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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • When I was younger my grandmother died of cancer. She wanted to pass at home and we lived with her.

    For months she just declined, until she was bed-bound in the living room, having carers and family members feed her, clean her after she pooped on herself, sometimes randomly screaming in pain, having nightmares, and was largely incoherent. In the last week she didn’t have the strength to eat and her doctors told us to just stop feeding her. She had a death rattle that lasted for days and echoed through the house every time she breathed, until finally something just gave out.
    It was not dignified. It was not peaceful. It was deeply traumatizing. I wish we could cut her suffering short somehow – for us as much as her.



  • I was going to ask “What’s your point?” but then I realized that this post isn’t even anti-AI.

    The text of this post highlights anticompetitive business practices that have nothing to do with OpenAI’s business model.
    Straight up - they can’t even use the silicon wafers.

    This is just market manipulation to harm their competition and possibly engage in stock market fuckery. (Micron, which stands to make billions, is largely owned by U.S. based wealth management companies.)

    OpenAI and its business partners stand atop a massive bubble that they are desperate to not have pop. I’m horrified, but kind of impressed at the maneuver.

    You’re throwing stones in the wrong direction.




  • I feel like I would empathize with the situation you describe, but I’m so cynical, I just imagine the father telling the frightened child that the friendly ice cream man was hiding a terrible secret - that he is a criminal and was here illegally; that he is taking jobs from people who need the work, and will then use the nearest white homeless person as an example of the type of person who could be working, in clean clothes, and not struggling on the streets if only we facilitate this vision of a white Christian ethno-state.

    And while that narrative is complete and utter nonsense, it is a common one, and it’s one that impressionable children believe and adopt as a core part of their worldview. Many never recover from that intellectual poisoning.


  • Everybody hates the government, but that take is not applicable.

    Reading the incident report -
    A privileged user got spearphished into downloading a compromised system administration tool. After the compromised tool was detected by industry standard (and modern) intrusion detection software and removed, the backdoor it installed, which was not fixed, was (eventually) used to install a keylogger. Shortly thereafter, another privileged user had a keylogger installed. Afterward, the harvested credentials were used to create further compromises in their network and to move laterally throughout it.

    The age of the equipment or software is not a factor when your admin accounts get compromised. The user that got compromised should have known better, but they literally failed one thing - double checking the veracity of the download website. They didn’t surrender credentials, or fall for any direct attack. It’s not really a government bad, private industry good sort of thing. Heck, if that had happened to a non-admin user, the attack wouldn’t have been possible.


  • The why is sort of at the limits of my knowledge. I can tell you a ‘close enough’ what, though.

    By default, Windows tries to install programs to the program files directory, but that requires admin, which triggers user account control. However, apps that do not require admin to install or run can still be installed to the users profile. Clicking cancel from a UAC prompt will just try to install the program locally instead of for all users.

    My assumption is that many system administrators believed UAC was enough, or that programs installing locally (as in, just for that user) and not requiring admin were not a big deal.




  • A few years ago I noticed an annoyance with a soundbar I had. After allowing it onto my WiFi network so we could stream music to it, it still broadcast the setup WiFi network.

    While dorking around one day, I ran a port scan on my network and the soundbar reported port 22 (ssh) was open. I was able to log in as root and no password.
    After a moment of “huh, that’s terrible security.” I connected to the (publicly open) setup network, ssh’d in, and copied the wpa_supplicant.conf file from the device to verify it had my WiFi info available to anyone with at least my mediocre skill level. I then factory reset the device, never to entrust it with any credentials again.


  • And it’s an act of constant, willful effort by yourself and your community.

    One neighbor is a rental, they are a large immigrant family and are barely getting along. Property owner lives out of country. Another neighbor thought it would be a fun idea to feed neighborhood stray cats. They wound up creating a very healthy breeding family of raccoons out the run-down garage of the rental. For years their offspring have wreaked havoc in our neighborhood. Every fall I’ve had to call a pest control company to trap the tiny raccoons that are small enough to climb downspouts (the big ones aren’t) and destroy the siding and soffits of my neighbors houses. The cat food guy moved away, I figured out how to occlude the raccoons from my downspouts with ample and unsightly flashing, and along with other neighbors, have built or repaired fencing in in our backyards (mostly because of pets and trespassing neighborhood kids, honestly).
    It seems like the raccoon misadventure has finally concluded. I’m now stuck with damaged soffits that squirrels have moved into (on account of a looming walnut tree that lives in a neighbors yard and is so large it overhangs my roof), and a repair estimate that was $5k a year ago, when I had the garage roof redone but wasn’t sure I’d gotten the raccoon problem licked, so I didn’t want to proceed with those repairs. Who knows what it’ll be now. … yay.






  • I have an FDM printer (Ender 3 clone) that is mostly 2020 aluminum extrusion as the frame. A few years ago I found some 2020 on sale and built a set of shelves for my wife’s plants out of it. (Now - I know. It’s not the most economical use of materials, but it was the middle of winter, and I didn’t want to go work in the garage. Plus the 2020 was on sale.) It’ll support a slew of plants over a 4-foot span (~1.2m) without any sagging or other concerns. It can be wobbly side to side, but that’s a matter of bracing and connectors.