@gepandz@mastodon.social
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

gepandz

@gepandz@mastodon.social

Furtherer of entropy by forcing things into ordered patterns ... sort of, and usually only for a short time

IT Ops morlock with degrees in CS. DevOps, SRE, SysDE. Former adjunct instructor. Formerly at AWS DynamoDB. Lead Patch Engineer in Talkdesk's FedRAMP SRE practice. Sailor

Opinions are my own, for better or worse

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

drahardja, to random
@drahardja@sfba.social avatar

“Really the only other dinosaurs howling into the wind about the latest fax machine going extinct due to the internet are [commercial real estate] bagholders, who are of course upset they (god forbid) have to reinvest or change strategies, and continue to clutch pearls hoping the world would revert to a previous state. They of course don’t believe Earth can change (something it’s literally defined by). We’re a free capitalist society and so everyone has to go through the ringer of disruption, but ultimately we come out the other side better for the vast majority. They’ll evolve, but for some reason this group are extremely sore losers here.”

#returnToOffice #remoteWork #flexibleWork

“Remote work won, don't let anyone gaslight you to believe otherwise”

https://www.hottakes.space/p/remote-work-won-dont-let-anyone-gaslight

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@drahardja

Exactly. I don't even consider a role that's not 100% remote or hybrid in my area. My kid lives here, and I can't move out of the area without losing my 50:50 parenting plan, so if a company makes me choose between my kid and their job? Sorry, the kid was here first, and I actually like them. 🤷‍♂️

Besides, the commute from the bedroom through the kitchen for coffee to the office is really hard to beat.

I've been arguing since the mid-00s that I don't touch the servers I maintain.

skinnylatte, to random
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

There's a new yoga studio in my neighborhood that bothers me. They made a big sign that said, "tired of stepping in shit?"

I mean, shit, I think it's a big problem too, but also people who yammer on about it without advocating for more toilets, or homes, just feels to me like.. yammerers

"In all, SF seems to maintain between 20 and 26 restrooms per 100,000 residents. [..] we’re operating on the level of countries like Botswana."

https://thefrisc.com/where-are-all-of-san-franciscos-public-bathrooms-no-one-really-knows-f3d247b18bb4

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@skinnylatte

Portland, Oregon, had a similar problem, and we just designed a better public toilet, The Portland Loo ™️ (https://portlandloo.com/). They're less than $100k a pop and only need a water and sewage connection (unless the site doesn't get enough sunlight for the solar lights to work, at which point it'll need a power hookup, too).

People can either complain and scapegoat, or they can, y'know, solve the problem. 🤷‍♂️ Other cities have bought and deployed The Portland Loo, as well.

nixCraft, to linux
@nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

TIL. got some cool features. https://x.com/d_feldman/status/1740108692203430006

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@nixCraft

😂

Ian Malcolm GIF

elisol, to random

I'm curious: fellow sufferers, what's the wackiest thing you've done to try to make it better, and did it work? I'll start: huffing powdered cayenne pepper and while it didn't make the migraine go away it did give me a bit of a distraction from the original pain. 2/10, probably would not try again unless it was REALLY bad.

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@elisol

The only thing that stops it for me is Sumatriptan injectors, the old-school ones. It turns what used to be 13-24 hours of curled up in the dark hoping to die into about 24 hours of a mild headache, like a moderate hangover. It also stops the auras, which means I shoot myself, wait about 20-30 minutes, and I can read, again. It cuts down on the light-sensitivity for anything but direct sunlight -- so it's a good thing I live in the PNW where it's usually cloudy nine months of the year.

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@elisol

I've tried Max-Alt (both the melt-under-your-tongue MLT and regular varieties), as well as other home treatments like massive doses of caffeine, and it's the only thing that works consistently and quickly.

lauren, to Youtube
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

Something so very wonderful that I've never seen before (from the early 60s) just surfaced for me on . But I'm not going to share it here, because I don't want to deal with complaints about it being "politically incorrect" by today's standards. So you get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir!

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@lauren @mdione

Forgot which platform I was on and was trying to figure out how spelling things out in Morse Code ("CW" among ham radio users) would help. 😅

Strandjunker, to random
@Strandjunker@mstdn.social avatar

Have you ever wondered why Germans didn’t do anything about Hitler? Well, the rest of the world is wondering exactly that about Americans and Trump.

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@_9CL7T9k8cjnD_ @wilbr @LordCaramac @GGMcBG @Strandjunker

I mean, Ford was also the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf and received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle on his 75th birthday in 1938. For all that the Ford Motor Company did for the Allies during the war, the man himself was very pro-Nazi.

US racism and Jim Crow heavily inspired Nazi policies, as explained well in Rachel Maddow's book Prequel. They even sent German lawyers to Alabama to study the legal frameworks.

briankrebs, to random

Last night I set a new record for the length of time it took me to find a specific cybercriminal in real life. This one only took ten years, and hundreds of hours of research -- almost all of it in the wrong direction. I'm ecstatic, but also kind of mad at myself for missing key pieces of the puzzle that it turns out I had IN MY INBOX all along.

Anyway, the person in question is a big fish, and this going to be quite the story when it's ready. So, if I'm unresponsive to nudges etc for the next, er...week probably, you know why.

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@briankrebs

Great work!

It'd be neat to know these stories, like Cliff Stoll's book, The Cuckoo's Egg. Dunno if this one rises to a full 300+-page book, but a collection of these kinds of stories could be fun -- the parts that can be shared, anyway. 😂

briankrebs, to random

Germany-based email provider Tuta says Microsoft Outlook is blocking all emails from tutanota.com.

https://tuta.com/blog/outlook-falsely-marks-tutanota-emails-as-junk

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@skip @briankrebs

In the past, the excuse has been, "We get SO MANY spam bots flooding our servers that it's just easier for our poor, overworked, engineers to block all of the IPs not from a small, carefully curated, list of our known competitors or our own servers. Won't somebody think of the workers? And if we're wrong, then The Hackers will win and steal everything and put coal in your stockings!"

... Or something. 🙄

The upshot is they limit the market to themselves and Gmail and Yahoo.🤷‍♂️

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@briankrebs @skip

I have a friend who runs his own server and has since the 1980s. A few times a year, I'll think, "I can do that," but then think through all the steps and processes he's built up over literally decades to secure his systems, tune his spam filters, and everything, and I just go back to doing something else.

Same story (shorter time scale) for setting up my own Mastodon instance -- the one I'm on is fine enough, and its annoyances are less than the switching costs. 🤷‍♂️ For now.

binford2k, to random
@binford2k@hachyderm.io avatar

I wish I truly understood why people don't get that "reduce costs" is exactly the same thing as "increase revenue."

Like I know the accounting bullshit, but we're not children anymore. We should understand nuance.

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@binford2k

From a profit perspective, sure, increasing revenues is equivalent to cutting costs. But if you're in, say, a saturated market with little reasonable hope of increasing your revenue footprint, your easiest way to increase profit is to cut costs. And we all know that profits must forever increase, since sustainable businesses are unthinkable in today's market.

Whether that's the right choice in the long-term is a problem for next quarter. 🙄

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@binford2k okay, makes sense. It reduces cost for the customer, as well as reducing support costs for Puppet and the community, since there are likely to be fewer hand-rolled modules running around at varying levels of quality.

I think you're arguing that, by giving it away for free, you're saving more in the long run than you'd get if you charged for it, yes?

I think that argument would have a LOT of variables in the model, but in this case, I agree that base modules save more in the long-run

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@binford2k I have NO IDEA how you'd successfully argue that to an accountant or finance person, though... 😅😭

protecttruth, to random
@protecttruth@mastodon.online avatar

Why the word “neoliberal” is horribly harmful 👇

The widespread use of the word to refer to Reagan’s economic ideology causes most of the US left to conflate Reagan’s economics with Biden’s.
(I strongly suggest we should use “neolibertarian” which makes it all a lot more clear.)

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@protecttruth

I remember seeing that thread on Bluesky, and their other responses about their vote not really mattering is belied by the sheriff race in Caddo Parish, LA (~43,000 votes cast, with a one-vote margin of victory):

https://apnews.com/article/louisiana-election-vote-parish-sheriff-recount-b95748fd61fd84c38b89a21655aa3e2f

Every vote counts, and while it's their right to vote for someone obviously unable to win, I think they're being dangerously naïve in their approach, and that's going to hurt a lot of folks I know and care about.

tommorris, to random
@tommorris@mastodon.social avatar

Fun discovery today. Imagine an NPM package where the package.json says it is licensed under MIT, but the LICENSE file contains a completely different license like GPL.

GitHub pulls the data from the LICENSE file and says it is GPL, NPM pulls from package.json and says it is MIT.

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@tommorris

Been there... 🥃 🤣😭

pluralistic, to random
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

The most consistent bright spot in the dark swirl of US politics is the competence of the Biden Administration's progressive enforcers: people like , and , who keep demonstrating just how far a good administrator can go. Anyone can have a vision, but knowing how to execute is the difference between hot air and real change:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

1/

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@pluralistic
Right. Each Competent Man needs to be right every time, lest they become Incompetent. Competent Administrators (CAs), on the other hand, only need their systems to be Competent, and it's FAR easier to tune a system than a person. It's a positive variation of the Attacker's Privilege: the system has to be right eventually, and it gets a lot more bites at the apple than one CM would.

The problem is that a CA system has a hard time leading to the ultrawealthy, and we can't have that.

GottaLaff, to random
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

rights groups seek ballot measures in 9 states in 2024

But “hurdles include public opinion on abortion care that is much less supportive, while in others, the obstacles are technical — including difficult signature and passage thresholds.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/abortion-rights-groups-seek-ballot-measures-9-states-2024-rcna125177

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@bynkii @DWTSquawk7600 @GottaLaff

All systems are only as effective as their faithful implementation, whether by computer systems or human beings. It's on the voters to ensure that they elect people who will faithfully execute the will of the voters and vote out those who break faith.

I'm honestly at a loss for how to fix it, otherwise. 😕

nixCraft, to random
@nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

What is the first thing you install on a fresh computer? 🤔

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@nixCraft

Emacs, since most recent OSes come with basics like git, zsh, etc.

Sheril, to mastodon
@Sheril@mastodon.social avatar

With new folks arriving on every day, a reminder that social media doesn’t have to look like anything we’ve experienced before.

We get to build the fediverse. So let’s make it awesome ✨

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@Sheril

Sounds like my bumper sticker pitch for Progressivism: "It doesn't have to suck. We can make it suck less if we try." 😂

drahardja, to BMW
@drahardja@sfba.social avatar

IMO still has the best car brands in . While most companies just go with transliteration of their sounds (Lotus = 路特斯 lù tè shī), or literal translations of their meanings (General Motors = 通用汽车 tōng yòng qì chē, literally “general cars”), BMW’s Chinese brand is 宝马 báo mǎ, which not only sounds like “BMW”, but also means “Precious Horse”, which I think is cute for a car.

Special mention goes to Ford which uses 福特 fú tè which is a transliteration, but also means “special good fortune” if you squint a little bit.

I’m sure you know more cool brands I don’t. Tell me!

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@drahardja

I don't know any good translations, but I love how creative people are across languages.

I also love a good pun. As my grandmother said, "Puns may be the lowest form of humor, but they are the highest form of intelligence." Doing that in more than one language is impressive.

johnlray, to random
@johnlray@mastodon.social avatar

It seems like we basically have to choose whether to brand Trump as just another groveling, incompetent little New York bag man or a fearsome phoenix of revenge who would use a second term to make his opponents suffer and please have a seat before I tell you how high Independent swing voters tend to score on the authoritarian values index

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@MattHodges @afamiglietti79 @johnlray

🥃

SwiftOnSecurity, to random

I need to explain the importance of SMB signing and blocking inbound NTLM in a manager-level PowerPoint slide in a way that’s both exciting and correct and based in real-world security improvement against attackers.

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@RandomDamage @SwiftOnSecurity

I dunno. Somebody dancing blissfully between multiple blazing dumpster fires could certainly make a point. 😂

shezza_t, to random
@shezza_t@mastodon.social avatar
gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@shezza_t

The first bit also works if you assume that two new cats will just magically appear from the neighborhood. 😂😅

GottaLaff, to legal
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

As always, I’ll be juggling coverage of Shouty McCokeFace’s testimony from mult sources; if you @ me w a ques, I won’t be able to reply, so please make sure to say “Not for you, Laffy” or, “For others to answer” or something. TY!

THREAD 🧵will start here 1/…

Via Klasfeld:

…from .

’s 2nd day of testimony will begin later this morning. On the 1st, he tried to shift focus to his accountants—& the AG's counsel shed light on his father's trust.

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@GottaLaff

For others keeping track of the drinking game rules, if he doesn't recall the conversation, sure, that's one drink, but do you need to drink again when he doesn't remember even with documentary evidence? Like, is that a twofer? I want to play by the rules, but also don't want to get hurt... 🤣

gepandz,
@gepandz@mastodon.social avatar

@LittleTownJane @GottaLaff

Maybe they figure that, if they get sanctioned or disbarred, they'll end up on a board or thinktank somewhere, what @pkrugman calls "Wingnut Welfare"?

I'm just stunned by their behavior.

I guess if you can't win the game fair and square, work the refs, but, geez... 😬

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