clubm8

How am I supposed to save up if no one connects me with anything but nonprofit work then ratfucks me like CDT did?

I actually had professors at two different local unis say apply to this or that then never heard back. I am happy to take specific suggestions, but I struggle with executive dysfunction when folks have me try the same things over and over without any fruitful result.

I was hoping to find allies here, but everyone is a libertarian or a jerk apparently. (No offense, but absent specific suggestions... I'm angry)

Maybe I should do crime, then get the sympathy criminals get? I'm not sure I follow your logic.

I have a master's (PhD ABD) and have worked as a pentester, I was laid off prior to covid.

The staff keep refusing to clean, and it lacks the safety bar and a few ther things.

>You need food. Look around for soup kitchens, food banks, church food lines, apply for food stamps.

The last time I tried to use those systems, they had IT errors... IT errors I could have solved, but people kept insisting I was mentally ill... because I had no job.

Can you see how this becomes circular logic quickly?

I was hoping people would be an ally, and see this is an issue solved by a referral or recruiter, but apparently you're going to troll me like I saw them troll the guy who eventually shot up tree of life.

(I regret not keeping the alaprazolam script, but... when you take that drug, you're set up for twice the anxiety when it wears off)

I'm angry and frustrated I'm economically precarious, and have folks like you say "call a crisis line" when I tried that prior -- I was forced to rely on my (abusive) family for support.

Do you want to extend help, or be adversarial?

I can be adversarial if you prefer that.

Or maybe... crazy idea, someone connects me with a recruiter :-)

Sean "vilerat" Smith connected me with my PhD. I worked for a CMU professor prior to grad school. I had multiple people advise me I should do NSA or State.

Please don't conflate having had too much tea with psychosis, especially when it's someone like me who literally sat down with someone from the CERT insider threat team for coffee to discuss career paths pre-Snowden.

Pittsburgh, PA

> What education do you have?

PhD ABD Security Informatics

>What work experience do you have?

Mozila and PARC, UX Researcher, Pentester at Tech Impact

>What other marketable skills do you have, if any?

In addition to numerous UX research papers I can code in bash and python, and do light C/C++ perl and a few others (basially, enough to understand and deploy a vuln)

>What family and friends do you have that could provide any support?

None really -- I had a small social circle and went to college in the town I grew up in, folks moved away. My family is homophobic and abusive -- I just had one of my family members make a show of giving me an Aldi's gift card and deny remembering a Halloween parade where one of the mafia types I had voted out of office wandered the parade handing out fifty cent pieces to children.

(Before we had legal casinos here).

If you want, I can send you a CV -- and I'm happy to take something other than some TS:SCI

I got the impression RAND and CERT treated my interviews as free consulting sessions, so they're no longer on my list.

Any other questions?

We had our state rep arrested, as was one of the police who responded when I called after my laptop was smashed by one of my parents.

I'll edit in citations shortly

Edit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Folmer#Arrest,_resignatio...

https://www.wpxi.com/news/local/former-collier-township-poli...

>Your family is saving your life right now. So folks ARE willing to help. Keep them informed as to your efforts so they don't get resentful.

My family also smashed my laptop and threatened to kill me for supporting the wrong political candidate. I was told by the therapist who got me the initial weed card to avoid contact if at all possible.

I'm a domestic violence victim, trapped here by folks who won't give me the ability to earn the money to leave.

I mean, like many people I'm not best suited to working a register if I can code in bash and python. It's the typical issues when you're raised Catholic, have to rely on family for support.

I'm a US citizen and eligible for an Italian passport, but I don't have the funds to continue the process.

I'm not going to pay to turn my phone on when I'm preparing for emigration.

It's been FOUR years. I can show you photos of my wounds, and photos of the laptop that was smashed. This is an economic issue, not a psychological issue.

Lack of reoccuring income, paired with years of only one job offer at a time after interviews masquarading as free consulting sessions.

What I need is a job, and a place to spend money from my job on rent.

(Right now, the only "drug" I'm using is caffeine... in the past, a small bit, then cannabis in the evening helped, but... Mike Folmer's people harassed me. You know who that is, if you're from PA.)

Are you willing to help with these things, now that I've explained how I tried the typical options?

Yes -- part of the issue was here was that the local health care monopoly doesn't really have a vested interest in helping, since the candidate I got elected immediately went through

>t might be the case that getting a handle on this, esp. if it comes to a medical intervention, might be a good first step. Also just a note, the mention of "hard drugs"... if you're doing anything w/ THC I would stop that immediately as it can greatly exacerbate symptoms.

I've had the opposite experience -- THC helps when alaprazolam (which I had a script for) -- but if you accept a medical card, people start interacting in ways I hadn't encountered since the 90s.

I was told I should get a job, avoid my family but... the HN crowd didn't help, so I have days like today where I have too much caffeine and it comes off as much more mentally ill.

(I had been told I'd be starting as a dishwasher on Monday. Someone yanked the offer. I'd have preferred to take a xanax or a joint, and instead I ended up pouding tea and reading to wait for the rain to pass... kind of a least worse decision)

I actually got the original medical card via a therapist.

Again, this is a situation where folks gamify my ability to make good decisions.

It's shitty, and extortionary, and makes me less sympathetic when folks spaz out like the tree of life guy did.

Euroskepticism is a virus, but OTOH the Five Stars had a good idea: politics should not be a profession.

I'd love to see more folks do good work then pivot to entertainment if they want bags of Qatari cash in a way that doesn't involve destabilization

It's especially annoying since many people who vote in the EU are a bit more... extreme? Like when you're marketing to "Beligum" or "NL" whatever... the people who've been there multiple generations are the right wing parties.

The folks obeying the spirit of the laws are like the students in America, oft not registered locally.

It's a feedback loop of the same sort who Brexited being sent other things in their feeds.

I agree with the author:

>If there is insufficient support for a proposed legislation, the only proper democratic response is to withdraw it

I'm tired of this fraternity brother model of public policy -- ask until you hear the "yes" you wanted from those who didn't block you from being heard at all.

You have time to post on HN, you have time to code on the side.

OSCP is worse than useless -- combining

And even if you get it... you'll probably be 80 to 100% travel.

Pentesting is not a fun gig. Focus on automation etc but... that's hard if you grew up poor.

(My area, Appalachia, is as poor as some of the areas we outsource too, but it's maginified by if you must rely on parents for college etc and never amass wealth of your own, you're on a dark path)

Your best bet is to do fun projects, and save as much money as possible.

I regret not traveling more when I had an emergency fund, forever afraid to give my name or let someone spend the night lest they go into the computer or something. I will always regret that.

Anyways... try to write some scripts of your own, and put them on github, and share them here, and you might get something.

I got my first decent offer that took me out of a terrible situation when I wrote some toy scripts that did things like use python's RNG to generate a passphrase, take the MAC up and down.

Another option is to go more of an analyst route but... my Bellingcat cert didn't help much.

But to be honest, if you're precarious, it might be best to save up as much as possible, and hostel in the EU -- you'll find a partner or a job, most likely.

(Since I was American, they didn't help me, so I went back to where I came and eventually had my hard drives fail and lost most of the memories.)

Sorry to be flippant but... so many here are millionaires and billionaires -- it breaks my heart to see smart people told to give up their savings to prove things we know they have when we see their code, see their speech.

And on top of everything, you speak (or at least write) English well -- a huge asset. Own that. Many struggle because of comms issues.

Does "the web" work better, or the Google ecosystem?

One reason I don't want to move from iOS is their embedding of their stuff into the OS, which in turn beams my queries etc through GOOG.

But it's been a long time (multiple years) since I messed around with an Android tablet.

(Don't have the money to take risks rn, though ironically the next laptop will probably be anything but a macbook -- touchbar is terrible, heart my f keys)

I thought they write them in advance?

(IIRC this was an issue once, someone hacked the DB and released some early?)

Look for nonstops, save your money to afford nonstops.

(A hotel because a long layover became a night or two will eat up costs saved by not getting the nonstop)

Another great source of quotes is bash.org (I get the impression the similar names are a coincidence):

<Cthon98> hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars <Cthon98> ***** see! <AzureDiamond> hunter2 <AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me <Cthon98> <AzureDiamond> **** <Cthon98> thats what I see <AzureDiamond> oh, really? <Cthon98> Absolutely <AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2 <AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you? <Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as **** <AzureDiamond> thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that <Cthon98> yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as **** <AzureDiamond> awesome! <AzureDiamond> wait, how do you know my pw? <Cthon98> er, I just copy pasted YOUR ***'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw <AzureDiamond> oh, ok.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230710221245/http://bash.org/?...

(Can't tell if the issue is Tor or the site is down hence the wayback link)

Speaking as an antifascist who once parked a Ford Focus on Sand Hill Road amongst super cars and stole a few glasses of the finest bourbon from Zuck's shindig that was in the same venue as the bar some Stanford types insisted on going to because they don't need to worry about money so they disdained the nuthouse.

"The News" will remain separate, and it's probably a good thing.

You have a good community here -- I disagree with many people, but I keep coming back because they accomplished what Slashdot failed to do.

(A place where I don't have to here grown ass men talk about how they want to pour hot grits over underage film stars, where we can be the kind of anonymous that only happens when people can guess, but never know, who's three nodes or seven proxies away.)

You might be looking with rose tinted glasses. I joined Something Awful just as they were closing the file forums in my teens -- I thought they were just worried about the legal issues around stuff like AXXO rips, not... the terrible things.

All my life, I had folks from that place keep me purposefully precarious and police my responses to said precarity.

The early internet was a total shit show, and I'm forever traumatized it took as long as it did into "Hard Candy" for me to realize that guy was not only bad, but abnormal.

(And later on, it amused me greatly when some ex army dude was like "You can't say things like that" when I listed it on my OkCupid and said "Why wouldn't I want a girlfriend who enjoys movies about forcing pedophiles to jump off the roof?")

The friends I made, I made in real life -- it was "The Internet" who invaded my work, invaded my university club, and in one case, a college Democrats kegger where I met my first girlfriend with insults that used to live entirely online, when I was nothing but kind to the best of my ability once I became a man.

(Maybe if you went to more museums and Vagina monolugues, and spent less time getting teenagers high in the back of the MC Chris tour bus, you too could meet a "MILF" and not need to perpetually throw all ages shows for narcissistic supply, rude little man who forgets there's no such thing as "pre med" at our university)

Not you, parent... it's dark out, and I'm having a bad day, for for some of us, the dream of the 90s was an utter nightmare followed by an Eternal September 11th, never reaching this so called "real world" where we'd have the rights and opportunities of the late stage capitalists and... not exactly philanthropists... who made it this way.