This is my favorite thread of the day. I learned something, and it brought back memories of plugging one of these into my parents '87 Buick LeSabre wagon. Complete with wood grain panels. Yeah, I didn’t date much back then.

Load virus on to banking system to embezzle fraction of cents on each financial operation.

Not that easy when it’s a fleet of servers in multiple remote data centers. Lots of IT folks will be spending their weekend sitting in data center cages.

Seems appropriate to drop this here:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-reichstag-fire

On February 27, 1933, the German parliament (Reichstag) building burned down. The Nazi leadership and its coalition partners used the fire to claim that Communists were planning a violent uprising. They claimed that emergency legislation was needed to prevent this. The resulting act, commonly known as the Reichstag Fire Decree, abolished a number of constitutional protections and paved the way for Nazi dictatorship.

Just got back from a 3 day trip to Brussels, we loved it. Plus, Smurfs (Les Schtroumpfs) everywhere. We did take a day trip to Bruges though, that was even better than Brussels IMHO. Especially since I could walk around saying to my wife “If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn’t, so it doesn’t.”.

Until said dog poops in the corner halfway through, then you have 12 more hours of entertainment, snuggles, and smells

Kirby said that he has seen the IDF ‘take actions - sometimes actions that even I’m not sure our own military would take - in terms of informing civilian populations ahead of operations, where to go or not to go. They have taken steps.’

How is this controversial? The daily mail is an awful source.

Meanwhile, me over here with the self-doubt slamming ctrl-z

The 2017 tax bill that the Republicans rammed through had a time bomb in it for software developers. Starting in 2022, companies could no longer expense R&D costs, and instead had to amortize them over 5 years. This has led to massive tax bills in 2023 for companies. I have no doubt that this is another major factor in the recent tech layoffs.

Take an imaginary bootstrapped software business called “Acme Corp.” This company generates $1,000,000 of revenue per year running a SaaS service. It employs five engineers, and pays each $200,000. That is $1,000,000 paid in labor costs. For simplicity, we omit other costs like servers and hosting, even though those costs can also fall under the new R&D rules, and have to be amortized. So, how much taxable profit does this company make?

In 2021, the answer would be zero profit. In 2022, the answer was $900,000 in profits(!!)

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-will-us-companies-hire

Sometimes it’s like wiping a marker

Assume positive intent. Amazing how much lower stress your stress levels will be if you don’t feel attacked (on the road, on social media, in conversations, etc).

Oh yeah, and buy a bidet. Your bum will thank you.

Classic: A Christmas Carol, the 1951 version with Alastair Sim. Sim’s giddy portrayal of Scrooge on Christmas morning is one of my favorite performances of any actor.

Modern: A Christmas Story, and Elf.

I haven’t seen The Always Sunny podcast mentioned yet. If you like IASIP, this is a must listen.

Visa, for example, spent $10 in the 12 weeks to October 6, compared to $77,500 during the same period last year, according to Sensor Tower’s data.

I’m no business genius like musk, but I’m gonna take a guess that wouldn’t even pay the bills for the ridiculous X sign he put on the roof and then had to take down.

I think it varies by seniority. We had layoffs, and all of our lead and principal engineers were able to land a new position in 4-6 weeks. But the junior, mid, and even some senior level engineers had a far rougher time. And managers/directors are having a really difficult go of it right now.

This paper describes the paradigm in detail, they’re called Orthodox File Managers.

I learned Norton Commander way back in the 90s, then moved to Midnight Commander, and it’s still a key part of my toolset. Using the keyboard in a hybrid shell / tree view mode is still the single most efficient way I’ve found to manage files. Need to find files under a subdirectory? Press F7. Need to move an entire directory somewhere else? cd to it, then press F6. Want to move all the pdf files under a subdirectory somewhere? Use the find dialog, then move the search results. No mouse/trackpad needed, everything is at your fingertips.

Somewhat related, at least on Linux and OSX, GNU Stow is a great way to manage dotfiles.

I guess it depends what one calls “the media”. Something like IEEE Spectrum is top notch for tech news. Reuters and AP generally are pretty good for normal news. Past that, maybe something like The Conversation?

For a lot of these you need to study/practice on sites like HackerRank for a while first. Some companies go overboard and expect you to build some crazy recursive dynamic programming implementation in 15 mins without an IDE, others are more realistic and just want to see if you know things like algorithm complexity, can pick appropriate data structures, and write logical and clean code. And yes, very little of it applies to what most of us do day to day. Anyways, HackerRank is great for interview practice, you can Google for pretty much any solution to their questions.