Punkie

All over the map: Barracuda, SkyHawk, Ironwolf, Constellation, Cheetah, etc…

Three companies, kept track, but not after I left. It was always funny to me that they bought out Atlas and Maxtor. “Of course they did. Why not dominate the market on shitty drives? lol” I am surprised they hadn’t bought Deskstar.

Yeah, but it’s Seagate. I have worked in data centers, and Seagate drives had the most failures of all my drives and somehow is still in business. I’d say I was doing an RMA of 5-6 drives a month that were Seagate, and only 4-5 a year Western Digital.

It’s the “not handling” part that gets us as kids. We knew better. Adults didn’t. In my case, I was in high school, but it was on a “Teacher workday, student holiday” we had each semester. I watched it live on NASA TV, which we had on channel UHF 55 in the DC area. Even the voice of mission control delayed about a minute or two. I remember thinking, “THAT didn’t look good…” but then they said nothing but normal speed and temp readings, so I thought it was just the angle of the chase plane. Only when the famous “forked cloud” appeared that the announcer said, “we have an apparent major malfunction,” or something.

I’d compare LLMs to a junior executive. Probably gets the basic stuff right, but check and verify for anything important or complicated. Break tasks down into easier steps.

Uber has been stuck at the same light for like, 20 minutes now. What is he DOING?

Skyr. Nice, Nordic name.

It’s awesome, actually, like a pun on the sound they make.

One of the things I have learned is that a lot of middle management don’t have tangible roles, so they make up for this by recognition, which is usually “presence.” So they have meetings to be seen, stay relevant, and look important. Like, how do you measure management as a product? It’s a social game, primarily. I’m not saying all or any large percentage of management is like this, but there are a LOT.

“What do you say you DO here, exactly…?” And they start to sweat.

Edit: Clarifying I know there ARE effective ways for an organization to do this, but that doesn’t mean they do or even know how :/

Also does anyone still port knock these days?

If they did, would we know?

Basic setup for me is scripted on a new system. In regards to ssh, I make sure:

• Root account is disabled, sudo only
• ssh only by keys
• sshd blocks all users but a few, via AllowUsers
• All ‘default usernames’ are removed, like ec2-user or ubuntu for AWS ec2 systems
• The default ssh port moved if ssh has to be exposed to the Internet. No, this doesn’t make it “more secure” but damn, it reduces the script denials in my system logs, fight me.
• Services are only allowed connections by an allow list of IPs or subnets. Internal, when possible.

My systems are not “unhackable” but not low-hanging fruit, either. I assume everything I have out there can be hacked by someone SUPER determined, and have a vector of protection to mitigate backwash in case they gain full access.

See, I think one of three scenarios might have happened:

• Luigi didn’t do it. He was framed and set up because out of the hundreds of prank tips, this guy looked “close enough.”
• Luigi did it, but the evidence was made up to make the case solid and the police look competent. Luigi wasn’t stupid, but he’s boned anyway.
• Luigi did it, and he really was that stupid.

As a writer, one of the aggravating tropes we have to follow is, “make the story believable,” when reality sometimes doesn’t align with “a good story.” Some criminals are really that stupid, and some armchair theory, based on decades of movies, books, and TV shows, you expect “hey, this is what they SHOULD have done is.” And they didn’t. It’s like when a chessmaster has to watch complete amateurs play chess. “Obvious strategies” are ignored, and basically both players are just not thinking past their last move.

I, too, have shitty wireless. In fact, for my work laptop, that’s exactly what I do. So much more reliable. Way too many wireless connections on too many channels close by.

Give them time to write it up! They police are having problems with the shared Google Doc permissions.

I would argue that as god’s creation, sentences like that made by mortals are the true test of faith: what you know to be true versus what some angry person tells you. I’d like to think if this mythos is real, that those that stayed openly gay, for example, and didn’t hurt anyone were given the gold star upon arrival to heaven like, “You passed! You passed the test of faith! I knew you could do it, I believed in you!” And those that hid their gayness or condemned others, “Aw… sorry buddy. better luck next time, okay?”

Also, I keep seeing people quoting stuff outside of the bible like biblical truth, like The Rapture, and stuff from Dante’s Inferno which is, at best, Bible fan-fic.

I know this is a joke meme and all, but I get a pang about the “I keep having to feed it Benadryl” part because, while funny, some people are like that with kids and pets and that makes me sad.

I have been using Kubuntu as a daily driver for almost 10 year now, and never regretted it. I had one Windows box for things like special cases (like dumb website forms that won’t let me use Linux), Pearson Vue exams, and edge cases related to work, but it’s on standby as a secondary system I RDP into. I am not a gamer, so I didn’t need it for that. I saved so much money not having to buy hardware in the last decade or so.

Sadly, Windows 11 won’t work on anything I have (TPM issues, too old), so I recently got a cheap Windows 11 laptop before the tariffs hit and I pay more for dumb Windows-only reasons.

Linux all the way, man. Gave me a career, a life, and my hardware back.

One of the buildings around here had a piece of art commissioned (?) for their lobby, and it was “Georgia O’Keeffe” -esque. Not really an orchid, but an “abstract” of that style. Well, over the years, it sun-faded, and the colors that stood out it was pretty obvious what it looked like. Most common joke was “is this where my gynecologist’s office is?” Eventually, the building owner had it removed and replaced with sailboats.

Layoffs are not bad press. Not to the shareholders, the only ones who matter to these types. I used to think “oh, layoffs mean the company isn’t doing so good,” but shareholders see “they reduced cost but lost no customers, thus increasing value of the company should it be sold.”

Zenni was a game changer. I could get their top-of-the-line titanium frames with glass and auto-tinting for like $130 from them, or get the most basic birth control plastic frames with acrylic from my optometrist for no less than $900. Most of my glasses from Zenni are $80 or less, and yes, I have to wait 4-6 weeks. The optometrists are super-upset about this, too. Like some refuse to give me my prescription or pupillary distance, with high-pressure sales tactics and dire warnings. I have been told I’d ruin my eyes with “toxic metals” and “frames that will burn sunlight into my face and retinas.”

Well. It’s been nearly 20 years, and none of that has happened.