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.

You should have a look at some of the official PowerShell scripts they’ve made to assist with managing, installing, and decommissioning Exchange Servers.

One had the word group misspelled consistently the entire way through it. Another had a wonderful comment noting that an internal function (to manage something with AD permissions or deep internals of the Exchange Server) that looked misspelled was in fact spelled correctly, because the command had a typo in the real name of it.

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.

If you’re on Lemmy, I’ve expect a certain level of tech awareness to begin with, so why would you ever use “raw” Chrome over one of the many de-googled forks?

I’m not even pushing for Firefox here, just use UnGoogled Chromium or something.

Anime Email was a mistake

That was always my assumption of the end game. You have the system prompts, an advertising bias prompt layer over top, then the user prompts.

“Naturally worded” advertising that doesn’t immediately appear to be advertising and searching using natural language always seemed to be the biggest use cases for LLMs to me, considering they can’t be relied on to output accurate info.

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.

Who the hell watched Psycho-Pass and thought it was a good idea?

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?

Soft, not as much as a gummy bear though. Closer to a skittles without the hard shell. Or a non-sticky starburst. They pretty much taste like stale sugar.

Does the blue haired one just… not have a name?

Yeah, people seriously underestimate the costs of elder care.

Gimme those big ol Jitties

Doctor, there’s something off with today’s dose.

AI writes essays for you

Complains about no job you studied for existing

AI writes for you

you studied for?

I think I see the problem here.

More seriously, most people don’t end up working what they studied for. And the job market absolutely does suck.

Garry nuked the Facepunch forums

How in the FUCK is this the first time I’m hearing about this? It’s been over a decade since I browsed them last, but those were a massively important component of the whole Garry’s Mod community.

I think a big part of the failure, beyond the absolutely massive amount of mismanagement, is that a lot of the stuff that made GM awesome has had it’s “lunch ate” by other development engines and sandbox game systems. Facepunch was never going to be big enough to fully challenge Second Life, or Roblox, or Unity, etc. They had a niche that they should have focused on.

On top of that, there’s a problem that commonly happens with games that have deep modding communities that get “sequels”: All of the awesome stuff that the community spent years building on the last game won’t work with the new one, so there’s not any real reason to switch until the amount of content in the new game (from the devs or the community) passes a critical threshold.

And then changing the underlying creation tools so drastically from the last game by jumping from Lua to C#? Yeah, let’s just throw away most of the skills the community built up!

What a shitshow.

Hell, I’d press it for fun

I’ve been an adherent of Notepad++ for ages. What’s the draw of Kate?

There’s a little bit of the “screechy tsundere” voice here and there going on that was pretty common at the time, but a lot less than most shows of the era. Beyond that, the dub is great, imo.