Funny - I was just reading about the creator of Ethernet this morning (Robert Metcalfe):
In 1995, Metcalfe argued that the Internet would suffer a "catastrophic collapse" in the following year; he promised to eat his words if it did not. During his keynote speech at the sixth International World Wide Web Conference in 1997, he took a printed copy of his column that predicted the collapse, put it in a blender with some liquid and then consumed the pulpy mass.[26][27] He had suggested having his words printed on a very large cake, but the audience would not accept this form of "eating his words."[28]
I believe they've also been in the US for 20 years. However, they aren't centralized like Flock. Flock cameras also all look the same so it's more present and in people's faces. The opposition to these is really heating up right now.
It’s hard to say exactly what the folks in the article are grappling with, not working with them personally. I never got to the point where I was anywhere near personal crisis from my classified work. These folks sound like they were associated with some kind of wet ops or drone programs. Not fun to deal with.
I know cleared psychologists are a thing. I never tried to speak with one but I’m told demand is high, and the ones out there are typically very oversubscribed.
I may be a bad counter example to this article. I never had to cope with super severe depression or crisis, or conops that would bring me a ton of personal crisis.
I just see a commonality in struggling with not being able to talk about it. Work is too big a part of my life to not be able to discuss it freely. That did cost me something, personally. I’m glad it didn’t cost me anything as dear as what it cost the people in the original article.
In all of my years messing with computers, I have met very few people who are as fluent with the technology and the terminology. There is virtually no one I know that I can talk to about the things I do. I do not work in IT. I do not know people in IT. I also do not go out of my way to find IT folks. For a while this bothered me a little.
On pondering this, I suppose everyone with a hobby has this same lacking. For that matter, anyone with a mind that contains unique thoughts has the the same lacking. A desire for comradery seems pretty universal.
That said, not being able to talk about it and not being allowed to talk about it is quite different!
There are chaplains and in-agency psychologists, both can have classified conversations with you. The problem is that you cannot change the underlying causes of any illness/sickness
When they opened retail outlets it was the beginning of the end. That was the peak of their growth rate and the moment when Dell really started to go after them.
I think this was true in the 90s and 2000s. When not everyone was a script kiddie. But why hire someone that literally didn't write their own exploit? Sounds like the most advanced thing they did was just social engineering and dumping a DB.
It was just simpler back then. There was no aslr, no hardware level protection from execution, traffic was all plaintext, switches didn't exist, or maybe they did but just nobody used them and everything on every network was just one giant collision domain, developers by and large didn't even think about securing software outside of DRM, and absolutely nobody understood the basic premise that someone on the phone may be lying to your business to get access to things they want.
The skillset that made you a 1337 h4x0r in the 90's makes you a mediocre sysadmin these days.
i can get on YT or some AI and find how to do virtually all of the stuff you mentioned, but back then you had to roll your own and figure it out yourself
but i am generally in alignment with the idea that they're not getting gub'mnt jobs now. 1) how could you trust them? and 2) there is a global glut of talent, including laid-off FAANG / big-org talent that you could scoop up.
why take a risk with an idiot who can't keep his ego in check long enough to maintain OpSec when you can hire a senior security engineer just laid off from Oracle with an MIT pedigree? 30 years ago the 133t haxor types were rare, but now they're churning out cybersecurity grads to the point of oversaturation.
I had books that I scoured from the visiting nurses book sale every year and phrack. That's not much different than yt or ai. I guess there was less direct context with the books, but grasping the basics got you further.
For anyone considering these devices, the only reason I would recommend against them is if you plan on getting multiple to link together - the DGX Spark has a much, much faster interconnect bandwidth ceiling than the AMD devices do.
Microcenter has them marked at $4500 right now (that's with the 4TB SSD) [1]. I suspect it comes down to what you're using it for; if you're looking for a general purpose computer that's also solid at AI, the AMD machine is better. But if you want the best possible AI machine at below $5k... actually you should probably just buy an RTX 3090 or 5090. But if the 128gb of memory is critical, then yeah DGX Spark is it.
We do get ice and snow in Portland, along with flooding and landslides. No, it's not the same as Midwest, but we do get a few days every other year or so that you just don't drive out in. The black ice around a couple curvy sections of i-5 are notoriously bad at night in winters. (Terwilliger)
I have lived in the midwest, as well as Portland. It is good that Portland only occasionally gets ice, because in like-for-like conditions it is way more dangerous than the midwest. Primarily because of hills. I found driving in snow & ice in the midwest to be mostly a non-event, even on inadequate tires.
I really hope we're able to get them without the city council messing things up. The way they reacted to the news at first, you'd think Minneapolis was the first city to ever have autonomous vehicles. That, mixed with a heavy dose of "What about the buggy whip makers??"
Not the original commenter, but for me, I just .. don't feel like it anymore. I used to be a rum enthusiast, now I've got two very nice bottles I bought myself just as I started ozempic, that are still unopened one year after.
It has the same appeal as room temperature water when you're not necessarily thirsty.
In 1995, Metcalfe argued that the Internet would suffer a "catastrophic collapse" in the following year; he promised to eat his words if it did not. During his keynote speech at the sixth International World Wide Web Conference in 1997, he took a printed copy of his column that predicted the collapse, put it in a blender with some liquid and then consumed the pulpy mass.[26][27] He had suggested having his words printed on a very large cake, but the audience would not accept this form of "eating his words."[28]
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