bbsz
The thing is, it's somehow mostly (not only) North Koreans utilizing this particular tactics.
PS. They wouldn't allow you this rhetoric, regardless of you being sympathetic with them. It would be allowed only if you embrace the Juche and the Supreme Leader cult in fullest. Otherwise, you're nothing to them, an enemy, you don't deserve the Geneva convention or any of the basic human rights, by the doctrine's definition. The system there is not even like China's "One country, two systems", it's a thing on it's own.
No, they didn't. Not in this case. That's not to say they wouldn't at some point. In some of the previous cases we dealt with, North Koreans were obsessively trying to get write access to CI/CD from the repo owners. They will also try to get your PAT tokens if possible. Similarly, any other access tokens (AWS etc.). We had one case where malicious npm dependency was injected after few months of regular work.
DPRK IT Workers focus is not hacking, it's:
1. Getting paid (The quality of work is variable, sometimes they are not that bad, but most of the time they are basically stubborn junior devs)
2. Then, stealing secrets to exfiltrate to actual DPRK hackers
3. Then, credibility building, so they could return to your co-workers with a job offer or some repository code with an "issue to debug" and force you to open code/attachments.
They will also recommend each other for jobs. If you'll hire one and signal that you want to hire more, they will invite their "friends". In some organizations this can go as high as 3 to 5 DPRK IT Workers for the 10 people team.
The other opensource json visualizer I found operates on the similar model as OP's project, but it also doesn't provide a standalone component.
Mentioned above "district cooperative" flatly refused to remove an old asbestos roof from over the balcony and professional removals don't deal with 1x1m asbestos roofing. I removed it myself, standing on a chair on 10th floor balcony with an old grinder as it was permanently attached to the building through the metal frame, because of course it was.
I pushed it into the same basement as no one was interested in picking it up, no matter petitions, asking nicely, asking not so nicely, making threats or wanting to pay.
Oh, the times in the commie blocks :)
Gas leaks - check, Fire hazard in the basement - check, Fire hazard through faulty (aluminum) electrical installation - check, Elevator out of order or just simply being scary - check, Often plumbing problems (no hot water for a month? check!)
and the list could go on and on. The last straw for me was when I installed a water filtration and filters basically turned black in a week and clogged. I just moved.
One of the big advantages of those buildings is often the location. Beats living with no public space (parks, playgrounds, walking space etc) and public utilities (like schools, commies, built those with every new district erected) and on the outskirts of the city
Moreover, the project isn't as "innovative" as it seems to be portrayed in the article. The quality of these buildings today depends on a variety of factors, such as the precise time they were built (during periods of a strong vs. weak socialist economy), the location (growing worker cities vs. peripheral cities), and their maintenance over the years. During socialist times and even up to today, these buildings were largely maintained by legal "cooperatives." The quality of management within these cooperatives can vary significantly. And management of those basically never changes through the decades.
There is also a notable difference in the quality of an average "block" among different Central and Eastern European countries. Having traveled through most of this part of the continent and living in Poland, I've observed that many Balkan Soviet blocks were of significantly lower quality, likely due to smaller economies and greater scarcity of materials at the time, which affected their ability to meet building standards (all these blocks were state-built).
For anyone interested in how these were made en masse in months, here's a link to an old Polish movie archive from 1976, which was pretty much the peak of building these in Poland, following a substantial loans from the western world. The video lacks subtitles, but you can still observe the manufacturing, quality control, delivery, and on-site assembly process.
Here in central europe ticks are a massive problem. Lyme's caused serious year long health issues for a family member. It also almost killed my dog when he caught one of his first ticks ever.
I also do "checks", avoid tall grasses and have the whole system for management of my family's "tick security" (sometimes with their complain in the background). However, studying this problem basically every single summer I once found the alternative explanation as to why tick population today explodes globally in moderate climates.
Collapsed deer predator population[0]. Deer and small rodent populations are unchecked because predators can't thrive in ecologically stressed areas (There's little to no wild forests of enough of the size for wolf in most of Europe). Herbivores had far easier time adapting to the transformed environment compared to their natural predators. They also get less hunted by humans, obviously.
[0] https://hal.science/hal-03015707/document (ctrl+f > "tick")
No amount of DEET will solve that. There's also no need to CRISP'r anything or spend a decade of research on poor quality vaccination. This is system's fragility problem.
Then again... ticks were a very common occurrence for the first settlers in North America. There're diary entries mentioning them "in swarms" explicitly. But, what's different today is that you don't need to be even close to a deer trail to get 23 ticks of your dog after the walk.
You are right about "no walls everywhere". At the time there were also no concept of a country border as it's today. If only a free peasant, you could walk from France to Russia, start settling some land there and no one was any wiser. It would be a local administration problem at best (if any was present), but not an international one like today.
In a way it feels against "the spirit", but maybe it's exactly the same way of thinking you're pointing out.
It became almost pointless to try to host such a small search/aggregator as a separate web (discovery through web search is almost impossible and it's hard to make people stay on a new website today because of activity sinkholes like twitter/reddit. add to it a hassle of managing modern application at scale etc).
I don't know. But I feel that projects like such will have a higher 1yr survival rate when developed directly as a "feed".And, AFAIU, that's what activitypub got created for.
First 3 to 6 months is always terrible. I also had issues with sleep because of dreams, and also used cannabis for that purpose. Getting back to sleeping without THC in the bloodstream is, well... an experience on it's own.
It's funny how all of the adults I've heard/read basically share the same experience of dropping it (REM rebound, heart rate and anxiety/strange thoughts). And, yeah, today's weed is far more potent than weed I initially started to smoke almost 2 decades ago.
I'll spare myself commenting on Wolfram, it's enough to do Ctrl+F on "arrogant" in this topic. Frankly, I don't even care. It's just that New Kind of Science didn't meaningfully advance anywhere beyond being "an interesting concept" for all of his natural life.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP/douglas-ho...
You can arrow through it to just have a look at the slides. At 39 minute presenter talks about extreme orbits that made some of the objects hard to discover for decades.
Business is separate from war (see Sweden's metallurgy industry during WW2).
I also always feel that there's a lot to more to take down from energy consumption per household by simply making more efficient devices (especially for heating and cooling). It's possible that modern AC/heaters are already close to the peak electrical efficiency, but I guess even better producer standards for things like insulation, thermal conductors or precision sensors could still squeeze something out of the nation-wide usage.
(I don't like TikTok and everything it stands for)
But I'd say that this makes it even the more valuable lesson. Battlefield characteristics is still very close and Russians (now) are acting like they would act against the NATO-trained forces.
And, of course, it's liberal on my part to put Ukrainian Army in the basket of NATO forces as that is only true for maybe a year (after the first rotations ended).
That being said. I think that there's unprecedented amount of military intel US is getting out of this conflict for pennies on the dollar.
And even if you'd want to use that metric. How exactly loosing zero US personnel at the cost of getting a real-life assessment of NATO combined mobile warfare against the Soviet artillery superiority doctrine is a lose situation for US?
I remember some of my friends being "famous" for doing that all the time for every single call, operating the mobile at like 5$/year. The whole thing had it own jargon.
I was born in 93. In 2000s all of my then web-deving with html/php was without even an awareness of something like version control. I was storing snippets of code in .txt files in case my change (often made directly on the FTP server) was to crash everything. Of course, this was just a hobbyist environment, I was a teen running some small personal communities. Then, I stopped programming for years and when returned around 5 years ago `git` was basically everywhere. Now, after working in "professional environment" with software development, I don't imagine running any project without some version control when more than 1 person is involved.
What were you using for version control, how did that work between programmers committing to the same new feature?
I also find having some public activity on my gh to give me an ability to include it into the resume. It's a good conversation starter for many people from my experience.
Trying to build generalized search engine for the modern internet that will come close to Google/Bing would require a "tech megaproject" level of investment and commitment. Most likely only to end up with the same optimizations and architecture as existing big-search and the very similar level of experience.
I think it's a better direction to build a search based on more limited amount of topic-based data and focus on great match engine within, then - just aggregate the relevant ones together. Far more maintainable also on the crawling part. I can use google/bing to find the Honda dealership or read keyboard reviews, or get 50 most useful unix commands.
I also wonder if with the rise of LLMs, while it still may not be feasible in such large scale production environment, those can serve as guides/agents to also improve the query itself and not the results of the query, for example - a chat-like search where user answers shift the relevancy metrics for returned documents. This would fit perfectly for smaller but open source, customizable and thematic search.
That being said. I think it's great that project as such pop up more often. (Phind.com was also on my radar this year)