HenryBemis

To paraphrase the words of the lady in the political scene: "keep your filthy hands off my computer."

I will run on my PC whatever I want and you don't dictate it I want to run adblockers or not.

I don't think anyone minds the ads. I think we all mind the tracking, data brokers, and that OUR data and OUR profile are mishandled by a bunch of greedy thugs. So yeah, cat and mouse till the end of time.

I don't know about you/others, but I prefer the thousands of books from Gutenberg (and spend my remaining years reading from the ancients) that having some bunch of a-holes trading what I like and what I won't, without my knowledge of approval.

Word. I save every update with a date and a 'domain' (in case I customize it). E.g. "2025-06-06 Name Surname CV (PM).docx", "2025-06-06 Name Surname CV (ITSec).docx". When it is time to send it out, I "Save As PDF" with name "Name Surname CV.pdf" and send it out.

This way I have all past iterations (I try to keep it at 2 pages, so every now and then I need to cut out stuff, but I want to keep those old bullet-points in case I need to bring them up to match some job reqs)

1) Save 6 to 12 months of emergency fund (everyone, always) 2) Start working 8h 0m* (and then just walk out of the office) 3) Depending on the country: Get a doc to write you up for burn-out, (depending on the country) you can get 'easily' 2-3 months leave with reduced pay, that will give you the time to recover, regroup, prep for interviews, etc.

*Once upon a time I was working 12h a day, 5d/w. I had issues with my director. My CAE told me in my face that "nothing will change, he stays there, I stay here, I don't care, work it out". I thanked him and started leaving at 17:00. The first day he stopped me and asked me to do something to which I responded "it's 5pm, I'm leaving, I'll do that first thing tomorrow". I stayed there doing 9-5 and did a great job, but ONLY 9-5. 2-3 years later they had an 'exit plan' in which I happily collected 10x salaries to leave :)

EDIT: the above works if you are a perm. If you are a contractor, find a new contract that pays 'ok' and take it. Give your current 'client' and/or intermediate-consultancy the 1 month, and walk out.

I assume that they shave off milliseconds by doing so, and a gyroscope (or similar) sends back the position/angle of the drone. And like this does it bypass the 'limited' onboard computer and instead uses a much better/faster computer?

I remember the "Beatle that got away" saying that "the best thing that happened in my life was to leave the Beatles, and I would never change that" (I don't remember the precise quote, but it was something along those lines). He then went on explaining how "if I was still with the Beatles he wouldn't have the kids he now has, and there is no price for that.

So....

1st line, all zeros. It shows me where the zeros are.

Well.. that's it. Any non-zero is a 1.

So.. finished on the second line.

Am I the only one?

You kinda said it, but you didn't hit the nail on the head. Yes we need the pilots. But -I will repeat my own example in my current mega-corp employer- I am about to develop a solution using an LLM (premium/enterprise) that will stop a category of employees from reaching 50, and will remain to 20, and with organic wear & tear, will drop to 10, which will be the 'forever number' (until the next 'jump' in tech).

So yes, we keep pilots, but we keep _fewer_ pilots.

I am obviously not happy that this happens/happened to people and they had to cough up large amounts of $$$ because they got hacked. If anything I'm in the profession Audit/Sec/GRC and VERY much against thieves.

The 'amusing' part is... since the first time I encountered "DevOps" I thought that it is a terrible idea (but what do I know...). There are some stupid buzzwords that became the norm and I thought they were moronic/creepy/dangerous form the fist time I heard them (and I was spot on). DevOps is one. It's like saying "someone eats swords for a living" and "that very someone pierced his stomach". I will feel sorry for the fella and will wish him speedy recovery, but I will whisper to myself "what a f... moron".

Also, due to my Audit/Sec/GRC background, I laugh when I read/hear such stories because "you auditors know shit, we don't need ITGCs" and plenty other stupid shit that I hear from Tech Bros. Well, how do you like them apples/ITGCs now??? So, don't try to bark at the one who laughs. Instead punch the moron who says "we don't need ITGCs, documentation, reviews, etc, they are a waste of time".

So.. sorry, not sorry (at all).

EDIT: as you can understand this is a sensitive topic for me, because ITGCs cause time/money, but hey, go ask those DevOps, (now) would they prefer to have ITGCs are X cost in time, or they prefer the loss? And seeing that they have BAD IT practices who will ever trust them again to do something right?

There are a lot of moving parts to your reality and my question. If you are flying solo, already banked $10m from this thing, you can sell it for $10 and never go hungry and your kids (if you got don't know/I'm not asking) will also be set for life.

As a user (again, I may be a cheap bastard) I love a "pay once - have forever". I assume your SaaS is not for commercial/business use, you mention "price sensitive hobby market". If you price the 'runs offline' at $10, good luck to your competition to beat you.

Also, if your market penetration is steady and linear at 0.5% per month, and you are just on the first 5%, then that's a different timeline/decision process.

There are so many thoughts I got for this (as an 'internal/me mental exercise'). I hope it all plays out well for you, and you decide what's best for you and your business :)

Thank you for responding and giving me that POV.

Or.. to counter that. How many people are working there, and how many people own that company? What is your 5-10-50 year strategy? Get a $20k salary per month till the end of time and live a long happy life, or sell it to GigaCompany for $1bn and go buy an island and retire at the sweet age of <insert_your_age>? Do you plan to expand? Milking the customers for as much as you can is a great(?) idea, but risking your customer base "because I want to go from $100k salary per month to $101k salary per month" is reckless imho.

If I may suggest Steve Gibson's method, Spinrite. One-time purchase. I bought it once. It 'lives' on a usb-stick, offline.

If I lose it I can download it again.

I bought it at v4.x or v5.x (I don't remember, it's been years).

I've paid for the upgrade to 6.0. The upgrade from 6.0 to 6.1 was free (and very significant).

When he moves it to v7, I will happily pay for that upgrade as well.

I don't know if I am a cheap bastard (perhaps I am) but I prefer to pay-it forward. I buy a 'lifetime' subscription for the things I want _a lot_ and/or need. I remember a decade ago I paid $200 for a SaaS when the monthly rate was $20. I use it a few times per year (so let's say it would cost me $40 to reactive-use-deactivate). I got the lifetime at 10x, I broken even after 4-5 years. I paid the folks 10x when they needed the funding (and offered the 'lifetime'), and they 'thank' me by having me on 'for free'.

That said, I did take the risk, because if that SaaS was dishonest or simply they would have gone bust, I'd lose the 90% of that payment, but the amount was small ($200 for a lifetime service is a small amount for an EU costs/standard of living).

Apologies for the (not really) dark humor, but.. [0]. Focus on the cat, and replace the ill did described on the TV with 'higher cloud costs'

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/T8BmaVd.jpeg

> I find it easy to admit that computer art did not contribute to the advancement of art.

(We = humans) We made the tweets. We made the paintings. We wrote stupid things on Reddit (or the smarter things). We photographed nature. We built LLMs. In a way, what LLMs are doing is derivative/product of 'our' (and nature's) work. It's like adding 4 ingredients to the blender, blend it for only a few seconds, and you get variation. If you put 4 similar ingredients and you blend again for the exactly same amount of seconds you will get something similar but not the same.

LLM is a blender :)

You brought in my mind the "Elon walking in with a sink" and saying "let that sink in".

> "When an employer was initially interested, they often backed out once they realised I was based in Beijing."

Yes, of course. You/that person may be the best & nicest on the planet, and/but we 'have decided' that 'China is the enemy and cannot be trusted'. So of course your CV will be discarded.

Also.. you pull something (criminal/damaging) off, where will they find you and keep you accountable? China will never extradite you to any country to be imprisoned. Is this a joke? Doesn't the person realize this at all? Is this person naive/5yo or just says shit for the clicks and the LOLs?

My code (that ChatGPT writes for me is from 500 to 1000 lines). Every 5-7 versions, it starts messing things up.

I keep the working versions on a Word file on a Landscape, A3, 3 columns (version number, comment/changelog, the_code)(yes, cheap, scalable, easy).

So, every 5-7 versions, I start a new chat. I ask ChatGPT to read/write a summary/description of the code, and then I proceed to ask it for new changes/enhancements.

> standard USPS

I remember buying a super cool Microsoft keyboard back in early 00's. I got it via USPS (from US to EU), and all was well. One year later I wanted to buy one more because it was soooooooooo nice I wanted to have a second one for when the first one would die out many-many-many years later. This time it was DHL, and those cunts were taking everything through customs, so their 'facilitating' subsidiary makes a buck. Fucking DHL... I haven't given them a cent ever since.

> big registrars get thousands (lowballing it) of domain checks every day.

It doesn't take much. 3-4 bad employees getting a dump of searches, and looking for the cool ones, telling their cousin to buy them for $10 and wait. Those folks will skip the "butts-are-bad.com" from a Pakistani IP, but they will go for the "fitness.ai" from a Californian IP.

EDIT: and filtering for 'cool' words/acronyms such as AI, GTP, sex, profit, gold, crypto, coin, etc... to focus on the good stuff.

Having been the guy who got a couple of F's, and retook the exams in Sept and passed them to continue to my next years of studies and eventually my BSc I can say.. no! Do the work. Deserve the A/B/C. Get the A/B/C. I don't believe I'm the only one that suspects how the test will go, knows what the test result will be once I see the question, and know what I should have done to get that A/B/C mark.

I get it that shit happens in life (imagine someone having exams two days after they buried a father/mother/brother/sister), now THAT person, yeah, boost their results by 'one step' because if they got a 40% going through THAT, then they would have gotten 60% in a normal/BAU situation.

But don't hand out degrees to people who don't deserve them. It dilutes the degrees of those who do.

> To be clear, Amodei didn’t cite any research or evidence for that 50%

This reminds me the "Walter White" meme "I am the documentation". When the CEO of a company that makes LLM says something like that, "I perk up and listen" (to quote the article).

When a doctor says "water in my village is bad quality, it gives diarrhea to 30% of the villagers", I don't need a fancy study from some university. The doctor "is the documentation". So if the Anthropic/ChatGPT/LLaMa/etc. (mixing companies and products, it's ok though) say that "so-and-so", they see the integrations, enhancements, compliments, companies ordering _more_ subscriptions, etc.

In my current company (high volume, low profit margin) they told us "go all in on AI". They see that (e.g. with Notion-like-tools) if you enable the "AI", that thing can save _a lot_ of time on "Confluence-like" tasks. So, paying $20-$30-$40 per person, per month, and that thing improving the productivity/output of an FTE by 20%-30% is a massive win.

So yes, we keep the ones we got (because mass firings, ministry of 'labour', unions, bad marketing, etc.). Headcount will organically be reduced (retirements, getting a new job, etc.) combined with minimizing new hires, and boom! savings!!

Yes, correct. (try to) Move some of the accountability and guilt to the user.

Also, someone got to shake hands of members of parliament, ministers, senators, governors, mayors, etc. took selfies with Gates, Malala, et al, and created 'content' for their LI profile, and are dubbed 'an influencer of security', and made it to some "30 under 30" list.

So yes.. :) a proper PR effort.

But hey, in case you don't have enough books lined up waiting for your eyes, there are some great ideas/suggestions. Viggo Mortensen is also an author? I saw the book "Coincidence of memory", I looked him up on Wikipedia, and yes, he has written plenty-a-books. So.. there are a few more now on my "future book buys".

Jira (for life!)

Perhaps the parent means "identify the commands/procedures that would cause workload "5", and if many of them exist and rank them accordingly? So a procedure that 'prints a line on the log' 'costs' "1", but a thousand of them would 'cost' "1000" or something similar?

There are two parts on this approach. The 1st one is the positive "hey, chillax, transfer knowledge, don't be stressed, etc." The 2nd is security: "this guy cannot be trusted to 'touch' anything, we don't want him to plant a timebomb, we don't want him to mess things up, etc."

It's not 'polite' to bring up the 2nd, but it _is_ there. Imagine me/you/him/her doing something wrong and bringing down Prod for X hours. Then imagine your manager telling the director "oh, and btw he submitted his resignation 2 weeks ago, and in confidence he told me he goes to our ABC competitor". That-Looks-BAD, even if it was the most honest of mistakes and even someone else's fault. Once you 'stop playing', don't touch that jenga tower!!

Happened to me back in 2009 and I couldn't believe it. I got paid for 1 month to sit around, drink coffee, answer questions. Then I moved and got a 30% raise.

This 1 month also helped me refresh all my knowledge, go through my notes, etc. "In teaching I learn, and in learning I teach". Having around 100 people asking me questions from all over the 'region' helped me put things back together, see connecting dots that I missed before, and I left there with a new (better) set of notes about myself and how to do things.

Facebook could implement the feature that could tell you which of your friends is within walking distance, so you can grab a coffee, but nope. Also facebook = cancer, and unfortunately now we have more cancers (TikTok, etc.)

Best/fun case: when I was contracting some years ago, if you had your laptop unlock someone would send an email to the project team "coffees are on me! let's pick them up after lunch", and they would pay (but everyone's daily rate was multiple hundreds of GBP per day, and that would pass as 'expense' so the total 40-50 pounds didn't hurt much).

Worse case: (same company) someone send an email to all infra team (including the VP) that "I'm stupid and I don't lock my laptop". That guy (the 'funny' one) was kicked out of the project/contract/building within the hour.

My friendly advice, lock it for them, when you see them again take them on the side and tel then "hey dude, lock that damn thing" and move on with your life.

Pro-tip: when I am somewhere and I'm gonna drop a massive #2, and/or I got 2-3 litres of liquid in me, I run the faucet on the bathroom sink at 10-15% of its max flow to cover the noise. This also helps if the house has two floors/levels, and the pipes run in the open. So I 'mask' when the 'output' starts and ends.

Let me leave a comment for the historians of the future, on why this is 100000% correct (imho).

I have been to Canary Wharf Tesco store countless times. The amount of times that someone scans all their stuff, pretend to press buttons, pretend to 'touch' a card to the POS, and then get their bag(s) and walk-out, and then I walk to that self-checkout point and see that ALL the items are still there and the payment was never made.. are "too damn high" to quote the meme.

And then I have to sign to a member of the staff, oblivious of just happened, and ask them to clear-up the list so I can scan my stuff. Of course the thief always speed-walks out, taking all the corners necessary to break line-of-sight so they cannot be pointed at (as someone JUST saw them walking away and can ID them easily).

Next steps, they look at their watch, wave at the cameras (I assume for retracing later who was that). I am sure that Police in London has better things to do that chasing someone stealing GBP 30 worth of groceries (which they probably do every day).

So.. yeah.. "this is why we cannot have nice things".