Elias Thorne, goblins and ghouls, is there somewhere all these “sticky topics” have been aggregated?

“no, I prefer my brain to stay asleep thank you. asleep, smooth, and pristinely unwrinkled.”

Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

Yeah, why would you ever hang those upside down unless that’s what you were going for? Or you could just cut or snap off the handles.

Or you’re a fan of good music.

… who can also tell the incoming weather with their knee

God, I was just enjoying some cyberpunk-adjacent media yesterday and laughed at the satire of an in universe news outlet complaining about “anticonsumerist terrorism”.

Something something torment nexus

Are you high right now? It’s a shit post in the shit posting community. I took it as a joke about how “sooper serious” the DARE program took itself while being entirely toothless and not particularly educational.

::|:;

Yes, but. Big but.

The devs of the games included in that email signed off on it before it went out. The version the devs were shown had no “runes” included.

GOG has acknowledged that those runes can display on some devices distinctly as the symbol for the SS, so they did not send this email to subscribers subscribed in the German language. Instead of just using a different fucking symbol, or not using it twice in a row.

As far as I understand it, those are pretty random runes, not specifically Slavic at all.

Taken as a whole, it shows that they had some idea of how this would appear, and they went through with it anyway, for no obvious benefit.

Not a good look.

“Fun” fact: Windows is finally just now, in the year of our lord 2026, trying to release some updates as “live”. As in not requiring reboot.

It’s going better than you’d expect, but still far worse than they have any excuse for.

I have two friends who first met because one was this girl’s “platonic cuddle buddy” and the other was her fuckbuddy. Neither knew she was effectively getting half the relationship from the other and they both wanted a “full” relationship with her until they both showed up at an event she was at and it came out. When they found out they both “dumped” her and became friends.

I can only assume there’s a different backdoor for 10 that just hasn’t been published. Even if there isn’t, Windows defaults to backing the key up to the attached Microsoft account. You think they’d ever tell intelligence agencies to come back with a warrant for that?

Just use Veracrypt folks.

Wait, has anyone ever seen Nigel Thornberry and Princess Diana in the same room?

Why that minion got bedroom eyes?

Works with toddlers too.

How else are people going to know how to navigate them?

That plus the ever growing push for device linked personal ID on personally owned device feels like the real end goal. Governments can already snoop all web traffic. Now they want to close the gap on device level surveillance by pushing more and more people towards renting virtual devices with traceable payment methods. For people who don’t, device link to personal ID means they no longer have any of that mess of having to prove ownership or who took the action.

Removing the tinfoil hat though, I really hope this causes cloud resource cost to drop through the floor.

Groups like the ones pushing data centers can and do literally hire people to figure out how to get in the politicians’ good graces, convince the politicians it is not only a good idea but the best idea, stoke the politicians’ ego(s) such that they think they know best/better than the people they supposedly represent, and then literally train the politicians on how they can do an end run around their constituents to get things passed by the letter of the law but clearly not the intent of the law.

I know Louis Rossman can be a controversial figure due to how he communicates things, but he’s been doing a good job exposing how Flock surveillance cameras are getting passed/governmentally funded in shady ways in numerous jurisdictions where they have negative public support. It would be silly to expect that the tactics they are using are also not in use by the much larger forces with deeper pockets behind all these data center pushes.

I absolutely have less than zero respect for politicians, but I seriously cannot imagine living a life almost entirely surrounded by people deeply trained to manipulate my emotions, sense of self, and self validation towards corporate ends. Beyond all the obvious life experience/world view differences due to wealth and socioeconomic strata, that’s fucking terrifying.

People can work around a horrifying amount of mess for a dizzying amount of time before it all comes crumbling down due the wrong thing occurring at the right time.

All of these examples are from finance companies, mostly banks. Not all my stories, these include stuff from friends in the field.

I know a place that had no documentation on access revocation for >30 third party systems.

Another with no Identity and Access Management policy until the pandemic. Service accounts with god level access? Go ahead and set an 8 character password with no expiration date, and never change it after 20+ employees who know it leave.

One place with software that sits installed on computers within reach of the public where every client copy includes a password decryption function in a file that you can copy out of the client install and then just call it from whatever program you write. Yeah, you still need read access to the user database’s password field, but this was software that employees used to interact with bank accounts. With trivially reversible decryption.

That last software was slated to retire over a decade ago, and last I heard was being kept alive by the finance company paying for source code access and maintaining their own edited version themselves. The last time my friend talked about it a year or two ago, the software was just shedding its reliance on Internet Explorer and shifting to Edge.

Some federal processes and laws still require fax communications for various financial shit behind the scenes.

Do what you can to steer out and away, keep your hands off it/don’t perpetuate it, have a threshold for “fuck it, not my problem to fix”, have another threshold for “fuck it, let it burn or they won’t learn”, have a third for “fuck it, I’m running before this eats me”, and always always always cover your ass. In writing, hard copy somewhere you control and work doesn’t.

Ultimately, remember that companies don’t reward heroics. Unless you can quantify your improvements in manager-speak, it won’t even register to them. They don’t give awards out for burning yourself alive to keep the engines running for another day. They give out penalties when your changes result in temporary setbacks during adjustments to the new normal.

There are many, many, many people in management and elsewhere that do not learn until they’ve been bit in the ass (if they are capable of learning at all). If you eliminate the friction before they feel it, they won’t know you’ve done anything at all. You want to look good, that’s how you move up. Let some things fall. Let some things break, especially when you know the fix is relatively easy and no one wants to take responsibility to ok it before SHTF.

A ton of this job is managing people, at least as much as it is managing complex systems. Not to be sociopathic, never forget the people are people, but start looking at corporate interactions and politics like you might look at a complicated system with no or little documentation.

Thankfully the fediverse is still small enough that blocking people has a noticable effect. On reddit, for every person you block there’s 4 more to take their place.

Uh… uh… It was kind of an… interesting set piece in that awful World War Z movie? They have… a lot of… sand? Um… a third. A third. Shit. The Mossad seem to be a very… effective… organization?