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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: March 28th, 2024

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  • There is no such thing as easy or hard.

    Give it a try, fuck it up, and give it a try again. Try not to fuck it up in the same way as the first time. Repeat until it works - it will work eventually.

    It took me about 6 hours and 3 disk re-formats my first time. I was particularly bad at it. I barely knew what a disk was, nevermind a partition.

    Actually I’m still not sure what a partition is.

    You’ll do fine :)


  • But MS teams is very secure! It’s sandboxed in a web browser :) It’s effectively a single-tab display of an entire ram-eating chromium process :)

    The only unfortunate side effect is that it can’t read your system default audio output, so it uses a cryptographically secure random number to decide which other audio output to use. That’s right - it very securely knows about all of your audio outputs, even though they aren’t the system default :)

    Did you just try to send someone a file? Don’t worry, I’ve put the file in sharepoint for you, and have sent them a link instead. Actually, wait - you had already sent that to someone else, so I sent file (1).docx instead. Actually wait - that was taken too. Now it’s file (2).docx.

    I would like to provide a friendly reminder that you will need to manage the file sharing permissions in sharepoint should anyone else join this 1-on-1 direct message chat :)



  • It really depends on the parameters of the thought experiment.

    If everyone suddenly received a lot of money, there would be a wild period of adjustment before we figure out the pricing system again and life continues as normal. Even though there’s a lot more money, there is not magically more TVs to buy. Nor would we all start building tv factories - there’s not magically more copper or concrete to buy either.

    If we all got more money and buried it in our yards and swore never to use it, then nothing has changed. For the sake of the thought experiment, someone would break the promise (I would - I want air conditioning), and then everyone else would break it too, and we end up in the previous situation.

    If everyone were suddenly truly wealthy - as in stuff / things - some might think we would chill out and coast for a while. But having satisfied our big needs ( I am not being hunted by tigers) and our medium needs (Air conditioning, yay!), I imagine humanity would just keep working - there are always more problems to solve / there is always more work to do.




  • My apologies, allow me to elaborate - grayhatwarfare.com is a cybersecurity company that crawls and indexes publicly-available blob stores, like s3 buckets, azure storage accounts, digital ocean spaces, and google cloud object stores. They offer limited search capabilities for free, no account-wall.

    They are a legitimate cybersecurity company, despite their name.

    My employer is working on a sensitive data scanning service, to alert clients in case their information surfaces in these buckets (even if they do not own the bucket), leveraging the grayhatwarfare api. In short, allowing us to detect and remediate the problem, which I hope you will agree is a white-hat activity :)

    I do not publicly condone breaking the law. I reserve the right to criticize the DMCA tho ;)




  • I pay attention to credit card readers.

    I have gotten to know their makes and some models. I have developed preferences. When I go to a run down establishment and they have a nice reader, I am pleasantly surprised. I know that walmart uses ingenico isc250s, and they do not support tap. I know that dunkin has high quality readers, and sometimes tim hortons does too, but less frequently.

    When leaving a place, I might say something like “damn, you don’t see that model of verifone very often”, and my friends will look at me funny.

    Semi-related, did you know that most receipt printers have embedded telnet servers in them?











  • I’ve been zipping things all day. Because it’s only one blob in the container, and then you can use website_run_from_package, which is just about the only way to get azure functions stood up via infra-as-code.

    But whatever unzip thing they use sure isn’t the linux default, because it doesn’t support symlinks. And pnpm uses almost exclusively symlinks, to point to its central package store, so re-installing doesn’t take 8 years like it does with npm.

    But that’s fine, because zip will follow symlinks and bake the actual files in, in place - which is pretty slick. But then azure functions package resolver can’t seem to figure out what the hell is going on, because it’s still putting dependencies in node_modules/.pnpm.

    So we pass —shamefully-hoist, which is a great name for a flag, which puts all the things at the top level of node_modules, and now zip works, and azure works - but each dependency also comes with its own node_modules, with another symlink to a package that’s already at the top level. So it works, but it’s 10x bigger than it needs to be - 6.4 MB instead of 668 KB.

    Fortunately we can use our build script to populate a .npmrc file, and set node-linker to hoisted, at which point pnpm will mimic npm with no symlinks at all - small, efficient, and dumb enough that the azure functions runtime can figure out how to deal with it.

    It took me 4 hours to debug this mess.

    All that to say, yes, a weighted blanket would be downright delightful right now, but please keep the zip files away from me