do any of you hate how self-hosting services like photo- or document-management systems, or even a simple rss tool, forces you to sort your stuff out, and put your decades old files in order?!

What is this “sort” thing you speak of? I don’t sort anything, I have NextCloud syncing my entire photos, videos and documents folders and they are just as messy as ever. Granted, I do go through my photos and videos once a year and dump them in a folder named for the year they were taken. Occasionally, I’ll go hog wild and try to sort some of a year’s photos/videos into folders named after events. Though, that hasn’t happened in a number of years. I setup NextCloud so I could have everything synced to my own server and just forget, not have to deal with labeling my data.

As for bookmarks. I already keep those in folders; but, I don’t sync those. I use my desktop far more than I use my phone for web browsing. And the types of things I use my phone for (mostly recipes), I just keep bookmarked there.

The first issue with running a coin miner is using company resources for your own profit. Your own system, using your own electricity, go for it. Running it on a company owned laptop, while at a company building, burning electricity the company is paying for. Ya, that starts to get uncomfortably close to fraud or theft. There is also that whole, “running unauthorized software on a company system, doing who knows what else in the background.” There is a very real possibility that the coin miner has unknown vulnerabilities which could allow remote code execution; or, just outright be malicious and contain a remote access trojan. Maybe he was smart enough to audit all the code it was using and be very sure that’s not the case. More likely, he just grabbed a random implementation of XMRIG, put his wallet in the config file and ran it. Either way, he also made a point of refusing to remove it, so we escalated up to management. With the recent ransomware outbreak having been in the multi-million dollar (possibly low tens of millions) damage range, refusing to remove unauthorized software went over about as well as a lead balloon. There may have been other factors at play; but, the unauthorized software and being a dick about removing it was what got him out the door.

If you spin it up, fucking own it. When you’re done with it, shut it down. I have long lost count of the number of times I’ve reached out to a team to ask about the coin miner they are running on some random EC2 instance only to find out that some jackass spun it up for a test, gave it a public IP, set the VPC to allow any inbound traffic, installed all kinds of random crap and then never updated it. Nor did it get shutdown when the test ended. So, a year and a half later, when the software was woefully out of date, someone hacked it and spun up a coin miner. Oh, and the jackass who set it up didn’t bother to enable logging or security monitoring. But, they sure as hell needed the ability to spin stuff up on their own. Because working with IT to get it done right would be too hard for their fragile little ego.

You joke, but I’ve actually been responsible for a coder getting shown the door for running a coin miner on his work laptop.

In his defense, cyber security at that company was crap for a long time. After a ransomware outbreak, they started paying attention and brought some folks like myself in to start digging out. This guy missed the easy out of, “hey that’s not mine!” The logs we had were spotty enough that we would have just nuked the laptop and moved on. But no, he had to fight us and insist that he should be allowed to run a coin miner on his work laptop. Management was not amused.

Same. I had gotten the paid version because the dev deserved something for such a great app. RIF died and I did a hard cutover to Lemmy. Deleted my Reddit account and probably caused some confusion for the cordcutters subreddit. I had a post which was part of the sidebar for about a decade.

Ya, sadly there is still a lot of useful content in the technical subreddits. So I find myself ending up there via search engines on a fairly regular basis. But, I specifically use the Redirector plugin for Firefox to auto-magically force the use of old Reddit. If I hit the site on my work computer, I’m quickly reminded about why I quit the site.

ICE was formed in 2002, following the attacks which destroyed the World Trade Center. Like basically everything the US did in the wake of that attack (e.g. Patriot Act) this has been an absolute disaster and should be rolled back.

If you’re willing to count audiobooks, I’ve been tearing through Nathan Lowell’s To Fire Called. Which is from his Tales From the Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper series. It’s a sci-fi series that focuses on space based merchant shipping crews and fells somewhat reminiscent of the Aubrey-Maturin series by C.S Forester (something I read many years ago).

I also picked up a hard copy of On the Edge by Nate Silver (yes, the 538 guy) from the library and planned to crack into that this weekend.

I work for a fairly large company, and we’re hearing about “AI” constantly. CoPilot is available and its use encouraged. Also, in the cybersecurity space, AI is fucking everywhere. Vendors won’t shut up about their “AI Enabled” products. And the new hotness is “Agentic AI”, which is basically automation, but we’re going to let AI hallucinations fire off the automated process which could bring production systems down.
Good times are surely coming. /s

It looks like archive.org is capturing some of lemm.ee. So, it’s possible that most of the images are there and could be referenced.

I kept hoping to see one of the drones fly up an air intake. Perhaps not the best way to damage an aircraft, but goddamn it would be epic to see one blow up from the inside. Sadly, the air intakes are probably also covered while on the ground.

He got tired of shoveling corporate shit and decided to put those skills to use for himself, shoveling chicken shit.

The hot dog is a loss leader. They want you paying your membership fees, and that hot dog keeps you paying. While you’re paying, you probably also shovel a ton of money into the store buying all sorts of stuff. It may be a good deal for you, but it’s a fantastic deal for costco.

ChatCCCPT

So, DeepSeek?

Thanks for the link.
For the use case I’m considering (porch light), having the actual light bulb would be preferable. Just have it always on and do something else (e.g. timer/motion detection) to turn the light on and off. Would be a good reason to get off my arse and setup HomeAssistant.

I don’t remember it that way. To me, it was a minefield of viruses, popup ads, chain mail, and unexpected extreme NFSW content.

What, you don’t want to punch the monkey and also have 50,000 pop-up and pop-under windows spawn because you picked the wrong link?
Also, accidentally discovering that python[.]com was NOT where one went to download the scripting language back around 2006, while trying to help a student get her laptop setup. It’s still not, but that’s not how I wanted to learn that fact.

Interesting form factor. Would love to have something like this, but not tied to some cloud app/service.

With a long, strong, flexible tongue and a reputation for eating things, one of those collaborations basically writes itself.

I was talking about his mechanics in Brawl Stars, what were you thinking about, sicko?

After my time in Finance (which, curiously, also involved a Crash in the Industry I was working in)

A-ha! We’ve found the cause of the market crashes.

Joking aside, I was around for the dotcom bubble burst and the 2008 crash. Both were caused by wild speculation and we seemed to have learned nothing from them. I have little doubt we’re headed for another recession and it will again, be driven by speculation. We also have a problem with private equity (I call them “vulture equity”) which likes to capitalize on businesses which are struggling . They swoop in, buy up the company in a leveraged buyout, and then start extracting as much value from the company as possible. Usually this is in the real estate that the company owns. Once all of the value is extracted, the company is spun back off, saddled with the debt used to buy the company in the first place, and then it flounders until it ultimately collapses. This was the fate of companies like Sears or Red Lobster. Once a vulture equity company engages in a leveraged buyout of a company, that company is doomed.

I very briefly considered it but don’t trust my awareness to get out in time, plus participating in the scam would eat me up.

Ya, one of the best pieces of advice I got was, “never gamble money you can’t afford to lose”. This is what keeps me out of trying to chase that tiger. Sure, it could be possible to make some money by jumping on one of these scams early and trying to ride sell the bump. But, it’s also likely that be the sucker losing out in the end. I’d rather not waste my money that way.