other than that which is strictly of a defensive nature, due to the constitution of the country sponsoring (a small part of) the project.
I’d just like to point out that if you are in the computing industry long enough, you will get to see a few such incidents under different circumstances, not only in industries like aerospace. Mostly things like ECC save your a*, sometimes your software will be able to recognise a temporary spurious reading and disregard it because you had enough alternative checking logic, or in the case of realtime and safety critical maybe even your systems can take a vote between them. Got caught out by (cpu cache line) bit flips in the 90s, months of pain trying to track it down. Some of your will know :-)