anon9001

Maybe with training, your grandma could enjoy plinking targets and also be safer in her home?

There are grandmas that love hunting and spending time at the range.

It'd be nice to live in a world where nobody ever commits acts of violence. Unfortunately, we banned violence long ago, and it seems that criminals are still doing it anyway. The next best thing we can do is be prepared.

It's not that bad.

The easy way is to find an SBR you want to buy, file Form 4 for $200, wait for a few months, then take receipt of your NFA item.

Or if you want to do a conversion from an existing rifle, file Form 1 (also $200) and get short barrel. The disadvantage is that you've then created an NFA weapon, so you'd have to be more careful how you handle transfer and sale.

If you don't want an NFA SBR, well, AR-15s can be pistols. Pistols can be short. Pistols can't have buttstocks, but there are legal products that are not "intended" to be used as stocks. They happen to look just like a stock, but they're totally intended to be used as an arm brace. If you do use one as a buttstock, that's not how it was intended to be used, but it is legal to do so. This approach is so popular that ATF has issued letters saying it's not illegal.

Here's most of what you need to know: http://preparedgunowners.com/2017/04/27/atf-reverses-opinion...

It's not mentioned in the article, but pistols cannot have a forward grip, as that would make them "Any Other Weapon", which is NFA. If you have a forward grip but don't have the tax stamp, you'll go to prison. Keep in mind you can start down the AR-15 pistol route, then later get your Form 1 tax stamp to convert it into a rifle by attaching a stock.

This is all quite ridiculous, but that's the law.

The documentation may look daunting, but VBA isn't that difficult to do useful things with. You'll be mostly copying/pasting from google like most professional coders :)

You can start with a macro and turn it into VBA, which is sometimes useful.

That's how gun people feel about researching gun violence.

I don't think the way to reason about this is based on "serious fire power" vs some other kind of weapon that you feel is more acceptable. All guns can be lethal.

If grandma feels unsafe, she might get a gun. I can understand how older people might want firepower when they know they can't physically fend off an attacker.

If you accept grandma's right to be armed, would you rather she use a more or less dangerous gun?

Most gun controls make the weapon less safe. It's similar to how people think sharp knives are more dangerous, but they're actually much safer than dull knives.

The way to think about it is that the round is doing most of the work. The gun is just a delivery system for the round, and besides fully automatic weapons, every other weapon choice is about safety, accuracy, and reliability.

A "Short Barrel Rifle" or "Short Barrel Shotgun" is easier to operate, and therefore more safe than a non-NFA rifle. They were regulated to make people feel better, not to add safety. The velocity of NFA SBRs is actually lower than the velocity of a bullet leaving a non-NFA 16" barrel.

A silencer is not silent, it's just hearing protection, but also requires an NFA tax stamp. They don't sound like they do in the movies, and there's no mistaking it's a gunshot.

Expandable stocks and foregrips are scary looking, but the whole point of them is to gain accuracy, which makes the gun safer. These are usually legal, but there are silly regulations around these too.

Larger magazines allow you to focus on your threat instead of counting your bullets. For now, these are legal, but banning magazines with large capacity is a common talking point.

The reason all of these items look scary is because we see military with them. But even in the military, they're not to make the guns more lethal. The whole point is operational safety.

If you don't think anyone should be allowed to have a gun, that's actually a more defensible position. If people are allowed to have guns, they should be allowed to have any gun and any gun attachment that improves their safety.

Except that's not true... Life in the US is expensive. If you stop earning money, you go homeless and hungry.

I'd like to opt out of all of this and I'm in my 30s. Unless you're counting healthcare, food, and shelter as "wants", you need to work.

I'm lucky enough to still have my parents, and their advice on this is that I can stop working when I have enough money to retire. Solid advice, makes good sense.

But if I look at how much money that requires, I'll probably be done in my 40s. If I had kids, it'd probably be in my 50s. If one of the companies I've worked for has a big exit, maybe I'll be done with work by 40.

I don't want to prescribe that to another human, especially one that's predisposed to having my views.

> I think it would be a lot healthier to grow up like that than as a child who could have whatever they wanted (monetarily.)

I'll admit I haven't given a lot of thought about parenting, because I don't think I'll ever get to do it, but I'm pretty sure that's not how the relationship would work. I'd probably let them follow the crowd and if they thrive and are happy, all is good.

If I detect that they're about ready to off themselves rather than go to the office for one more day, maybe I'd open up the treasure chest and tell them to go live life as an artist. A poor parent can't offer that.

TPM dies if your motherboard dies, so you'd need a backup key anyway.

There's also no way for you to independently audit the TPM device, so you don't know how secure it really is. Personally, I don't trust Intel to keep the TPM secure, as they've shown they can't (see the above link).

The keys are in the chip if you use them for FDE, so you're expanding your trust that someone with access to the TPM can never dump the keys. This could be a problem if your machine is stolen.

By going the yubikey route, you can move the trust to a device that's physically on your person. That way, if the machine is stolen, there's absolutely no way to recover the keys, and there never will be even if more intel vulnerabilities are found.

You could use a yubikey for the FDE keys, and only use TPM for trusting the boot device. But if you're already carrying a yubikey to decrypt your device, you might as well boot off USB too.

You can also use a private gpg key and an gpg-encrypted keyfile. Yubikey can store gpg keys (with attestation if you want), and you can enable both yubikey access and gpg in initramfs. That's good for servers if you pair it with initramfs sshd.

TPM is kind of broken, as I understand it, so I didn't even bother looking into it. There's really no reason I can't carry my keys on my physical keychain, so I don't see a need for TPM. I can also put a USB stick on my keychain and use that to boot.

That way even if an attacker has physical access to the hardware, it would be require some really advanced firmware/microcode hackery to compromise the machine.

> So you consider your life so far has been only pain, nothing of worth or fulfillment because you've not had a nest of millions-of-dollars to lie in?

Not only pain, but definitely not actualized either. My life to date is a gamble that I'll maybe be able to achieve autonomy before death. If I was born into wealth, I would have started with autonomy.

Not everyone is cut out for work, and I have to dedicate pretty much 100% of my being to make it happen.

My week is consumed by work, my weekends are consumed by resting for more work. Maybe some people can compartmentalize work in such a way that it doesn't eat their life, but I haven't been able to figure that out yet.

> You'd rather not have lived?

To date? Yes, I suppose. But my hope is that I'll be eventually be able to buy my freedom, so maybe I'll eventually be thrilled that I struggled and achieved independence, if that ever happens.

I'm hoping that someday, by not having kids, I'll be able to stop working and give living a try. Maybe I'll be an artist? Or work on some kind of cause to help others? I might be getting too old for sports, but it'd be nice to physically train full-time for something to see what my physical capabilities are. Or maybe read the classics and study philosophy? I don't know, the point is, I can't know, because I can't pursue anything else full-time while working.

I don't really consider my 30-something years so far as much "living", because I can't think of a time after childhood where I've had longer than 20 consecutive days without a job to be done. Even as a kid, it was only 60 days or so of summer vacation. Incidentally, that was the time I learned to write code, which ended up becoming a job because I couldn't learn anything else while trying to pass school.

> Do you resent your parents having you?

Somewhat, because I wouldn't have done it myself. I will never understand how they could toil for others for their entire lives and then think it would be great if we could continue the tradition for another generation.

I try not to be bitter about it because there's no sense in that. I can't really undo my parents choices, so I'm trying to make the best of things. But if I were somehow able to advise them before they decided to have me, I would have tried to politely decline existing.

From my perspective, I really only exist because they wanted children, so my purpose in their life is to bring them happiness. I can really only start setting my own purpose once I achieve enough autonomy that I don't have to work to exist.

If I can scrounge together enough wealth to retire before I die, I'll consider it an enormous victory. There's a good chance work will kill me before I can leave it. I'm pretty sure I'll never make enough to have kids.

I'm holding out for the chance that I'll be able to restart life in my 40s, but this time with a trust fund of my own creation. Then, without work, perhaps I'll be able to achieve a good life.

I know my view is considered extreme, but I don't see any other way to look at it.

If I have kids now, I'll have to work into old age, and so will my kids. That's a very sad situation in my view.

If I achieve financial independence personally, but I have kids who will have to toil their whole lives, then I'd feel I'm making a selfish choice. How could I explain to my kids, who would see nothing but a relaxed and happy life at home, that they now owe our system 40+ years of labor?

If I can achieve a level of wealth that would ensure my children could follow their dreams, then I'd love to have kids.

It's very hard to find a partner that would be able to say "Well, if we don't have $5M+ by age 40, we'll be childless, and that's fine. If we do make a lot of money, we'd love to have a big family."

I know lots of people here are doing it, but how can you ethically commit your unborn children to a lifetime of work?

And god forbid you have a child with disabilities and don't have a sizable financial buffer...

I thought it was poor form to have a lot of code in headers. This seems like it'd be better served as a small C http library.

You can see that both AppArmor and SELinux are part of the "Linux Security Module" framework.

If you know what's in the table of contents on the left, particularly "The Linux kernel user’s and administrator’s guide", you'll have a pretty good idea of how Linux hangs together: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/index.htm...

If you don't know either of them yet, I'd suggest vim ;)

> I bought an rpi, but could never figure out something to do with it. Any suggestions?

Pi-hole is a super popular project, maybe give that a try.

> or requiring me to understand pointers

Maybe learn to do some old-school stack smashing? https://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html

There are a bunch of CTFs out there you can play with that help build skills.

> I feel like I'm pointing a flashlight around a cave with Linux systems. Any advise for some systemic learning?

Sounds like you're on the right path :)

Maybe try doing http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/read.html if you really want a deep understanding of how Linux works.

Also, just browsing the Linux documentation is useful: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

Don't worry too much about the meta-narrative about the culture associated with each of the languages. The surveillance state is being built with python, but a lot of hardware hackers prefer python too. Ruby is praised for its flexibility, but its most successful project is literally called "Ruby on Rails" because it tells you exactly how to do everything.

The way people feel about languages goes in cycles, so it's good to be aware of it, but you can mostly ignore it. Use the best tools for the job. If the job is making computers do things, the best tool is unix :)

I think most of the people who were into Perl for the "beauty" ended up going to ruby.

People who were into it for CPAN went to python.

You might find this interesting, as you can see the spirit is alive and well: https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...

  ruby -0ane 'print $F.shuffle[0..3].join,"\n"' < /usr/share/dict/words

  perl -MList::Util=shuffle -0ane 'print ((shuffle @F)[0..3],"\n")' < /usr/share/dict/words

How's about we allow a little local flavor while people tell their stories?

Can't I build and use this if I want? It looks very open, but I haven't tried building my own client.

If you want to stay in the organization and get promoted by performance metrics, then figure out what numbers are being evaluated and work to maximize them, so that you appear as the model worker. It's not very hard to stay one step ahead of management if that's the game you're playing. If you have the best relationships and the best metrics, you should be able to get your promotions.

If you want to stay in the organization and coast, then who cares, just do what you want and they're almost certainly not going to fire you without plenty of warning. If you do get put on a PIP, then go find a new job immediately, and repeat. From what I can tell, most of the workforce does something similar to this for 30-40 years.

If you're not a leader, not a model worker, and not on autopilot, then you probably need to find a new organization where you can be one of those things.

People advocate for Signal because it's arguably the least offensive of the available e2e options. Also the founder for Signal has a long history of doing good work in this area.

Are your solutions overbuilt? Poorly documented? Introducing new patterns where they aren't needed?

The biggest clue I've got to work with is:

> I refer to stack overflow or ask my colleagues if I get stuck on some design / technology feature which I haven't seen before.

I'm searching up the problem as many ways as I can before I even get started. Even if I think I know how to do something, there could be a better way to do it.

> the rush to complete the deliverable on time

If you're rushing, you're doing something wrong. Here's a secret: it's way more important to be reliable than it is to be fast. Who's setting the deadlines? Is there a way you can squeeze more time? A lot of junior devs underestimate things habitually.

Powerful stuff.

Here's the most up-to-date guide with version numbers and bootloader choices and such: https://nh-server.github.io/switch-guide/