At least the district didn't send a runner, shouting "cyber terrorism, we traced it to this room!!!" at the top of their lungs [0].
2,212 karma · joined October 6, 2015
Massed ICBM defense is a matter of sheer volume - with the current GMD system the US can throw enough exoatmospheric kill vehicles (and THAAD to handle the leftovers) to counter a handful of re-entry vehicles from a smaller nuclear power like North Korea or Iran. Not hundreds (vs China) or thousands (vs Russia) that you would see in a peer-level nuclear exchange where everyone has multi-megaton MIRVs, decoys, and SLBMs with much shorter flight times.
Some fantasy future AI with the right sensors may perfectly track all of that sub-orbital mayhem. Without an enormous fleet of thousands of kill vehicles to actually defend against that threat, and the logistics to keep that fleet operational, it can do nothing about it. Building and supporting that sort of strategic defense is obscenely expensive, and as such it remains a Reagan-era fever dream.
Agreed on the pay, it would have been good if it wasn't in California.
Weiler Labeling Systems comes to mind.
I used to work at a packaging machine OEM. Lots of robotics, bespoke designs, and every day was like an episode of How It's Made. Very fun, but eventually I left to chase the SV startup circuit. All of my old co-workers still work there.
It taught me the necessity of being as viciously crass as my new classmates in order to fit in. If you consider that normal, then let it be known that I'm perfectly fine sticking with abnormal people thank you very much. I am perfectly content learning the lessons of Lord of the Flies by reading, and not by getting thrown into a small re-enactment of it.
Though I suppose public middle school psychology was useful when I was an internment camp guard in southern Iraq. I'll grant you that.
> Then again, his parents also had him integrate tightly with athletics for the decade before this over precisely the concern about socialization we're discussing. Perhaps there's a critical time in development when socialization is necessary and there are other venues than public school to remediate this.
I'll add to your anecdata - most homeschoolers I knew did sports and other extracurricular clubs, outside of the co-ops they may be participating in.
As someone who spent time in all three, I felt that my academic time was utterly wasted in public school. Sure, "learning outside" is always available, but that doesn't regain the time served in government mandated kid-prison.
> In my experience all that people talk about how private and homeschooling affects your ability to socialize with normal people is true.
In my experience, people are surprised that I spent 2/3 of my pre-college education in various forms of homeschooling. "You're so well-adjusted", is a frequent refrain.
> The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well-installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
[0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
This is all anecdotal and will vary wildly by org and era. So if you were to compare, say, a NATO WSA during the Cold War against a modern colocation facility that occasionally trots out crew-served weapons for marketing photoshoots...while both are secure facilities featuring some degree of lethal response capability, these will have very different liability profiles and rules of engagement. But in both cases there will need to be procedures in place for evaluating on-duty armed guards in a manner that doesn't get anyone hurt.
For routine training during shifts, a training exercise is openly declared. This can be done ahead of time, or an evaluator may do so by surprise - it all depends on what procedures and scenarios are being evaluated. Once the evaluator/actor is detected or challenged by guards (or some other threshold is passed during a scenario), an exercise is declared out loud. Normally, this will happen before anyone in that scenario might reasonably need to use force.
Upon exercise declaration this is accompanied by a quick "safety briefing" over the radio to response forces with routine reminders on what to do if an unsafe act occurs, so guard forces know to appropriately pretend (shout "bang", blink flashlight, etc) instead of actually firing upon intruders. There's a degree of make-believe roleplay once the exercise is active, since discharging duty weapons in real life comes with mountains of paperwork that I don't want to think about even decades later. Of course, less harmful forms of force may still be permissible (and expected!), such as various restraint techniques or handcuffing/zip-tying resistant bad guys.
For any competent org, this sort of training happens constantly and with enough variation to keep everyone on their toes. The role of "bad guy" is rotated between different guards, so everyone has a chance to attempt breaking in to various restricted areas and enjoy tasting the various flavors of pavement around base as we tackle each other. An exercise of one type can snowball into another, if I manage to catch some unsuspecting lazy troop unawares and "kill" them (usually with a "Surprise! This is an exercise, you're dead, do not answer your radio."), then while they're tagged out (and chewed on by their sergeants about situational awareness), a quick response force is scrambled from available troops on shift to stop us. By this point everyone on shift will know the situation has escalated from a failed pentest into a nasty wargame and should act accordingly.
Bear in mind that these sorts of live exercises are meant to evaluate procedures and test readiness in situ - the forces involved may suddenly be interrupted by real-world duties and time constraints. Live force-on-force training conducted with blanks, MILES gear, airsoft or whatever less-lethal weapons they have these days would be during designated training time and not on shift.
(to include the ones that appeared in the time I spent typing this post)
At least today I can just limp along with Homebrew. I doubt self-hosting mDLs are in anyone's plans.
5.56mm is a very small cartridge for game that large, and with full auto you will spray wide and in a few seconds have an empty mag. Besides, within 10 feet everything that can go wrong has gone wrong and you will likely get mauled anyway. Large magazine rifles with backup pistols do have a niche in hunting packs of aggressive wild boars in close quarters, but that is an exceedingly dangerous hobby best left to those with a background in door-kicking.
The downside is that metadata here isn't just a cache, it is necessary to operate in this fashion and must be backed up.
Semiconductor EDA comes to mind, where users are at the mercy of their tool vendors and they expect something that really hasn't evolved much past an office network of Unix workstations from 1999. Object storage is almost completely alien to the tooling, and despite significant file & block storage costs there is little interest from EDA tool vendors to adapt their tools to object storage. This is a challenge for semiconductor firms operating in or moving to a cloud environment.
S3FS/rclone can of course act as a shim, but are very slow when it comes to metadata operations in a typical shell. But if you were to move your metadata away from the distant object store and closer to to your compute environment things actually start becoming usable - this is the case with JuiceFS. Of course there are also tiered storage systems like Weka would have better overall performance, but is more complicated to set up and more expensive to operate than JuiceFS.
Noita comes to mind. Also includes some pretty wild fluid dynamics.
> HOW did they do that pixel-perfect terrain destruction anyway??
Usually the terrain is a bitmap, and various effects paint/erase it.
In prior roles I've seen NetBox explicitly vetoed in favor of technically inferior solutions because there was no available support contract at the time. Also, Sunbird has fancy 3D rack renders, and that's management catnip.
[0] https://www.raphnet.net/divers/ntt_data_sfc_controller/index...
Today I learned. For context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
A handful of folks thought it was "pretty cool", everyone else kept on versioning with myriad copies of "Copy of plc_control-1a (new) (final) (1) (b).ACD"
It's allegedly the basis of the tech used by Eleven Labs.
Then, six months later, said executive shows back up demanding to know why you haven't provisioned this great Y thingamajig that his golf buddy was raving about.