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.

Edit: should have scrolled down, somebody already said ir

Honestly looks too low to be a beard. Most beards start closer to the mouth.

Missed shots just add to the mythos of these chucklefucks as some sort of noble martyrs to such a degree that I always have to wonder if these aren’t false flags.

Long long maaaa_aaaaaaaaaa^aaaaaan

https://youtu.be/pbDNNexgiqs

Exactly. I’m not helpdesk anymore, thank god, but my team still has a ton of day to day work that’s tracked in the ticketing system.

Well, for years I’ve been stuck in project hell, doing work that isn’t easily fit into the ticket system. My last review my boss said I had only closed about 1/3 of the tickets of the next lowest person on my team, and that it doesn’t matter except we have a new exec watching that shit, so I have to make it look better.

So the next project I got, I chose to do something manually that I could have automated, that required the help desk to open tickets direct to me about 2-4 times a day whenever someone new needed access to the system I was setting up, until the project was done.

A week in I automated the “manual” task anyway and had a bunch of tickets I could close with a copy-pasted resolution.

I would feel bad, but my co-workers game the metrics even worse than I do.

I think it’s the shooter of Charlie Kirk. But that’s purely based off the mention of Erika Kirk.

Calling any court he’s tried in a purely religiously motivated one is fucking rich though.

As far as I know, he was caught red handed. No room for doubt. The law isn’t void just because he killed someone the world is better without, lol.

At least with Luigi there’s a bunch of extenuating circumstances that create some plausible deniability. This is just “This guy killed someone I think needed to die, so the rule of law shouldn’t apply!”