chisel

I work for a large company and they are (or, at least were) open about the fact they they put compensation into a software that everyone in the industry uses, then compare compensation for similar roles across the industry, and determine wages that way. Aka, collude with competitors to keep employee compensation low.

Of course, this year they just decided to keep all the extra money for themselves and give the employees fuck all.

I’m not sure how it is at Google, but in my experience large businesses loathe their employees for being the largest line item on their expense sheet. Not surprised they give absolutely zero weight to their desires.

7zip

You can do the exact same thing with Plex, you just don’t need to since automatic remote streaming is built in. In fact, the article’s solution is literally Tailscale.

You can also bypass plex authentication on any ip range you choose, so if you add your local network and plex’s auth service goes down, it’s no big deal.

Shelter?

I’ve had a similar experience with car insurance. Home insurance, though, my rates went up ~40% two years in a row. Switched companies and pay less than half of the inflated rates.

Advertised? I’d vote no. Discussed? I’m all for it.

Oh, interesting, that’s pretty new. Technically it’s not an official part of the W3C spec yet, but it’s close enough that browsers support it now. Though, it only allows you to control the bar color, track color (which is generally invisible nowadays, so track color changes nothing), and width. So, yes, more customization than was there before, but still extremely minimal.

It’s a few lines of css, no JS required.

.my-div:hover {
  overflow-x: scroll;
}

And the look and feel of the scrollbar is generally determined by the browser/OS. Unless someone does a custom scrollbar implementation, but that is exceedingly rare. So that thin rounded gray bar is a browser/OS design, again, without any JS.

Electricity. Off-site backup. FOSS project donations. Thigh-high socks. Domains.

AI will be good at scaning for known vulnerabilities, but patience and attention to detail? Not in my experience. I use agentic coding agents for work and they are getting better, but they still will regularly get stuck in a loop of running into a bug when running tests, attempting to fix the bug in a stupid way, still erroring, trying another stupid fix, trying the first stupid fix, and so on until a human intervenes. They may be patient (as long as you pay for more tokens), but they aren’t using their time wisely.

AI tends to use the “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks” approach. It’s getting better at writing maintainable code, but it still will generate more-or-less spaghetti code with random unused or deprecated variables, crazy unnecessary functions, poor organization, etc… and requires lots of testing before producing something functional. Which is fine in an environment where you can iterate and clean things up. But as an attack vector, if you need 58 attempts to fully realize a vulnerability, in most secure environments you’re going to get detected and blocked before you finish.

Add to that that AI is pretty good at copying from pre-existing knowledge (like a database of known vulnerabilities) and not good at generating novel ideas (like discovering a new vulnerability), and the scales are further tilted in the defenders’ favor.

Bringing the car to the vet in a cardboard box without any holes and not looking inside: ḩ̷̰̗̭̣̠̺̲̦̍̓̑e̷̱̗̝̦̣̪̲̼̒̉̅h̶͓̳̼̞͉̲͈̮͍̼͕͗̈́̇͒̊̓̆̃͠e̷̦͈̊̓̀̃?̸̲̝͇̺̋̊̂̄̌͑͜

Well, AT&T for example requires that you use their provided modem+router combo, which they provide for free (unless you include their plans being generally more expensive than their competitors as an extra fee). They do try to sell you on range extenders for, what I assume to be, the shit router they give you.

Their router gives you less control than you’d get with your own router, helps with lock-in because it makes it harder to change providers, and allows AT&T full root access to your network, so I wouldn’t recommend it for self-hosters. However, it is the cheapest option since you’re requited to use it anyway. Besides, of course, using a different ISP, which saves me tooons of money over AT&T.

Sorry, but continuously analyzing all running processes, blocking half of them, and rerouting all of your TLS traffic through a MITM proxy with self-signed certs that break 25% of your software is 100% necessary to ensure the confidentiality of business secrets. And what would our KPIs be without our company-sponsored keyboard logger and mouse tracker?

Also, our internal process relies on this software from 1973 with endless half-baked additions that takes 10 minutes to open, uses 32GB of ram, and idles at 80% cpu and 90% disk iops for some reason.

No, you can not have permissions to delete the icons on your desktop or rearrange your taskbar. Stop asking.

Non-profits want to maximize their impact and spend efficiency. If they track how people use their services, they know better where to focus their efforts for improvements. If they know how people are finding their site, they know where to focus their marketing spend to help the most people per dollar spent. Marketing and user analytics are an important part of even altruistic goals.

A can of beans a day keeps the heart disease away! 🫘

Anywhere from 5 to 7 bananas. Or about 0.01296 football fields.

I prefer face to face communication, speaking in code and whispering in eachother’s ears so nobody else can hear.

If you’re fine with self hosting, you can just self host it and backup your local drives to a remote location. That’s what I do.

For backup software, I use Duplicacy. But Veeam, Borg, etc… would work just fine. For images, since they’re just static files and you don’t really need a version history, you could get away with a scheduled rsync job. Though, technically that leaves you more at risk of ransomeware or something that overwrites your data.

For remote storage, I’d first consider a Hetzner storage box since they are flat-rate pricing and pretty dang cheap at $13/mo for 5TB. You might also consider StorJ, B2, S3, etc… I’d just stay away from any lesser known ultra-cheap storage providers.