benchly

Just to clarify, no, we cannot be involuntarily drafted because we are amateur radio operators. However, should we be drafted in time of need, our experience in radio does help direct the likely path we would end up taking.

You also bring up an interesting time in ham radio history that a lot of newer hams are largely unaware of; WWII. Amateur radio thrives on communication globally, so anyone from the US could talk to anyone from any other country. The need for restrictions of the bands became obvious in the years leading up to the US entering the war, with various countries that were once accessible by radio going dark. The US logically followed suit, but operators were still monitoring.

There's a great article on this time in amateur radio history here; https://bw.billl.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Radio-Histor...

While I am not a software developer, it sounds like our career paths have had the same trajectory, and I'm wondering what the common factor is across industries.

I work in automation (mostly) as a lead tech and professional troubleshooter because I am familiar with a wide and varied amount of automation technologies. I've met plenty of people over the years who have much more advanced skills than myself, but never go beyond doing more than parts swapping on a workbench, which leaves me scratching my head.

Over the last few years, I have listened carefully to what people around me say about my work, and while it is good gas for the ego, I have notice that's not the likely reason I get promoted so quickly. While I can walk into a problem and know how to apply different processes to figure out what to do almost reflexively at this point, the real focus seems to be that I take ownership of the process.

Bit of a buzzphrase, "ownership of the process," but the short explanation is that a little planning, accountability, resourcefulness and communication seems to get you a lot further than just knowing what to do in any given situation. Employers like that because they now have department manager they can rely on, and team members like that because someone else is taking responsibility so they don't have to.

You're good at code, obviously, but if you zoom out on your work a bit, are you also bringing a bit of accountable authority to the table? That may be the real reason why you move up so quickly, or at least something that greases the gears so that can happen faster for you than, say, an equally skilled colleague.

As much as the current administration turns my stomach, previous ones are not absolved from weaseling their way out of catastrophic mistakes, either.

It's sort of funny that this thread turned into a USA vs Russia debate when they both play the same games. One of them is just slightly better at pretending like they're playing fair and friendly. My take-away from that is once an organized body, be it a country, corporation or religion, gets very large and holds a lot of power, they will inevitably start doing bad things.

There's no incentive for them to comply with your request. Like Facebook, scam ads are a revenue stream for Google. The profitability usually offsets any negative PR or fallout that results from these platforms turning a blind eye to the point where their budget accounts for some percentage of scam income, leaving them to pick and choose when to take action while they actively make their platform increasingly hostile to users who want to protect themselves from said ads.

I have the same experience, and my hands are pretty small. Some paranoid bell rang in my head about it being an intentional annoyance to start getting us to use voice-to-text more,

Even switching to the Hacker's Keyboard and tweaking some settings still has me smacking the "tab" key or whatever when hitting space.

Just out of curiosity, who here is a one-handed texter, like me? I just assumed my constant need for error correction was because I only use one hand (and thus, one thumb) to type, but this thread has me wondering.

You might be interested in The Order of Time by Carlo Ravelli. Time and gravity are certainly linked, but from what I took away from the book (which is a lot to digest, even as non-mathy as it tries to be) is that Time is really heat. Heat moves only from hot to cold, dispersing in some entropic fashion as we move toward the final state of the universe, but in the meantime we can measure that time/heat "flows" at different rates, depending on how near or far you are from large bodies.

I likely need to reread it, though, as some of its ideas are a bit above my weight class when it comes to understanding physics. But, you may enjoy it!

Good point. That kind of thinking is an absurdity. Saying IBM dropped the ball 70 years ago without acknowledging that lessons were learned, leadership has changed hands a lot since then, and most importantly, the tech landscape back then was very different from today unless you grossly oversimplify everything amounts to nothing more than a fallacious opinion.

Not even much of an IBM fan, myself, but I respect their considerable contribution to the industry. Sure, they missed a shot back then, but I think this latest statement is reliably accurate based on the information we currently have.

You Can't Win

It's pretty entertaining!

And free to read for anyone interested: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69404

Some days, everything feels like one big psyop.

You don't see how preventative maintenance such as implementing a policy to remove old accounts after N days could have prevented this? Preventative maintenance is part of the forethought that should take place about the best or safest way to do a thing. This is something that could be easily learned by looking an problems others have had in the past.

As a controls tech, I provide a lot of documentation and teach to our customers about how to deploy, operate and maintain a machine for best possible results with lowest risk to production or human safety. Some clients follow my instruction, some do not. Guess which ones end up getting billed most for my time after they've implemented a product we make.

Too often, we want to just do without thinking. This often causes us to overlook critical points of failure.

Sorry, I should have worded that as "stop apologizing so much, especially when you keep making the same mistake/error/disruption/etc."

I did not mean to come off as teaching my kid to never apologize.

Thanks, this is where I was coming from. I suppose I could have made that more clear in my original comment. The idea behind my style of parenting is self-reflecting and our ability to analyze the impact of our choices before we make them.

But of course, apologizing when you have definitely wronged a person is important, too. I didn't mean to come off as teaching my kid to never apologize, just think before you act. But you get the idea.

Everybody gets hacked, sooner or later.

Right! But, wouldn't a more appropriate approach be to mitigate the damage from being hacked as much as possible in the first place? Perhaps this starts by simplifying bloated systems, reducing data collection to data that which is only absolutely legally necessary for KYC and financial transactions in whatever respective country(ies) the service operates in, hammer-testing databases for old tricks that seem to have been forgotten about in a landscape of hacks with ever-increasingly complexity, etc.

Maybe it's the dad in me, years of telling me son to not apologize, but to avoid the behavior that causes the problem in the first place. Bad things happen, and we all screw up from time to time, that is a fact of life, but a little forethought and consideration about the best or safest way to do a thing is a great way to shrink the blast area of any surprise bombs that go off.

I've thought on this as someone who travels between the US and Canada a lot, and the scene about the embezzlement scheme from Office Space often comes to mind (the "Pennies for everyone" tray: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/ea64c5fd-3c6d-46f9-b729-beef7b0...)

For me, it's not about the pennies I'm losing. You're right, I don't care about them and the end of their minting doesn't mean much to me at all. No, it's about who is getting the pennies I'm losing. Let's say Nestle, a company I loath, has a box of instant noodles for $0.99 USD. Our hypothetical noodles are very popular, so everyone in the US tends to buy them.

Suddenly, pennies go away. Nestle thinks "hmm, so our customers were already paying $0.99, might as well just bump the price up to $1.00, nobody will care." And they'd be correct. As a typical consumer, I'd pay $1.00 for something that I was just paying $0.99 for because the difference is negligible to me.

But if everyone in the US buys them for lunch, that's not a negligible difference to Nestle. That's nearly $3,500,000 USD in extra revenue that week. If the consumer behavior remains consistent, that's an extra $182,000,000 USD per year. Maybe that seems like small potatoes compared to what Nestle grosses annually on a global scale, but even the richest of companies can do A LOT with that much extra cash.

But of course, that is an extreme and overly simplified example. However, it illustrates the idea that while the individual will not really feel the change, the collectives or corporations will.

I'm not an economics expert by any stretch of the imagination, but one thing I'm fairly sure about is when something like this type of change happens, the corporations are unchallenged at finding ways to exploit it, which usually translates to more money going up to them and less coming back down to the individual.

First, define in detail what "success" looks like to you in relation to what you are trying to do. Be specific, here, because that yard stick varies from person to person, profession to profession, etc.

As an example, I consider myself a pretty successful controls technician because I have a good reputation in the circles I run in, generally get the job done quickly so my customer can get back to work and stop losing money and my work hasn't resulted in anyone getting hurt (a very real possibility in my industry). I have almost no social media presence.

My friend is in real estate, and he has spent years building a client base that feeds itself on referrals by making himself very open, accessible and interactive on nearly every social media platform that most people use daily. He is also quite successful and has cultivated a reputation for trust and honesty because of his social media presence.

To define success, it's important to understand what it is you want to accomplish.

That's a great way to look at it, sort of like the idea of cutting notches in a door frame to keep track of your growth as a kid (not something my mom did, but I see it referenced a lot in movies and tv). It's good to remember where we came from, how we've evolved and recognizing that we are perhaps stronger for it.

Thanks for sharing! I will have to check out The Last Gasp. Heck of a title, that. The reviews seem to paint it as something that's up my particular alley.

sacred knowledge?

I think you might be romanticizing this, a bit. When you convince the public that not talking about something is the best course of action, they become a lot easier to control. We learned this during WWII with the propaganda machine that was fully employed on all fronts, and arguably before that with the work of Edward Bernays and people like him. If public discourse and debate could be quashed, then it was much, much easier to simply tell everyone what their opinions of a thing should be.

This was my take for a short story I banged out one week after reading about the metal-eating microbes. Basically, humanity was all "three cheers for these little guys helping us fix all the pollution, etc" then shifting to "huh, that's an awful lot of changes happening to the gas content of the air and oh, didn't you corporate guys who sold us these solutions say you had these microbes under control? Oh, you did? But...like past tense?"

I read too much dystopian sci-fi to write much else, but in truth, I have pretty high hopes for these garbage-eating microbes.

Well, looking back on what I wrote, I should have also said this:

7. It's also okay to not have or want any tattoos

Self-expression can take many forms :)

I have one on my laptop that says "Fuck Your Algorithm." It's like a fine wine that gets more potent by the week, but it's about as political as my stickers get. The rest are just cool art I enjoy, usually from artists I meet at street fairs and whatnot, since it's an easy way to throw them a few supportive bucks without breaking my own wallet.

Saying they don't age well is pretty generalizing, given the variety of ways one can express themselves with stickers that aren't necessarily topical or political.

You're missing something, but that's sorta the point. The idea of what a full-stack developer or back-end engineer or hacker (or whatever term we want to bandy about) looks like is largely based on stereotyping and a bit of myth. You can't tell what someone does for a living just by looking at them all of the time, but you can some of the time, so it's easy to play on that by dressing the part because we humans can be easily tricked into trusting our own information by default. If you cosplay as a network engineer, it's pretty likely that's what most people will think you do.

Say you're red teaming, and you are on-site looking to gain access to the server closet of a business. Some initial setup about you being there comes into play, but once there, it's up to you to look like you belong there, when some unwitting person with access to the server closet will lead you to it, then leave you to do your thing on the pleasant notion that you'll have the "problem" fixed by the end of the day. This is an ultra-simple scenario used as an example, but looking the part sometimes means having some stickers on your laptop that tell people you're really into a specific language or tool chain, or that you've been in the SOC trenches long enough to know what a lot of those inside jokes mean. Details often sell the lie.

I get this, but thankfully the regrettable tattoos I got back in the day were small/simple enough to hide under cover-ups. My former tattoos were drug-related, but these days, they're all themed with the retrovideo games I still love play, especially when I need a breather from everything else.

As a result, I am that guy that tells people a few rules about tattoos:

1. Don't get a tattoo of a band. They will eventually fall out of favor or do something stupid.

2. Don't get a tattoo of any person unless they've been dead for a long, long time. Like a band, a person will also eventually fall out of favor or do something stupid. Even after they're dead, it may still be uncovered that they did something stupid in secret.

3. Don't make your self-expression about other people. Rules 1 and 2 should have already put you on this path.

4. Consider time. So you like cars, especially the 1987 Pontiac Firebird you had in high school. Have you always liked cars? Will you always like cars? Have you and will you always like that car? If there is doubt, rule it out.

5. Are you drunk or high? Best sleep on it.

6. Can you be honest with yourself? This is the Catch 22 question, but an important one. We tend to have a few versions of ourselves to contend with; the one we want to be, the one others perceive us as, and the one we need to be. Sometimes they align, sometimes they don't, but self-expression hinges on understanding the difference and allowing that we might be deceiving ourselves about who we really are, sometimes.

Getting a tattoo is a remarkably difficult and personal thing that I see a lot of people not take seriously enough, then live to regret it, myself included. The artist who has now done all my visible work is an absolute master at getting people to slow down and think about what they want, which was a terrific boon in my life, because he probably did more for me as a person than my therapist did. His clients are life-long, one even having traveled from another country to get more work done by him. That's to say nothing of his absolutely radical art and style that always produces something unique and fit for the person to make part of their lives.

It's something I often think about when I look down at my arms, see those old game homages and realize, regardless of what else has happened in my life or whoever I thought I was at the time, they have been with me since the beginning and are still here, helping me through it.

What's missing from the initial comparison is the fact that smartphones opened up all sorts of conveniences, which is partly what makes them so addictive. Rock music, D&D, etc, these other things that were crusaded against offered no convenience for all, so a conservative mind saw no value in it and attacked it as something that warps or rots young brains. Smartphones obviously do that and worse, but because they offer all sorts of helpful tools in our daily lives, we let it slide.

When I was in high school in the 90's, the famed Texas Instruments calculators were often banned in some maths classes because, as was said at the time, we were "not going to be walking around with a computer in our pockets all the time," so we needed to learn to do the work. By the time my younger brother passed through the same classes, they were required to have a graphing calculator because it actually helped kids complete the work. And play Dope Wars.

While we do tend to overreact to new tech, ways of thinking, games, music, etc, there's something inherently oily and snakelike about a thing that brings convenience to our lives the way smartphones or cell phones did. They slip in, comfortably at times, settling into our habits and routines while simultaneously altering them. We end up manipulated by it and before we know it, we can't set it down. In the case of smartphones, our data became the commodity, a mere decade or two after we were worried about tracking devices in cars or phone lines being tapped. But the smartphones kept delivering on their promises, which kept us hooked.

As someone who recovering from alcoholism, I struggle to call our love of smartphones an addiction, but if it helps people be aware of the dangers, by all means, use the term. To me, the problem of smartphones is manipulation at the deepest cognitive levels. We started offloading some thinking to them and who could blame us? We had the store of human knowledge in our pockets! We could play a game instead of sitting idle on the train, gamble with online casinos to try and win some extra cash that week, keep up with the Joneses on Facebook or get into a heated debate on Twitter during our lunch break, check banking, stocks and eBay sales, etc. We no longer had to carry a separate device to photograph or record the moment. The list goes on and on. But in the end, it altered our behavior just enough that we allow ourselves to be controlled by it, monitored by it, and bought and sold by it.

Hah! Maybe for now, but I'll probably pass that with a few more posts I have in the works. They're related to some projects I have going (that I will eventually finish), which means more photos.

What I really need to do is standardize my format and size, just to make things a bit more visually tidy. I'm not all that interested in keeping below a certain size, more so that I'm not doing anything I consider unnecessary for the function and feel of the site. Fairly certain whatever readership I have is either related to me or people I play D&D with, so it's really just a fun thing for me to do once in awhile.

I thought that too assumed my blog fit the criteria. I was wrong; weighed in at just over 100KB too heavy to get in the club.

My guess is the photos.

Individuals may be heartened when they have confidence these principles will carry on to the next generation.

I like this and care deeply about what happens to our world after I am gone, but I worry (excessively, actually) that most others do not. Greed, immediate gratification, etc, these things cloud our judgement so greatly that even I have trouble remembering that the future exists with or without me in it.

It's an interesting problem to think about, but I have no idea what branch of philosophy it falls under, so pardon my sophistry. I do wonder, though; how do we get people to care about this?

I've been part of three software-adjacent product development teams where the Lead did exactly this and it did not go well all three times.

Having been team lead a few times myself now, I have learned that I am not there to be a field marshal. I'm there to act as a hub or conduit for all the other parts of the team. When they clash, I help resolve the conflict. When they question, I help assuage concerns. When they have ideas, I help evaluate the value of implementation. When they need resources, I approach the right people and do what I can. When they fuck up, I take the heat and rally them to help fix the problem.

It took me over a decade to learn this. I'm not the best. My name is unrecognized, for the most part, outside of some very specific circles. But I find that being part of the team rather than some imaginary demagogue to them yields consistently good results with significantly lower risk of talent loss and helps avoid over-promising/under-delivering.

The article does a nice job of pointing a few things out that I find essential in good leadership, but one thing in particular is saying "I don't know, but let's figure it out." Not only does it give your experts permission to be uncertain and helps avoid the trappings of getting defensive, as the author mentions, but it also reminds them they are not alone in this fight. That's powerful.

I'm sure many of you reading this have felt unsupported by your leaders in the past, a cog in a machine that will stress you to the point of breaking and simply replace you with another when that inevitably happens. Maybe my experience as a tech/troubleshooter colors my view here, but people, just like machines, need to be cared for if you want them to keep operating at a level that allows them to make a meaningful contribution to the team.

It's less illusion and fantasy and more code for "what I think." If you notice, it's only uttered by people who believe their own reasoning should be automatically accepted as truth. Ego leaves no room for doubt or embarrassment.

To me, this author's blog (and others like it) do echo the finality of the end of our existence by remaining in their questioning, unfinished state. That's really just how it goes with our mortality and I think there's something poetic to be said about that, but I have trouble articulating it. We leave life with many questions left unanswered and things left unfinished, no matter how hard we try, it seems.

To the individual, here is, in effect, never enough time. There never will be.