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bigfatkitten

Because in any decent sized organisation, the speed at which code is written has never been the bottleneck (even if management thinks that it is.)

Internal turf wars, endless meetings to get “alignment” and pivoting on management’s latest whims are what slows feature delivery.

The talent pool in India has always trended towards mediocre. Highly skilled candidates do exist of course, but in a sea of diploma mill graduates they are extremely hard to find.

Companies have decided that a mediocre employee with Claude is now good enough, especially at the offshore price point.

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @02:20PM (#50342147)
Red Hat is always slow in backporting patches to their Frankenkernel.
Re:Malware uses LLMs to rank victims by how much they're worth on Saturday October 31, 2026 @07:32PM (#50321290)
It’s absolutely possible, but almost nobody does, at least until they get breached.

Developers have decided that the convenience of just letting their servers pull arbitrary code off the Internet is more important than the security risks.

Re:Malware uses LLMs to rank victims by how much they're worth on Saturday October 31, 2026 @04:13PM (#50319671)
There’s also been a regression in how infrastructure is operated.

15 years ago you didn’t let your production infrastructure talk out to the Internet, and if you did, it was via an explicit proxy with allowlisted domains.

This significantly limited the damage that a malicious dependency could cause. With the move to cloud and DevOps, that network security model disappeared.

Back then they only really did routing and switching, and those are still the only things that Cisco kind-of does well.

Almost every new product of theirs I’ve touched in the last 20 years has been trash, and even the R&S golden goose is being dragged in that direction with customer-hostile functionality like Smart Licensing and a general decline in quality.

Re:Proton's CEO Cancels AI 'Re-Interviews' on Friday October 30, 2026 @09:43PM (#50312436)
And that you have to do business with Google, who have a religious objection to providing any meaningful customer support.

I get better support from AWS as a $30 per month customer than I did with GCP and Google Workplace spending $300k per month at work.

Re:Proton's CEO Cancels AI 'Re-Interviews' on Friday October 30, 2026 @09:38PM (#50312406)
I stopped worrying about this because everyone I correspond with uses email services that store emails in plaintext, mostly Microsoft and Google.
Re:Proton's CEO Cancels AI 'Re-Interviews' on Friday October 30, 2026 @09:36PM (#50312392)
I am also a happy Fastmail customer, but they are an Australian company with infrastructure in the US.
That’s more or less how I’ve heard Meta employees justify their own career choices.
Or Vietnam.
It’s a pretty obvious outcome. Attorney-client privilege applies to the executive branch of the government as much as it applies to anyone else, and not just in national security matters.
You’re government agency, and you ask your lawyers about how the law operates given a particular set of circumstances.

In response, the lawyers provide you with advice about how they think the law applies to this situation, and what findings they think a court would make given the evidence etc available.

Information subject to attorney-client privilege (as this information would be) is exempt from release under FOIA anyway. Dropping a security classification on top adds protections against unauthorised release by insiders.

Sometimes there are good reasons for this, such as to protect particular technical capabilities that are easily circumvented if adversaries know that they exist, or to protect human sources who might end up dead if found out. Other times, there are no good reasons to do this but without knowing all the circumstances it’s impossible to tell either way.

The fact that you suggested that number people of people who install custom bodies etc is miniscule indicates that you are not at all familiar with the AU/NZ market.
That’s not a new thing.

I replaced the heater core on a 1987 Ford XF Falcon. In hindsight, it would’ve been easier to pull the motor out and cut myself an access panel in the firewall than it was to disassemble and reassemble the dash.

> Why would you want that on EV chassis tho?

Because you want to install equipment such as air compressors, pumps, welders, cranes or water tanks, or you want to carry bulky items like ladders, and/or you need accessible and ergonomic lockers, drawers etc to store your tools and equipment without having to dig around the tub.

Same reasons as you’d do this on an ICE truck.

The number of people (and in particular, fleet operators) who do that in Australia and NZ is extremely high.

Ford Ranger Super Duty wasn’t even available with a factory tub at launch, and the Toyota Landcruiser 79 doesn’t have one at all.

The fact you can’t take it off and replace it with a flat tray or a service body, for a start.
Re:Ask HN: When did you last visit or use stackoverflow? on Friday October 23, 2026 @06:07PM (#50216026)
I have never found the site useful.

I’ve found posts where someone has asked a question about the exact issue I was having, but where some self-important mod who knows nothing about the subject had inevitably squashed it and pointed to a completely irrelevant thread about an entirely different problem.

The law isn’t self servicing. What the Constitution says only matters if it is actually enforced, and whether anyone is willing and able to do that is very much unclear.
Re:RIP Virtual Box on Friday October 23, 2026 @03:51PM (#50214417)
Oracle cloud was a relatively minor chapter in VirtualBox’s history.

It was developed by a small German outfit who were acquired by Sun, before Sun was in turn consumed by Oracle.

Re:eMudhra to Exit Global SSL/TLS Certificate Business on Friday October 23, 2026 @06:34AM (#50206860)
I worked for a bank who had a team within its security org dedicated to dealing with fuckups caused by Indian outsourcers.
Fares typically make a negligible contribution to the overall costs of operating the system.

Public transport in the state of Queensland, Australia charges a flat fare of 50 cents. They only reason they charge anything at all is because they want the trip data for route planning purposes.

Depending on where you are, it is arguably illegal (money laundering, dealing with proceeds of crime, maybe contravening sanctions depending on the gang) but I’m not aware of this being tested.
> They know their infrastructure, can have sensors and traps everywhere.

They can have, but they’re sufficiently tied up with other corporate busy work that they don’t.

This is not a novel situation for Microsoft. From 2015:

https://www.securityweek.com/researcher-calls-out-microsoft-...

Re:Decade-old RAM is making a comeback on Friday October 16, 2026 @05:07PM (#50124737)
Why would a washing machine need an LLM?

The decisions those devices need to make, at their very most adventurous, can be and already are done using DSP instructions on a $2 MCU.

Re:Former German spy chief arrested for attempted treason on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @03:12PM (#49982713)
Israel doesn’t really have any allies other than the United States, and even that is a one-sided relationship.

They are adversarial to everyone, but everyone who wants to maintain friendly relations with the U.S. is obliged to play nicely with Israel.

Re:SAML: A Fractal of Bad Design on Friday September 25, 2026 @01:59AM (#49840650)
The people running these WGs are mostly professional committee members who get paid by their employers to fly around the world to attend meetings.

They don’t build products, they don’t operate networks, and they don’t talk to customers.

Re:SAML: A Fractal of Bad Design on Friday September 25, 2026 @01:57AM (#49840641)
NSA has their own stripped down and opinionated profiles of IPsec that they mandate for applications they really care about.

HAIPE IS is classified, and mostly accommodates NSA’s private algorithms and key management practices.

IPMEIR is public, but it mandated the Suite B cipher suites and so I don’t know where it stands now with the move to PQC.

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