typicalrunt

I used to use SyncThing, then Dropbox, then iCloud. But then I just caved and paid for Obsidian Sync and it is the best money spent aside from Claude. I don't have to tinker with weird settings anymore or deal with sync issues, it just works.

> People are kinda stupid when it comes to eating meat. The current scale of meat consumption [1] is just mind boggling. Yet even this comment has to be a throwaway because people can't handle someone telling them they shouldn't eat meat 2x a day.

I'm sensing a lack of empathy in this comment.

Calling people stupid or attaching any label to them will only hinder your attempt to sway their minds.

Portraying black and white thinking (splitting), when we know the world is shades of grey, also hinders your ability to change minds.

It's great that you found benefits to moving to a non-meat diet. This helps others see what they could benefit from. Continue from here.

And their timeframe is pre-COVID and the worst possible time during COVID, when people were just trying to figure out how to work and live and not catch some deadly virus. 2020 was a hectic time and such an abnormality that I wouldn't base any long-term human behaviour on it.

As a non-judgemental sidekick. It helps with flesh out a random thought, it helps me understand a random coding problem, it helps me see why a vuln exists in a particularly difficult-to-read piece of code, and building outlines for reports and presentations that I'm too lazy to deal with. It is also starting to replace the random Google searches I used to do.

To boil it down, it's my "10-minute task" time saver.

And my use of it really picked up when I started using GPT4. It's head and shoulders above GPT3.5 in terms of quality and clarity of output.

That's not my point suggesting CISSP. The book I recommended takes the reader through the different OSI layers for networking and security, a basic intro to threat modeling, and other stuff that is fundamental to security. One can always skip the managerial stuff, but it doesn't mean the CISSP book is not a good recommendation.

Also, having a developer understand the value and need for code security from the perspective of a security person is important to the overall success of an infosec program. Otherwise both engineering and infosec are going to be grating on each other.

Security is mutli-faceted, so it's hard to know where to start. I like to help people begin by getting them to learn the fundamentals. A lot of security training is changing your mindset (perspective) on situations.

Two books I like to start this process:

* Threat modeling by Adam Shostack

* CISSP all in one handbook by Shon Harris

You don't need to get a CISSP cert, but the resources and education are generally applicable in most situations.

40 is a great time. In fact, I went down a similar path.

Now that you've done your share of sysadmins, SRE and software developer, you can see how things can fail. That's the heart of security. As tptacek advises, choose an area of security to focus on and go down that path for awhile. You'll find you will want to go further or jump to another path, but security is a great thing. The world is going to need more security-aware people and you can be at the forefront of it.

My current security focus is holistic defence of data flowing from customer to company. The whole SDLC lifecycle. It's fun but super challenging because it focuses on changing human mindsets and behaviour, but my Dev and ops skills are essential to my technical success.

And certs are useless on their own. Don't do certs unless you can specifically get something out of it. Your work experience is much more valuable than a cert at this point.

You're only going to get anecdotes and opinions.

Given the inputs you stated, I am full CF because I don't want to manage state files, and I want some more advanced things like Deletion policies and automatic tagging of resources with the stack info. We use these tags in a lot of lookup scripts when operating on the infrastructure.

> I still can't really figure out what a container is.

If you mean this in a general sense...

One use case at Unbounce (where I worked in infrastructure) was to encapsulate the runtime dependencies for different services that were on a machine.

Our monolith required Ruby 2.1 and a bunch of gems. Then we were using Scout for centralized monitoring, which required 1.8 with a separate set of gems. We only noticed the problem when our monolith moved from Ruby 1.8 to 2.1.

To fix this problem of dual-Ruby runtimes, we encapsulated the Ruby 1.8 + gems into a Docker image for Scout, then ran the Scout container on the machine. It works perfectly and never conflicts with the monolith's Ruby runtime.

Duo: https://duo.com

Super easy to setup and use. About $1/user/month, so fairly cheap.

Hmm, I'm replying to a comment... Oh well. :)

> you'll get paid more than you need to survive - so don't be an idiot with your money.

Adding to this is something to consider:

You will be paid more than you need to survive, but you will most likely survive longer than you will be paid. Make sure you save money for those times.

~ is for one character. If you have a word you want in caps, do gUw. For lowercase, it's guw.

That'd be quite witty of them. Polly would normally map to being a parrot, repeating whatever was told to it.

Ledger cli. Intimidating at first, but everything is in a text file so it's super portable.

I do understand capitalism, the point I made was that sometimes I don't have to like it. Scalping included.

I don't need to prove my knowledge to you by pointing out lots of capitalism's flaws. Instead of reading my comment carefully, you decided to teach me about how basic supply and demand operate. Jesus, you are a self-absorbed piece of work.

I grok capitalism and even like it. But there are times where it is difficult to like it. In this case, people rushed to buy this product for the sole purpose of reselling it for 8x. What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense.

In the end, I think these scalpers won't sell for 8x because anintendo will just pump out more product. Still, it is sad to see this happen.

Threatstack will do that. Their agent runs on your machine as a kernel mod and will alert you to any libs being used (e.g. openssl, libcurl) whose version matches a known CVE.

This killed one of our main webapps, but since the site was hosted on AWS, I provisioned an ACM certificate (free) in about 5 minutes and manually applied it to the ELB listener. Couldn't have been easier.

Today's weirdness and communication around it has made me trust Globalsign a lot less now.

To separate the marketing website (www.) with the webapp (app.).

It allows you to scale one independently of the other, and you can have different codebase and deployment workflows.

I use them indirectly like I use design patterns. I'm not thinking "Oh, I'm using 3rd NF" or "I'm using Singleton" at work. Instead, when designing databases I'm thinking about removing duplication (which is the crux of normal forms). However, like proofreading, you can go too far and normalize your database too much, making it hard to work with, so you allow duplication of some fields (hence denormalization).

Hope this helps.

I got the chance to play with Holus last month during one of H+'s open houses. The unit itself is pretty neat and the holograms (yes, they are just Pepper's Ghost) is of good resolution. The use of iPhones and iPads to control the perspective is really cool, but still glitchy.

However, my friends and I found no practical non-game application of the technology yet; maybe this is the case with anything new, where it answers a question nobody has yet to ask.

I do agree with the OP that the images in the KS campaign aren't real (or even possible). The Holus simply doesn't look like that and I wouldn't be comfortable if my company was promising images in a KS campaign like that. At the very least, H+ should have added an asterisk on each image that said "CGI rendered" or something to that effect to inform potential backers.

> I'm not entirely sure that subtly influencing people to be nicer to each other is a bad thing

This would be a subjective opinion. The ends do not justify the means.

I agree with you that getting people to act nicer to each other is a nice goal, but you can't do it by enlisting them all into a hidden experiment.

> I don't see how anything they are doing is devious or underhanded.

Well that's the point of A/B testing isn't it? The user doesn't realize that they are part of the experiment. That's the devious part. If they had signed up to be part of an experiment, then at least it wouldn't be an underhanded maneuver to start changing game UI or semantics on them without their knowledge.

To answer the title: it's never OK to manipulate users. Let's look no further than the dictionary to see why.

Here is the OED definition (3rd entry):

    manipulate: To manage, control, or influence in a subtle, devious, or underhand manner.

It's sad people are seriously talking about human experimentation like it's a noble thing. Regardless of the fact that it's using bits and bytes, these are peole's minds being experimented on. Since nobody signed up for taking part in the experiment, this PhD should lose his credentials for performing immoral experiments. Instead he is praised because we euphemize it as "A/B teting" and most people don't know that these experiments are immoral.

Even the article accidentally lets it slip that these experiments are immoral. The article mentions that when Mr. Lin was receiving his PhD he had a team of students as test subjects. My guess would be that these students signed waivers and acknowledged that they would be part of an experiment (hence "test subject"). What Mr. Lin is doing now is using gamers as test subjects without their consent.

If this were any other industry, or if the experiments targeted a physical (as opposed to mental) part of the body, I think people would be more angry at the callousness of these so-called scientists. Heck, what if GE or Monsanto came out with a glowing article stating the benefits of A/B testing on farmers' mental states and their crops?

edit: added definition

edit 2: To explain why I get so outraged when I see articles like this... receiving my Bachelor of Science meant that I had to understand the right and wrong way to conduct experiments. And experimenting on humans is the most cumbersome because, to be honest, you can really screw someone up if you aren't careful. Even the most innocuous experiments can lead to bad outcomes for the test subjects, so one doesn't simply jump to human trials until you can conclusively argue that it won't damage another person.

There's a fable, "The Scorpion and the Frog" [1] wherein the moral is (copied from Wikipedia):

The fable is used to illustrate the position that no change can be made in the behavior of the fundamentally vicious.

My point about changing the rules of the game is that if the oppressors are not changing because they have all the power, then don't try to change the oppressors. Instead, find a way to remove yourself from the rules that they created. After all, rules are just constructs and can be changed by anyone.

If enough people stopped allowing employers to push 60-hour work weeks on programmers [2], then we might start to see some change. The way that I stopped employers from abusing my time was to first admit that it was myself that was allowing it to be abused, and then to say no and instead show them what I could accomplish in 8 hours (or 40 hours per week). If an employer violated my rules, I left. That's my rule. It may mean that I miss out on some opportunities, but there are so many more opportunities for people out there that stick to their principles (within reason) and work with other decent people.

Lastly, I'll be more clear. The overall point I'm making to you in this comment and others is that you need to stop thinking in absolutes. There is too much pent up stress that doesn't need to be there, and your life will be a lot better if you stop feeling like things are things are set in stone (because they're not). This is very cliché to write but this is one of the few things that only age can teach you.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog

[2] by quitting, talking to labour relations boards or the government, etc. Or, just saying no. It's a very very powerful word.

Your writing reads like you have a chip on your shoulder. It beats around the bush, but you should just come out an say that you don't like people over a certain age. But be careful, because there's a good chance you will soon be that age (or older) and start griping at younger people who don't seem to hold your viewpoint. Your account is 20 minutes old with only 2 comments, both of which are inflammatory. Please take a breath before clicking Submit.

It's completely ludicrous to imply that programming is somehow being led astray by young people. Young people have no power. They do what they are told.

Young people don't have to do what their told. We are raised to listen to our parents so, yes, we do what we're told for fear of being punished (grounded, yelled at, etc.). Though that doesn't mean you can't break out of that mold.

The "black box" programming philosophy was not invented by Gen Y. It was invented in the 80s at least and taught by greybeard professors.

This doesn't even make sense. You are being insensitive towards people. The entire point of learning how to program and understanding computer science is to open the black box and peer inside.

The ageism in the field is not something that is coming from young people either. It is coming from employers with the purse strings who recognize that young people are MORE EXPLOITABLE than old people and so they can get more work for their dollars.

Ageism exists in every field, but let's just focus on tech. Do you see many 50+ year old programmers? Ever wonder why? There is a bias for younger people because, yes, they can be molded (or exploited, as you put it), but it is up to that young person to identify any exploitation and resolve it. That's the only way it can change.

Old people lead every field. Young people do what they're told. Old people lead programming too--this guy just isn't one of the influencers. He isn't a 50 year old VC, a 50 year old Comp Sci prof, a 50 year old CEO, a 50 year old BDFL.

If you don't like the way you perceive the game being played, then you are completely free to change the rules of the game. It will mean you need to break out on your own, and take your lumps, but just throwing your hands up and complaining that the "old people" own everything isn't going to change anything. You are simply allowing the problem to persist and then complaining that it exists.

Holy shit, settle down for a second.

The guy equates working for a paycheck with entitlement... how out of touch can you be?

I didn't read any of what you said in the author's blog. He even mentions, at the end, about "waxing nostalgic". So his argument going to be a bit one-sided but then, it is his argument after all.

I agree with the overall sentiment of the author's rant. I miss some of the geeking out that was done in the tech industry, because it now seems to be filled with people looking to get rich quick with barely-working MVPs, or building services that have no revenue stream. The industry has turned very "business-y", IMO, but maybe it is just the natural cycle of every industry.

UPDATE: Adding a bit of substance to my comment.

There's a bias that interviewers need to watch for when they interview candidates. People who write interview questions often find the answers easy, and for the obvious reason that they are the ones that have spent the most time with it.

From a candidate's point of view, the question is new and every solution must be thought through, lest the interviewer thinks that the candidate isn't very smart.

> "Writing good specs is important" - it's also really really hard.

Yes, this is a very good point. Unfortunately it's also a point that many non-software developers miss. Writing software is hard. Very hard. We, as an industry, should be pointing that out more.

> But if you're doing agile properly, you shouldn't consider a user story a 'spec' - a user story should be a placeholder for a conversation.

I'll submit that there's no way to know whether you are doing agile properly or improperly, unless you move to another company.

> It is unrealistic to expect a non-technical stake holder to deeply and accurately describe anything but the most trivial feature. It needs a developer mindset to poke the idea, see what holds water, see where it falls apart, foresee the consequences.

This smacks of elitism and it is what makes non-developer scoff at us. Developers are not gods, we're not even the smartest people.

We are simply the people that have to crystallize the requirements into a computer that only understands logic. Non-tech stakeholders can completely describe business requirements and also be made to understand the how their requirements fit into the logic of a computer. Non-technical people are not stupid, they just have different interests.

> You can't do that in a spec. It needs to be a conversation.

The spec is the output of the conversation.

> Have a conversation, understand what's needed, build good software.

And this is the most important thing said.

The trick with adhering to your statement is to define the parties involved in each step. Minimize those parties and then implement each step in order as fast as possible without sacrificing quality.

Remove the word "Agile" and the concept of software development, and what you've just described is how work has been completed for thousands of years. I fail to see how Agile comes into play.