Punkie

When eventually washed off, the aerogel is handily broken down by soil microbes.

I am not going to claim to be an expert on any of this BUT that wording sounds suspiciously like bullshit. Maybe it’s not, but it’s one of those phrases that sounds like when vitamin companies claim that more B12 has shown to fix whatever ails you. Or “our plastic is environmentally friendly: 100% recyclable, and breaks down into teeny micro-particles over time, and gets absorbed by the sea life like ordinary sand…”

That explains why it’s so hot outside.

I have had two tech jobs like that, even before COVID, starting in 2016. The first time, it was a company that outgrew their workspace. They put us in ‘rent-an-office’ spaces for a bit, and then my boss started working from home a few days a week. Then he allowed me to. We moved to a new office, but it was always empty in my section. That was fine, too, but the commute was terrible, so I started doing 2 days a week, then once a week, then a few times a month. I rarely saw my other coworkers in person, and nobody said anything aloud.

The next job started because of COVID, and when they started doing RTO, they also wanted to do “hot desking” (no assigned seating) and open office plans, and I was not having that. I was not going to work in a “cafeteria” like setting. So I got contracted work and have worked from home 100% for several years now. Nobody has office space, and we work all over the world to collaborate. I get paid very well.

I hope i never had to go back to an office. I reach retirement age in about 15 years, and I am hoping to make it.

Trying getting out of that in your 50s with arthritis setting in. Oof.

I think this is one of the extreme examples of revenge instead of rehabilitation. It’s a prime breeding ground for control freaks who want to punish those that break the rules, and will stop at nothing to try to accomplish this by dealing out damage via a morality defense. And I think a lot of parents know this, at some level, as revenge for not conforming to their definition of normalcy. “Retribution for being bad.” Like mob mentality.

In the bible you get permission to declare your teenager wayward, take them outside the city gates and stone them to death.

I was like, “Really…?” But sure enough:

Deuteronomy 21:18-21

If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them. Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place. And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

… k.

We had a case not too long ago where someone “recruiting” for one of the GAFAM who was stealing PII by “accepting” applicants, getting their IDs and personal info for supposed employment, and when these people showed up for work, the real company had never heard of them. I think they got 30 people last time.

Mental health never being addressed, so we’re also too tired.

Probably HR (or the NCS equivalent) never told the right people. I am not saying this is actually what happened, but a lot of IT bemoan the fact they are never told some rando employee was fired because HR neglects to inform them. Sometimes it takes months to discover, and even with a 90 day password/login lockout, some halfway decent admin could get around this by secretly building a back door, and using the messed up communication and politics between departments to hide this. Even in the 1990s, I saw people put in “time bombs” in their code that “if such and such is not updated in 6 months, run destructo-script A.”

But imagine someone like Kandula Nagaraju here. Worked in QA, probably did a great jobs with some skills, but had the personality of swallowing broken glass. He was terminated in October 2022 due to “poor work performance,” which could mean anything. “Not a team player.” Or maybe he really was an idiot: I mean, a smart person would have a conniption, but get employed elsewhere and then slam his former company at parties. “Those NCS folks didn’t know what they had with me!” But this guy was probably someone with some anger management issues, probably a jerk, and possibly stupid. He might have had revenge fantasies, and set up a small virtual server posing as a backup code mirror. But outside the audits, it allowed ssh from the outside, and hid it through a knockd daemon. Or maybe only launched ssh at certain hours before shutting it down again. Silently working away in a sea of virtual servers with little to no updated documentation. He gets in, has internal access, and runs a script with admin credentials because they don’t rotate their AWS keys/secrets quickly enough. Or didn’t even know he was let go.

After Kandula’s contract was terminated and he arrived back in India, he used his laptop to gain unauthorised access to the system using the administrator login credentials. He did so on six occasions between Jan 6 and Jan 17, 2023.

That’s embarrassing to the company. Not only did he get in, but SIX TIMES after he was let go. he probably knew what order to run the delete commands (like, say, an aws “terminate-instances” cli command from a primary node), and did so one by one, probably during hours with the least amount of supervision, where the first few alerts would take hours to get someone in the monitoring chain to wake an admin. Given his last day was in November, and he got back in January, the admins probably thought their 90 access credential rotation was “good enough,” but he got in on his 80th day or whatever.

I know this because I have had to do triage when a former contractor did this to a company I worked for. But instead of wiping out instances, he opened a new set of cloud accounts from the master account, put them in an unmonitored region (in this case, Asia), and spun up thousands of instances to run bitcoin mining. Only because AWS notified us of “unusual traffic” were we made aware at all, and this guy knew his shit and covered his tracks very well. He did it at a speed that could have only been automated. Thankfully, AWS did not charge us the seven figure amount that this activity amassed in just three days.

Pro Cavity Creeps agenda:

I remember hearing that some Hollywood contracts require that if you sign up for some studio, you must make X amount of films. Big stars get to chose those films to some degree, but once in a while, they have to do “a stinker” to end the contract as “X amount of films done, okay?” or something. Contractual Obligation and all. This film feels like a dumping ground of a lot of those contractual obligation hires from the trailer alone.

The weird thing is this is the exact argument many people give for socialized medicine: the wait times. “Imagine if the hospitals were run with the efficiency of the DMV. A,trak, or the Post Office,” meant as a negative slant. “Imagine if FedEx was the only game in town, and to mail letter was $10, and to receive mail and packages was a $25/mo service charge, plus fees for every item delivered.”

“The price of being right” enters into this as well. It can be very frustrating when you let something go because the minor details do not matter, but being 100% technically correct has hazards of its own in a social narrative.

I can see that being very possible. You see this when taxes are levied to “improve something” and then that money doesn’t go to that something in a directly helpful way. And then the budget that is the main staple of survivability of that something is kept static because of the “new influx.”

For example, say that you have a toll road increase to help the infrastructure of your roads. Say your Annual Budget for Transportation is $50mil for 2021. In 2022, you requested $60mil. You decide to implement tolls in new ways and increase tolls in other ways (like fines, mileage taxes, and so on) to make up that shortfall. This brings in an additional $10mil, let’s say, in 2022. The revenue is forwarded to 2023. But in 2023, you actually need $80mil because of the two years of shortfalls where it stayed at $50mil, yet costs continued to increase. That $10mil from 2022 now puts you $10 mil behind in 2023. The fact that the previous budget needed steady increases were ignored because “well, we’ll just make things more expensive to make up 2022’s shortfalls of the $60mil request.”

That’s IF that $10mil isn’t siphoned for other things. Fresh money brings fresh ways to spend it. Grifters via backroom contracts to “fix roads” that go over budget with nothing to show for it. So these new fees and increases actually made things worse due to no oversight.

So yeah, I could totally see UBI being siphoned off by similar things.

The thing is that for a majority of cases, this is all one needs to know about git for their job. Knowing git add, git -m commit “Change text”, git push, git branch, git checkout , is most of what a lone programmer does on their code.

Where it gets complicated real fast is collaboration on the same branch. Merge conflicts, outdated pulls, “clever shortcuts,” hacks done by programmers who “kindof” know git at an advanced level, those who don’t understand “least surprise,” and those who cut and paste fixes from Stackexchange or ChatGPT. Plus who has admin access to “undo your changes” so all that work you did and pushed is erased and there’s no record of it anymore. And egos of programmers who refuse any changes you make for weird esoteric reasons. I had a programmer lead who rejected any and all code with comments “because I like clean code. If it’s not in the git log, it’s not a comment.” And his git comments were frustratingly vague and brief. “Fixed issue with ssl python libs,” or “Minor bugfixes.”

I was burned afoul by a former admin who, instead of diagnosing why a mail service was failing, labeled a script as a /etc/cron.d file entry as “…” (three dots) which, unless you were careful, you’d never notice in an "ls " listing casually. The cron job ran a script with a similar name which he ran once every 5 minutes. It would launch the mail service, but simultaneous services were not allowed to run on the same box, so if it was running, nothing would happen, although this later explained hundreds of “[program] service is already running” errors in our logs. It was every 5 minutes because our solarwinds check would only notice if the service had been down for 5 minutes. The reason why the service was crashing was later fixed in a patch, but nobody knew about this little “helper” script for years.

Until one day, we had a service failover from primary to backup. Normally, we had two mail servers servers behind a load balancer. It would serve only the IP that was reporting as up. Before, we manually disabled the other network port, but this time, that step was forgotten, so BOTH IPs were listening. We shut down the primary mail service, but after 5 minutes, it came back up. The mail software would sync all the mail from one server to the other (like primary to backup, or reversed, but one way only). With both up, the load balancer just sent traffic to a random one.

So now, both IPs received and sent mail, along with web interface users could use. But now, with mail going to both, it created mass confusion, and the mailbox sync was copying from backup to primary. Mail would appear and disappear randomly, and if it disappeared, it was because backup was syncing to primary. It was slow, and the first people to notice were the scant IMAP customers over the next several days. Those customers were always complaining because they had old and cranky systems, and our weekend customer service just told them to wait until Monday. But then more and more POP3 customers started to notice, and after 5 days had passed, we figured out what had happened. And we only did Netbackups every week, so now thousands of legitimate emails were lost for good over 3000 customers. A lot of them were lawyers.

Oof.

Disclosure: I work from home and enjoy it immensely. I never want to work in an office again.

So sorry rich people are going to make less money off of their real estate investments, boo fucking hoo, how about adapting to technological and cultural changes better?

There is that, and some rich people need to be boiled in their own pudding. But this affects all downtown businesses, even mom and pop shops. People will just flee like urban flight did when people went to the suburbs. What’s left? I hear about “well, turn office buildings into residential space,” but the logistics of that with fire codes, building codes, and urban planning are not drop in replacements. They can be done, but at great cost.

We’re looking at an urban decay beyond what we’ve planned for. Minneapolis is terrified to become another Detroit or Gary Indiana.

While still a stupid thing to say, I am concerned that this quote was mildly taken out of context. It was made at a business luncheon, where he was addressing downtown business owners. I believe “you” in “you become a loser” meant “if people work from home, you downtown business owners become the losers here.” But yeah, “nasty cat blanket” is a classist and elitist statement from someone who has a stereotype image in their head.

Link to that part of the speech, sorry it’s from a FOX affiliate.

https://www.fox9.com/news/minneapolis-mayor-says-remote-work-turns-you-into-a-loser.amp

Not just LinkedIn profiles: there was a case out here near DC a while ago where a well known company leased out their function space for training meetings. Using a compromised company account, a set of scammers set up some fake recruitment profiles, leased out the meeting space for “software training,” and did some “mass hiring” where 30 individuals had their credentials scanned and duplicated. The effect was someone from the recruiting company was contacting you, you had a face-to-face where you got offered an in-person, you showed up to their offices, and got a “job offer pending a background check,” with a date of hire in official-looking emails. You sent in your SSN, copies of your passport and driver’s licence, and after a few weeks, they tell you to show up for orientation. Only, the day these people showed up, the company was confused and had never heard of you. The people you supposedly spoke to had never heard of you. And your identity was stolen, and huge loans and charges started showing up in your credit report.

Yikes.

A friend of mine with daughters told me that he couldn’t see the appeal in teen girls, because “I have two; they don’t even know how to wipe properly.”