AI at least provides a clear product that can be a helpful workforce multiplier, whereas Bitcoin provided an unprotected alternative to traditional markets with none of the safeguards nor legal precedents of traditional markets, so it’s only led to illegal activities piled upon illegal activities

To be fair, if I had an option to effectively invest in Google circa 2004 in 2024 I would toss some spare money at it, and that’s basically what OpenAI is offering at this moment. They’ve established themselves, shown strong leadership and established strong relationships with major companies. They’re a leader in a particular product segment and while they could falter and fail, there’s enough momentum that they’re more likely to be acquired than to actually fail, plus they’re swimming in extremely uncharted waters so there’s plenty of opportunities for them to both greatly improve ongoing operational efficiency and to create new products with new markets, much like where Google was in 2004

On the other hand some breakthrough in either hardware or software could make AI models significantly cheaper to run and/or train. The current cost in silicon is insane and just screams that there’s efficiencies to be found. As always, in a gold rush, sell pickaxes

PayPal is nice since it gives virtually zero trust to the seller to secure customer info. But as you alluded to, PayPal has lots of problems mostly stemming from it trying to get all of the benefits of being a bank while accepting none of the responsibility of being a bank, and therefore customers receive none of the benefits of a bank while still getting all of the drawbacks of another entity handling their money

320/1000 people know someone stupid enough to fall for a scam.

Correction: 320/1000 people know someone unlucky enough to fall for a scam. Plenty of very smart people fall for scams. All it takes is some lucky timing on the part of the scammer, where enough happens to be correct that they miss/overlook whatever tells might be present until it’s too late

This risk increases significantly when users exchange credit or debit card information to view content on unregulated and illicit websites.

I mean, providing payment information to legitimate services is always a risk. There’s so freaking many breaches that you simply have to assume your card will see fraudulent charges sooner or later and watch your statements for the unexpected activity so you can stop and reverse the charges before you miss the deadline

There’s growing research into positive tipping points for the climate. Biden’s historic investment into renewables put a finger on the scales tipping them for significantly more solar and wind investment, which will of course reduce the cost of building solar and wind and soon enough the federal government’s finger won’t even be needed on the scale to make solar and wind cost effective to build.

Other decarbonization efforts like pushing for more bike infrastructure leading to fewer car trips and more bike trips, and shifting cars to electricity rather than gasoline also have tipping points where it will make far more sense to do the cheaper thing that happens to be better for the climate than not

I realized I was long overdue for a hardware refresh when I learned that nvme drives are /dev/nvme and not /dev/sd[x] and I realized every single computer I interacted with was pre-nvme

Having written some error messages in a godforsaken database frontend, an error message only means that something didn’t work correctly and may or may not correctly indicate what is actually wrong

The final line of the one about the VAX machine is so perfect

The biggest problem with the bubble that IT insulates themselves into is that if you don’t users will never submit tickets and will keep coming to you personally, then get mad when their high priority concern sits for a few days because you were out of office but the rest of the team got no tickets because the user decided they were better than a ticket.

If people only know how to summon you through the ancient ritual of ticket opening with sufficient information they’ll follow that ritual religiously to summon you when needed. If they know “oh just hit up Rob on teams, he’ll get you sorted” the mysticism is ruined and order is lost

Honestly I say this all partially jokingly. We do try to insulate ourselves because we know some users will try to bypass tickets if given any opportunity to do so, but there is very much value in balancing that need with accessability and visibility. So the safe option is to hide in your basement office and avoid mingling, but thats also the option that limits your ability to improve yourself and your organization

What irks me is the “technical impossibility” of raw TCP and “I must be wrong” when filling out their firewall change form.

Most commonly a port is opened to accept traffic of a specific protocol that runs overtop of TCP of UDP. I’m guessing the individual that responded might not be very good at technical communication and was just trying to question “are you sure it’s raw TCP and not just http traffic?” In order to keep the holes poked into the firewall as narrow and specific as possible

They’ve since given us a different port “close to others that we use”, for whatever reason that matters, and based their choice on some list of common protocols outside the reserved range. But not 4001.

Usually if infrastructure is assigning a port other than default it’s because that port is already in use. The actual port number you use doesn’t matter as long as it’s not a common default (which basically all ports below 1024 are)

Using ports that are close together for similar purposes can aid in memorability if that’s a need, but ultimately it doesn’t matter much if they’re not conflicting with common defaults

They opened a ticket because an arrow at the border of our UI vanished when they screen shared on Teams. Because of the red border. And they blamed our application for it.

Probably a user was complaining and needed action immediately and they didn’t have time to test a cosmetic issue in an edgecase. For minor issues I’ll open a ticket with the party I think might be responsible just to get it out of the way so I can get to higher priority stuff, and I’ll rely on that party to let me know if it’s not actually their problem. Heck it might even simply be the IT person assumed it was a misrouted ticket, since users open tickets in random queues all the time

They didn’t set up their PKI correctly and opening our webpage on specific hosts gave the typical “go back” warning. But it was our fault somehow, even though the certificate was the one they supplied us and it was valid.

If the certificate is correctly generated and valid an SSL error would indicate it was incorrectly applied to the application. I’m guessing by the inclusion in this rant that the conclusion was it was in fact a problem with the certificate, but we don’t have enough details to speculate if it was truly a mistake by the individual that generated it or just a miscommunication

Honestly it sounds like you’re too quick to bash IT and should instead be more open to dialogue. I don’t know the specifics of your workplace and communications, but if you approach challenges with other teams from an “us vs them” standpoint it’s just going to create conflict. Sometimes the easiest way to do it is to try to hop on a quick call with the person once you get to more than a couple of emails back and forth, plus then you have more social cues to avoid getting angry with eachother and can give more relevant details

WSL is interesting because it manages to simultaneously offer everything a Linux user would want while also actually capable of none of what a Linux user would need it to do. Weird compatibility issues, annoying filesystem mappings that make file manipulation a pain, etc

In a Windows environment I’ve found it honestly works better to either ssh into a Linux machine or learn the PowerShell way of doing it than to work through WSL’s quirks

no benefit over GUI alternatives

Lol nice bait

My current workplace organizes both development and infrastructure within IT which itself is a sub department of finance. I’m not saying this is the best approach because honestly it only took 1.5 layers of apathetic management to make long term planning a nonstarter

This hit too close to home. I’m now in my second forced job change in 3 years, and honestly I’m trying to make the most of it by using this job change to move to a larger city, just like how I used my last job change for a big bump in pay and benefits. It’s been a goal to move for better resources for my special needs child, but now it’s also about ensuring more resiliencey in my finances because if the next place lays me off I’ll actually have no shortage of places to work within a 30 minute commute rather than commuting an hour like I did a year and a half ago and like I’m likely to start doing again soon. This shit makes me seriously wonder how people manage to work at places for 20 or 30 years straight

Or for the political bent, we need to make layoffs more expensive and tip the balances on mergers and acquisitions to make those far harder. Force companies to pivot to meet a competitor or die

Meh my “conspiracy theories” just aren’t exciting enough because they tend to be too grounded in things that are actually likely in the real world and explaining weirdness in what is presented to the public with a guess as to what happened behind the scenes, like that the sonic movie was a joke pitch that somehow got greenlit so then they had to actually make the movie and to try to make it decent

I called it a conspiracy theory because it’s really just based purely off of observation and gut instinct and not facts. Good to know my gut instinct happened to be right though!

Personally I think it’s just a problem that arises when too many people are in the room. Get enough people on board and it starts sliding towards catering to the lowest common denominator

I love the conservatives think that’s such cutting slander when really having a male politician who understands the need for feminine hygiene products by uterus havers everywhere is such a breath of fresh air

I have to respect the mall t-shirt kiosks selling poorly made trump merch right next to the equally poorly made Kamala merch. At least they’re just there for the hustle