CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@paninid We have three kids. One is truly not great at math. But she works her ass off and crushed her math SAT and AP Calc exam. Middle kid is good at math but doesn’t love it and doesn’t try too hard at it. Our youngest is a no doubt math genius who can’t do basic arithmetic unless he’s focused on a different, more difficult problem. All I’m saying is that it’s a spectrum and you have to meet people where they are.

One thing I also know to be true is that too many math teachers in K-12 hate math and are bad at teaching it. I tutored my kids in math from algebra through calculus and maybe one teacher in each of their five years did a decent job or even seemed to care. She quit mid-way through middle kid’s final year calculus class. The replacement was awful. We’re home-schooling our youngest for his last two years of high school.

@SteveBellovin What did Murray Hill’s data center look like? We used large amounts of basement space in Holmdel, but we were a big mainframe center for the Labs.

Note for all you younger folks out there, Bell Labs Holmdel was abandoned for years and then repurposed. The building you see in the “Severance” exteriors and some of the interior shots is the old Bell Labs Holmdel building. It was also the location of my first Sys Admin job after I graduated in the late 1980s.

@cav I would have expected the cooling retrofit to be prohibitively expensive. I wonder how they managed it?

If you visit the campuses of many universities in the USA, you will find that much of their campus computing is concentrated in basements. This is because those specialized spaces to support computer infrastructure were built during the 1960s—a time of civil unrest in the USA, particularly on college campuses. It was felt that the large mainframe computers of the day would be targets of anti-corporate sabotage. Basement bunkers were more defensible and generally didn’t have handy windows for tossing firebombs through.

This is a post about AI data centers.

@alice That is perhaps the most charged description of Jenga that I have ever read. Kudos!

“Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your words out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the Fediverse, anything at all, you would've hidden from it in terror.”

Nobody wants to be told they are broken.

Nobody wants to be fixed.

They want to be seen and loved for who they are.

To be supported.

To feel safe.

@babe Another USA oddity is that we call them football fields, not pitches.

But things that small don’t get measured in football fields. Maybe golf clubs for something that size? “Bigger than a putter, but shorter than my big driver!”

@babe And they say us folks in the USA have strange measurement scales. “Well now, that looks like it’s maybe 2.5 bunnies long!”

@venya @artemis Only if they can kill hundreds in a way that can’t be hidden from view. One of the lessons the US military did learn from Vietnam is that the reality and horror of war being beamed nightly into people’s televisions destroyed any notion of popular support for the war. The media has been kept at arm’s length from every US military action since. And now the military industrial complex owns the media.

@artemis I saw a documentary once about the 1965 battle of la Drang, which was the first major US/Vietnamese conflict in Vietnam. After several days of intense fighting, there were roughly 7 Vietnamese soldiers killed for every American soldier.

Both sides looked at these numbers and said, “We can win this war.” One of them was right.

@JoscelynTransient Meanwhile aging cishet guys like me with declining testosterone levels are basically getting high fives from the medical establishment as we show up for our regular testosterone boosts. The obvious double standard makes me crazy.

You all truly are beautiful and badass. Respect.

@aburka @lerg @cwebber Yep, but there’s usually a dip when they lose a lot of money to a cyber attack. And that seems likely to happen.

@lerg @cwebber Oh wow. If I were a financially motivated attacker, I would be looking very closely at Coinbase right now. Time to short that stock.

@servelan @lisamelton “Close personal contact”— it seems like they are dancing around the fact that there may have been transmission from people hooking up on the cruise.

@da_667 I started doing computer support professionally in 1985. By the end of the dot-com era in the early 2000's, I had long burned out on fighting the same battles endlessly in corporate IT. Things were never going to get better for the reasons you cite--basically coming down to a lack of real consequences for doing a bad job.

In addition, there are now entire industries that have grown up around offering "solutions" for how broken these practices and products are. And also industries around handling the blast effects from the latest successful intrusions. You can buy "cyber insurance" to give the appearance of managing your corporate risk. InfoSec has become "too big to fail".

After thinking about this long and hard, I ended up going into the incident response business. If security breaches are inevitable, IR services will always be in demand. I get paid better and get more respect from customers than I ever did trying to do things right the first time. I don't kid myself that our remediation strategies are likely to make a long-term difference in most organizations' security postures, but sometimes there's a win.

I’m a very experienced computer booper and a Luddite. Not in the way most people think the word Luddite means as somebody who stubbornly refuses to adopt technology. Rather a Luddite as in one who see and protests the use of technology to undermine the value of skilled work and the workers.

@vaurora You simply look prepared for any circumstance—indoors or out!

I was contacted by somebody who's graduating soon and interested in pursuing a career in vulnerability research and binary exploitation. I frankly don't have as much experience in that part of our industry.

Who would you suggest they reach out to and where should they be looking for a job to get their foot in the door? What pitfalls should they be looking out for?

Napping form 12/10. No notes.

#Caturday #CatsOfMastodon #Maddie