benchly
You also bring up an interesting time in ham radio history that a lot of newer hams are largely unaware of; WWII. Amateur radio thrives on communication globally, so anyone from the US could talk to anyone from any other country. The need for restrictions of the bands became obvious in the years leading up to the US entering the war, with various countries that were once accessible by radio going dark. The US logically followed suit, but operators were still monitoring.
There's a great article on this time in amateur radio history here; https://bw.billl.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Radio-Histor...
I work in automation (mostly) as a lead tech and professional troubleshooter because I am familiar with a wide and varied amount of automation technologies. I've met plenty of people over the years who have much more advanced skills than myself, but never go beyond doing more than parts swapping on a workbench, which leaves me scratching my head.
Over the last few years, I have listened carefully to what people around me say about my work, and while it is good gas for the ego, I have notice that's not the likely reason I get promoted so quickly. While I can walk into a problem and know how to apply different processes to figure out what to do almost reflexively at this point, the real focus seems to be that I take ownership of the process.
Bit of a buzzphrase, "ownership of the process," but the short explanation is that a little planning, accountability, resourcefulness and communication seems to get you a lot further than just knowing what to do in any given situation. Employers like that because they now have department manager they can rely on, and team members like that because someone else is taking responsibility so they don't have to.
You're good at code, obviously, but if you zoom out on your work a bit, are you also bringing a bit of accountable authority to the table? That may be the real reason why you move up so quickly, or at least something that greases the gears so that can happen faster for you than, say, an equally skilled colleague.
It's sort of funny that this thread turned into a USA vs Russia debate when they both play the same games. One of them is just slightly better at pretending like they're playing fair and friendly. My take-away from that is once an organized body, be it a country, corporation or religion, gets very large and holds a lot of power, they will inevitably start doing bad things.
Even switching to the Hacker's Keyboard and tweaking some settings still has me smacking the "tab" key or whatever when hitting space.
Just out of curiosity, who here is a one-handed texter, like me? I just assumed my constant need for error correction was because I only use one hand (and thus, one thumb) to type, but this thread has me wondering.
I likely need to reread it, though, as some of its ideas are a bit above my weight class when it comes to understanding physics. But, you may enjoy it!
Not even much of an IBM fan, myself, but I respect their considerable contribution to the industry. Sure, they missed a shot back then, but I think this latest statement is reliably accurate based on the information we currently have.
It's pretty entertaining!
And free to read for anyone interested: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69404
As a controls tech, I provide a lot of documentation and teach to our customers about how to deploy, operate and maintain a machine for best possible results with lowest risk to production or human safety. Some clients follow my instruction, some do not. Guess which ones end up getting billed most for my time after they've implemented a product we make.
Too often, we want to just do without thinking. This often causes us to overlook critical points of failure.
I did not mean to come off as teaching my kid to never apologize.
But of course, apologizing when you have definitely wronged a person is important, too. I didn't mean to come off as teaching my kid to never apologize, just think before you act. But you get the idea.
Right! But, wouldn't a more appropriate approach be to mitigate the damage from being hacked as much as possible in the first place? Perhaps this starts by simplifying bloated systems, reducing data collection to data that which is only absolutely legally necessary for KYC and financial transactions in whatever respective country(ies) the service operates in, hammer-testing databases for old tricks that seem to have been forgotten about in a landscape of hacks with ever-increasingly complexity, etc.
Maybe it's the dad in me, years of telling me son to not apologize, but to avoid the behavior that causes the problem in the first place. Bad things happen, and we all screw up from time to time, that is a fact of life, but a little forethought and consideration about the best or safest way to do a thing is a great way to shrink the blast area of any surprise bombs that go off.
For me, it's not about the pennies I'm losing. You're right, I don't care about them and the end of their minting doesn't mean much to me at all. No, it's about who is getting the pennies I'm losing. Let's say Nestle, a company I loath, has a box of instant noodles for $0.99 USD. Our hypothetical noodles are very popular, so everyone in the US tends to buy them.
Suddenly, pennies go away. Nestle thinks "hmm, so our customers were already paying $0.99, might as well just bump the price up to $1.00, nobody will care." And they'd be correct. As a typical consumer, I'd pay $1.00 for something that I was just paying $0.99 for because the difference is negligible to me.
But if everyone in the US buys them for lunch, that's not a negligible difference to Nestle. That's nearly $3,500,000 USD in extra revenue that week. If the consumer behavior remains consistent, that's an extra $182,000,000 USD per year. Maybe that seems like small potatoes compared to what Nestle grosses annually on a global scale, but even the richest of companies can do A LOT with that much extra cash.
But of course, that is an extreme and overly simplified example. However, it illustrates the idea that while the individual will not really feel the change, the collectives or corporations will.
I'm not an economics expert by any stretch of the imagination, but one thing I'm fairly sure about is when something like this type of change happens, the corporations are unchallenged at finding ways to exploit it, which usually translates to more money going up to them and less coming back down to the individual.
As an example, I consider myself a pretty successful controls technician because I have a good reputation in the circles I run in, generally get the job done quickly so my customer can get back to work and stop losing money and my work hasn't resulted in anyone getting hurt (a very real possibility in my industry). I have almost no social media presence.
My friend is in real estate, and he has spent years building a client base that feeds itself on referrals by making himself very open, accessible and interactive on nearly every social media platform that most people use daily. He is also quite successful and has cultivated a reputation for trust and honesty because of his social media presence.
To define success, it's important to understand what it is you want to accomplish.
I think you might be romanticizing this, a bit. When you convince the public that not talking about something is the best course of action, they become a lot easier to control. We learned this during WWII with the propaganda machine that was fully employed on all fronts, and arguably before that with the work of Edward Bernays and people like him. If public discourse and debate could be quashed, then it was much, much easier to simply tell everyone what their opinions of a thing should be.
I read too much dystopian sci-fi to write much else, but in truth, I have pretty high hopes for these garbage-eating microbes.
7. It's also okay to not have or want any tattoos
Self-expression can take many forms :)
Saying they don't age well is pretty generalizing, given the variety of ways one can express themselves with stickers that aren't necessarily topical or political.
Say you're red teaming, and you are on-site looking to gain access to the server closet of a business. Some initial setup about you being there comes into play, but once there, it's up to you to look like you belong there, when some unwitting person with access to the server closet will lead you to it, then leave you to do your thing on the pleasant notion that you'll have the "problem" fixed by the end of the day. This is an ultra-simple scenario used as an example, but looking the part sometimes means having some stickers on your laptop that tell people you're really into a specific language or tool chain, or that you've been in the SOC trenches long enough to know what a lot of those inside jokes mean. Details often sell the lie.
As a result, I am that guy that tells people a few rules about tattoos:
1. Don't get a tattoo of a band. They will eventually fall out of favor or do something stupid.
2. Don't get a tattoo of any person unless they've been dead for a long, long time. Like a band, a person will also eventually fall out of favor or do something stupid. Even after they're dead, it may still be uncovered that they did something stupid in secret.
3. Don't make your self-expression about other people. Rules 1 and 2 should have already put you on this path.
4. Consider time. So you like cars, especially the 1987 Pontiac Firebird you had in high school. Have you always liked cars? Will you always like cars? Have you and will you always like that car? If there is doubt, rule it out.
5. Are you drunk or high? Best sleep on it.
6. Can you be honest with yourself? This is the Catch 22 question, but an important one. We tend to have a few versions of ourselves to contend with; the one we want to be, the one others perceive us as, and the one we need to be. Sometimes they align, sometimes they don't, but self-expression hinges on understanding the difference and allowing that we might be deceiving ourselves about who we really are, sometimes.
Getting a tattoo is a remarkably difficult and personal thing that I see a lot of people not take seriously enough, then live to regret it, myself included. The artist who has now done all my visible work is an absolute master at getting people to slow down and think about what they want, which was a terrific boon in my life, because he probably did more for me as a person than my therapist did. His clients are life-long, one even having traveled from another country to get more work done by him. That's to say nothing of his absolutely radical art and style that always produces something unique and fit for the person to make part of their lives.
It's something I often think about when I look down at my arms, see those old game homages and realize, regardless of what else has happened in my life or whoever I thought I was at the time, they have been with me since the beginning and are still here, helping me through it.
When I was in high school in the 90's, the famed Texas Instruments calculators were often banned in some maths classes because, as was said at the time, we were "not going to be walking around with a computer in our pockets all the time," so we needed to learn to do the work. By the time my younger brother passed through the same classes, they were required to have a graphing calculator because it actually helped kids complete the work. And play Dope Wars.
While we do tend to overreact to new tech, ways of thinking, games, music, etc, there's something inherently oily and snakelike about a thing that brings convenience to our lives the way smartphones or cell phones did. They slip in, comfortably at times, settling into our habits and routines while simultaneously altering them. We end up manipulated by it and before we know it, we can't set it down. In the case of smartphones, our data became the commodity, a mere decade or two after we were worried about tracking devices in cars or phone lines being tapped. But the smartphones kept delivering on their promises, which kept us hooked.
As someone who recovering from alcoholism, I struggle to call our love of smartphones an addiction, but if it helps people be aware of the dangers, by all means, use the term. To me, the problem of smartphones is manipulation at the deepest cognitive levels. We started offloading some thinking to them and who could blame us? We had the store of human knowledge in our pockets! We could play a game instead of sitting idle on the train, gamble with online casinos to try and win some extra cash that week, keep up with the Joneses on Facebook or get into a heated debate on Twitter during our lunch break, check banking, stocks and eBay sales, etc. We no longer had to carry a separate device to photograph or record the moment. The list goes on and on. But in the end, it altered our behavior just enough that we allow ourselves to be controlled by it, monitored by it, and bought and sold by it.
What I really need to do is standardize my format and size, just to make things a bit more visually tidy. I'm not all that interested in keeping below a certain size, more so that I'm not doing anything I consider unnecessary for the function and feel of the site. Fairly certain whatever readership I have is either related to me or people I play D&D with, so it's really just a fun thing for me to do once in awhile.
My guess is the photos.
I like this and care deeply about what happens to our world after I am gone, but I worry (excessively, actually) that most others do not. Greed, immediate gratification, etc, these things cloud our judgement so greatly that even I have trouble remembering that the future exists with or without me in it.
It's an interesting problem to think about, but I have no idea what branch of philosophy it falls under, so pardon my sophistry. I do wonder, though; how do we get people to care about this?
Having been team lead a few times myself now, I have learned that I am not there to be a field marshal. I'm there to act as a hub or conduit for all the other parts of the team. When they clash, I help resolve the conflict. When they question, I help assuage concerns. When they have ideas, I help evaluate the value of implementation. When they need resources, I approach the right people and do what I can. When they fuck up, I take the heat and rally them to help fix the problem.
It took me over a decade to learn this. I'm not the best. My name is unrecognized, for the most part, outside of some very specific circles. But I find that being part of the team rather than some imaginary demagogue to them yields consistently good results with significantly lower risk of talent loss and helps avoid over-promising/under-delivering.
The article does a nice job of pointing a few things out that I find essential in good leadership, but one thing in particular is saying "I don't know, but let's figure it out." Not only does it give your experts permission to be uncertain and helps avoid the trappings of getting defensive, as the author mentions, but it also reminds them they are not alone in this fight. That's powerful.
I'm sure many of you reading this have felt unsupported by your leaders in the past, a cog in a machine that will stress you to the point of breaking and simply replace you with another when that inevitably happens. Maybe my experience as a tech/troubleshooter colors my view here, but people, just like machines, need to be cared for if you want them to keep operating at a level that allows them to make a meaningful contribution to the team.
To the individual, here is, in effect, never enough time. There never will be.