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commercialnix

35 karma · joined July 2, 2024

I am a part of a team that provides expertise managing fleets of user endpoints and also servers/cloud for large commercial environments. On this site I occasionally share an in-the-trenches perspective of expertise-driven use of open source in commercial environments.

Due to unethical mafioso tactics of some of the "big tech" companies, commercial entities are not named.

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commercialnix··on Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business
By day 2 I'd have filed a lawsuit seeking over $5-million in combined actual and punitive damages. You have to speak the language they understand, anything else is a waste of time.
commercialnix··on oh-my-posh: The most customisable and low-latency cross platform/shell prompt
At this one startup I was at, I asked one of the fresh grad hires who had a really neat looking terminal what his Oh My Zsh plugins did. He couldn't name more than two and didn't really know them. I asked him what a process' exit status was and somehow he didn't know it.

All of the other fresh grad hires tried to use Ubuntu systems with a Windows XP mindset.

Having a central bank really is a great evil.

commercialnix··on Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine
I feel like you and I would be friends.
commercialnix··on Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine
I use Sway (an i3 clone for Wayland), so these "split views" and "workspaces" are not appealing to me.

Zen makes serious claims about performance and sandboxing, but do not forwardly present writings on how they do these things, leaving us with the impression there are some tweaks here and there but not much more.

commercialnix··on Police cannot seize property indefinitely after an arrest, federal court rules
Most people who live in cities are very domesticated. In third world countries and also small towns in USA, where the police blatantly rob people under the color of law, people form their own small gangs and literally hunt the other gang (irrespective of costume/uniform) down and kill them.

Highway robbery is highway robbery, uniformed or not.

commercialnix··on Leaving Neovim for Zed
I'm still down to seriously consider Zed, but this is one of the most inorganic posts I have ever seen.
commercialnix··on Nitric Is Terraform for Developers
One IAM table aka AWS subaccount, or in GCP another "project", for one app or small collection of apps that go together is the right approach in most cases. Yes.
commercialnix··on Nitric Is Terraform for Developers
Developers are inevitably going to grant themselves full admin access to everything.

  const imagesBucket = nitric.bucket('images').allow('read', 'write');
commercialnix··on Who Goes Nazi? (1941)
In an America where fascism seems to be on the rise, we must understand history so to avoid repeating it.

  Adolf Hitler FULL SPEECH in ENGLISH AI Reconstructed Audio 'Freedom or Slavery' (No Music)

  https://odysee.com/@SpAIke:9/Adolf-Hitler-FULL-SPEECH-in-ENGLISH-AI-Reconstructed-Audio-'Freedom-or-Slavery'--(No-Music)-(1080p):e
commercialnix··on Entropic Engineering DEFCON 32 Statement
I feel like at some of my previous jobs I'd never have been hired if I weren't half negro.
commercialnix··on Researchers discover potentially catastrophic exploit present in AMD chips
We need heavy-handed laws mandating that any firmware included with hardware sold must be accompanied by source code, documentation to interfaces, and can be flashed by any person in legal possession/ownership of the hardware. And, that any cryptographic keys for such are not "fused in" so they can be changed with appropriate physical access (and optionally sealed with tamper-evident material).

There's no valid reason to not have this law. Any "intellectual property" excuses aren't going to fly, everyone already knows they're bullshit.

edited: slightly clarified legal possession

commercialnix··on Ask HN: Should we bring software dev in-house?

  Obstacles & Patterns To Maximize Flow in IT Operations • Ben Rockwood • GOTO 2013

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2IfgkL5_po
commercialnix··on Hetzner Cloud Expands to Singapore
Nice.
commercialnix··on Building rqlite 9.0: Cutting disk usage by half
Looking forward to a Rust implementation.
commercialnix··on Ampere AmpereOne Aurora 512 Core AI CPU Announced
> but I suspect the majority of these chips will end up carved up into smaller VMs

As someone who works with BSD Jails and preferably (though not as often) illumos Unix Zones, I look down my nose at those who would run VMs on these chips.

My org's competitors should go ahead and use VMs.

commercialnix··on Secure Boot is broken on 200 models from 5 big device makers
I was thinking about this too, thinking about the TPM 2.0 configuration of some machines. However, the keys used by TPM are not the "platform key".

> from what I can tell loading in your own PK will override the built-in ones

How can one go about doing this? If you have any resources that can show how, please share them. The public key of the "platform key" is "fused" into the hardware, is it not?

commercialnix··on Microsoft technical breakdown of CrowdStrike incident
There was absolutely zero luck involved. As I already wrote in the previous comment, I did something very simple. I sought out a WiFi card that already had Linux drivers and then purchased that WiFi card. I didn't have to "do anything" to get the WiFi card working.
commercialnix··on Intel N100 Radxa X4 First Thoughts
These could be very interesting devices if they were not infected with binary blobs.
commercialnix··on Microsoft technical breakdown of CrowdStrike incident
In 2002 I wasn't yet even out of middle school when I had a Linux distro running all key hardware components "just working". At that time at my school we were taught how to search the web, so I searched the web and looked up what hardware worked. Very simple. All I had to pitch to my parents was, "this system shares its code and encourages me to study it and learn code", which made clear to them what I was asking for wasn't just another video game console. Soon after I had a refurb laptop (fortunately not x86) and a curated WiFi card that ran Linux (and soon after, BSD) with everything "just working".

When I see someone complain about unsupported/unsupportable chips in comments on online forums, especially one dubbed "Hacker News", I am puzzled how I in my middle school years acted out a pattern that is objectively smarter* than what I read in such comments. I also happen to first-hand know I am for sure not the only one with this vantage point. Those who comment about unsupported/unsupportable chips as if it is somehow an open source kernel's fault might want to take a moment to consider how others, and how many others, are viewing such drivel. For every one of us who take the time to point this out, there are 10,000 of us experiencing utter contempt, like as if we just got an unexpected whiff of some hot garbage.

[*]And, I honestly don't think I'm even that smart.

commercialnix··on Malaysia asks Microsoft, CrowdStrike to consider covering losses from outage
The bad decision wasn't necessarily necessary.

I have enough of an IT background that I'm not going to buy into a theory that is something like "choosing Windows" is actually "necessary". Maybe in the early 2000s, sure. But this decade? Bull-fucking-shit. We are in a year where everyone (or in Malaysia at least enough people) 35 years old has grown up around computers.

We are far beyond the point where there are any valid excuses.

commercialnix··on Secure Boot is broken on 200 models from 5 big device makers
> And why I want to control my own keys.

Such as the keys to one's own house.

commercialnix··on Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript
I was not aware of this. I did see ReScript covertly bring some sanity to some NodeJS projects, and more than once. So this history of the project is worth digging into. Thank you for surfacing this insight.
commercialnix··on Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
Imagine being dumb enough to have one of those in your house.
commercialnix··on How to develop on Windows: comparing native, MinGW, Cygwin, WSL
In these places we wouldn't call it a "policy" but just how we did things.

One of the devs there was talking to someone about "implementing any calls in .NET" as NetMQ (native ZeroMQ for .NET) using an exclusive pair socket to pass Apache Thrift back and forth to Rust codebase also using the exclusive pair socket. One of the phrases I heard was "all code we contribute is accessible to your existing .NET devs".

The term accessible may not mean readable or maintainable for the .NET devs in that context, but the corporate customers seemed comfortably confident they would continue to have a relationship with the firm so whatever.

commercialnix··on Malaysia asks Microsoft, CrowdStrike to consider covering losses from outage
Malaysia isn't a victim. Malaysia consented and chose to run Windows. They got what they asked for.
commercialnix··on Secure Boot is broken on 200 models from 5 big device makers
> most mechanics are competent with brakes

Because if they aren't and something happens the mechanic is the one who ends up rotting in a cell. Put the same penalties in place for ODMs and OEMs, mandating that machine owners absolutely always can change the locks to their own property, and mysteriously every single problem we have ever seen with secure boot is no longer some obscure inevitable unavoidable technology issue.

commercialnix··on Secure Boot is broken on 200 models from 5 big device makers
> Secure Boot ensures that a device boots using only software trusted by the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM)

"We sold you this house with a front door designed where our key will always let us in". Why do we put up with this shit?

commercialnix··on Secure Boot is broken on 200 models from 5 big device makers
It's like buying a house with locks that can not be changed.
commercialnix··on Secure Boot is broken on 200 models from 5 big device makers
Not any less reasonable than expecting a mechanic to be competent and knowledgeable with brakes.
commercialnix··on Secure Boot is broken on 200 models from 5 big device makers
This is the way a smart person looks at write-protect switches.
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