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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • This is a bit of a left turn, but I’ve started to note random articles like this when I see them.

    This might sound a little tin-foil hat~ish, but I think that some of Ukraine’s intelligence and war efforts are informed by the media. Starting back with the NordStream pipeline sabotage, which happened just after the media began covering how Russia could use the threat of shutting down the pipeline to hold Europe hostage, I’ve noticed that there’s sort of a back and forth. The media will focus on something as being a resource or asset to Russia, and Ukraine will target it. Right now it’s Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’ - the merchant marine fleet that only travels between Russian allied countries, so the ships do not have to undergo international inspections. Not only have 3 of those ships recently sank due to weather (They were 50+ year-old river tankers that had undergone substantial modification, being used as transfer vessels to move oil for the military and were operating in the Black Sea - well outside the conditions they were built for due to threat of Ukrainian attack.), but the 4th was a newer vessel operating in conditions it was built for and it sank due to an explosion in its engine room. That last one really complicates some things for Russia - it had vital parts to another ship (a nuclear-powered icebreaker), as well as cranes from their Syrian Port (that they might be losing?) that were going to be repurposed at their Vladivostok Port.

    Anyway, I guess all that is to say, I’m sort of expecting to hear within a few weeks that the factories that make these chemicals have been bombed.




  • My organization seems to have already thrown in the AI towel, or at least are resorting to magical thinking about it

    We’re highly integrated with Microsoft - Windows Login, Active Directory, Microsoft 365, and even a managed version of Edge as the org-wide ‘default’ browser that we’re encouraged to sign into with our organizational credentials to sync account information, etc. Our AI policy is basically “You can use any Microsoft AI feature your account can access.”
    They can try to block whatever sites they want with the firewall, but once you let a user get comfortable with the idea of allowing systems to exfiltrate data, you aren’t going to also make them more discrete. They’re trusting that by throwing open the floodgates users will actually use Microsoft’s offerings instead of competing offerings — as if folks who sometimes still cannot tell the difference between a web browser and ‘the internet’ will know the difference. And they are also trusting that Microsoft is going to uphold our enterprise license agreement and their own security to keep that data within our own cloud instance.

    Boy howdy, this will be interesting.



  • Headline is a little silly. It didn’t ignite or stoke anything, really.

    My issues with the health insurance system didn’t get worse as a result of this. I have just felt a sense of camaraderie that I haven’t felt in a long time. The discussion and shared consensus has been a good reminder that I’m not alone, and hopefully to other people, too, that they aren’t alone, either.

    It’s not that folks suddenly realized they hated their health insurance. They’re just talking about the same thing for once, and generally have the same view about the industry. It’s a strange catalyst for discussion, but it is something universal that affects a lot of people in the U.S.

    I would not have expected for a shooting to lead to that sort of unity, but I think it has. At least a little bit. My wife is on X and told me that even Ben Shapiro supporters were disagreeing with him when he said something political and divisive about the shooting. Just sort of shocking.





  • What I’m seeing through your comments here is that your kid trusts you enough to get you into the weeds with them on this problem, has a good enough sense of judgement not to want to just fudge their name to follow the path of least resistance (don’t want to do election fraud in a technical, though not real, sense), and you all have thought through it all and realized it’s a battle not worth having, given your local and statewide political makeup as well as the stress it would cause your kid. It seems like your kid is comfortable with you, self-aware, and capable of making the sorts of pragmatic decisions that many adults cannot make.
    Damn. Do you mind asking your kid what it feels like to have good parents that are preparing them to tackle life’s challenges?

    Presented kind of as a joke, but good job. Seriously.



  • “I don’t really want to look at my body any more,” he said, noting it was too painful to see photos from the hospital. “Every time I see myself, I have flashbacks. And every time I see cops, I think, is he after me? And I know in my head it’s not true, but it just comes up.” He said he questions whether he could’ve done something differently. “I have to keep telling myself … I didn’t deserve this.”
    He added: “I just want the Department of Justice to take care of them and fix what they say they’re going to fix … I’m not trying to get attention, I just want my story to be heard because I hurt.”

    Oof.





  • Ah, sorry. I edited that away, after rereading the context. I didn’t want to inject personal philosophy into what was clearly not about my beliefs.

    But the second clause was given (or was intended to be given) in the context that I don’t believe hope is actionable. It’s just wasted emotional energy. If I can take an action that directly improves things, I do.

    The scale is also poorly defined - sorry. The first: world at large. The second: the world that is around me - my family, my local environment (radiating out from my house, into my community, etc - but I know I can’t impact the national level).




  • That’s where I know I don’t know enough to respond.

    Well, crap. I just looked it up. Looks like phones will send out your MAC address when looking for WiFi networks to connect to, and they more or less always search for WiFi, unless currently connected to WiFi.

    So - yeah. Same issues with Bluetooth.

    And some newer consumer routers do all sorts of funky things under the hood in the name of security, which includes sending information about traffic back to their corporate home base. That could easily also include MAC addresses of passing devices. (Or telling the manufacturer every site you visit. Very fun now that the latest trend in routers is to require cloud connections and accounts, so your identity with them is ‘known’.)