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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • The real miracle in the Bible is that Joseph didn’t fuck for his entire marriage and was ok with that.

    According to Christian mythology Jesus has several brothers and sisters from Mary and Joseph. So no miracle there. One just has to wonder if they waited until after Jesus was born to start fucking.


  • He was one of the early authors of the Christian church and is the author of several books of the official Christian mythology. In the Christian Bible, the letters to the Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Thessalonians and Philippians are all believed to have been written by him. There are several other books (also letters to various congregations) which are attributed to him, but there is some debate about the actual authorship.

    So, he’s kinda the OG Paul when it comes to Christian mythology.




  • I regularly use CoPilot to search Microsoft documentation for me. E.g. I needed to find a particular interface in Entra and couldn’t remember where it was. So, I asked CoPilot and it got me to the right spot. I’ve thought about asking it about Microsoft licensing, but I figure that might result in CoPilot becoming self aware enough to kill itself.

    I also use a number of AI agents built into the cybersecurity tools I use on a daily basis. Generally stuff along the lines of “find all the cases related to this system/IP/user/etc” type queries. It’s also good for questions like “how do I tune this alert” so I don’t have to remember whatever bullshit process this vendor put together for tuning false positives. Our primary SIEM/SOAR tool has an AI which does initial triage and investigation work and it’s not terrible. It struggles with correlations for more complex events, usually highlighting events which have no bearing on the event in question. But, it often provides a good first pass and description our first line analysts can use to start a real investigation.

    AI is a tool. And like a lot of tools, it has it’s benefits and limitations. The problem is we’re still figuring all those out and the people marketing these tools don’t want to admit to the limitations and they over-sell the benefits, then blame the user when those benefits don’t materialize. Given how much modern economies are based on information and knowledge, I do expect AI to have some lasting impact, but I also expect that we’ll adapt and it will just be another way of getting things done in a generation or two.





  • IT is what you do when you are good with computers and not so much with people. You get really good at making the magic number boxes work for the MBAs and start explaining RFCs or networking protocols so that they fuck back off upstairs so you can go back to digging through log files and pcaps. It’s all just puzzle solving, reading and a crippling fear of social interactions.



  • When you have a potentially volatile situation, lobbing bombs at it rarely makes it better. This wasn’t a “time bomb to explod[ing]”. This was a deliberate decision by Cheeto Mussolini to launch a foreign military adventure. While the current regime in Iran was far from ideal, it’s important to keep in mind why that regime was in place. The UK and US were directly involved in overthrowing the elected government in Iran in Operation Ajax. That resulted in a violent, repressive dictatorship. But it was friendly to UK/US oil interests, so that made it ok. When the Iranian people overthrew that government, the current Iranian government came to power.

    That the current administration expects a different outcome this time around is the height of stupidity. All this will accomplish is creating another generation of Iranians who hate the US due to direct experience.


  • That’s funny, while I still buy Samsung TVs, I hate their phones. So much of what their phones can do is usually locked to only working in Samsung’s apps and those are universally dog shit. The phones themselves are also often privacy and user control nightmares.

    Granted, there isn’t a lot of good choices for phones these days. I’m still running an old LG phone and have been looking outside Android as my next possible solution. But, I also haven’t had a reason to upgrade.


  • Ah yes, let’s use contractors. Anyone else remember when USIS was just faking background checks? I’ve been a Federal contractor, and while there are some great, hard working people doing government work as contractors, the companies behind those contractors are almost universally doing everything they can to skirt the line between “completing the contract” and “outright fraud”. They certainly have no interest in doing what is best for the organization, people or tax payers. It’s all money grubbing assholes looking to leech off the tax payer.

    We need to realize that 90% of everything done in the wake of 9/11 were bad ideas. With DHS itself being a monumental fuck-up. We did need better inter-department communications. But, by creating one agency to rule them all, we put too much budget in one bucket and failed to let specialists in each area focus on their area of specialization.



  • Ya, the defense economics of a $50k Shahead drone being taken out by a $4 milion Patriot missile do not work in the defenders’ favor. If Iran can keep that up long enough, those conventional weapons will start slipping through. Still, this was a known factor with Trump and Bibi’s war and I don’t think a bunch of civilians getting killed in drone attacks was a significant deterrent (QED, that war is going forward). While I believe that could result in the US/Israel making some propaganda declaration of victory and quietly ending the war, I don’t think it would ever be a deterrent in the future. That’s why I would expect Iran to want nukes. If they want to ensure that the US and Israel don’t just randomly drop bombs on Iran when a US leader needs a distraction, they need a credible threat of Israeli cities disappearing in a mushroom cloud. That’s something that couldn’t just be ignored.


  • Between Trumps first and second terms, he has demonstrated the issue with any long term deal Iran might make with the US. Under Obama, Iran had agreed to international inspections and a general framework that would have ensured that they followed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (of which they are a signatory). Trump rolled up in 2017 and tossed that out the window. And now Trump has decided to further destroy any credibility the US had left by dropping bombs. I doubt there is any world left where the Iranian Government trusts the US Government. I’d expect them to go more the North Korea route, isolate themselves further and make a sprint for nuclear weapons. They will have to content themselves with being part of the BRICS system. But a nuclear umbrella, with a high likelihood of nuking Tel Aviv, seems the only way to ensure the US/Israel aren’t randomly lobbing bombs at them.


  • The uproar is the same uproar that has always existed when government overreach threatens privacy. The question should never be, “why are you fighting this?” the question is, “why is this needed?” And the answer is that it is not. It’s yet another mnaufactured moral panic which is being pushed by the folks who want to destroy privacy. Some want that destruction for the privacy so that they can spy on and control others, the rest are dimwitted fools who believe that they can give up privacy to obtain some small measure of security. They are wrong and in the end will have neither privacy nor security.