Also, this is literally their job. The surprising bit would be if US intel services weren’t doing a thing about a Russian invasion of an independent European nation.
I mean, sure, if a Trumpist gets offended by it because they want the fascists to win, I get how they’d get in a bind, but other than electing Trump and making sure fascism becomes the rule of the day around the world, I’m not sure what they expect to expect.
Sure, unless there was a correlation between the technologies deployed by the individual companies and their vulnerabilities.
I’m not saying there is in this case, but it’s a phenomenon we see all the time in systems ranging from technological to immunological. When network (social, computer, whatever) connect systems with correlated vulnerabilities, there can be cascading failures that do not spread outside those networks. It’s been so long (over 30 years) since I’ve even thought about RF and related systems that I have no idea what specific or proprietary technologies the major companies have, so I just shrugged it off as I was unaffected, and penciled in that there may have been a correlation with solar activity.
I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.
First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.
That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.
Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.
Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.
You’re absolutely right. In my memory, though, the ones that stick out the most are the ones where the hero is pro-corporate but in an anti-corporate way. I’m thinking about movies like Working Girl, 9 to 5, and Secret of My Success, and even Other People’s Money. The villains were the very straight and square boss types and the heroes were the young(er) upstarts who could out-business them. OPM was a little different but I think it fits the theme.
The main difference I’m seeing is that even in the pro-capitalism shows, it was still all about sticking it to the man. If the good guys were cops, the man was the chief of police. If the good guys were businessmen, the man was their boss. If the good guys were soldiers, the man was their CO, or the generals or politicians back in Washington.
Maybe it’s purely subjective on my part, but it seems like there’s a lot more pro-authority movies being made now. You can’t take a movie like Top Gun (which still had the shaggy haired rebel as well as one of the most homoerotic themes in mainstream cinema at the time) with something like Bill Murray in Stripes. Stripes is great comedy that I’d place almost at the level of Caddyshack, but even though both movies could have been shown by recruiters to get people to enlist, Stripes was still a goofball comedy of the slobs against the snobs (with the snobs in this case being their leadership).
I’d really like to get back into that kind of default cultural image. Cops were mostly corrupt (Serpico) or idiots (Cannonball Run), or else inept (Escape from New York, or all of those stupid Charles Bronson movies).
It just feels like we hit that point where the default is to love Big Brother.
Wasn’t there also a report today (I think) about an unusual level of sunspot activity? Without digging into it, I think I sort of just assumed they were related.
I have AT&T fiber and a Verizon iPhone and I didn’t notice disruptions on either. My partner has an AT&T iPhone and didn’t notice any issues.
Ironically, Robocop would have defended him from the terminators.
I really do miss the 80s/90s era anti-capitalist dystopian future movies. We have the Purge series now, which has been pretty good (at least 3 and 4), but nothing approaching the massive numbers of productions ranging from They Live to Rollerboys to Robocop to Running Man and so many others.
It feels like we’ve hit a tipping point where subconsciously at least we’ve figured out we’re actually the bad guys from Red Dawn and the Wolverines are the people we’re killing, and just decided to lean into it. I’m waiting for Handmaid’s Tale to get a Birth of a Nation makeover in the next ten years.
I already control technology with my thoughts. I just use my fingers to do it.
I don’t know how this works for help desk level jobs, but I do know that big tech companies generally avoid the massive job sites and recruiters. They also frequently have at home advisors. Have you tried hitting up the individual company sites?
Thanks! I will check back.
I can’t say anything about Soylent but it might be a good substitute. I thought there was some kind of issue with them (I think their target market was the “code academy” types), but I might be misremembering.
However, I can recommend Boost. It has something like 100 more calories than Ensure, and like Ensure I can down a bottle in a single go.
I’m currently going through something similar (although I did mostly stop getting sick in the morning), and I’m toggling back and forth on the solid food thing. I’d be interested in learning more about your diagnostics.
Not to minimize malnutrition - that’s an effect that we know will be carried epigenetically for at least two generations even if everything stopped now and we weren’t looking forward to a decade-plus of occupation - but the situation on the whole is physically rewriting the brains of both the adults and more especially the children.
I am an adult, and I chose, more or less, to put myself into the situations I ended up in. I still have PTSD to the point that I had a flashback and panic attack in a friend’s bathroom during lunar new year when they set off a brick of firecrackers and it sounded exactly like a half dozen automatic weapons firing from across the intersection. It took me about 15 minutes of breathing exercises and pushing everything back down before I could come back out. What I went through was absolutely zero compared to what these people, including children, are going through. You’re going to have everything from suicides to psychoses to radicalization and hair trigger political violence. And it’s baked in at this point. It’s done. It’s going to happen with all of the physical certainty of billiard balls hitting each other. All they can do is make it worse, which is what they’re doing every day.
There’s going to be decades of consequences, and Israel is going to find itself isolated far more than it has ever been.
I’m saying this as someone who has done this from both the military and three letter agency side, and as an academic researcher.
You do know that actions like this will only increase support for Hamas, right? Like, for at least the next 20 years - a full generation and probably some change. This kind of adversity - especially this over the top - drives people together in solidarity. This isn’t seen anywhere outside of Israel itself as a war on Hamas. It’s seen as the slaughter of unarmed Palestinian people - most especially by the Palestinian people. They’re going to have a generation of children growing up prepped for an ideology that will make ISIS look like the cast of Sesame Street.
As someone who has been playing in the stock market since the 90s, I feel these folks may be over invested in GI Joe and might want to diversify to reduce risk.
“Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good goat trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”
-John Lewis
“So, a group called The Satanic Temple successfully sued to be allowed to distribute coloring books in elementary schools. Sorry about that whole piling rocks on you until you died thing. We were still figuring this liberty and freedom stuff out.”
Deflation is much harder to fight than inflation. I think Japan struggled with it for a decade or more.
That’s the thing. I wouldn’t be disappointed to hear Tucker Carlson saying something like that. I mean, it’d probably count as the nicest thing he’s said all season. Same with whatever that Fox version of the view is.
But Whoopi used to have heart.
What we need is a vaccine for affluenza.
If you start college (assuming you’re an American) do not under any circumstances drop out. This goes double for grad school. What will happen is the at you’ll still owe money on your student loan, but will not have whatever advantages you might have accumulated as a result of having a degree.
Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. Seriously. It’s an old joke, but it’s funny. I upvoted it, I was just playing off of it. Threaded humor is like jazz. We just have to play off of each other.
I want to be clear. I do not blame Ghana’s people for these laws. I do not blame Africans for the many nations that have enacted similar laws.
Christian church organizations, acting under the rubric of evangelical outreach or even more offensively charitable giving have backed religious and political leaders with LGBT-phobic agendas up to and including execution for being gay. Of course they’re going to do it - they get power and money for doing so.
The US needs to extend the Logan Act to apply to these situations and make the crime a felony that can lead to the arrest of the people involved and the legal dissolution of the organizations.