than3

Incidentally, in case it wasn't clear.

For there to be a choice, the person must accept and make a decision of their own free will with sufficient knowledge and without constraint such as coercive or malign influence.

Very few real choices actually exist these days since corruption by dependency and outright coercion robs you of your agency and choice, in an attempt to manufacture your consent which the law deems as necessary.

This occurs often without your knowledge because they don't teach this stuff in compulsory education (by design). Anytime you've simply clicked through one of those software EULAs, you've given consent but not necessarily had a choice.

I hope you re-examine those paper-thin limiting beliefs you hold.

I don't think that would work.

The question goes to, how do you prove or meet any kind of burden of proof needed for discovery, where they've done it when you aren't even an employee. No lawyer will take that job just on your say so unless you are bankrolling it.

There is simply no way for you as a candidate to know short of you being in or near the room where it happens when it happens. Certificates or education level are also not a protected class. Discrimination based off race would be a blatant violation, but certificates vs degrees; I'm not so sure (and I'm not a lawyer).

mbgerring, I agree with you in almost the entirety of what you've said both here and in some of your responses.

There are a lot of false assertions made, often with no consequence for doing so, which is an ongoing problem; and worse a lot of these people actually believe what they say is true despite well researched facts showing to the contrary. Its disheartening that so many people are completely irrational when it comes to discourse on these things.

As for the lack of housing, to me its clearly not a money problem. Also, in other areas they do hotel vouchers instead of actually creating affordable housing; and while programs may limit it to no more than 30 days, there are loopholes which allow a revolving door between multiple hotels accepting vouchers. I would guess this is where most of the money is going, and this doesn't do the same thing as providing permanent housing first.

Additionally, the vouchers themselves are often traded, for drugs and other things and the areas where these are accepted, quickly become crime-ridden because the dealers follow the vulnerable populations; its one of the reasons some areas refuse to add additional local transit resources. They simply don't want to deal with it; or they deal with it in a way that makes it someone elses problem (like what happened in Santa Ana).

Everyone seems to have an opinion on what needs to be done, but none that I've seen have actually followed through on what the rigorous studies have shown. There always seems to be some loophole, corruption, backroom deal, etc for business to capitalize on homeless services without actually improving the situation in any way while draining resources meant to help people get back on their feet.

I'd add, polish often means different things to different people. For example, failure planning and risk management often only happen when there is funding.

There also was no content moderation.

Unfortunately that's invisible though.

They can never really know that you were there and change action. Just like they can never really know all those clicks are organic clicks for their ad-spend.

Its more of a we trust its this because we don't want to look behind the curtain. Unfortunately.

I've been in IT for over a decade and in almost all companies, with the people that hire these types, before the hiring manager or person who makes the decisions even see the resumes for any position; HR throws out everyone without a degree; if they are desperate they hold onto the certificates in another pile. Not a choice, no say, it happens, unilaterally just about everywhere.

Don't like what I said?, tough, this is the harsh reality of IT and really any job today. Its the cult of qualification. Who decides who is qualified is a corrupt process when that criteria is not based solely upon knowledge and skill... as education and certifications are based on other criteria with the mentioned criteria being secondary today. Its another form of tweedism by adding a filter at an earlier stage so you only get certain candidates later. Lawrence Lessig can explain it to you.

Those stories of getting hired into IT are unicorn stories that are almost always the exception than anything else. You might get one opportunity in a 30 year period if you are lucky, if at all.

I would have appreciated someone not giving me the same advice you gave, 30 years ago. It resulted in two decades of wasted effort and financial loss, it was deceitful and limiting. It is the former because the person giving the advice should have had constructive knowledge of knowing better based upon their position and authority.

Ignoring what I'm saying or downranking to make my post invisible to go on with happy thoughts just means you are volunteering or misleading others into a struggle session that won't ever end, until they re-exam what you said and ultimately discard it. They won't thank you for that when all is said and done, and doing something like that is one of the more evil things a person can do. This is why when giving advice its important to know from what you speak, to have and show credibility.

These are hard truths, its better to actually educate and give people a chance than mislead them into self-limiting cycles of suffering without warning for potentially decades.

"Just be yourself and find your superpower" is rubbish when you are trying to find a job to feed yourself and progress to financial independence. Coding at this point will likely be eliminated by a Chat-GPT based derivative in a few months or worse case a few years, and you'll be only a halfway decent programmer by then and likely completely dependent on social nets for food thereafter while somehow bearing the cost to go back to school to re-educate.

The prevalence of spectrum disorders being used as a catchall leads to over-diagnosis/mis-diagnosis. Many times there may be underlying causes that never or rarely get resolved or correctly diagnosed.

Chronic heavy metal poisoning for example was a common underlying cause that was often diagnosed as a spectrum disorder depending on symptoms presented.

It was very difficult to test because it doesn't stay in the blood but instead binds almost immediately. You had to work with a willing doctor and use a chelator and cause acute poisoning to determine if this was the case. Treatment options were not very good either.

For example, many people who received silver dental fillings have had this, while the ADA called it silver, and promoted it as stable, science in the last 20 years has shown marked neurotoxic effects which is why its mostly not used anymore (to my understanding).

The chemical composition of those fillings was 50% by weight mercury which leached when people drank acidic drinks (i.e. soda). Teens and young adults were at higher risk.

> There are other door openers, like being a really good coder.

This may have been true at one point, but if it was ever true, it no longer is.

To get well-paying jobs (above the poverty line), you either need a degree or you need a certification. The certifications run into the exact same component issues of academia. Its optimizing for a specific type and limiting everyone else, and importantly its not primarily based upon knowing the material.

Certifications are the only alternative to a degree, and they get deprecated regularly and have no due process. Deprecations are as if you never had the certificate. If there is an issue, at best the single (only) company doing the testing will refund you for one certification, and then not allow you to try again (barring you from receiving a certificate). This is only in the case where you can prove they have done fraud/deceptive and unfair business practices, but can't get a court to nullify the NDA to provide standing for future litigation. If you can't, prove malfeasance they'll just keep your money; and their default practices try to limit any evidence they might provide. Accountability SOPs in a normal functioning business are often completely absent.

Employers will bring you in for interviews, and low ball you because they'll say "I see you don't have a degree, or applicable certificate. We can't pay you what we would pay a qualified person... How does ... <lowball or just above minimum wage> sound?" (for skilled work normally paying 70-100k for the IT position). They count on you being desperate enough to take the pay cut after they have wasted as much time as possible.

Additionally business insurance can sometimes dictate that certain positions hold a comparable indicator of proficiency, where experience is not counted.

This same conversation occurs regularly even when you have a decade of direct experience doing the exact same job. I know because its happened to me during many interviews, and I've compared notes and every other person who has followed a similar path that I've met has had it happen regularly as well. I do well because I'm a miracle worker, but I always have to prove myself at every step, because I am significantly more than I am on paper.

For many people who have the education and skill to do the jobs, qualifications are just another means to limit future opportunity, keep wages low, and reduce income mobility.

In my opinion your advice is harmful because it misleads about reality, and the experience required to find out otherwise necessitates needless suffering.

> I've never been the kind of A type personality ...

That's a poor way of characterizing the issue. I think you should look more closely at why you haven't done well instead of internalizing that you are just not the right type of personality.

> I've been told I have ADHD

A lot of heavy metal poisoning is often mistaken or misdiagnosed for spectrum disorders. Its hard to test for chronic poisoning because you have to take a chelator which causes acute poisoning to even test for it. Having been labelled in this category often is a disadvantage because structure is incredibly important for people on the spectrum but you can ask for certain accommodations and they are required to give them if you have a diagnosis.

> told I won't be receiving a CS degree ... because my grades weren't good enough for entry.

You have not said where you are located, but if its anywhere in the US this is par for the course. Its important to recognize the reasons for the failures and place blame where it actually belongs.

Many times in US based curricula, the student is set up to fail, and by that I mean in any other industry if the same practices were followed it would be fraud and they'd be found liable. That being said, sometimes it is because you have repeated personal failures and not addressed them, but this latter aspect is in the minority.

What I'd suggest is re-examining your failures, and identify exactly what caused them with a objective view, and what if anything you can do to fix them.

Start with examining what any student needs to control basic academic outcomes, and whether those requirements were met for the classes you took.

When setting up your schedule, were the classes appropriately advertised based on the amount of time they require for pass. Classes are rated by unit hours, if the college recognizes a 12-unit course as a full load, divide 40 hours by 12 and you've got the max number of hours any class should require (per week per unit) in coursework for the 16 or 12 week period. You cannot expect your best work if one or multiple classes exceed this since you'd be exceeding safe limits for any professional job. No one does well when something requires 60+ hours of work a week for an extended period of time. This can actually send people to the hospital. If its above 40, they have not provided the necessary control over basic academic outcomes.

Additionally, structure of the course is important. There are systems properties that are necessary for any test/exam to be valid, or have a valid inferential basis; these properties are normally covered in an EE class; take an overview look at the properties from MIT OCWs videos. You may need to look at the book but its cheap and well worth having. Don't worry about the math, look at what the properties are, how they are defined and tested.

The professor may have removed or added properties (without understanding this rigorous approach) to limit the people who pass, or fail people. They may do this for any arbitrary reason.

This is often seen in non-deterministic questions being asked on tests without a basis for inference. An example might be a multiple choice question with 3 or more actually correct answers to choose from (breaks determinism and inference).

Causality spirals are specifically designed to fail people. An example of these is the classic 3 question test which I've seen numerous times in engineering tracks, where the 2nd question requires the correct answer from the 1st question, and the 3rd question requires the correct answer to the second question. Classes that use these often have two main tests, which don't occur until you can no longer receive a refund.

Ultimately they amount to the whole grade, and you can only get 1 question wrong out of the two last question on either test and still pass.

Additionally, there may be other dirty tactics that further optimize for failure. An online grader may randomize each individual students question pool. If there is a problem with the questions, the professor may not take action for a question that other students didn't get, there is no clear signal to them that something is wrong with the test and they didn't vet the question pool.

Online material and graders may mark correct answers as incorrect, and have subtle dark patterns embedded to induce failure spirals. They may not provide a means to report problems to the professor. This is done by not providing a button, and the dark patterns may have text on a red background that pops up with each incorrect answer after every question. Its the opposite pattern for dopamine loops which are embedded into games as addiction triggers, only this is a frustration trigger. It does this when the question was answered correctly, you get no popup when its correct, you get a red popup when its incorrect. Its subtle, but after 4 or 5 times of this happening, you can't concentrate because its futile, and that applies to a broad set of the population. Its known pedagogical circles that this causes poor outcomes, there was a classic psychology experiment where this was tested by telling the teacher a particular low performing student was gifted, and the low performing students did better when they were told that compared to when they were told they were low performing.

Mismatched coursework, inference requires matched coursework; if the lecture and material covered do not match what's tested, they are testing your guessing or mindreading ability. This is common in courses that pay professors to teach who then refer their students to Khan Academy (yes this happens regularly), and online material such as an etextbook where the reading doesn't match what is being tested.

Lack of any redemption mechanisms so snowballs continue until dropout. This usually means no extra credit, no test retakes, no communication regarding the exact material that will be tested, no study guides that are verified for accuracy before the test, and no legitimate guidance provided by the professor during office hours. These all happen regularly in academia and impact outcomes towards the negative.

There is an escalation path if these issues are the case, but unfortunately unless you know how to accurately document and case-build, and have the money for a lawyer to sue them; by the time you get to reaching out to the Board of Trustees, you may still get no action.

After all, all bureaucracy seeks a lowest common denominator, which is often negative production value; and in any bureaucratic system standing is important and the people in these positions have their standing threatened since they themselves are also teachers or were at one point. Its easier for them to do nothing, since taking any action against their peers threatens their social standing among educators, they are all in it together first, and for the student second. These are longstanding issues that are common with any centralized structure that lead to corrupt systems.

There is a rule of thumb for checking disadvantaged structure based off probability, but it requires multivariable calculus and really doesn't tell you much except that you need to dig in more detail.

Probabilities are also notoriously impractical when it comes to actual likelihoods, its useful in finding out whether the distribution curve for passing has been scrunched to the point of pass|fail with extremely narrow outcomes.

Most of these problems are found in core transfer classes that are always full. The result is people can't transfer into specific programs since they often can't pass those gatekeeping courses with arbitrary pass requirements.

Some courses structured as described have a pass rate of less than 10%, and that includes all previous years of dropouts among the pool of potential passes; they don't track re-attempts.

The people that pass these courses are often people who break academic honesty policies. I won't tell you to do that, but sometimes in a corrupt/fraudulent system where they've lied or misled about the actual prospect of completion, I can't say its not a reasonable alternative given the lack of any kind of reform possible and the lack of any actual due process within the system. Being state funded means that often, absent any gross provable negligence, nothing legal will have standing; but you'd need to talk to a lawyer (with a proper case built, either for discrimination or fraud). If you plan to go the latter route, I'd suggest not tipping your hand.

Also, I've run into a few instances where test questions have marked my answer as incorrect when it was correct, and upon review it showed the answer they claimed I submitted was not the answer I submitted. I would suggest you use a screen recorder while you are doing any kind of assignment like this since you cannot trust anything will be above board.

The main issue with Usenet was it lacked any form of content moderation.

Its hard because the drug dealers follow where the vulnerable populations go. Crime increases because the drugs increase as the populations shift locations.

FWIW, I upvoted; but I agree this is an ongoing problem on HN and really any place that allows people to downvote based on how they feel.

You can state all the facts you want and some people downvote because they simply didn't like it; others downvote because your replied topic was about a downvote (against policy) and those same problematic people who downvoted may also have multiple accounts and/or be doing this to promote a certain propagandist narrative. There's really no way to combat it or tell given the site design.

Ultimately its a bridge too far and violates free speech by de-amplifying what you said (because it goes invisible once it goes under a certain vote, greyed out at 0, hidden -1, delisted/invisible -2) but that's mainly just my opinion that the vast majority of people (or more accurately bots) here don't hold. Its why I think most current social media should be outlawed (as its currently designed).

It interferes with communications which are an important signal over public discourse for our representatives to take action. They stop being responsive and representing when they can't receive meaning from their constituency because its an intentionally jammed/noisy channel and they so far have failed to take any action to remedy that jamming, which can have grave historical consequences.

When there's no effective representation, the rule of law eventually breaks down.

I agree.

SF has a lot of issues and the money went to places that were ineffective with only a small portion going to housing first.

17B shows this isn't a homeless problem, this is a corruption and accountability problem.

To elaborate, System's and Signals is a course usually reserved for EE majors, you can watch lectures about it at MIT OCW; there's a Textbook which is relatively cheap and while its very math heavy (probably requiring Calc3+a bit of abstract math for EE work), an intuitive understanding of what the properties are and how to test for their presence is all you really need to get some basic use from it as a System Admin/DevOps.

A barebones understanding of network is pretty simple (its an onion), it can get complicated as soon as you need to start worrying about time to convergence, multi-homed networks, and/or dealing with BGP and ASN's or if you need to reimplement network stacks. CCENT/CCNA/CCNP are certs that cover the material exceptionally well though its dry to put it mildly. Its also what I would expect of a Network Admin, not a System Admin/DevOps.

I've found System's and Signals provides a useful paradigm/filter for characterizing certain classes of operational problems (by whether the properties are present or not in computational contexts).

Computation for example in general require Step (usually associated with a clock signal), Time Invariance (given the same inputs provides same output regardless of time shifts), and Determinism (the fixed same input states going into function only provide a single unique output) systems properties to function and do work.

The latter property must hold and includes any series of intermediate steps as well, mainly to fulfill requirements of the theory of computation (afaik) regarding turing machines (finite state automata/automata theory with implications of halting and decidability when not present; this is mainly found in the dragon book or a compiler design course, pretty sure video courses for this are available on MIT OCW).

Time Invariance for example is affected by Memory properties and fails in the presence of Memory (such as a cache, which is why there must always be a way to clear it from an operational perspective to allow troubleshooting).

Troubleshooting interconnected systems relies heavily on Time Invariance. If you can demonstrate the property isn't there as a rule of thumb, you can make estimates that it will take much longer to resolve certain issues given the guess and check nature of the problem.

While these are mainly rules of thumb without formal verification (at least for me), they've been aligned from observations I've made and served me well as an additional tool. Most of what I know in this regard is self-taught aside from the initial exposure from going for an undergraduate in engineering where I took but withdrew from this course. I don't have a degree, though I know quite a bit about computer science and related theory at this point.

If you can verify a property is missing, you don't spin your wheels, also expectations are set appropriately upfront once you know the property is missing; well before investing a lot of resources to work the problem. Sometimes the problem isn't worth digging into in terms of cost, and recognizing it allows you to offer value in potential cost savings.

As for Infra, Scaling, and such. Volume 2 of TPOSNA will give you a solid foundation as its about Cloud. Volume 1 is all about in-house IT.

Edit: Being able to compose state graphs and a cursory amount of graph theory is also important, if you have to verify determinism. Most commonly people miscount the absence of something as a state, and it ends up borking the automation in weird edge-cases since the absence often gets mapped as two or more potential (non-unique) output nodes breaking determinism on a state graph.

In many areas, DevOps means different things to different companies.

While I'm not in a DevOps position, nor have I been in one. The people I've met who were, primarily focused on providing value and automating repetitive work.

This usually took the form of creating tooling or instrumentation that made everyone else's jobs easier or reliable (eliminating human error).

While that is easier said than done, the tooling they created needed to be rock solid, and there are certain operation aspects that are often overlooked because Operations rarely has as much input as Developers in more classical teams. As long as it continues running without problems few people care.

Volume 2 of TPOSNA for Cloud breaks some of these operational requirements down. I'd also add, its important to understand and know the limitations of computation, and maybe a little compiler/automata theory on the types of problems and what leads to halting/undecidability.

In that kind of position, you will often be dealing with automation; and you may need to be able to verify requirements of computation such as if a output interface is injecting non-determinism into subsequent forked processes. Any automation after that will fail in unpredictable ways, and it happens in a lot of places (take a close look at ldd coreutils output sometime).

There are a few core requirements that programs assume are true, but then break down when those assumptions stop being true. Having an implicit knowledge of System's and Signals is very valuable with this in mind as those properties can be tested; and effective troubleshooting only works when certain properties are present allowing you to characterize problem classes quickly and allocate/provide estimates of time more effectively. Non-deterministic type problems take exponentially longer since you can only guess and check.

As for certifications, if you want a background in System Administration RHCSA was good; I haven't seen it since they were acquired by IBM.

You should look at the person who issues the certifications and see how long or how they validate those certifications. With deprecated certifications, they often stop validating whether its been issued so its as though you didn't have any certification.

No problem, it has been my experience, and I try and pay it forward when I can. I'd have appreciated knowing this back when I was first starting out, but it wouldn't have changed much in terms of outcome.

As a young adult you don't often really have much experience dealing with duplicitous or deceitful people and processes.

Incidentally, I don't really go into it but there's almost as many if not more problems with getting a degree compared to certifications but it is the favored solution for the job market since you don't have people invalidating it (through deprecation) and its a one time fixed cost (after completion).

Without getting into detail, many core transfer requirements at the course level often don't provide any means for a student to control basic academic outcomes in bottlenecked courses and there's no effective due process to correct issues. You are at the professor's mercy and a lot of them simply don't want to teach but they still want to be paid for it. Its a form of fraud, but not one you can really go after them for without it costing more than the personal benefit.

That 4 year degree that is advertised may as well be a never-year degree if you are unable to somehow get around these arbitrary, unadvertised, but widespread impediments. Trying at another college or getting another teacher often isn't sufficient as these are widespread systemic issues. I've gone far afield while I was trying to get an engineering degree (early on), short of going to school outside the US , what you see with these things is what you get.

I've personally been slogging along for most of my young adult through mid-life trying to put myself through college for a degree while working. It may happen that I get a degree in business or underwater basket-weaving by the time I'm supposed to retire if I get a lucky break.

In the meantime I make a decent living by referral since the vast majority of most advertised positions are junk; and I'm a bit of a miracle worker, my reputations gotten around locally and my work pretty much speaks for itself; I've more than a few systems that are still running a decade after deployment with no major issues. Ransomware incidents have happened occasionally, but they've largely been inconsequential to the businesses involved as a result of preventative measures and policy recommendations.

Those junk positions are usually some data miner, or broker seeking to either elicit, obtain or sell your personal or proprietary information they get from you to someone with no real position being available. They've monetized the interview process and advertise year round, same positions.

I've had more than a few instances in what I initially thought were good-faith interviews, where I've had to end the interview prematurely because it became clear they were more interested in trying to solicit proprietary information that they were not entitled to. Sometimes you just have to walk away, any place that tries to do shady stuff during the interview process isn't a place I want to work and you are interviewing them just as much as they are interviewing you.

Claude Shannon huh?...

You generally don't get a first job in IT as a System Administrator, ever. Its one of those unicorn stories you hear about that almost never happens. That being said I'm one of those unicorn stories but then again I had a hell of a lot of unofficial experience backing me up. I've run system's in professional configurations since I was little. I caught a break in my 30s and transitioned internally from a assistant position to their IT System Administrator after their IT Contractor disappeared without notice with a pending SAM audit and left them holding a bag with a lot of over-provisioned licensing.

The accepted path is you get in via Help Desk Support. Several years as a T2/T3 may develop into additional responsibilities which overlap some with what a classical Sysadmin does which allows you to make the leap.

Certifications are a poor replacement for a degree. They show you are up to date sure, if you can pass them. Most of the time passing them is not about knowing the knowledge but about effectively dealing with issues that in any other business sector would be considered fraud and unfair and deceptive business practices, but they get away with it because it is wrapped up behind arbitration and non-disclosure.

Its done this way for profit motive and because you have no alternatives since only one place does the testing for these. Those can also be revoked for any number of reasons unrelated to the test itself.

In my opinion they are marketed fraudulently to employers as minimum qualification for a role while setting a very high bar; and inherently limit the number of people who receive them in a way where knowledge is only secondary to profit motive (repeat customers).

I've taught email server administration and had people I taught pass; and then when I tested with almost a decade of experience in that area, it was failed for issues not related to knowing the material that were outside my control. 1 month before they would even respond, 3 months of back and forth before they finally issued a full refund for the clear failures on their part and my pigheadedness about documenting every single conversation in writing (proper case-building). Unfortunately I can never share the specific details that are covered by the NDA so long as it is in place.

The parties involved also apparently have blanket liability protection which they received from some of their government contracts according to one of several lawyers I spoke with from my state's BAR referral line, when I was considering suing them. None would take the case without a significant retainer, and didn't have high hopes for a positive outcome.

HR also favors degrees.

If you have neither, many companies use this as a negotiation tactic to draw you in; and then low-ball you. You can have 10 years of directly applicable experience doing the same job and they will say "Since you don't have a degree or certification you aren't qualified, and we can't pay you what we would pay someone who is qualified; or We don't have that position available but we have another at .... whichver it is its <half pay or minimum wage doing the same skilled labor>. This is all done after you've invested time into the interview process for a position that clearly was never available to you, except they wasted your time so you would accept the low-ball as desperate people often do.

I still regularly see this happen with increasing frequency and stale certifications such as deprecated certs which you did pass; are the same as no certification. I keep a list of entities in my area that I will never apply to because they have shown they are bad actors. Incidentally, state run job board listings often have less of these because the companies involved have to certify the accuracy and availability of the jobs; often under penalty of perjury. Something to be aware of.

As for the most important skills you needed to do the job... Stress Management, Documentation, Risk Management, and Communication, followed shortly thereafter by a mindset of constant improvement.

If you lacked any of those; bad things happen.

Its not enough to write things down, you need to write them down in a way that at a glance you and anyone else get all the most important information tailored towards the job that will be working with it.

If you can't handle stress, you'll get high blood pressure, early onset diabetes, and potentially other medical conditions that will shorten your life. Nothing is worth your health.

Everything must go through a risk management paradigm. Before you run a command, you know it won't bring everything down, and have a contingency in place for if it does so you don't have to think. Its written, you follow each step mindlessly. You do everything you can to minimize risk to the business.

Communication, if you can't communicate in a professional tone and manner you will be crucified by holier than thou management. This includes non-verbal communication such as attire. They will walk all over you making your life hell, undercutting your authority; minimizing your advice, etc.

You know what you are talking about, but if you cannot communicate it along with the appropriate risks; you can't do this job.

You can find the bulk of most of the methodology you will need in two book volumes by Limoncelli Hogan and Chalup. TPOSNA.

Yet another classic example of perverse incentives. Create a problem, offer a solution that creates other more serious problems. Force it through bureaucratic circles without representation. Create a less free world.

When you drive, you are responsible for you and your passengers safety.

How can you possibly be responsible for the car suddenly stopping when you have no control over it as a mandated safety feature.

The only choice you have if this is mandated is you can't drive. So you can't travel long distances, or transport things long distance, interferes with interstate commerce and travel you are confined to your local area of walking distance.

This is beyond stupid, and lacks any basis of granted authority since it opens the door for violating constitutional rights, in the name of a dubious claimed safety issue. Congress can't create a law and have this not be unconstitutional how can a committee think this will be any different.

> something is seriously wrong

Not at all, this is just the way things are, and if you studied history correctly you'd realize this and be educated enough to rationally think about these things instead of repeating a common indoctrinated response. Unfortunately most people who have attended compulsory k-12 education are fighting against some level of indoctrination whether they know it or not. There are numerous factors designed to rob people of their reason and its a rare individual who overcomes this.

Systems work either because of the distribution of labor, or corruption, that enables them to overcome friction and enact change in a productive direction.

In centralized systems, the distribution of labor is not effective because you are not free to build those systems from the ground up (decentralized). Its top-down and concentrated. The people in these systems do not do this for free, they seek benefits as does anyone in a distribution of labor, and this is oft referred to as corruption since it is working outside the defined top-down system's provided benefits.

People over time are almost always incapable of limiting themselves when they are raised above others, there's a biological component which affects dopamine related to heirarchy. Its the same in lobsters, which is why some anti-depressants actually work on lobsters.

Power increases heirarchy, affecting dopamine levels, you run into the same issues of those at the top always striving for more; and it never being enough. In this particular context seeking more power than has been granted is a problem.

Over sufficient lengths of time, governments become corrupt. They start passing laws with no legal basis, and use their power to compulse, coerce, and increase their power and control through enforcing these laws which they had no authority to pass in the first place.

There are many written accounts of this, some of the most famous being Thomas Paine who described the destruction of the Bastille and the French Revolution.

This is the natural lifecycle of government. When governments are unable to correct issues internally, they devolve into fascism. When facing fascists, they will take whatever they can; as determined by the people with pull until people stop them; the cycle starts over, generations forget, hubris sets in; and it repeats.

The only thing stopping them is your ability to defend yourself and your property making the cost more than the benefit. Its why this was written into the constitution. Its happened many times in recorded history.

It almost always starts with corruption by dependency. Making the majority of people or a population completely dependent upon the system for survival. It often creates a problem and then utilizes tactics that the only reason something couldn't be fixed is because their power isn't enough which is plausible; but its never enough and neglects the origin of the problem. History is full of examples where people have lied to gain more power.

Slow small corruptions over time that build into larger and larger corruptions, finally to laws without a legal basis of authority that can be applied arbitrarily to anyone the leaders or their delegates choose.

People living through these times normalize this behavior because they have no choice. Its a psychological coping mechanism. Eventually a destabilization event occurs breaking any dependencies for authority and you have fascism/authoritarianism, such as what happened in Germany starting with the Reichstag Fire (1933) that ultimately paved the way for WW2.

Timothy Snyder did a series of videos on Tyranny. You may find these interesting as a starting point for further self-directed education as he is a credible source, being a Yale Historian with background in the Holocaust and more recent history.

Most of what we are taught in school is incomplete in an intentional way, and misleads towards wrong viewpoints because we weren't provided all the appropriate information, nor were we biologically developed enough or trained to think critically and rationally.

Much is taught by rote prior to the age of reason and students conditioned for boredom as was done in the original compulsory education our education system was based off which originally came from Prussia to train obedient patriotic unthinking soldiers.

Our system is designed to train obedient workers. Critical thought is not what its designed to teach, they only teach what promotes an obedient worker which is why they don't teach you about money or other things that would help you be successful, success outcomes are only a secondary objective and that is a structured design.

> that's like every sysadmin's nightmare.

Not worst case scenario, but it definitely was up there.

I'll always remember it, both because nothing you normally had access for would work because no access, and my contingencies really paid off.

I had just come off a project fully automating configuration and deployment for our more common infrastructure components; auditing and meeting various security baselines.

Its nice seeing hard work you had just finished and tested in action working better than you thought.

Most of our time spent was ensuring all relevant data was migrated from the sprawl of endpoints to a central fileshare with integrity intact with no malware.

Entrypoint turned out to be one of the employees using a dropbox file-share. The previous admin had been directed to allow it by a person in upper management on a one-time basis for WFH. Their home PC had been infected and spread laterally. It was a brief blank stare/mental facepalm moment finding that out. Ultimately everything was back up and running, We made recommendations; and their IT wrapped everything else up.

While not titled as a cyber-security professional, I am a System Admin/Engineer who has worn that hat a few times when there was no one else available.

In my experience, it seems like vendor disclosures, and measures that might impact correcting vulnerable components are insufficient, and slow, if they happen at all.

The larger brands are getting pretty good about disclosing in a timely manner but you always have cost cutting happening unbenowst to you organizationally where inventory as you said isn't accounted for, and then those devices may or may not have disclosed vulnerabilities or had a fix within a reasonable time after public disclosure. Not vetted hardware but consumer, or semi-professonal brands that are much smaller.

I've run into areas where mitigations also were extremely costly because some simple circumstance was overlooked.

As an example, almost 8 years ago I was brought in to help a client who had suffered a ransomware attack where their previous IT staff were non-responsive and they were desperate.

They had Mcafee's DLP deployed organization wide, and the local DLP server that generated the unlock codes was among several other assets that had been encrypted but not documented or inventoried (so that didn't have a backup). The software product true to their word prevented even authorized system administrators from being able to make any mitigative changes without that unlock code which was not possible, their support for resolution was ineffective and useless. Even in safe mode, everything was locked down, and after exhausting all other options even accessing the system physically from a Linux live disk failed, the HDD would hang after trying to access certain parts of the disk (at an extremely low level). We were never able to figure out exactly what caused the hangs, but it happened regularly for long-running processes and we verified SMART passed. We had a guess that they were doing something funky with NTFS where separate files under a certain size get conglomerated into the same sector block which wasn't supported by Linux at the time, but we were never able to confirm definitively.

What could have been a few hour turnaround ended up turning into a week of downtime (where everyone was shut down, 10 days). Fortunately it was during the holidays which was their slowest time when they normally shut down for a week but it could have been much worse.

After exhausting options, we ended up having migrate data, wipe and reimage with almost a completely new infrastructure. We corrected a number of additional issues (misconfigurations) we found during the process but there was a good portion of time where we were just spinning our wheels with the vendor who was useless.

We went to contingency and stood up new infrastructure after we hit a certain threshold on man hours trying to work with them without any progress.

Yes, but the entity paying had to have constructive knowledge of their operations when they purchased them. A slap on the wrist is what they counted on to eliminate a competitor and get it cheap. If only there were clawback measures.

> mass shootings happen because ...

Unfortunately with regard to that point, you are naively mistaken, mass shootings happen because we as a people enforce gun-free zones and these extreme and malign individuals target those zones for the highest possible casualty count. Some of those shooters who were caught alive have admitted this.

When you have gun-free zones you have an area the shooter knows people will have no means of shooting back. There is plenty of propaganda to the contrary, but that is all it is; propaganda.

When was the last time you heard in the media all the times someone tried to do a mass shooting but died because someone nearby with a gun stopped them after the first person was shot. It rarely merits coverage.

The news doesn't even merit coverage most times aside from local coverage, but when a lot of people die its national, and pushing a gun control narrative.

Why don't they want people to have guns?

People with guns don't give up their liberty when tyrants and fascists try to tell them otherwise and take it, that is a core part of our American History.

Also we have a right to own and bear firearms that's written into the constitution. Do I need to tell you what upholding and enforcing laws that have no legal authority basis engenders for the system as a whole? It certainly would not be a democracy which follows the rule of law.

There are ways to get it done so it would comply with the rule of law, if people truly wanted that, but it requires constitutional amendments which frankly haven't happened and won't happen so long as there exists an educated and knowledgeable population that values their history.

FWIW, I think you need to learn more about your history and how to recognize propaganda to correct those deficiencies, otherwise you are just adding to harmful noise in a very Unamerican way.

> I think piracy is much closer to dying than people think it is.

I sincerely hope you are wrong because it engenders certain things which would indicate we have a very rough road ahead as a people.

Being able to record and save historically significant things and communicate about them when they are not offered to the general public in a way that can be saved for posterity is an incredibly important thing because it documents your history. We are looking at a black hole for at least the last 20 years.

There are news pieces that happened which I know and others my age noticed, about which cannot be found anywhere on the internet anymore because of the DMCA being used to remove references to it. These were historically significant and details things which just are no longer available. Without supporting evidence, people with a benefit to do so argue it never happened (deceitfully); when it did.

Additionally, while they won't say this, and I am not a lawyer so don't take this as legal advice. The courts and any law passed by congress are required to have a legal authority that is based in one of the fundamental documents, which does not violate those documents (in any way).

Many of the judges ruling on the DMCA cases have failed to address the actual coercive and documented abuses this legislation has been used for over the short time its been upheld. The supreme court recently refused to hear a case about it, and the legislation appears to lack legal authority because its being used to thwart innovation, control and limit free speech and discussion and other things, in violation of our first amendment rights as people; and when there is a lack of basis for authority it becomes null and void (as Thomas Paine would say in 1776), or unconstitutional.

When its upheld and enforced despite lacking a basis of authority it calls into question important aspects of credibility of the courts and the rule of law, and whether we live in a democracy or actually in a fascist state. Incidentally, enforcing law without basis has been done historically in fascist states like for example East Germany before the wall came down.

That in its entirety is very concerning to me because this should never happen except in the latter; and that likely means a lot of death is ahead for almost all of us because those dynamics cause inevitable outcomes, as all intolerable and coercive acts enforced through law do eventually.

> aren't relevant to running an eating disorder helpline

they are when you replace a human's activity with what's effectively a computation engine.

Those have fundamental limitations which are well known, and they did it anyway. Any reasonable professional in a position to advise should have known, there is really no excuse because this is such a fundamental limitation going all the way back to Claude Shannon and Turing. Its discussed regularly in computer science major related undergraduate coursework.

If you are going to use AI, you should be being advised by experts who are knowledgeable in the area especially when there is potential harm as it is safety critical.

fundamental limitation of computers, you run into the halting problem or decidability problem when you have same fixed inputs and multiple different outputs.

human's can handle multiple different meanings given the same inputs and provide a correct response.

I would not be surprised if that was the case. It was a monumentally stupid idea to fire the human workers for this particular application. No computer can hope to accurately respond in a way that isn't harmful at least some of the time.

Human's don't have that problem.

You are naive and misinformed. This is wrong with regards to about everything you just said.

Basal metabolic rate varies dramatically with the amount of lean muscle mass. You can rapidly lose lean muscle mass by having too high of a caloric deficit which is dependent on overall fat %. The less fat, the smaller the deficit.

Some people have metabolic disorders, others have allergies or sensitivities which cause inflammation that halt fat loss. This includes inflammation from leaky gut, or certain common gut-based infections that are almost impossible to get rid of like H. Pylori.

Physical activity's impact is almost neglible compared against diet and muscle mass.

Also a calorie of a food is not necessarily a calorie of the same food cooked differently, the caloric availability changes depending on preparation.

Unequivocally; yes, this is harmful. You are not a doctor, and should not be giving medical advice.

Neither am I but you certainly have not known or worked with people who have done this kind of lifestyle transition.

That level of calorie deficit requires medical supervision because the potential complications are life threatening. They don't say 'less', its 500-1000 calories.

Your kidneys, liver enzymes, and a number of other factors must be healthy before this can even be considered, and you must be using a nutritionally complete supplement each day for shakes and drinking a lot of water while also taking anti-gallstone medication. They run blood tests weekly to confirm this for as long as you are in the program. I've people who I've worked with who did this.

Some people develop gallstones on these low calorie diets, it gets stuck blocking the duct, requires surgery to correct. You can potentially die.

You can have a gallstone attack and other complications if you can't slowly ween yourself off the supervisory diet. Suddenly transitioning from no food to 3,000 calories in a hunger haze can cause your organs to shut down.

Ask a doctor, they'll tell you and set you right.

They had to shut down after being bankrupted by USG?