I still wonder why English (a Germanic language) doesn’t have its own pronoun for the plural 2nd person like German (euch) or Dutch (jullie), I think it kinda helps with distinction between talking to one person and talking to multiple people.
The problem is… what pronoun should we choose? I think “yinz” would sound kinda cool, but nobody outside of a very specific spot in the US actually uses it (other than myself I guess).
I agree. It’s the plural of “you” that should be the official standard, since it disambiguates “you.” It can even be broadened to include larger groups via “all y’all,” as in, not just y’all in talking to, but all y’all in the house.
Where I’m from people just assume you’re a hick is you say y’all. It’s not very common in the northern, out Midwest of the US, but everywhere in the south.
People of inexplicably confident certainty that they alone have discovered legal loopholes enabling them to ignore laws they don’t like while benefitting from public services and infrastructure of a nation they assert they are not a citizen of. It’s delusional ignorance.
I kinda wish the government would recognize their sovereignty, and make them pass through customs every time they leave their property, cut off their public utilities, make them apply for a work visa…you know, give them the full experience.
Don't worry...they already get their public utilities cut when the stop paying for them, and they pulled over and charged when driving an unregistered vehicle. Plus many don't have a social security number, so can't apply for most jobs anyways. That's what gives them the opportunity to complain that they are being oppressed and they are fighting for a righteous cause. It also gives us entertainment when they post their latest attempt to say the secret words that will let them get away with all these things that inevitably fails.
The sad thing is that their kids usually don’t have a social security number or birth certificate either, so the kids end up screwed over when they leave their parents and try to get a job or place to live. It’s not an easy process to get those documents.
People of inexplicably confident certainty that they alone have discovered YOUTUBE VIDEOS THAT DISCUSS legal loopholes enabling them to ignore laws they don’t like while benefitting from public services and infrastructure of a nation they assert they are not a citizen of. It’s delusional ignorance.
You know, there are probably some in the mountains of West Virginia that might as well be sovereign citizens. They’re living in the woods off the land, not using public infrastructure, trading with their neighbors, and being self sufficient.
Hell, I’ve got a buddy who has a little shack. He pays his taxes, has a registered vehicle, and obeys the laws. He’ll work the oilfield or do odd jobs a few months of the year, pay what he needs to pay, then go live in the woods with his dog until he needs more money. He hunts, fishes, and forages. We check on his property while he’s gone.
He owns almost nothing and is basically on the most hardcore camping trip you can imagine for half the year. I wish I had that mindset and skill set. He’s one of the happiest guys I know.
The skill set to live like that is wild. I’ve got a couple of acres in the swamp where I hike and shoot and camp, generally act like a redneck. You could drop me off naked in January, I’d be fine in 20-minutes. But I wouldn’t last more than 3-weeks!
Most people have no concept of living off the land like your buddy. Wish I could hang with him and learn!
Eh, more like Trekkies are techies. I would consider myself somewhat of a techie, definitely nerdy, and very much into sci-fi, but I really don’t give a shit about Star Trek. I’ve seen a lot of it, just because I’ve had a couple girlfriends that really enjoyed it, but otherwise I probably wouldn’t have watched any after my childhood.
Now, if HBO were to do a hard R version, I’d probably get into it.
I find star trek boring too, there’s a lot of far more interesting and exciting scifi out there so I really don’t get how it still has such a huge fan base still.
That said, if they start dropping the hard Rs in Star Trek I will definitely tune in to that catastrophe.
It’s ok, whenever you get annoyed about his ego, just go watch the clip of Ole’ Bill trying to pontificate after his trip to space and Jeff Bezos cutting him off. The look on his face is so sad and frustrated.
I never really thought about it before, but it seems obvious now. Trekkies and open source tech folks would have a massive overlap, and Lemmy kind of exists perfectly within that intersection of utilitarian principles. So of course we would all find each other here.
Alphabet gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $42.688B, a 7.85% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2023 was $160.503B, a 1.7% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2022 was $156.633B, a 6.77% increase from 2021.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2021 was $146.698B, a 50.01% increase from 2020.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2020 was $97.795B, a 8.71% increase from 2019.
Huh, they seemingly have money to not fuck our eyes without lube for ads, but I guess they somehow just don’t have enough money, 156 billion dollars is really nothing after all. Probably more money in between my couch cushions. Such a small indie company that has to struggle to remain afloat, like an Etsy store.
There are lots of reasons that one area of your company may make less money. It’s like how the NYC subway or post office technically don’t “make money” but the value they bring to the whole system is a net positive by enabling all the other companies to make way more.
Data aquisition for analysis, AI training, tracking and simply having monopolized a space. Theres a lot of positives and indirect profit that might make it feasible.
But does it “Good” for the public like say road improvement?
It does “Good” for the company by increasing the quality of the output of it’s AI/LLM, more data to track users etc.
There isn’t a reason to run a section of your company if it costs you money.
It’s funny that you say this, because Google intentionally ran YouTube without making any profit from it for many years. The goal (which they succeeded in) was to starve out any competition and establish YouTube as the online video monopoly. Ever since establishing that monopoly, they’ve been squeezing more and more money out of the platform knowing that social inertia will work against any would-be competitors (everything is on YouTube, all of the content creators are on YouTube, all of the viewers are on YouTube, so how does someone convince enough people to move to another platform?).
Prominent example is printer hardware and the ink. Hardware is sold at little mark-up or at a loss and then they force you to use their iteration of liquid gold. Printer ink is dirt cheap to manufacture and costs more than human blood.
Is that 10 million active users of uBlock Origin or 10 million active installs? Also relevant because I’ve seen workplaces that deploy UBO to all users thanks to advertising being an easy vector of getting users to click random links they shouldn’t
So I can’t find my original source for that one anymore, but I looked at the Chrome Web Store and addons.mozilla.org and they show a total of ≈17m (10mil on Chrome, 6.9mil on Firefox).
I don’t see a good active users number on uBlockO’s website or anything, and I also don’t have a good way of estimating how many of those installs are second or third browsers; but an enterprise install probably wouldn’t go through the extension storefronts and would instead be delivered directly via MDM. Whether that means they’d count toward the browsers’ totals, I’m not sure.
Still, it seems to me that the vagaries around this probably cancel each other out decently well; sure, some might be double-counted or enterprise installs, but the actual uBlockO users are probably more inclined to be power users, online more often than other users. I’d say that 4% is probably in the ballpark at least. Maybe it’s 1%, maybe it’s 6%, but I don’t think it’s terribly far off.
This phenomenon is normally created by a bunch of mid level people without many stock options trying to get promotions. They need the big arrow to go up to get a good raise, be recognized, etc in their individual business units.
The people pushing things to go up are typically not motivated by the gross number as much as they are making their boss happy enough to pay them more. That’s why the change is all that matters.
Comedy gold. Literally in the opening crawl and then some background character was like “I don’t know, dark force powers, cloning or some shit” and that was all we got 🤣
I always said that opening crawl should behave been the movie. How Palestine came back, grew power, and the opening 10 seconds of him searching for the stones. That should have been half of the movie
I don’t really mind it as a plot twist, but it shouldn’t have just come out of nowhere. I’m still not clear on exactly what is supposed to have happened there.
Also, there was that weird thing where they announced it in Fortnite, wtf was that about.
I agree that it’s a pretty bad idea to bring back Palpatine, and that the execution of that idea was also really bad, but this idea has been in the Star Wars universe for a long time - in the early 90s the Dark Empire comics were all about a clone of the emperor secretly working to assemble a powerful industrial and military machine in the galactic core, before going on a crusade to restore the galactic empire, with Luke Skywalker as his new enforcer, to replace Dark Vader.
The comics were and are extremely popular and a lot of the sequel movies seem to pull some ideas from them, but never in a way that really makes sense. For example, in Dark Empire, the republic has to deal with a mysterious new military force conducting heavy strip mining of planets long before they know anything of the new imperial threat.
It’s well known (and good) trait of Star Wars movies that they jump straight into the action without too much context, but the writing on episode 9 was so sloppy it feels amateurish. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I believe they could have got a fanfic author to do a better job. Delivering exposition like “somehow, palpatine has returned” directly to the audience is a fucking joke.
To be fair, though, I think the scenes on Exegol pretty much confirm that it was cloning, or some kind of Sith alchemy, and subsequent works (the Mandalorian, for example) are definitely leading in that direction, but that’s a post-hoc explanation for something that already damaged our immersion, not foreshadowing or a further explanation of something that was already plausible but a mystery.
I do think it’s a really good thing to have mystery in Star Wars, not everything needs to be explained and every new story should add new mysteries. I think things being mentioned and not explained (the Clone Wars mentioned in ep 4 being the best example of that, imo) is part of what makes the universe feel vast and real, like it has a full history that you could study for years. So I don’t agree with that “an intriguing story hook is shown and never explored” is always fair criticism. Sometimes it is, but often it’s just a cool mystery that will inevitably be answered in some minor novel or comic a few years later.
Anyways, I’m not saying they should have copied Dark Empire, or demonstrate/explain exactly how Palpatine returned or how he built his fleet. They should have just hinted at it by having the resistance interact with a new military force with a different aesthetic than the New Order. Have Rey bothered by a growing darkness that she assumes is Kylo, but reveal that Kylo had felt it too and doesn’t know what it is. Show the cloning vats and Sith alchemy on Exegol before we know that Palpatine’s back.
Definitely, 100%, don’t announce the twist villain of your movie on Fortnite to generate buzz. Make less money, probably, but a much better movie. I’ve written way too much in this comment, sorry, I’m having an autism/adhd moment
I agree that it’s a pretty bad idea to bring back Palpatine, and that the execution of that idea was also really bad, but this idea has been in the Star Wars universe for a long time
What’s funny is that I didn’t know about that (I’m a movies only type on SW, never known much about the extended universe), but I actually think it’s fine as an idea. Just needed to be presented better.
I would like, for instance to know how, if at all, Palpatine and Snoke were connected. The sudden loss of Snoke in TLJ really robbed the sequels of their villain far too soon. If he had stuck around to IX, and then was revealed to be a front for Palpatine (with explanation for his survival) that would have worked better.
Still though, I really enjoyed IX, which I know is an unpopular opinion, but after TLJ, it just felt right again, even if lots of it was very silly.
In my opinion, and this is gonna be deep Star Wars legends theorising rather than canon, Snoke was almost definitely intended to be Darth Plagueis (of “the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise” fame), Palpatine’s former master. He was obsessed with Sith alchemy, cloning, biological engineering, that kind of thing, and famously could “keep the ones he cared about from dying […] but not himself”. He roughly matches the appearance of the character, with some extra scarring. He would be one of the few characters capable of producing a viable force sensitive clone (I’m ignoring X-1 and X-2, because they’re minor game characters which probably didn’t get much thought put into them) something which Vader and the Kaminoans had been working on secretly with limited success.
I think the reason that we didn’t get a Snoke=Plagueis reveal in Rise of the Skywalker (RotS) is because fans had been speculating about it from the beginning, and “defying audience expectations” was vogue in media at the time (e.g. the game of thrones final season), and extremely heavy criticism of The Last Jedi (TLJ) influenced the story team to almost completely ignore TLJ entirely, almost as if it was cursed and if they referenced any events in it, RotS would also be cursed. So they had to, essentially, cram two whole movies of storytelling into RotS, which is why the pacing of that movie is so absolutely ridiculous.
The likelihood is that we’ll never get a direct answer as to Snoke’s origins, or if we do, it’ll be in some random novel or comic. I get the feeling that Disney want to brush a lot of the sequel trilogy’s bigger mistakes under the rug, so to speak.
Definitely, 100%, don’t announce the twist villain of your movie on Fortnite to generate buzz. Make less money, probably, but a much better movie. I’ve written way too much in this comment, sorry, I’m having an autism/adhd moment
That is still the stupidest bit of it, it’s not even revealing the twist villain that’s the issue even, like that could have built mystery if it was in the trailers and shit right, it’s using a third party studio to reveal a critical plot point in a media that is pretty young, both in it’s age and audience, and in a game that’s looked down upon by the generation that would probably be the target audience for the reveal
Also it’s time limited so it’s just a matter of time before his reveal becomes lost media, so great thing there too
This was honestly so funny, it's hard to be mad at them for just not even giving a shit. Yeah we could pull an explanation out of our asses that won't make any sense, or we just throw that libe at people.
You only dislike it because whatever bad app you’re using to share them on doesn’t support them.
Stop being the gullible fool and start hating the apps not the file format.
Edit: I also spot your .gif favouritism in there. .gif is an archaic and wasteful format, and asking for it is the same as looking at your car and whining that the fuel has no lead.
Everytime a post gets displayed on a screen, it got transferred over a dozen routers, parsed by a network card, decoded byte by byte to get each pixel’s color and then displayed on screen
Transferring and decoding all that extra data on millions of computers isn’t free
When you make an instagram post that gets seen by millions of people it’s absolutely not negligible to use webp vs a jpg and choosing one over the other because you’re just… used to the extension? is downright getting unacceptable if you are at least a lil tech savvy
People need to start using newer file format for real now. It’s been 20 years
The point is the browser just plays the mp4 with autoplay and looping and then people call them GIFs when they aren’t. The only time you are looking at an actual GIF file is when the quality is atrocious and the colors are messed up because it needed to be dithered.
This is circular reasoning. They are wondering why gif is still a thing precisely because it’s so supported while other formats that are better aren’t and you are answering that it is because it’s supported while other formats aren’t.
Because it’s old and easy to handle. Yes it’s wasteful if you convert whole videos, but really anything under 10s with low rez is easily handleable by pretty much anything. Gif was the first animated format and that’s why it’s big. Also early internet forum days were absolutely plastered with pixelart gifs that ran for minutes and barely swalloed 100kb. You can get a lot of bang for your buck if you save on pixels and framerate. But ofc a 60fps render of some 4k bluray clip will eat your memory. Contrast that with 16×32 px gif that runs at 8fps.
GIF is big because it uses dictionary compression (pixel colors are mapped to a lookup table and then combinations of bits of increasing length are assigned to each table entry, the shortest combinations going for the most used colors, the longuest for the least used ones) which is great for stuff with clear (not-aliased) lines, a limited number of colors and large areas with just one flat color (such as drawings) but really bad for actual pictures (anything real world or imitating it, with natural shading).
I believe GIF still beats all or most other formats (except, for larger images, the actual vector graphics formats used in the programs with which such drawings are made nowadays) for things like drawings. (That said, I think PNG has a mode that does the same kind of compression, used for stuff like the little lemmy icon next to our nicknames here)
Animation on top if it was a bit of a hack due to the header format allowing multiple images in the same file, so it’s really just a slideshow that has no video-oriented compression (i.e. each image is compressed individually and stored whole even if it’s pretty much the last image with but a handful of pixels changed), hence why it’s big when used for animation.
The kind of compression used in stuff like JPEG is based on the frequency of how each color channel changes across a block of pixels - which was 8x8 in the original JPEG - (i.e. it tries to match each block in the image to a sum of waves of different frequencies) which is much better for natural images, but loses information as a perfect match is usually impossible, and video compression methods have all sorts of intermediate frame compression techniques, the most basic of which is “this frame is the last frame with block such and such intact or moved around X pixels plus here’s a bunch of entirelly new pixels” which usually is a lot better than compressing each image individually and storing it, not taking in account previous or subsequent images.
PS: I learned this stuff back at Uni, almost 3 decades ago, which shows you just how old this stuff is.
If I remember it correctly you can’t rally beat a good dictionary encoding with wavelet compression for certain kinds of image such as drawings, cartoons and in general images with no or flat shading.
(Might be a bit outdated on that believe as I don’t really know what compression algorithms are used in JPEG-XL or WebP)
Further, GIF is lossless compression, so that means your drawing compressed with it will be much smaller and after decompression you still have the same image exactly, pixel by pixel.
That said, most drawings nowadays being digitally created with vector drawing apps means that an even better format is whatever native vector graphics format used by the app as that can scale to whatever size you want.
The guy clearly isn’t familiar with a lot of image formats and is trying to find out about them by asking, a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and in a special community called no stupid questions, no less.
You don’t need to call anyone a gullible fool and furthermore you’ve not actually helped to answer the question “what is webp”, at all. What are you trying to achieve with this pointless aggression? If you wanted one less “gullible fool” you’d have to answer the question and educate, at best you’ve sown confusion.
What are you trying to achieve with this pointless aggression?
Some people in the tech community just seem to have this weird superiority complex for some reason. They think they’re smarter than everyone else and look down on the normies, meaning they come off… Like this guy. It’s like they put all of their skill points into INT and none of them into WIS.
I feel like this answer is somewhat warranted because OP seems to have already made up their mind that it’s bad. They referred to it as a “plague” and “filthy” despite not knowing what it even is. This comes across as a lack of interest in the actual answer and more just using this post as a platform to rant about it (despite knowing nothing about it).
It’s not unreasonable to ask everyone here to word their questions politely (or at least neutrally). This is somewhat aggressive, so I think an equally aggressive answer is perfectly suitable.
Ok so I’m going to be making a lot of assumptions here but I think that OP’s language was hyperbolic and over the top because it was tongue in cheek and trying express frustration with what to them is an inexplicable roadblock to their normal web use, whilst also genuinely trying to figure out why such an obstacle would be put in place. Until they get the necessary information they’ll never see it as anything else. Looking at it that way the kind of nerd rage response devoid of the necessary context or pertinent information for the person it’s directed seemed as inappropriatenas it was counterproductive.
That said, those are just assumptions I made based on the tenor of OP’s speech and I guess you could argue I didn’t extend the same benefit of the doubt to his respondent. I don’t think that matters much though, it’s still utterly pointless bloviating at someone who just clearly doesn’t understand.
Neither have they the choice of what format others use. The point here was that the apps are to blame for not supporting the format, not the format for not being supported. It’s a common format nowadays.
I’m afraid future will be conservative nevertheless due to the simple fact that they’re the only ones making kids. I’m liberal myself but I don’t have kids and will never have so my traits don’t pass to the next generations. The conservative neighbours with 7 kids on the other hand…
I don’t know. I think it depends more on where they grow up and who/what they’re exposed to (in person and online). At the high school I work at, we have a bunch of lgbtq+ teens whose conservative parents have no idea they’re queer or go by a different name. But I also don’t live somewhere like Wyoming with a much higher conservative population. I live in a college town in a (barely) blue county surrounded by red counties in an ultimately very blue state.
I hope we find a way to kill the online radical right pipeline and continue to expose more teens to other ideas, other cultures, and other ways of life, and maybe it won’t matter so much who their parents are.
But they ARE communal. Where you grow decides 90% of what you believe in.
It’s actually why I disagree with the top comment chain that smarter means more left leaning. I think it’s more that left leaning communities have better education standards and lead to smarter generations. Cause and effect reversed.
The ability to propagate the politics depends mightily on the success of the community though. It’s sort of the other side of the ‘brain drain’ principle-- if people have to leave the community for educational or economic opportunity, they’re probably not going to be able to reconstruct the same echo chambers.
Even when you see a preserved group within a larger population (think of Chinatowns and Little Italies), they’re inherently getting a lot more cultural exchange than back in the home country.
A lot of the most self-destructive policies (neglecting education, running the environment into the ground, skate-where-the-puck-was-in-1972 economic policy) are just begging for decades of brain drain. The kids are going to leave because there’s simply nothing there but the Gizzard Extraction Plant, and that got automated in 2032.
What top comment chain? They’re all talking about Reddit censoring leftists, not talking about the intelligence of any faction. The most I’ve seen are people making fun of the right, but that’s to be expected.
Okay. I read that post, nowhere did it come off as patronizing at all, and it holds people accountable foe having basic knowledge which is an expectation of most adults in society, so I don’t see how the anti-intellectualist garbage is in any wa valid here.
In some ways yes but it can have the opposite effect too. I know lots of left leaning people who grew up in super religious/conservative families and hate everything about their beliefs.
Yeah it probably will. We’ll see in the next few decades. Aging population and low birthrates are much bigger problems that most people realize. Increasingly small amount of workers has to cover the living costs of the increasing numbers of retirees.
The thing about that is, if they’re ignorant, their kids will be ignorant too. And what that adds up to is just the same thing we’ve got: a large group of people who are subject to whatever momentary persuasion happens to reach them on any given day, and a political/ruling class that can work with that just fine, so they are taking steps to hamper education sufficiently that this can endure for an indeterminate amount of time before we all burn.
What those large populations do react to, is missing a meal or three. And so far, these aristocrats seem to understand that whatever else they try to pull, they must always service the fundamentals: bread and circuses.
The progressive/conservative axis has nothing to do with the economical left/right, it was only forcefully merged in the USA because they have only two parties.
I find it so ironic that the comment above you is literally saying that being progressive means challenging what you [think you] know, but you are being downvoted by (I assume) people who call themselves progressive, without any discussion.
Well by definition right?
Progressive outlook means your open to new ideas, exploring new territory, open to concept that challenge what you think and know, and gives you the ability to push boundaries, make new discoveries and try new things.
Conservative outlook on the other hand means you are content and safe with the familiar, doing things the way they have always been done because its tried and true, however this means if they feel unconfortable or threatened by ideas which are going to change the way the live and how things work which makes them dig their heels in and get defensive.
Please, enlighten me how you’d remotely service a few thousand Bitlocker-locked machines, that won’t boot far enough to get an internet connection, with non-tech-savvy users behind them. Pray tell what common “basic hygiene” practices would’ve helped, especially with Crowdstrike reportedly ignoring and bypassing the rollout policies set by their customers.
Not saying the rest of your post is wrong, but this stood out as easily glossed over.
You’d have to have something even lower level like a OOB KVM on every workstation which would be stupid expensive for the ROI, or something at the UEFI layer that could potentially introduce more security holes.
Maybe they should offer a real time patcher for the security vulnerabilities in the OOB KVM, I know a great vulnerability database offered by a company that does this for a lot of systems world wide! /s
I didn’t say it was, nor did I say UEFI was the problem. My point was additional applications or extensions at the UEFI layer increase the attack footprint of a system. Just like vPro, you’re giving hackers a method that can compromise a system below the OS. And add that in to laptops and computers that get plugged in random places before VPNs and other security software is loaded and you have a nice recipe for hidden spyware and such.
Was a windows sysadmin for a decade. We had thousands of machines with endpoint management with bitlocker encryption. (I have sincd moved on to more of into cloud kubertlnetes devops) Anything on a remote endpoint doesn’t have any basic “hygiene” solution that could remotely fix this mess automatically. I guess Intels bios remote connection (forget the name) could in theory allow at least some poor tech to remote in given there is internet connection and the company paid the xhorbant price.
All that to say, anything with end-user machines that don’t allow it to boot is a nightmare. And since bit locker it’s even more complicated. (Hope your bitloxker key synced… Lol).
You’re thinking of Intel vPro. I imagine some of the Crowdstrike victims customers have this and a bunch of poor level 1 techs are slowly griding their way through every workstation on their networks. But yeah, OP is deluded and/or very inexperienced if they think this could have been mitigated on workstations through some magical “hygiene”.
Bro. PXE boot image servers. You can remotely image machines from hundreds of miles away with a few clicks and all it takes on the other end is a reboot.
Hey, it’s not perfect, but a fix that gets you 10% of the way there is still 10% you don’t have to do by hand. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, my man.
Separate persistent data and operating system partitions, ensure that every local network has small pxe servers, vpned (wireguard, etc) to a cdn with your base OS deployment images, that validate images based on CA and checksum before delivering, and give every user the ability to pxe boot and redeploy the non-data partition.
Bitlocker keys for the OS partition are irrelevant because nothing of value is stored on the OS partition, and keys for the data partition can be stored and passed via AD after the redeploy. If someone somehow deploys an image that isn’t ours, it won’t have keys to the data partition because it won’t have a trust relationship with AD.
With enough autism in your overlay configs, sure, but in my environment tat leakage is still encrypted. It’s far simpler to just accept leakage and encrypt the OS partition with a key that’s never stored anywhere. If it gets lost, you rebuild the system from pxe. (Which is fine, because it only takes about 20 minutes and no data we care about exists there) If it’s working correctly, the OS partition is still encrypted and protects any inadvertent data leakage from offline attacks.
Separate persistent data and operating system partitions, ensure that every local network has small pxe servers, vpned (wireguard, etc) to a cdn with your base OS deployment images, that validate images based on CA and checksum before delivering, and give every user the ability to pxe boot and redeploy the non-data partition.
At that point why not just redirect the data partition to a network share with local caching? Seems like it would simplify this setup greatly (plus makes enabling shadow copy for all users stupid easy)
Edit to add: I worked at a bank that did this for all of our users and it was extremely convenient for termed employees since we could simply give access to the termed employee’s share to their manager and toss a them a shortcut to access said employee’s files, so if it turned out Janet had some business critical spreadsheet it was easily accessible even after she was termed
We do this in a lot of areas with fslogix where there is heavy persistent data, it just never felt necessary to do that for endpoints where the persistent data partition is not much more than user settings and caches of convenience. Anything that is important is never stored solely on the endpoints, but it is nice to be able to reboot those servers without affecting downstream endpoints. If we had everything locally dependant on fslogix, I’d have to schedule building-wide outages for patching.
I’ve been separating OS and data partitions since I was a kid running Windows 95. It’s horrifying that people don’t expect and prepare for machines to become unbootable on a regular basis.
Hell, I bricked my work PC twice this year just by using the Windows cleanup tool - on Windows 11. The antivirus went nuclear, as antivirus products do.
But your pxe boot server is down, your radius server providing vpn auth is down, your bitlocker keys are in AD which is down because all your domain controllers are down.
Yes and no. In the best case, endpoints have enough cached data to get us through that process. In the worst case, that’s still a considerably smaller footprint to fix by hand before the rest of the infrastructure can fix itself.
Rollout policies are the answer, and CrowdStrike should be made an example of if they were truly overriding policies set by the customer.
It seems more likely to me that nobody was expecting “fingerprint update” to have the potential to completely brick a device, and so none of the affected IT departments were setting staged rollout policies in the first place. Or if they were, they weren’t adequately testing.
Then - after the fact - it’s easy to claim that rollout policies were ignored when there’s no way to prove it.
If there’s some evidence that CS was indeed bypassing policies to force their updates I’ll eat the egg on my face.
from what ive read/watched thats the crux of the issue.... did they push a 'content' update, i.e. signatures or did they push a code update.
so you basically had a bunch of companies who absolutely do test all vendor code updates beings slipped a code update they werent aware of being labeled a 'content' update.
I’m one of the admins who manage CrowdStrike at my company.
We have all automatic updates disabled, because when they were enabled (according to the CrowdStrike best practices guide they gave us), they pushed out a version with a bug that overwhelmed our domain servers. Now we test everything through multiple environments before things make it to production, with at least two weeks of testing before we move a version to the next environment.
This was a channel file update, and per our TAM and account managers in our meeting after this happened, there’s no way to stop that file from being pushed, or to delay it. Supposedly they’ll be adding that functionality in now.
Windows ADK does this too, or any PXE server really… so yes, you can. The CS issue though didn’t require re-image. Merely removing a file. DR planning would usually have a recovery image pre-installed to automate booting into for lower-level fixes.
A decade ago I worked for a regional chain of gyms with locations in 4 states.
I was in TN. When a system would go down in SC or NC, we originally had three options:
(The most common) have them put it in a box and ship it to me.
I go there and fix it (rare)
I walk them through fixing it over the phone (fuck my life)
I got sick of this. So I researched options and found an open source software solution called FOG. I ran a server in our office and had little optiplex 160s running a software client that I shipped to each club. Then each machine at each club was configured to PXE boot from the fog client.
The server contained images of every machine we commonly used. I could tell FOG which locations used which models, and it would keep the images cached on the client machines.
If everything was okay, it would chain the boot to the os on the machine. But I could flag a machine for reimage and at next boot, the machine would check in with the local FOG client via PXE and get a complete reimage from premade images on the fog server.
The corporate office was physically connected to one of the clubs, so I trialed the software at our adjacent club, and when it worked great, I rolled it out company wide. It was a massive success.
So yes, I could completely reimage a computer from hundreds of miles away by clicking a few checkboxes on my computer. Since it ran in PXE, the condition of the os didn’t matter at all. It never loaded the os when it was flagged for reimage. It would even join the computer to the domain and set up that locations printers and everything. All I had to tell the low-tech gymbro sales guy on the phone to do was reboot it.
This was free software. It saved us thousands in shipping fees alone. And brought our time to fix down from days to minutes.
How would it not have? You got an office or field offices?
“Bring your computer by and plug it in over there.” And flag it for reimage. Yeah. It’s gonna be slow, since you have 200 of the damn things running at once, but you really want to go and manually touch every computer in your org?
The damn thing’s even boot looping, so you don’t even have to reboot it.
I’m sure the user saved all their data in one drive like they were supposed to, right?
I get it, it’s not a 100% fix rate. And it’s a bit of a callous answer to their data. And I don’t even know if the project is still being maintained.
But the post I replied to was lamenting the lack of an option to remotely fix unbootable machines. This was an option to remotely fix nonbootable machines. No need to be a jerk about it.
But to actually answer your question and be transparent, I’ve been doing Linux devops for 10 years now. I haven’t touched a windows server since the days of the gymbros. I DID say it’s been a decade.
Because your imaging environment would also be down. And you’re still touching each machine and bringing users into the office.
Or your imaging process over the wan takes 3 hours since it’s dynamically installing apps and updates and not a static “gold” image. Imaging is then even slower because your source disk is only ssd and imaging slows down once you get 10+ going at once.
I’m being rude because I see a lot of armchair sysadmins that don’t seem to understand the scale of the crowdstike outage, what crowdstrike even is beyond antivirus, and the workflow needed to recover from it.
FOG ran on Linux. It wouldn’t have been down. But that’s beside the point.
I never said it was a good answer to CrowdStrike. It was just a story about how I did things 10 years ago, and an option for remotely fixing nonbooting machines. That’s it.
I get you’ve been overworked and stressed as fuck this last few days. I’ve been out of corporate IT for 10 years and I do not envy the shit you guys are going through right now. I wish I could buy you a cup of coffee or a beer or something.
Last time I used fog it was only doing static image deployment which has been out of style for a while. I don’t know if there are any serious deployment products for windows enterprise that don’t run on windows.
I’m personally not dealing with this because I didn’t like how Crowdstrike had answered a number of questions in their sales call.
Avoiding telling me their vuln scan doesn’t prob be all hosts after claiming it could replace a real vuln scanner, claiming they are somehow better than others at malware detection without bringing up 3rd party tests, claiming how their product was novel when others have been doing the same for 7+ years.
My fave was them telling me how much easier it is to manage but no one on the call had ever worked as a sysadmin or even seen how their competition works.
Shitshow. I’m so glad this happened so I can block their sales team.
Imaging environment down? If a sysadmin can’t figure out how to boot a machine into recovery to remove the bad update file then they have bigger problems. The fix in this instance wasn’t even re-imaging machines. It was merely removing a file. Ideal DR scenario would have a recovery image already on the system that can be booted into remotely, so there is minimal strain on the network. Furthermore, we don’t live in dial-up age anymore.
Then you didn’t 3-2-1, because you should be able to restore from your alternate format, e.g. tape, without your existing infrastructure. Ideally your second and offsite copies are also offline, so even if you ignored the separate media rule, it wouldn’t have been affected by the crowdstrike update.
Ultimately, nobody should have to tell you not to lock your keys in the car.
This works great for stationary pcs and local servers, does nothing for public internet connected laptops in hands of users.
The only fix here is staggered and tested updates, and apparently this update bypassed even deffered update settings that crowdstrike themselves put into their software.
The only winning move here was to not use crowdstrike.
But don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. A fix that gets you 40% of the way there is still 40% less work you have to do by hand. Not everything has to be a fix for all situations. There’s no such thing as a panacea.
Sure. At the same time one needs to manage resources.
I was all in on laptop deployment automation. It cut down on a lot of human error issues and having inconsistent configuration popping up all the time.
But it needs constant supervision, even if not constant updates. More systems and solutions lead to neglect if not supplied well. So some “would be good to have” systems just never make the cut, because as overachieving I am, I’m also don’t want to think everything is taken care of when it clearly isn’t.
You were all in, but was the company all in? How many employees? It sounds like you innovated. Let’s say that the company you worked for was spending millions on vendors that promised solutions but rarely delivered. If instead they gave you $400k a year, a $1 million/year budget & 10 employees… I’m guessing you could have managed the laptop deployment automation, along with some other significant projects as well.
Instead though, people with good ideas, even loyal to the company, are competing against sales and marketing reps from billion dollar companies, and upper management are easily swooned.
Almost all computers can be set to PXE boot, but work laptops usually even have more advanced remote management capabilities. You ask the employee to reboot the laptop and presto!
I wonder how you’re supposed to get PXE boot to work securely over the internet. And how that helps when affected disk is still encrypted and needs unusual intervention to fix, including admin access to system files.
I’ve been doing this for a while, and I like creative solutions, so I wonder about those issues a lot. Not much comes to my mind besides let’s recall all the laptops and do it one by one.
Hypothectically you could ship a company provided router to handle the vpn connection to your remote users, so you aren’t relying on the OS to be able to boot up to get connected to the vpn for the company network and PXE environment. Lots of extra cost and mess though.
From a home user? Probably ain’t shit-all you can do with PXE booting. But if you have a field office or somewhere a user can go with a hardware vpn appliance? Well now you’re in business.
I wonder how you’re supposed to get PXE boot to work securely over the internet.
PXE boot is more of last resort IMO, but can be uses as a chainloader to a more secure option. The biggest challenge I could see security-wise is having PXE boot being ran on unsecured networks. Even then though, normally a computer will have been provisioned on a secure network and will have encryption and secure boot-based encryption, and some additional signature-based image verification.
It also assumes that reimaging is always an option.
Yes, every company should have networked storage enforced specifically for issues like this, so no user data would be lost, but there’s often a gap between should and “has been able to find the time and get the required business side buy in to make it happen”.
Also, users constantly find new ways to do non-standard, non-supported things with business critical data.
Isn’t this just more of what caused the problem in the first place? Namely, centralisation. If you store data locally and you lose a machine, that’s bad but not the end of the world. If you store it centrally and you lose the data, that’s catastrophic. Nassim Taleb nailed this stuff. Keep the downside limited, and the upside unlimited or as he says, “Don’t pick up pennies in front of a steamroller.”
This is a good solution for these types of scenarios. Doesn’t fit all though. Where I work, 85% of staff work from home. We largely use SaaS. I’m struggling to think of a good method here other than walking them through reinstalling windows on all their machines.
That’s still 15% less work though. If I had to manually fix 1000 computers, clicking a few buttons to automatically fix 150 of them sounds like a sweet-ass deal to me even if it’s not universal.
You could also always commandeer a conference room or three and throw a switch on the table. “Bring in your laptop and go to conference room 3. Plug in using any available cable on the table and reboot your computer. Should be ready in an hour or so. There’s donuts and coffee in conference room 4.” Could knock out another few dozen.
Won’t help for people across the country, but if they’re nearish, it’s not too bad.
Configure PXE to reboot into recovery image, push out command to remove bad file. Reboot. Done. Workstation laptops usually have remote management already.
or
Have recovery image already installed. Have user reboot & push key to boot into recovery. Push out fix. Done.
Thank you for sharing this. This is what I’m talking about. Larger companies not utilizing something like this already are dysfunctional. There are no excuses for why it would take them days, weeks or longer.
I’d issue IPMI or remote management commands to reboot the machines. Then I’d boot into either a Linux recovery environment (yes, Linux can unlock BitLocker-encrypted drives) or a WinPE (or Windows RE) and unlock the drives, preferably already loaded on the drives, but could have them PXE boot - just giving ideas here, but ideal DR scenario would have an environment ready to load & PXE would cause delays.
I’d either push a command or script that would then remove the update file that caused the issue & then reboots. Having planned for a scenario like this already, total time to fix would be less than 2 hours.
At my company I use a virtual desktop and it was restored from a nightly snapshot a few hours before I logged in that day (and presumably, they also applied a post-restore temp fix). This action was performed on all the virtual desktops at the entire company and took approximately 30 minutes (though, probably like 4 hours to get the approval to run that command, LOL).
It all took place before I even logged in that day. I was actually kind of impressed… We don’t usually act that fast.
what common “basic hygiene” practices would’ve helped
Not using a proprietary, unvetted, auto-updating, 3rd party kernel module in essential systems would be a good start.
Back in the day companies used to insist upon access to the source code for such things along with regular 3rd party code audits but these days companies are cheap and lazy and don’t care as much. They’d rather just invest in “security incident insurance” and hope for the best 🤷
Sometimes they don’t even go that far and instead just insist upon useless indemnification clauses in software licenses. …and yes, they’re useless:
This person is talking about what caused the problem.
Completely different things.
Bad thing happened, how do we fix bad thing and its effects.
Analogous to: A house is on fire; call the ambulances to treat any wounded call the fire department, call insurance, figure out temporary housing.
This is basically immediate remedy or mitigation.
Bad thing happened, but why did the bad thing happen and how to we prevent future occurrences of this?
Analogous to: Investigate the causes of the fire, suggest various safety regulations on natural gas infrastructure, home appliances, electrical wiring, building material and methods, etc.
This is much more complex and involves systemic change.
Dual partitioning as Android does it might have helped. Install the update to partition B, reboot and if it’s alright swap A and B partitions to make B the default. Boot again to the default partition (A, formerly B).
It wouldn’t have booted correctly afaiu with the faulty update, and would have been reverted to use the untouched A partition.
Autopilot, intune. Force restart device twice to get startup repair, choose factory reset, share LAPS admin password and let the workstation rebuild itself.
What peeves me is that the right are all clutching their pearls about anyone who says anything other than blind Trump sympathy. Don’t get me wrong, political violence is wrong. But, remember this:
That shit was amazingly disgusting. And yeah, Trump gets no sympathy from me. But I won’t call for his death, either. I want him to live a very long time. In prison.
There are people on the right, that would call you out on even that. They’re gaslighting anyone left of Mussolini on what are the rules they should be following.
Not if he can’t get on video. The man’s bizarre hold on his base is all about his verbal delivery. If he has to rely on written messages, he can’t verbally circumvent the higher brain function in his victims and they’re more likely to actually become aware that his messages are gibberish.
Conservatives call for violence; Call for rising up; Literally calling themselves DOMESTIC TERRORISTS: Absolutely a nothing burger. Just a bunch of locker room talk. Relax that’s normal conservative speech.
Liberals blinking aggressively: WHY ARENT YOU MORE TOLERANT BE BETTER.
Steam is clunky… Exit -> Oh you want to exit? Let me launch a new window letting you know I’m shutting down and take about 20 seconds while I was sitting here idle before you asked to shutdown.
See you tomorrow where I’ll validate your games again. Just in case!
Yup. And you can kill processes in Windows to in the task manager. Or probably with a Powershell command too, but nobody’s gonna learn Powershell LOL.
There’s nearly always equivalent functions in both Linux and Windows, just in Windows you gotta click around in more bullshit forms and shit to find stuff. Or learn Powershell, but again, LOL. They are both OSes after all, they do similar things. Just one might do them better than the other.
I usually write verbose code and use self-documenting function names, but to have such a limited set of verbs available can be frustrating. They could at least have used a proper dictionary and included all verbs. Then have a map of synonyms that are preferred, like instead of ‘create’ they prefer ‘new’ (which isn’t even a verb).
Why do you need to “tell” some “application”? Why do you need a “finder” if you know the absolute path already? Does this imply that “finder” always runs, ready to be told something?
Finder is macOS equivalent of Windows Explorer (maybe, it’s been a while). I assume Linux desktop suites have various similar processes. In other words, a second optional layer (with more features) to access runtime libc file manipulation api.
It’s one of those things wher eI’m sure it’s fine if you learn it. But it’s not DOS CMD, but also not bash.
So instead of improving CMD to have more features or just going all the way and offering an official bash implementation, they want me to learn a third thing. Just don’t have time for it.
I wanna learn PowerShell but I only really learn extra stuff like that if I have to. My work computer is a Mac now and has been since 2019. At home I don’t use too much on Windows to really warrant it. I did used to know how to do “sudo” in PowerShell which was useful. Best the hell out of restarting as admin.
The “object” approach instead of everything as text seems desirable.
In theory, sharing a digital file can have a much greater impact than sharing a CD physically. Plus, you lose access to your copy of the CD if you give it to someone else. You can think of it like transferring a license for one user to a different user. There is no simultaneous usage.
I don’t personally agree with this view, but I believe that’s the argument.
The amount of people who will duplicate their tapes and CDs would be lower than the amount of people who will duplicate their digital files.
Most of the time when a law sounds silly for banning something when alternatives exist, it’s because people themselves are silly and don’t actually go for the alternatives at the same rate as they would the banned thing. Ie gun accessory bans, ninja star bans.
Burning CDs. That’s how I know most people didn’t know how to do it, or want to put in the effort. You had to go buy a stack of CDs, hope your computer supported burning, had to make sure players could support the burned disc (depending on if you made a music disc or data disc, if it was rewritable), and spend the time to burn the disc.
Contrast that to ctrl+c ctrl+v.
There’s more people who can ‘duplicate’ digital files than there were people burning CDs.
Eh, technically it is only criminal if he distributed it. US (and I think international) copyright laws has provisions for “personal backups” of media you have purchased. There is nothing illegal about ripping a copy of a CD to your computer or burning an image of a game disc, only if you allow the copy to leave your personal possession. It is so you can keep a copy in a fireproof safe and not lose access to your property in the event of a disaster.
Not that you needed to be told and I get the sarcasm; I am just a habitual pedant and felt the need to utilize the opportunity for a PSA.
I think you are referring to rules in the USA. In Canada, we have ‘fair dealing’ laws that would allow you to rip your CD and sell it. In part, this is already funded by a levy on blank CDs here.
Of those three steps, step 2 is the illegal one. (Assuming we’re talking about music and not software.) Even if you never do step 3.
(Not saying things should be that way. Nor that it’s not difficult to enforce. Only that as the laws are today, even ripping a music CD to your hard drive without any intention to share the audio files or resell the CD, even if you never listen to the tracks from your computer, the act of making that “copy” infringes copyright.)
Edit: Oh, and I should mention this is the case for U.S. copyright. No idea about any other countries.
Technically Step 2 should be legal, as covered by the old VCR case law (I think it involved Sony). Making a backup of a VHS tape or audio casette was legal, thus it should be legal for other formats, also.
However the sneaky bastards then went and lobbied for a law that makes it illegal to circumvent DRM. So, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with writing the raw files to a drive, but if you have to crack the DRM to get the files to play then you’re definitely doing something unlawful.
Disclaimer: “should” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in my comment lol what I say is not in any way legal advice. Also, it could be that the VHS law was more about “time-shifting”, ie recording live TV so that you could watch it at a more convenient time.
Copyright also used to only be a civil offense, meaning law enforcement wouldn’t come after you, but a rightsholder might. However, they lobbied over that as well and ended up with a relatively low bar - if the value is over something like $1,000 then it’s automatically considered commercial and “criminal” copyright infringement.
Regular audio CDs don’t have any DRM. (Unless it’s a data CD filled with audio files that have DRM or some such. But regular standard audio CDs that work in any CD player, there’s no DRM. The standard just doesn’t allow for any DRM.) And so the DMCA’s anticircumvention provisions wouldn’t apply to CDs.
But as for the Sony case you’re referencing, I’m not familiar with it, so I’ll have to do more research on that.
Pretty sure it was this one: en.wikipedia.org/…/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive…. Sony were actually the defendant, with their Betamax format. It does seem to focus primarily on time-shifting, ie recording live to watch later, however the reason for this was that the content was already available to the viewer and thus the copying should be permitted fair use. The Supreme Court also quoted Mr Rogers’ testimony in their ruling.
“Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the ‘Neighborhood’ at hours when some children cannot use it. I think that it’s a real service to families to be able to record such programs and show them at appropriate times. I have always felt that, with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the ‘Neighborhood’ off the air, and I’m speaking for the ‘Neighborhood’ because that’s what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family’s television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been ‘You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.’ Maybe I’m going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.”
Applying this reasoning to new technologies has since been debated back and forth through the decades with little clear resolution. Subsequent cases have sided with the rightsholders (eg against Grokster and Limewire), but the reasoning behind them was all over the place. They addressed the purpose of file sharing technology and concluded that those services existed primarily to facilitate copyright infringement, rather than addressing the matter of personal backups.
In the US, if you don’t proceed to step 3, step 2 is legal (so long as the CD lacks DRM). You’re permitted a single backup under fair use; you’re also permitted to rip the music for personal use, like loading it onto a music player. You’re not supposed to burn it to a regular CD-R (is it illegal? Idk), but burning it to an Audio CD-R (where there is a tax that is distributed to rights holders like royalties) is endorsed by the RIAA.
When record companies make a fuss about the danger of “piracy”, they’re not talking about violent attacks on shipping. What they complain about is the sharing of copies of music, an activity in which millions of people participate in a spirit of cooperation. The term “piracy” is used by record companies to demonize sharing and cooperation by equating them to kidnaping, murder and theft.
There are companies out there that do allow this for digital licenses. Arturia, an audio software and hardware company, lets you de-register and sell a license key to someone else, who can re-register it. They don’t charge any fees for it at all either, like some companies do. It’s not hard, most companies just don’t care about you as a customer.
Edit: Their license keys all include five seats too.
And that’s why you don’t own digital media but only a “usage license”, because the original owner still has the original? Isn’t it then fraudulent if the shops sell you the media, despite it being only a license? And shouldn’t that be cheaper then?
Hermione mentioned in the first book that wizards tend to absolutely suck at things that are typically Muggle, like logic, so it follows that they probably suck at math too.
She successfully brewed a complicated polyjuice potion that took months to make by just reading and following the instructions in the book when she was 12. She reads just fine.
Reading is very common at Hogwarts and the wider wizarding world. Hogwarts has an extensive library, and most of their communications and news media are done over written mediums.
Contrast that to maths where the hardest thing most wizards would realistically have to do is basic money operations. Made even harder by their bonkers monetary system.
I think the OP meant that if they all stopped learning maths at 10, and there was no English class at Hogwarts, they probably stopped learning to read at 10 as well (well, the Muggles anyway, there’s no mention of how the Wizards learn anything before 11 I don’t think?).
I think that’s a bit over simplified. Do you think they’d be able to understand Shakespeare? Or a spell book from the same time as Shakespeare? There’s a reason we continue to teach English until a child leaves secondary/high school.
Do you think they’d be able to understand Shakespeare? Or a spell book from the same time as Shakespeare?
The bigger question is, do they need to understand Shakespeare?
Shakespeare is important in UK Muggle culture, not so much elsewhere, including the wizarding world which very much has their own cultural icons.
They probably aren't getting their spells from books that old either. The reason we don't transpose Shakespeare to modern language is the loss of artistic intent in the process. Something that wouldn't apply to purely factual books like a spell book.
Besides, they are expected to learn Latin; that's where their spells come from.
True, but their methods of learning do not differ significantly from that of muggles. They still need to take classes the same way we do, and this would need to learn maths and logic the same way too.
Because they didn’t actually live in caves that often.
The image of these people living in caves arises from the fact that caves are where the preponderance of artifacts have been found from European Stone Age cultures. However, this most likely reflects the degree of preservation that caves provide over the millennia, rather than an indication of them being a typical form of shelter. Until the last glacial period, the great majority of humans did not live in caves, as nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes lived in a variety of temporary structures, such as tents[4] and wooden huts (e.g., at Ohalo). A few genuine cave dwellings did exist, however, such as at Mount Carmel in Israel.>
We are finding evidence of pre-Homo Sapiens structures. Wooden structures typically rot. “Cavemen” is a misnomer from the evidence survivorship bias.
Also notable is your claim they were less intelligent. Human intelligence hasn’t dramatically increased genetically or biologically. Human knowledge has dramatically increased since the invention of writing recently in our history. Creativity and problem solving are highly evolved in our species and we have contemporary evidence of huge ability to transmit knowledge through oral transmission and the influence of tribal tradition.
Look at Inuit and other cultures that live in the Arctic. Humans can live (relatively) comfortably in extreme conditions without keeping their environment at a constant 22C.
Africa’s climate doesn’t offer that much deadly cold.
And where caves were involved, they may not have been a constant dwelling but a place to retreat to in times of need.
Your spelunking friends don’t consider rain a deadly threat because they have REI jackets and access to antibiotics, so their attention is entirely on the issues of rain destabilizing the cave. But disease and exposure were immediate deadly threats to more primitive people.
So hiding in a cave during the rain, despite your spelunker friends’ modern safety standards, was probably a survival tactic.
I mean, there were cave dwellers in Europe and Asia too. The richest cave culture finds were in France.
I can attest all threats are considered to the best of one’s ability (minus the “things everyone is willing to risk”), even with everyone’s REI vests/jackets, which is why everyone often takes different routes based on what they’re good at (for example, one is bad with slopes, the other panics at puddles, though they insist this is “fun”). Once a cave even had classic stereotypical radiation in it (I should note one unspoken con of caves is they have an extremely high radon composition, which is natural in caves even though hearing it might be a mind changer). Every cave is different.
The whole of paleontology/paleo-anthropology has this problem because for remains of organisms to be preserved certain conditions must be met, which is not the case everywhere at any time.
Was hired at a company as a designer. Went to the production meeting and sat down beside another designer (introduced myself and we started chatting). In comes everyone else and sits down. We all start chatting and do introductions.
Five minutes into the meeting the company owner comes in, chatting with a salesman. He glances around the room, then his face freezes on me - he then looks at the guy beside me and keeps looking back and forth. He finally motions for me to come outside the conference room. I walk out and he asks me what I was doing there. I tell him ‘remember, you hired me and my start day was today??’
He turned pale and just said ‘oh yeah I forgot’. He let me go back in the room but then I heard him call the guy beside me out.
The guy never came back. Apparently he had intended on firing him and forgot.
Needless to say I didn’t stay long before I found another job. The place was complete chaos.
Yeah, I was young and it was my first job out of college (technically I worked thru college but this was my first after graduation) so I was very inexperienced still and also didn’t know what to look for when it came to red flags.
The owner’s wife worked there in a ‘higher up’ position and was the major cause of a lot of conflict at the company. Basically he would give people orders then she would come along and contradict them.
If anyone disagreed with her then she would go to hubby and complain about said person(s) making it impossible to please either because you couldn’t prove her wrong. That designer in particular was just the latest of ‘trophy wife’s wrath’. The place had an insane turnover rate I quickly found out.
At least it was a good learning experience and taught me to ask questions and meet people during the interview process.
kbin.life
Top