csydas

just for reference most enterprise backup products are not affected by this and will have vddk for backups and restores. if your backup product supports cross platform restores likely migration is not blocked for you, and many free / trial editions are likely generous enough for most small - medium shops to migrate on the free offering

if you already pay for an ent backup product check if it can restore from vmware backups to another platform and you’re prolly fine (for now)

aha that’s sort of what i mean though — your concept is two parts: isolated restore and bespoke tests

the isolation part is something that is more difficult due to space and resource constraints, and a lot of backup apps handle that but expect the user to handle the bespoke testing part

your tool covers both but expects the user to provide both which isn’t always feasible for the application teams (not impossible but lot of red tape to request resources and a lot of resistance if the company already has recovery verification tooling)

if i were you i would refocus your pitch on making it work as part of those backup software workflows, “tell your backup team about this test suite and include it in their recovery verification workflows” and i’m sure you’ll get a lot of attention

most of the dba’s probably have a backup and recovery verification solution at their company with the isolation and resources but they don’t have the bespoke application testing

i saw your now dead comment about how no one you interviewed had an answer…

just it’s surprising to me that devops folk aren’t in an org that has backup software, cause this kind of testing is standard load out for most backup softwares, and they even solve the space and isolation issue with various instant restore / publishing capabilities where data from the backup is mounted directly to some staging server with postgres or whatever installed in an isolated area

not trying to knock the idea you are correct most ppl don’t test their backups, but it’s a bit strange no one you talked to used any of the most common backup softwares

definitely in favor of free solutions as backup software field is awful like many ent tech fields, but like the workflows do exist

As in how to interact with office docs programmatically? It's in the second text blurb, you can make a new COM object. For example new Excel Workbook:

  $excel = New-Object -ComObject excel.application

From there you have full access to all parts of the document as properties & can call whatever methods are available to edit the document.

As for how we enforce style guide on a presentation, each slide runs through a workflow checking the various style-guide rules that we have / corporate has

- Ensure correct template is used

- Set and enforce correct font

- Check text boxes for font size to check verbosity / readability

- Flag / remove animations (not accessible)

- Flag images without alt-text

and so on

for a 300 slide new release presentation, it takes about 45 seconds for the script to process and auto-fixes what makes sense to auto-fix (e.g., wrong fonts) and adds comments / generates report on what needs to be reviewed and adjusted

Didn't use AI for it, but had similar request for our team and we found it easier to build a tool that checks against our defined style-guide and auto-fixes what it can as opposed to generating and reporting on other violations of style guide. The idea was similar to latex, don't think about design while creating and let the tool flag / enforce the style-guide and design, and reviewers don't need to focus so much on what's wrong with slides and can pretty much focus on content

We use a simple PowerShell script to run the check (you can interact with any office doc as a ComApplication object) and it took only a few hours of digging through the properties / MS docs to get what we needed.

! calls are vital for your sanity if you ever do remote support

trying to write shell commands on a hypervisor console window within a remote session on a jump box is excruciatingly laggy and annoying, and that's assuming your remote session connection to the client is behaving well in the first place

it's not

age verification laws have little to do with protecting anyone, and social media companies are attempting to remove themselves from liability for their dangerous product by pushing for it

social media in its current unregulated state is harmful as has been demonstrated repeatedly with (suppressed) studies, and the push for age verification instead of regulation on the actual harmful content

age verification will always be a tool to censor whatever content certain interest groups want to censor and it is a wild violation of privacy as has been repeatedly demonstrated every time an identity verification firm gets hacked, they do not take this seriously at all, and all the while the actual harmful sites continue to do harm and have the ability to blame others for not 'protecting' people from the harm their product causes

it's a complete farce and has nothing to do with protecting anyone except tech companies peddling a harmful product

my experience as well. claude produces functional but over-engineered scripts fairly frequently with often very questionably useful safety checks, especially for powershell.

a common tell of ai generated powershell is a script that has dedicated functions to check types, often via several methods, and happily prints the output of the checks to shell. i do not get why it does this but it often adds dozens of lines that really serve no purpose but to make the shell output look fancy

>Yes, but those laws are pretty effective. They do deter murderers and thieves

This is really not true at all for violent crimes. Acts of violence are not really done by rational actors, same with many crimes. The death penalty / life in prison does not deter someone who has already decided that violence is an acceptable response to situations, and the story is similar with non-violent crimes; deterrence isn't really considered when someone has already made the decision to steal or do drugs. Deterrence doesn't change the conditions that contribute to those sorts of crimes; the law is more about restoring society as best it can, and in many countries it's about retribution / revenge more than anything.

With corporations, the conditions that lead to the undesired behavior is economical, and addressing the undesired behavior through economic methods seems appropriate -- if it's no longer economical to perform the undesired behavior, the company has to decide where they want to eat the cost.

In the case of the EU ban from the article, I suppose some companies may make the decision to pack up and leave, but my experience is many in the EU would be pretty okay with this with regards to clothing. There is a lot of interest in EU regarding sustainable, made in EU clothing and reusability, etc.

So if the goal is just to reduce clothing product waste in EU, losing fast-fashion companies and some luxury brands that most of the population won't / can't buy anyways probably isn't going to be such a big deal.

it's about the payment processors, not the card type, though the article makes it confusing by mentioning credit cards as it's really not about that at all

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/faqs/html/ecb.fa...

Read the FAQ, it's about no longer relying on US payment processors for handling transactions in a different country that may not support your country's payment system

Cute but like a lot of captchas misguided at this stage

The problem they try to solve is real, but I don't think that 'hacking minigames' are the correct direction to be looking to solve this, and ultimately end up making mandatory human identity verification seem more palatable as the less annoying option

games and challenges like this are more annoying / resource consuming to humans (i.e., time, patience), and can imagine it ends up excluding humans who cannot complete the challenge due to extenuating circumstances, like i have no idea if someone who uses sight assistance accessibility tooling can complete this challenge reasonably, and if this style of challenge takes off I am pretty sure the challenges will continue to exclude many humans who use accessibility tools

I worry this approach ends up being the next cookie banners (which were always malicious compliance in the saltiest, pettiest way)

anubis-style cycle burning approaches seem to be best, but have not looked for research on the efficacy of this approach. if it does have a positive impact for operators though, a method like that seems better

edit: to be clear, I do not want mandatory identity verification -- not at all it's awful, and my fear is that tools like this will only serve to make that option seem more palatable in comparison

>We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into..

https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...

it's the cornerstone of their strategy to invest in local, sovereign ai models in an attempt to court attention from persons / organizations wary of us tech

it's better to understand the concern over mozilla's announcement the following way i think:

- mozilla knows that their revenue from default search providers is going to dry up because ai is largely replacing manual searching

- mozilla (correctly) identifies that there is a potential market in eu for open, sovereign tech that is not reliant on us tech companies

- mozilla (incorrectly imo) believes that attaching ai to firefox is the answer for long term sustainability for mozilla

with this framing, mozilla has only a few options to get the revenue they're seeking according to their portfolio, and it involves either more search / ai deals with us tech companies (which they claim to want to avoid), or harvesting data and selling it like so many other companies that tossed ai onto software

the concern about us tech stack dominations are valid and probably there is a way to sustain mozilla by chasing this, but breaking the us tech stack dominance doesn't require another browser / ai model, there are plenty already. they need to help unseat stuff like gdocs / office / sharepoint and offer a real alternative for the eu / other interested parties -- simply adding ai is mozilla continuing their history of fad chasing and wondering why they don't make any money, and demonstrates a lack of understanding imo about, well, modern life

my concern over the announcement is that mozilla doesn't seem to have learned anything from their past attempts at chasing fads and likely they will end up in an even worse position

firefox and other mozilla products should be streamlined as much as possible to be the best N possible with these kinds of side projects maintained as first party extensions, not as the new focus of their development, and they should invest the money they're planning to dump into their ai ambitions elsewhere, focusing on a proper open sovereign tech stack that they can then sell to eu like they've identified in their portfolio statement

the announcement though makes it seem like mozilla believes they can just say ai and also get some of the ridiculous ai money, and that does not bode well for firefox as a browser or mozilla's future

I get the intention but it's a bad idea, same with the article

if people are meant to depend on your endpoints, they need to be able to depend on all of them

you will always have ppl who don't respond to deprecation notices, the best you can do is give them reliable information on what to expect -- if they hide the warnings and forget, that's their business

but intentionally making problems without indication that its intentional results in everyone (including your own team) being frustrated and doing more work

you cannot force ppl to update their code and trying to agitate them into doing it only serves to erode confidence in the product, it doesn't make the point ppl think it makes, even if the court of public opinion sides with you

cover your bases and make a good faith effort to notify and then deal with the inevitable commentary, there will always be some who miss the call to update

i don’t think that’s the right take

black markets and opposition members i’ve used / talked with focus on disposability not security

the premise of their communications is always “the platform is bugged” and in case of opposition members “the government can always just beat you and trick you into unlocking your phone”

deals happen on messenger all the time and burning messages / rotating phones and accounts is very common. for opposition members, messaging apps are purely for benign communication and actual discussion happens in person or in truly destructible formats or it’s not recorded at all

periodically anon burner message apps appear on app stores and rotate out pretty fast once they start getting too much attention

the idea of a perfectly secure app for communication is currently mostly a fantasy; if a malicious actor wants to get your info and communication they will. this doesn’t mean give up completely and be insecure but instead just be in a position to ditch the app when it becomes necessary, if you need that level of security

it’s better people be trained to understand the reality of what can be done with the communication methods they use and how they can be punked so they can make informed decisions — i’m fine with signal’s goals and efforts but i’m not a fan of signal advocates treating security and privacy like another round of the OS wars, that teaches people the wrong lesson and makes it harder to convince ppl privacy and security are a problem we need to take seriously not just for criminals but for everyone. privacy and security benefit us all or it benefits no one

azure likes to open new sections on the same tab / page as opposed to reloading or opening a new page / tab (overlays? modals? I'm lost on graphic terms)

depending on the resource you're accessing, you can get 5+ sections each with their own ui/ux on the same page/tab and it can be confusing to understand where you're at in your resources

if you're having trouble visualizing it, imagine an url where each new level is a different application with its own ui/ux and purpose all on the same webpage

You are correct it's poor and sloppy, but it's not "just" that. It's a lack of concern over the effects of their poor/sloppy crawler implementation.

The poor implementation is not really relevant, it's companies deciding they own the internet and can take whatever they want, let everyone else deal with the consequences. The companies do not care what the impact of their ai non-sense is..

> Marketplace isn’t a major direct revenue source, but it keeps users engaged.

> “It’s one of the least monetized parts of Facebook,” said Enberg. “But it brings in engagement, which advertisers value.”

> Meta relies on ads for over 97% of its $164.5 billion revenue in 2024.

Facebook's spin in the article was delusional as expected for a big tech business, but I'm surprised they let this little nugget of truth slip out, and somehow managed to not learn anything from the fact that a huge demographic engages _more_ with the part of the site that gets the least monetization focus.

I think some other posters already commented, but I wouldn't put too much stock in the MDMA being MDMA -- I use MDMA pretty frequently and never had brain zaps from it, but when I was on sertraline and quit without tapering off, I definitely had the brain zaps being described, and I still get them almost 15 years after discontinuing sertraline.

MDMA depending on where you are and what you got can be quite a few things, it's why test kits are important. It's not to say that MDMA cannot cause brain zaps, but given that we know that MDMA is usually cut with a lot of filler/other drugs without the user knowing, I would acknowledge it could do it, but would always have doubt it was actually the MDMA due to the knowledge that whatever the users who experienced brain zaps took likely had many other drugs/substances in it. In the current political climate surrounding drugs, I'm not even sure how a study could effectively be done correctly.

Which is unfortunate because brain zaps really suck and withdrawal from SSRIs is pretty rough. I easily get into addictive substances, and have successfully stopped use on quite a few pretty heavy things, and they didn't come close to the withdrawals from SSRIs for me. This is personal experience of course, and likely many other factors in my life helped with my stopping some recreational drugs without hugely adverse affects, but SSRIs just nothing helped and at the time (2010-2015), I really couldn't find any reliable information online or from doctors about the brain zaps.

I'm glad to read this article because it's great to see that there is attention to this and more focus on the side effects of SSRIs. SSRIs definitely can help many people, but it is pretty intense drug and the withdrawal is nasty for quite a few people.

Maybe I am just not familiar enough with the subject to get the point, but this article doesn't really seem to focus on their actual claim but instead it's about explaining why no one else could reproduce their findings?

I'm also still very confused on what the actual relationship is purported to be, at least based on this article. How did they determine cognitive ability here?

I'm extremely wary of claims like the title, especially this one, as it seems like something children on a playground would say and use to bully each other, and certainly I imagine that many people will use it to justify being awful to others that are perceived to be "lesser" because of the rather outrageous title of the article, the article which I still really don't get how they're even making these connections to draw such a conclusion.

Maybe the link should be changed directly to the video it discusses?

The article is purely a link to this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/4S9sDyooxf4

The article itself as I read it doesn't really contribute or expand the concepts in the video and instead is a call to action (not defined) as it assumes you've watched the video, basically I'm just not confident the article contributes anything to the subject its presenting.

I get what you’re saying but the other weird limitations of powershell as well as microsoft’s strangely abusive security relationship with powershell makes it a non-starter for me, or at least makes me hesitate a ton before putting effort into a ps script since even in the same AD orgs which in theory have the same gpos applied across all machines, it’s a crapshoot if the ps script will even execute without having to trick windows into allowing it to run. object oriented nature of ps is also a curse as much as blessing as simple text parsing or iterating over files on a system are very slow compared to bash, never minding that from my experience it’s a crapshoot on how well a given ps module handles strings and how that will be reflected in the script.

(e.g., one company’s ps module doesn’t handle square brackets ][ well and for an inexplicable reason the normal ps escaping does not work as advertised, requiring more backticks than usual and a different number depending on if you “” or ‘’ the input string. As best i can tell its joint fault of ps bug and poor module design but had no luck convincing the vendor to adjust their design because “it will break existing scripts”, which is a valid concern but it also means writing automation for their product is a headache since you’re going to see ][ in production environments as is a visually obvious delimiter when humans are reading it)

while i get what you’re saying i also know many senior devs who swim in dogma of their own creation, finding some trend they personally aspire to and enforcing it religiously. i think the relative experience of a dev is not a clue for me on if they are going to do research on what the end users actually need.

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about unless you're meaning about immigrating with more than 10,000€ worth of physical currency? I went through immigrating to EU recently and the declaration was as simple as signing a statement that I am able to show records of how I got the money if required by the country I was moving to, and one of the examples was as simple as bank statements showing you had an income that supported you having such money.

I don't think you're talking about this, so maybe you can link to a government site with the relevant law you're discussing? It's pretty trivial to demonstrate it in most cases, and I think even a paper ledger is enough for most situations.

Yeah on premises share point is absolutely still a thing. it’s not as common as i get it as microsoft wants you to migrate to share point online and at least clients i talked to said they did the migration because of licensing pressure from microsoft but i cannot comment on that personally.

Share point is just MSSQL in the backend and while setting up share point is mostly a simple affair with clicking through the wizards, managing it can get complex for the inexperienced since there’s a lot going on for on premises. the allure of a quick and easy self hosted share point site vanishes pretty fast once the reality of protecting it and keeping it running hits.

I think it's not such a useful debate. All of the early anime that was popular early on outside of Japan was undoubtedly influential and important part of the popularity of anime outside of the US, but Dragonball Z really had a special spot in that it had pretty large mainstream appeal and aired during normal afternoon blocks on American TV -- while Sailor Moon was known when I was growing up, I remember it being on early morning (06:00) cartoon blocks, so it was kind of out of the way. That isn't to diminish the influence of Sailor Moon, Saint Seiya, etc, but at least in the United States DBZ was a cartoon you talked about at school because "everyone" watched it and was waiting for the rest to be translated and dubbed.

I think that's mostly what the GP meant, and I would agree it was quite significant in this regard.

it’s just a bit too much for the question i think and it asks for opinion on a subject in an already stressful situation where the candidate is very eager to please and also had their mind in the context of answer with well reasoned technical arguments. I can easily imagine and many times have seen interviewers try to propose an opinion question like this only to spend time explaining to the candidate why the candidates answer is wrong.

It probably seems like a trap to many candidates and often it is a trap whether the interviewer meant it to be or not.

This isn’t to say that there shouldn’t be opinion questions but I wouldn’t position it like the author did in. at least how it’s presented it seems like it’s a fairly “big” question in the interview which candidates will pick up on as being important and questions of opinion can be nerve wracking in such a situation.

I also think that what the author is trying to test can be handled better; i am pretty sure the question is a measure of does the candidate think through their positions and can they defend it professionally, but i think there are better approaches, for example picking a common task with many ways to accomplish the task and asking the candidate how they’d do it and why it’s useful for them to use that method. For me at least i understand their approach a bit more and i like to hear about how they handle such situations in the way that’s most comfortable for them. that the task is one with many possible ways to accomplish it helps take the burden off the candidate in many cases as likely they know there are many approaches and it usually gets candidates to open up and talk about their projects and workflows. I often learn new perspectives on such tasks and telling the candidate as such calms them down a lot also since i genuinely like to hear new approaches. if there are elements i don’t understand, it’s a great question “oh that’s a new approach for me. can you explain a bit more how this method is useful for you?” (not exact words) which usually is a great way to get candidates to talk more as they see i want to hear their thoughts, not a specific answer; they know their answer is one of many right ones so there less burden there too.

i think the authors question is good intentioned but poorly executed.

this is weird criticism for me as much as i do worry about ai generated art taking work from artists, but this is a pretty stock and boring album cover as far as metal albums go. least for me album art is kind of a relic of bygone era — you don’t need to sell the band and album image with an actual image, you can just preview the album on any number of legal services.

album art can be good of course and very impactful but i’m not sure it’s worth criticizing bad album art because there’s a ton of it. art which is bad from a technical perspective can still be used effectively —- for example nekrogoblikon’s album cover for Goblin Island very much so looks like someone’s notebook sketch, probably by design, and it works well to convey the mood and attitude for the album and band.

while i get what the author of the article is trying to say i thjnk this is a needlessly harsh criticism of a band just trying something new with album art, which is fine i thjnk it’s okay place for it. artists who work with other mediums still will get work in this field i suppose because with album art it’s about conveying a specific “feel” for the album or it’s mostly just stock-like art anyways.

again still not a fan of ai art but this article does not make a compelling point

(also arguably a good font artist is more important for metal albums ))

Yes I used to run into these cards all the time in the past (maybe ancestors of the one from the article) but they were always a pain to deal with. I usually just recommended new wi-fi card if the card was showing these symptoms and i cannot recall anyone ever coming back with wi-fi complaints after that. but definitely if this trick would have worked i would have used it.

I think that is what the author is trying to say to some degree, hence their call to bring back themes.

I agree with the author’s article; it’s not that it’s a never ending torrent of dark mode zealotry, but at least for apps i’ve maintained, one of the first and most zealously pursued requests was always dark mode, even when theming options existed.

I prefer other color schemes and themes; not all white but mixture of softer colors — i have a language syntax file for np++ with lots of soft pastels and coloring for .log files that i prefer as it’s more gentle on my eyes. Usually i can get this with themes or ui hacks (e.g replacing assets when possible), but I’d never pursue such modes as diligently as dark mode enthusiasts do.

i don’t quite see the larger esoteric dilemma on binary design choices like the author did, but i’ve had the same experience of persons trying to “call me out” for not using dark mode in that “joking but seriously why are you doing that” sort of ways; the words were spoken with jest, but the conversation dragged on far past a friendly jab about not using dark mode and just became annoying. It’s probably the only feature with such zealousness and such low usage from my experience, and i also find the evidence of it being “better” very much so specious. Nothing against someone who wants dark mode a lot, that’s fine, just enough with the drama about it

Anger got me into programming; when properly guided it can help you to address a situation that is very frustrating for you without having a full blown melty. My very first “real” code was a script i made in my support days was only because i was tired of having to get some specific hardware info from systems, which no one could do. fed up with cranky clients and incomplete data, i decide enough is enough and made a script to ensure it always got collected. from there, i just never stopped writing tools to solve annoying tech problems; my experience was that learning to write code to do it automatically and correctly was less frustrating than begging people to run the correct commands, much less all of them.

this strategy carried over to many non tech things and i find i trust my anger to tell me when something is bad, but i also now pay attention and think what i want to do with such situations and what i actually want as an outcome and try to work towards that, or even consider “why am i so upset at it? is it really that bad?”. it just forces a more rational reaction in the service of my anger, and the anger is satisfied even if i find i’m upset over nothing; i still understand my feelings way better