Honestly, sometimes when I can't sleep, watching eSports helps (especially Starcraft II). IDK why, but put on a super chill caster like Wardii and I'm out in 20 minutes.

Having some loud, disruptive ad punch through my ad blocker and try to tell me about Liberty Mutual when I've almost dozed off is close to the most rage inducing experience imaginable. With Youtube now working to inject adds directly into video streams, I'm actually anxious about the future of my best sleep aid.

As a PHP developer, I'm in full support and look forward to contributing to what will be a vastly simpler and easier to use Linux kernel.

Business Insider? Really?

Above and beyond what the other poster said, they're a propaganda outlet for the management class... they love to (for example) boost studies that say Work From Home is bad and inefficient and "debunk" studies that say it's more efficient or has other benefits (with headlines like "The data is in folks, it's time to go back to the office!").

And if you need more evidence of who they really are, they're owned by Axel Springer.

A lot of senior people have fucked off from corporate life to consult and do their own thing and companies have laid off more expensive senior developers with decades of experience in favor of the young and talented and of cheap H1Bs. This is the result.

Man, Unions in America are anaemic. I REALLY wish our labor force would grow that kind of spine and stand up for each other that aggressively.

It's amazing how for a culture that fetishizes "freedom" we're willing to accept a reality where you have to give it up for half your waking life just to live and provide for your family.

I wish we would stop.

Cleaning out a ball mouse.

My 14 year old son recently picked one up out of this big pile of old computer treasure I was given by a client and said "What's up with this mouse?"

I began using Linux as my daily driver in 2001. I was 21. I think my story is pretty unique.

I lived in a house with 5 roommates, of which I was the second oldest. The others were 17, 18, 19 and 43. Except for the 43 year old we were basically all friends from Waldorf School (which is a fucking cult disguised as a liberal arts school, don't let anyone tell you otherwise).

There were only two computers in the house. Mine was the only one with an ethernet card. I got a Cable Modem. No one else thought they needed fast internet.

It was a kind of disaster of a living situation... like the 17 year old was an emancipated minor who was stripping using a fake ID, the 18 year old was a stoner who worked at the local bagel shop and sold weed. The 19 year old was a kid who immigrated from Mexico City when his mom married a American and was into a BUNCH of sketchy shit. SUPER nice kid, but his friends were like, in retrospect, obviously a bunch of gangsters.

Before the 43 year old we had two other roommates. The first was a girl who was 20 who we knew from school, but then she left and went to college out of state. The second was a girl our stripper roommate knew who was ALSO a stripper and had an inoperable brain tumor. Poor girl was 19 years old and was told she had 18 months to live. She quit school, became a stripper and dedicated her life to sex, drugs and partying. She was a complete mess and her friends + the gangster guy's friends turned our house into an absurd party flat that got the cops called on us (for noise or trash or sketchy people hanging around) like once or twice a month.

(yes... this IS the story of how I became a Linux user, I'm getting there).

So terminally ill stripper girl just disappeared one day. Never came home, never showed up to work, we never heard from her again. We needed to pay rent and we were all poor young people. Gangster guy has a legit job as a dish washer at a Mexican restaurant and he's like "Hey, this dude who's a server there needs a place to live."

Enter the 43 year old who is a TOTAL creep ball (imagine that). Just to cut straight to the chase, one of the first things he does is start regularly fucking 17 year old stripper girl's 16 (or possibly even 15) year old best friend from middle school, who starts spending the night at our house almost every night (and also ditching school all the time). They don't just fuck in his room, they fuck all over the house and don't clean up. Like I had clean up their used condoms and cum tissues from all over the house.

The other thing 43 year old creep ball does is fucking use my computer to download a shit ton of porn while I'm not around. Here's how we caught him.

Some friends and I are messing with my computer and we notice that... for some goddamn reason... AOL has been installed. Why the FUCK would AOL be there? I have a goddamn cable modem! So my buddy, who's also a computer nerd and is starting to get into Linux himself and I uninstall AOL and it asks if we want to save local files. When we say yes, it dumps... a bunch of AVI files of the hairiest 90s porn you can imagine onto my desktop and all I can think about is this creep ball who's used condoms I'm cleaning up sitting in my chair in my room when I'm not there jerking off.

SO... my buddy and I nuke my OS and install Debian. I leave the house and leave the computer logged in leaving a virtual console running.

Creep ball comes in to watch porn on my computer and is faced with the linux terminal. He typed (I'm not kidding)

• dir
• win
• win.exe
• windows
• start windows
• motherfucker!

That's the 100% true story of how I became a Linux user.

I disliked the books and haven't tried to watch the show.

But I think I disagree that our civilization is no longer capable of solving it's own problems. Rather, I think our civilization is going through one of the crappy parts of common cycles that civilizations go through. Frighteningly, this part usually comes right before really scary crappy parts.

Civilizations aren't static and the patterns don't always happen the same way, but I think we can predict that

1. Things get really shitty. People pull together for survival and build to a place of stability and prosperity.

2. The rich and powerful (being short sighted idiots just like the rest of us, but ALSO insulated from and out of touch with reality), start looting society for their own selfish, short term benefit. This destabilizes the institutions and systems creating the stability and prosperity. The population at large doesn't really understand what's happening or why, but they DO know that while they're still relatively comfortable, they're scared and they don't like it. They get more conservative and eventually turn to fascists, strongmen and authoritarians to try to get stability back.

3. This doesn't work out. It exacerbates the existing problems, makes things even more scary and less stable. Eventually war and rebellion break out.

4. When the dust settles, things are really shitty. People pull together for survival and build back to a place of stability and prosperity.

These steps aren't exact. They're trends. Lots of things can disrupt them (including famine, plague and barbarian invasions). But in step 1/4, we (humans) are actually REALLY good at collectively solving problems. In step 2 we're TERRIBLE at collectively doing anything. In step 3 we (collectively) are trying to solve all the WRONG problems... then back to step 1/4.

We seem to globally be right at the tail end of step 2. Which SUCKS.

tl:dr; This has all happened before and will surely happen again. Hostile aliens are just a modern take on the "barbarian invasion" disrupter. Beware of strangers bearing gifts.

They’re the people who never would have touched it, because it was too technical, had too high a barrier of entry, and saw it as niche.

Yep. My dad uses Facebook, Reddit and Youtube now. I remember having conversations with him where he was confused about why anyone would ever want to use Facebook and what the point of Youtube is... it just wastes time. When I first exposed him to AMAs I thought he would be interested in, in like 2012, he was like "It's really cool that you can talk to this person, but there's so much noise and joking around... how are you supposed to follow it all?"

Now he posts on reddit for help with home improvement projects and watches youtube channels about classic cars and how to fix your garage door opener and talks about stuff he saw his other Boomer friends post on Facebook. He sends me unfunny Youtube videos of AI Deepfakes of Trump and Biden talking about how they pooped their diapers. It's a weird role reversal, because now I'm like "I've left every single one of those enshittified platforms." But it took him years to get on them. It would take him even longer to get off.

Hahahahahahahaha.

I don't care what the science says! I don't care about the suffering of others! This offends my capitalist sensibilities that I have never questioned and I'm not about to start thinking too hard about it now just because some hippy libs want to sneak communism in the back door!

I have zero respect for this world view and hope we are able to simply bulldoze it with unstoppable momentum.

Not a movie character, but when I was a teenager the answer was 100% Willow Rosenberg.

Can't really think of anyone as an adult.

Start an Opensource Software Project. Soon you will have two full time jobs.

My hamster is a fucking primadonna hipster who works out 8 hours a day.

"Pellets..? Really..? Don't you know they're full of carbs...OH!! Fruit snacks!! I need energy!!"

"Carrots and dill treat? No thanks. I only eat the cranberry ones." *Drags treat over to his pooping corner and leaves it there.

Me: "Did you just flush that treat down the toilet..?"

At 1:30 AM "I'm going to the gym!" *Pushes hamster wheel up against the side of his cage for maximum banging and clattering noises, then proceeds to go on a brisk run for 2 hours.

When I'm feeding him. "You may pick me up and pet me human, I consent. I like warm hands."

When I need to clean his cage. "Bad touch, bad touch! I do not consent! I will bite you!"

Google.

Reddit - I don't post there any more, but sometimes I still end up there looking for answers and information.

BUT most of all:

LinkedIn - This platform is built to benefit companies, employers and managers, not the masses of people scrambling to use it to get noticed and build their careers. There are so many things that bug me about LinkedIn, but ONE is definitely that I have no real options NOT to use it (without suffering terrible economic penalties if I you know, don't want to give them my data). I get resentful and anxious every time I look at it.

Is that why she keeps refusing my pull requests...

Management: Doesn't matter, the competition is just as shitty to work for as we are. sips coffee

I had a coworker ten fifteen years ago who said basically "God's doing it and it's a sign of the end times." This dude was a trained engineer.

"Don't be evil."

My standard response is "capitalism breeds escalation, which can sometimes cause innovation, but always breaks down in absurdity."

Well, time for four more years of Trump, I guess.

When I look around the Democratic party, I see old people unwilling to change, from Biden and the DNC all the way down to my parent's friends in their little rich white suburban neighborhood with a median age of 57 and a median net worth of $3,000,000. People who are firmly entrenched in the liberalism of the 80s and 90s and who are terrified of Trump and terrified of progressives and think it's all insanity that also doesn't really affect them.

This is the Democrats' race to lose. All they have to do to lose it is stick their fingers in their ears and fight like hell for "Business as usual." Which is exactly what they're doing.

Rhawk-Arrgh, rrrooaarrgghh.

I just stepped down as tech lead at a startup after a REALLY good year followed by a REALLY awful six months. I left because the CEO lost a big customer and decided the lesson to take from that was that he needed to be in direct control of everything and everyone and because he jumped on the "back to the office" bandwagon (he reads all those frickin management articles from like Business Insider). I went from being the highest performing employee with the most brownie points to being miserable the second he switched up his management style. Also, the place haemorrhaged employees over the last six months. It's now an engineering company with ZERO engineers and a whole lot of open job postings that aren't filling for what he's willing to pay + the credentials he expects (+ the local, rather than national, applicant pool, now that he expects everyone to be in person). He has a big government customer though, so he'll probably keep floating for a while even if he can't actually do anything.

I knew I was unhappy, but I didn't realize HOW unhappy until my first day returning to freedom.

They'll milk it when upper management is ready to cash out to massively grow short term profits so they can all take huge bonuses. Then they'll replace upper management with scapegoats who can be there to absorb shareholder blowback and try to rebuild something of value from whatever's left.

Running each app component in it's own iframe is perfectly valid microservices architecture change my mind.

First off, you're NEVER unemployed. You're consulting / free lance writing. With your background that's 100% believable and no one ever checks on that. Even if they did... did you do ANYTHING related to your skillset to help ANYONE (friends, family)? They'll probably agree to be a former client a potential employer could talk to. Did you do any volunteer work? Get involved in any non-profits? Get references from folks there.

• I shouldn't say no one checks. I had ONE potential employer in my entire life check on ONE of my consulting stints. I had 3 real clients happy to say super nice things about me and I got the job.

2nd, if you're working part time somewhere off and on... you're working part time there the whole time while also working on your consulting business. That's why you were part time. If you were promoted, you note the dates of your promotions.

My resume says "Consultant at Coyote, ltd" for an 8 year period. Overlapping with that period is 1 year as IT director at a now defunct startup, 1 year as a project manager at a cybersecurity firm and 1.5 years as Cyberoperations Director at a spaceflight electronics startup. The CEO at the space company tried to get me to sign a no moonlighting clause and I flat out told him no. He was a bit of a dick about it (and whined about "this is standard stuff!") I held my ground and they didn't fire me. Fuck that noise.

3rd, Don't hesitate to clean up your LinkedIn. I HATE LinkedIn. It's intrusive and invasive, it serves corporations while exposing humans to a hypercompetitive stressfest of bullshit career posts to "like" and "engage with" and it exposes your past dirty laundry (or job history at dumpster fire positions) to potential future employers in a way that feels icky. I fucking hate that company, and wish death upon it.

That being said, you DO need to use it and game the shit out of it. Every hiring manager EVER will check your LinkedIn profile to see if it mostly matches your resume. But they won't spend time to dig too deep into it unless your REALLY STRONGLY being considered for a senior position. They'll just check that it exists and you have connections with people from former positions. Which if you're NOT connected to former co-workers... get on that.

Add a "Freelance Writing / Editing Consultant" (or whatever) position to LinkedIn covering the years from your first to your final unemployment period.

4rth, You're applying in a field where a gajillion liberal arts / humanities grads are competing over jobs that are being replaced by generative AI at companies that are being looted by vulture capitalists and repurposed for propaganda by right wing billionaires. I'm SO sorry about that. It sucks.

Realistically, it's time to ask what ELSE your background qualifies you for...

• Lots of small businesses, including high tech ones and consultancies will hire project managers with diverse backgrounds. I just hired an old friend of mine with NO tech company experience to be a project manager to help me wrangle a bunch of programmers working on different consulting gigs. Because I KNOW him and he's gonna kick ass and take names at that. In the past month of having him aboard, he's made ME significantly more productive. His back ground: High school teacher turned Whole Foods dept. manager, who spent a bunch of time trying to make a living hand forging swords and knives.
• Lots of successful business folks need personal assistants / executive assistants. It's often a shitty stressful job for a dickhead you don't like or respect, but it can also be an awesome job for a sweet decent person if you get lucky. My clients are small businesses. EVERY SINGLE ONE has one of those to help the big boss, and they have, like I said, a diverse set of backgrounds. One of my clients is a medical cannabis manufacturer and the CEO is a super sweet old lady. Her executive assistant is a guy in his 50s who survived cancer and whose background is in patent writing.
• Start ups and small businesses of all kinds need operations directors.
• With your back ground, you could consider roles in PR / publicity.
• You could also consider roles in technical writing.
• Government departments need case managers and supervisors all the time. A BUNCH of my friends with a wide variety of professional backgrounds work for the Colorado dept. of Unemployment, for example. None of them are rich, but they're not starving either.
• Your profile page claims you were a tech enthusiast before you got burned out (is how I read it). Are you enough of a tech enthusiast to help some boomer middle managers trouble shoot their printer problems and deal with scam popups locking their work computers? If so, an MSP may be willing to take a chance on you. It's part time and it's never enough money, but it's some income while you figure out your next steps.
• Your profile page also says your a van dweller. High five... I did that for 8 years and it was mostly awesome. Apply in any city you're willing / able to drive that van to.
• Dust off the old Reddit account (or make a new one) and just check all the job subreddits (r/DenverJobs and r/SFBayJobs are the two I'm most familiar with). If you get a call back, tell them you are in the process of moving (also say that on your initial application).
• Get in touch with recruiters. If you have a good looking resume, they will WANT to sell you. Look for recruiters that specialize in the industries you want to work in. Contact recruiters in cities you're willing to live in and tell them you're looking to move there.

Finally, your timeline makes me think you're in your 40s or 50s maybe? These are your PEAK earning years. Don't waste them.

You want OpenWRT. They're not too limited, but they're not very powerful either. Fan controller? Probably. Pihole? You can probably hack that together, though I've never tried. Media server? Erm... not my first choice. Other stuff? Limited only by your imagination, time constraints and willingness to troubleshoot weird problems most people have never had before.

I assume you're from Pakistan? https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/entertainment/okech-kendo/article/2001346402/teen-arrested-for-raping-chicken-to-death-blames-sexual-frustration

I would never have known if you hadn't told me. XD

Furthermore, I want AI content that I specifically asked for, not AI content that someone thought would get them page views.

We tried this same solution six months ago. It works, ish, but it can still be circumvented. It's not foolproof enough to trust with any situation where you need real security / confidentiality.

If you haven't played Gandalf try it out. It will teach you how to craft attacks against these kinds of strategies.

During the pandemic, I actually did a couple projects with old, broken phones for fun.

One was, I ran Kubernetes on them. Why? I was on lockdown and bored and lonely. Another was, my son and I experimented with using them as robot controllers, instead of RasPis. We sort of got this to work.

Iain M. Banks.

As someone who does cybersecurity consulting for govt. contractors, companies invest in security when some external force forces them to, and then they spend the bare minimum to meet whatever that force requires (and they try to get away with less at every opportunity).

Right now in government contracting we're experiencing this paradigm shift where the NIST-800-171 standard (which everyone was required to follow, but kind of on the honor system) is going to be replaced in 21 months or so by something called CMMC (Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification). But, CMMC is basically just the same requirements as NIST-800-171, so why?

BECAUSE, everyone just SAYS they're NIST-800-171 compliant on all their contracts. Everyone self scores themselves on it and gets a WAY higher score than they do when being scored by a 3rd party, and then reports their self scores up the chain. The way this works in both DoD and NASA projects, which is what I'm familiar with, is the big players like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, etc, have thousands of smaller suppliers and those suppliers have smaller suppliers, so the requirements flow down from the govt to the big contractors to the small subcontractors and each link in the chain is responsible for making sure the upstream links are compliant... which they NEVER are, but they all say they are!

Of course, the government KNOWS this is happening, but lacks the resources to do anything about it. So the solution is to make everyone get third party certified that they are compliant. Half that industry is setting themselves up for failure to meet that deadline (which, of course, has already been delayed and pushed back multiple times) and I have a feeling that when small companies start failing their CMMC certs, they're going to get stern warnings instead of losing their contracts because the government has to buy shit from someone.

When I talk to the money / business people at my clients, this goes in one ear and out the other.

There are wide spread (willful) misconceptions among those folks that cybersecurity is something IT people do and everyone else just does their jobs without having to think about it. I've had CEOs say things like "No, we're not doing that, we can't work that way." when I educate them about their requirements... and then look to me to provide the solution where they don't have to change anything about the way they work and when I can't, they get frustrated with me and my team. I've had them ask me "Well what do the big companies do?" and I say "Look, they actually TRY to do all these things they require you to do and they fail at it ALL the time, but I've heard you complain about how their bureaucracy and rules slow everything down and make working with them difficult. A bunch of that stuff IS what they do to deal with this." And they just don't believe me. I've had CFOs say "We don't have the budget to do all of this, so which parts are the most important?" and I've said "This is the LAW. You're supposed to do all of it!" But they know and I know that for the time being no one will hold them accountable.

Right now, tons of companies just say "We're NIST-800-171 compliant" or "We're working towards NIST-800-171 compliance" and their contracts go forward and they hire someone like me to tell them what to do and then they don't do 60% of it and delay doing 20% of it.

This is in an industry that is required by law to try extra hard on their security. In industries where there are no such requirements, or less requirements... good luck.

I just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as butthole is in fact GNU/butthole, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU+butthole.

Agreed. I've gotten several none technical folks (including older folks) in my life using Linux Mint and loving it.

What did I do?

I installed it for them. That was it.

I have people who depend on me.

My 14-year-old son has Long Covid with what they're calling reversible small airways disease. He's missed so much school over the last 3 years that we've had to transfer him to online school. He also has like three or four medical appointments a week he has to be driven to.

My wife has severe autism and EDS. She can barely do anything due to body pain and sensory overload.

Oh yeah, and all of their needs run 100% counter to one another and cause horrible conflict. Like "my wife uses cannabis to manage pain and sensory overload, it's one of the few things that can help her function like a normal person for a little while" and "due to his small airways disease, my son's pulmonologist has told us it's very important for him to never be in a house where someone is smoking or vaping." Like "due to the EDS my wife's body can't regulate its own temperature and she starts overheating if the temperature goes above 70° (like vomiting and passing out overheating)" and "due to complications from Post Acute COVID Syndrome, my son's body gets chilled easily, and he starts getting asthma attacks if he breathes cold air." Like "due to her autism, my wife's life needs to be a carefully regimented routine, that as much as possible goes the same way everyday, the same things happen at the same times, things need to be predictable and planned in advance, or she literally breaks down, can't function, has violent meltdowns and panic attacks" and "due to the online school, the medical appointments, combined with just being a teenager, my son's life is barely manageable chaos."

Oh yeah, and if I don't get out of bed, go to work and bring in money, both of these people are fucked!