theshadowknows

I was thinking the same thing. Would it be feasible to hide dozens or even hundreds of small pieces of code that, when deployed enough times, operate together as one large piece of malware. Say a few lines of code here that cause some memory to leak in a server context. A few over there that cause the server to occasionally reach out to some public destination and a few others that, if they should so happen to be reached out to will know the origin is poisoned and set in motion some sort of attack…it would be the opposite approach to highly targeted attacks. But, if we have tools that offer up code snippets then surely we’re going to have people blindly using them just through inexperience. So it seems plausible at least that it could act as an attack vector.

I dunno. NSO group is extremely capable. I know a lot of folks go back and forth on the “if you don’t want X vendor to shut you down then go build it yourself” and for various reasons. But in the case of NSO group I feel like AWS cutting them off is probably more of an annoyance than anything else. They’re gonna be ok.

My first thought on this is...wow, $4,000? The guy obviously isn't trying to monetize this extension but if he was that's insulting..he could make more money flipping burgers..

My second thought on this is...ouch, this is the same kind of stuff I'm tasked with working on in my present job. As I've mentioned elsewhere I work for a...fairly massive...corporate entity in the United States and I deal specifically with customer and member data. The majority of that data is highly protected and regulated, but the tiny little bit that isn't...we're working (and spending a ton of money) on "enriching" it from other data sources..and I absolutely hate it. This is a new direction for the company since there was a lot of executive leadership turnover in the past two years. But it makes me feel sick every time I see a new meeting pop up that involves Experian or Neustar or some other data broker. And the work on mining customer data from one part of the business to the other, people brushing off my objections because "look we already have legal approval, you need to get on the train before it leaves the station"...I hate every second of every day of it.

My mother's dad died of stomach cancer, my mothers mom had a brain tumor and died of organ failure, my mother was an alcoholic and died of liver failure, my father was an alcoholic and died from massive organ trauma (he made a series of bad decisions in rapid succession), my father's dad had multiple heart attacks and died of complications from MDS, my father's mother is still alive. There's a history of mental illness, cancer, diabetes, and overall poor health on both sides of my family....

That said, I'm taking as good care of myself as I can without going to the extreme. I don't want to deny my one short, brief life the pleasures that are here to be experienced but I also don't want to artificially shorten my (already stacked against) life.

I have decided however that I won't be dying in pain in some hospital if I can at all help it. I've watched it happen. I'll either live somewhere that assisted is allowed, or I'll FEED MYSELF TO SHARKS...something, anything, other than the slow waste of a hospital.

I need to work on my memory and brain health overall because it acts sporadically. I can remember my first memory...I was maybe 2 or 3 and I was playing with blocks on the floor of our living room and I thought to myself "have I ever talked before?" and then I thought "I should ask mom, but it would be weird to talk while also asking if I've ever done it before.."..it's a very confusing memory...

But half the time my short term memory is nearly useless so I have to write everything down. So much static from my internal monologs, constantly talking over each other. It's exhausting sometimes. So I just write down everything..what I'm about to do, what I was just doing, what I just thought to do next week...all goes in the notebook.

So this makes me wonder what the smallest modern OS is that’s usable for daily tasks (browsing, email, some light not taking). And also for more rigorous work tasks (programming, video editing, sound editing). I’d be curious to see what can be done on-device. I bet there’s some cool stuff…time to google!

You’re absolutely correct. I can write solid C :) but I make ok salary (155 base) and the vast majority of my work is doing architecture diagrams and writing reference code, most often in js. I also write a lot of sql.

I never commit something that I can easily google (with a high quality solution) to memory

As a hobby I want to learn a lisp. Where should I begin? :)

This seems like a great use case for a mobile app that can use ML to "clean" content from video like that

Yeah...but come on...it's a square!

There’s that line from COD that I’m sure is from somewhere else - amateurs practice until they can get it right, professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong. That’s sort of how I look at it. It’s served me well so far.

I'll be honest. I was in college when the iPhone dropped. I think I was my freshman year. I saw a few people with them and I was like this thing will never catch on. I had a Blackberry 8830 and I thought it was so amazing. And I never thought touch keyboards would take off in such a big way.

Obviously I was mistaken and I've had multiple iPhones now. That said for all their advancement I still, once in a while, look at the BlackBerry Passport and consider buying one...just because it's a square :)

They're a little bit ahead of us on the Fortune list, but not far. I've heard horror stories from people who work there, too. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this life..I just want to build cool and useful stuff!

One of the systems that my team is the owner of is our member facing communications platform - email, sms, mobile push, paper, IVR. We had a meeting a few weeks ago where we were going through budget for an internal client to onboard - we were going to vastly simplify and expand their capabilities. But when they saw the sticker price (only platform utilization, none of the resources on my team are "funded.") they blew up! "I can send email from my outlook for free!" ... "My kids send messages to each other all day and it doesn't cost a thing!!" ...so...the project died right there. It's so crazy to me.

That sounds amazing. Honestly I like product "stuff." I'm a product guy..I want to work on building things, making them work well, adding value to our customers. And when I started here it felt like we were doing just that. We augmented the customer experience with useful tech, we built out a great platform that (so far) has been scaleable and expanded the capabilities of tons of other teams. But the past several months things have changed from a partnership to "do this because we say so and we have bigger budget than you so we'll just buy contractors to do it if you don't." And I can't thrive in that kind of an environment.

I'm working on it :) I had 5 interviews with a great (seeming) company last week and I'm hoping against hope to get an answer this week...

My very first "real" job was working for a startup. I loved it until the day that I didn't. I worked with two really smart engineers, they showed me the ropes in building real software. We were collaborative and they didn't just dismiss my ideas out of hand. I learned a whole lot in 6 months, lessons I still use today. But then one morning I woke up to "the news"...our largest investor had gone bankrupt and the funding evaporated over night. We still got paid a few more months but work slowed and then stopped. Then we were told we couldn't get paid anymore and we all moved on.

I dont fault the startup for it but it certainly sucked. I've not worked for a startup since though sometimes it does feel like something I'd enjoy. On the flip side...

Currently, I work for a fortune 5 company. I work with some of the brightest people in the world on projects that move the needle every single day. Yet, the team that I specifically work on is constantly strapped for cash. Our services are used across the enterprise, we enable the company to save millions and we do it in a scalable way. But we are told that we can't have "enterprise" funding which means that we need to scrap and claw money from the people that use our services just to keep them online. There's so much politics that it gets in the way of the work and, again since were not funded, we can't hire FTEs and usually can't even get work from an agency unless its funded from "a client."

All that to say...I really, really hope that my next job has a better balance. I know that no job will ever be perfect. But I'd love to have a balance between "working with bright people who support the work that we're doing but without guaranteed funding" and "working for a soulless megacorp with infinite money that wont spend it but that offers job security."

I don’t really socialize that often. And I sleep sporadically. I do eat well enough. I try to eat lots of vegetables and drink lots of water. Salads are my go to.

The biggest reason I work so much is that the team I’m on is very small and I’m the “sr architect” which sounds considerably fancier than it is. In reality I’m the architect and the engineer and the prod support agent and the integration and business architect. Because my team is not considered essential we do not have budget to hire more FTEs but because our “internal clients” ARE considered essential we are basically at their mercy. And I see other teams in the company get descoped every month. So I’ve been trying to keep the workload handled so that my team doesn’t all get fired. But I can’t do it anymore which is why I’m trying to leave. Had 6 rounds of interviews with our biggest competitor over the past two weeks and I think they all went well. So hopefully in a couple of days I’ll be able to slap down my two weeks, burn my never used PTO, and hope for better days in a new org.

I came to the realization a while back that I only have maybe…4 friends other than my wife.

When I moved and left for college I was married already and most of my friends were not. My wife and I weren’t big into the clubbing thing so old friends sort of fell away. We did both make some friends in college, some mutual and some exclusive. But there were social factors that made that difficult - mainly we were very, very poor and were often embarrassed to have people over or go out since we couldn’t afford to. A small handful of those friendships live on in my wife’s social media but I have no social media footprint.

After college we both worked and that’s where I picked up the friends I have today. Two (now former) coworkers and a former boss. We have an ongoing text chat and we’re pretty open about real stuff. As luck would have it, both my former boss and I moved to the same state for new jobs and live fairly close. So the four of us (we and our wives) hang out on occasion.

At my current job I’ve picked up one more friend with whom I talk regularly about non work things. But I’m unsure how long that friendship will last as we’re both seeking new jobs, she’s leaving in a week and I’ll (hopefully) be leaving shortly thereafter. Hopefully it’ll last, but who knows.

My wife is better at making friends than I am. She’s joined several local groups around her interests and is slowly building a new social circle. But for me I tend to work from maybe 4am to 7pm and often during the weekend. So by the time I shut everything off at night I’m just so exhausted that I don’t have much more energy to do anything.

I make my living helping big ass corporation, inc connect all the systems to use doodads like these :)

Purchasing member data from data brokers. I can’t stand it. There’s almost never a legitimate business reason to do it. It’s invasive, aggressive, useless, expensive…anyway I make new enemies every week when I push back (less and less respectfully every time.) but it’s something that I feel strongly about, and if my bosses want blind loyalty they can fire me and get a dog

agree 100% - it’s easy to fall into the “I’m the best at what I do and no one does it better” mentality when you kick ass a few times…then it’s easy to fall into the “omg I suck and no one has ever sucked worse” mentality when you take a few hits :)

But yeah I think the company learned a pretty good lesson in that maybe it’s easy enough to fill a seat but replacing someone is a different story. And replacing -everyone- is a whole different genre xD

One of my former bosses said “everyone is replaceable” whenever anyone left. Which is trueish I suppose. But when our director and sr analyst left within the same week and then I put in my two weeks they begged me to stay at least until the team was full again since at that point I was the sr most person on the team. I did not stay. Then later I learned the entirety of the rest of the team walked out in one day, as they had all coordinated new jobs together.

Happened to me too!

The only time this bit me so far is that once I had a weekly recurring for…two years. And one day, for some reason, my phone started RSVPing to it again. Except it was every instance of it that had passed…blew up my bosses inbox and made my phone useless for about an hour. It was the weirdest thing. Funny though.

My handwriting is so bad. I’m 35 years old. And I try so hard. I slow down and hold the pencil/pen/stylus differently. I try making characters in different ways. And no matter what I do my handwriting goes from terrible to childlike and back. It’s embarrassing honestly.

"We're going to build a universal lightening component that all of our orgs can use! It'll be easy!"

It’s every couple of months that someone at my job comes along and says hey give me access to this data because my team is building their own marketing email tool. I always ask them who they know at google so that they can call and get unbanned from gmail. So far no one ever has an answer…email is tough and people need to be very careful when they try to do it at scale. That’s not to say that projects like this aren’t great. They are. But enterprise scale email is very complicated especially in regulated industries like finance and healthcare.

same! And it’s senseless there’s no need for it whatsoever!