I can assure you that I received nothing of the sort. In fact, I only found out because I called about transferring my policy to a new house. And yes, I read all email/snail mail sent by them. I was given zero heads up.
1,121 karma · joined July 5, 2017
They don't, but they have the courtesy of giving myself and thousands of others a proper heads up. Perhaps any heads up? They quite literally just dropped me, no email, no letter, no nothing. This type of thing should be given 3 months minimum.
> To pick random examples of unrelated companies, McDonalds or SpaceX would also refuse to insure you against fire. Why should people hate State Farm for this reason, but not McDonalds or SpaceX?
Alright, you just lost me, not even bothering to read the rest of your post. To answer your utterly moronic question: because they aren't in the business of insurance. I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.
"I don't know about you people, but I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do." - Gavin Belson
Given all the time and hype, I'd have hoped that wrinkles like this would've been ironed out by launch time.
Back to Wezterm for now, but I'll certainly be checking back in at some point.
(Yes, I’m aware that Ansible and Nix exist. I like them. This is really just a hobby project for learning Go).
So far it’s going great. The Neovim-inspired approach of essentially viewing applications and other incidental configurations (like ssh keys) as “plugins to your core system” feels like the right way to solve this problem. And given that Lua can exist as a simple YAML/TOML/JSON-esque collection of fields, but can also drop into proper functions or even quasi-OOP behavior, writing your own “presets” for a given machine config is also trivial. And Go is proving to be a fantastic language for running it all. Really excited to see where this project leads.
Err...what? Let's not rewrite history here. Plenty of people -- especially in tech -- worked remotely before Covid. Yes, the numbers increased dramatically, but don't make it sound like it was unheard of before the pandemic.
Also: tons and tons of people have no choice but to live far from the office. Rent is cheaper and more plentiful the farther out you get from metro centers, simple as.
I want to love it, but it's just so not there yet -- I worry that its lack of focus will prevent it from ever getting there.
I’m really not a fan of the “usual subjects” in the Linux desktop world (e.g. Gnome, KDE Plasma, etc…XFCE is decent), but step beyond that into the tiling Window Manager world and the user/developer experience is IMO leaps and bounds beyond any other desktop.
So, hire a team in another time zone.
This is a problem of management not prioritizing the health and wellness of their employees, simple as that.
It’s a zsh shell with BSD utils. 99% of my shell setup/tools on Linux just work on macOS. I can easily install the gnu utils if I want 99.9% similarity.
I very happily jump between macOS and Linux, and while the desktop experience is always potentially the best on Linux (IMO nothing compares to hyprland), in practice macOS feels like the most polished Linux distro in existence.
Do people just see, like, some iOS feature and freak out? This viewpoint always seems so reactionary. Whereas in reality, the macOS of the past that you’re pining for is still right there. Hop on a Snow Leopard machine and a Ventura machine and you’ll see that there are far, far more similarities than differences.
The nuance I was referring to was with regards to the actual facts of the situation, such as who is responsible, and that many, many people are just using it as an excuse to dunk on Windows. As I said, Windows/Microsoft are not at fault in this precise situation.
However, is it possible that I can state that a thing is bad without it being "tribalism?"
I'm invoking tribalism and setting myself apart from it in an attempt to make it very clear that my criticism of Windows is not simply tribalism. Stating that Boeing airplanes are prone to critical faults due to bad engineering is a fact, not tribalism; that is still true even if I personally dislike Boeing airplanes/the company. Perhaps I'm even critical of them precisely because of the bad engineering I've observed! Weird how that works.
The same can be said for Windows.
> Getting companies to test updates is already like pulling teeth. Besides, crowdstrike said the update they pushed was "designed to target newly observed, malicious named pipes being used by common C2 frameworks in cyberattacks". Is this something you really want to sit on for testing, which might take weeks or months?
gestures broadly I mean...given the current situation, obviously I'm going to answer with an emphatic "yes!" You know we have these things called computers, right? They're really good at automating stuff. Like testing.
I know that "getting companies to test updates is like pulling teeth," but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Companies do all sorts of stupid and negligent bullshit, are happy to spend money in the name of shifting blame, but are cheap as hell with regards to actually avoiding problems. That's not a good thing, and it should change. Is that really such a controversial statement? Apologies for potentially engaging in strawmanning, but in the even that your response is something along the lines of "they should test, but it's not realistic to expect that," yeah, I agree, but perhaps this precise event is the kick in the pants those who are against testing need to stop being cheap morons. And in case you're not clean on who I'm referring to: the decision makers at the top, not the engineers caring out their irresponsible and negligent agendas.
I was in the ER quite literally the day before this hit with a slash to my popliteal artery (long story, freak accident), and I shudder to think how it would have gone a day later -- I honestly could have bled out and died. The fact that so many places running absolutely critical infrastructure aren't routinely testing every change they push out to their devices is insane. Utterly, bat shit insane.
> What specific security issues do you think windows/NT kernel has?
Sorry, not taking the bait on this one. Windows is a piece of shit, and it's absolutely self-evident to anyone even kind of exposed to the alternatives. Expanding on this to you is a waste of time, as either you've never used Windows before (highly unlikely) or you're unwilling to see what I'm talking about for whatever reason.
> Moreover, how is windows being a "shitshow" relevant to the question of resiliency or dependence?
Do I really have to explain to you why a shitshow of an OS isn't resilient?
I've tried to make it extremely clear that 1) I don't blame Windows or Microsoft in this incident, but 2) this incident revealed just how much critical infrastructure relies on an OS that has no business being used as such. That's not "don't let a disaster go to waste," it's one disaster revealing a situation that is ripe for many, many more. I'm not "anti-Windows," I'm "anti-Windows-as-a-server" and "anti-horrible-system-administration-practices."
However, I'll say that, while this clearly is not Microsoft's fault, the realization of just how much critical infrastructure is running on Windows -- let alone Windows that's connected to the internet and has automatic updates enabled -- was sobering.
Are kernel mode drives maybe a bad idea? Yes! Should Windows be able to automatically roll back if a kernel mode driver fails? Yes! Should CrowdStrike have tested before pushing out the update? Yes! Should hospitals, police stations, airlines, etc be testing any and all updates that come their way prior to releasing them onto the rest of their fleets? Yes!
And so on and so on. The failures here are legion. I can at least say for myself that all of that (and more) is what I'm grappling with today, rather than the direct, root cause and content of the issue itself.
I say this entirely with as little tribalism or bias as I can muster: Windows should not be the foundation upon which critical infrastructure is built. It is a bad OS. It is a rickety, insecure mess; this observation (note that I did not say opinion) has only ever increased with time.
The NT kernel, I hear, is great. I generally trust those who say this, as they tend to be demonstrably much smarter than I am, especially with regards to kernel design, which is something I know next to nothing about.
But Windows? Nah man. Maybe there's a good kernel running the show, but the OS as a whole is a shitshow. Yes, this exact same problem could have (and has) happened on Linux; the OS is indeed not the culprit. But the understanding that this one, single, no good very bad OS is responsible for this much critical infrastructure going from an abstract worry to a real, concrete horror show has, I think, hit a lot of people, leading to a poorly-pivoted change of subject.
Windows servers are “niche” compared to Linux servers. Command line knowledge is not “uncommon expertise,” it’s imo the bare minimum for working in tech.
This stuff isn't impossible to solve. Rather, the incentives just aren’t there. People would rather build an apparatus for blame-shifting than actually just building a better solution.
Nearly every corporate machine that needs to run Windows should run it as a VM on a NixOS base, unless there is an extremely good reason not to.
Developing a "voice" is done, at least partially, via honing one's craft, as well as engaging with art made by other people and cultures. The former is antithetical to prompting, and the latter is actively being destroyed by AI.
I can't help but feel that this strange insistence by industry that AI be used to all but usurp art ultimately comes from a place of jealousy, and/or due to the fact that some intelligent-to-Americans-sounding British voice saying something like "we're operating at the intersection of art and technology..." at some TedX talk causes VCs to turn out their wallets.
As a former professional musician, let me tell you: the skills are not the problem here. People don't not make art because they don't have the skills. They don't make art because they have nothing to say, nothing to express.
The skills are a byproduct of having a worldview, a perspective. And unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) AI can't help anyone with that.