thebardingreen

thebardingreen, 3 days ago (edited 7 hours ago)

It’s probably less about telling off the UN and more about sound bites / video clips that will play well with his bosses and their political base back home.

Historically, right wing isolationist ideologues of all nationalities seem to cheer and double down when faced with international criticism. They know it’s them and their beliefs against the world and they have a fantasy that they can win, right up until an overwhelming number of them die for it.

Israel as a nation is not in a mood for self reflection and definitely doesn’t want to understand the hole their digging themselves into.

thebardingreen, 6 days ago

And a random, traumatized squirrel.

thebardingreen, 6 days ago

Uh… that’s been me. With Special K, Red Berries no less. I’m not too proud to admit it.

thebardingreen, 6 days ago

Regional Lemmies. Not holding my breath.

thebardingreen, 6 days ago

For real, he looks kinda like a Kazon.

thebardingreen, 6 days ago

Scotch?

A little old lady from Leningrad inwented it.

thebardingreen, 7 days ago

Thanks for the breakdown. When I read the headline, I guessed at a bunch of what the article said and you confirmed most of it.

thebardingreen, 7 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

I always find these breakdowns to be a little bit disingenuous. Like, you could do this same analysis on the whole email system, or on the whole world wide banking system, including ATMs, or on the energy usage of all DNS queries or even on global ActivityPub activity, not to mention shopping on Amazon or browsing Facebook. People DO do these kinds of breakdowns on generative AI, for exactly the same reasons, and reach the same kinds of conclusions.

Having a global computer network is INCREDIBLY energy intensive, with a massive carbon footprint. It’s not shocking that a given application of that network is energy intensive, with a massive carbon footprint. These kinds of analysis are put together by people who already don’t like cryptocurrencies (for all kinds of reasons both valid and ridiculous) who then go cherry picking MORE reasons not to like them.

thebardingreen, 10 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

As someone who does cybersecurity consulting for govt. contractors, companies invest in security when some external force forces them to, and then they spend the bare minimum to meet whatever that force requires (and they try to get away with less at every opportunity).

Right now in government contracting we’re experiencing this paradigm shift where the NIST-800-171 standard (which everyone was required to follow, but kind of on the honor system) is going to be replaced in 21 months or so by something called CMMC (Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification). But, CMMC is basically just the same requirements as NIST-800-171, so why?

BECAUSE, everyone just SAYS they’re NIST-800-171 compliant on all their contracts. Everyone self scores themselves on it and gets a WAY higher score than they do when being scored by a 3rd party, and then reports their self scores up the chain. The way this works in both DoD and NASA projects, which is what I’m familiar with, is the big players like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, etc, have thousands of smaller suppliers and those suppliers have smaller suppliers, so the requirements flow down from the govt to the big contractors to the small subcontractors and each link in the chain is responsible for making sure the upstream links are compliant… which they NEVER are, but they all say they are!

Of course, the government KNOWS this is happening, but lacks the resources to do anything about it. So the solution is to make everyone get third party certified that they are compliant. Half that industry is setting themselves up for failure to meet that deadline (which, of course, has already been delayed and pushed back multiple times) and I have a feeling that when small companies start failing their CMMC certs, they’re going to get stern warnings instead of losing their contracts because the government has to buy shit from someone.

When I talk to the money / business people at my clients, this goes in one ear and out the other.

There are wide spread (willful) misconceptions among those folks that cybersecurity is something IT people do and everyone else just does their jobs without having to think about it. I’ve had CEOs say things like “No, we’re not doing that, we can’t work that way.” when I educate them about their requirements… and then look to me to provide the solution where they don’t have to change anything about the way they work and when I can’t, they get frustrated with me and my team. I’ve had them ask me “Well what do the big companies do?” and I say “Look, they actually TRY to do all these things they require you to do and they fail at it ALL the time, but I’ve heard you complain about how their bureaucracy and rules slow everything down and make working with them difficult. A bunch of that stuff IS what they do to deal with this.” And they just don’t believe me. I’ve had CFOs say “We don’t have the budget to do all of this, so which parts are the most important?” and I’ve said “This is the LAW. You’re supposed to do all of it!” But they know and I know that for the time being no one will hold them accountable.

Right now, tons of companies just say “We’re NIST-800-171 compliant” or “We’re working towards NIST-800-171 compliance” and their contracts go forward and they hire someone like me to tell them what to do and then they don’t do 60% of it and delay doing 20% of it.

This is in an industry that is required by law to try extra hard on their security. In industries where there are no such requirements, or less requirements… good luck.

thebardingreen, 10 days ago

Nuke hurling trebuchets are an underexplored fantasy tech.

thebardingreen, 11 days ago

“Harley!”

“Yes puddin?”

“I need you to dress up as that Sailor Moon character from that Japanese cartoon show.”

“Oh, you’ah so kinky puddin! Ah…Why do you want me to do that?”

“Because I wish to place you on a throne of darkness surrounded by the skulls of our enemies and force Gotham to kneel before you and swear their allegiance to you.”

“Oh puddin! The things you say get me all wobbly inside! But why the cahtoon costume?”

“Harley!”

“Yes puddin?”

“JUST DO IT!!!”

“Uhh… Ok puddin.”

thebardingreen, 11 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

I’ve written more than enough words to win, while failing to finish my story. I’ve also played a lot with local LLMs. Can confirm on all counts.

thebardingreen, 13 days ago

That’s hot.

I mean… imagine being out in the sun like that, covered in all that fur.

thebardingreen, 13 days ago

Are you an old lady? That was his thing.

thebardingreen, 15 days ago

Vorta Man, Vorta Man, Vorta Man loves Changling Man. They have a fight, Changling wins. Vorta Man.

thebardingreen, 15 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

I have watched those exact guys eat an organization I worked for alive. At the end, they had like… 10 business consultants and 1 junior engineer. At an electronics engineering company.

i.natgeofe.com/…/NationalGeographic_1742512_3x2.j…

thebardingreen, 15 days ago

All my machines are named after Autobots.

thebardingreen, 15 days ago

I don’t really question my gay sadistic Odo headcannon

And that mental image of Odo as Quark’s dom is NEVER going away…

thebardingreen, 15 days ago

I mean, you’re definitely right about the women, but Odo is WAY too excited to lock up Quark…

thebardingreen, 15 days ago

I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at his “You’re in trouble now Quark” smile the same way again.

thebardingreen, 14 days ago

Humans starting with the Venerable trait is OP.

thebardingreen, 18 days ago

I began using Linux as my daily driver in 2001. I was 21. I think my story is pretty unique.

I lived in a house with 5 roommates, of which I was the second oldest. The others were 17, 18, 19 and 43. Except for the 43 year old we were basically all friends from Waldorf School (which is a fucking cult disguised as a liberal arts school, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise).

There were only two computers in the house. Mine was the only one with an ethernet card. I got a Cable Modem. No one else thought they needed fast internet.

It was a kind of disaster of a living situation… like the 17 year old was an emancipated minor who was stripping using a fake ID, the 18 year old was a stoner who worked at the local bagel shop and sold weed. The 19 year old was a kid who immigrated from Mexico City when his mom married a American and was into a BUNCH of sketchy shit. SUPER nice kid, but his friends were like, in retrospect, obviously a bunch of gangsters.

Before the 43 year old we had two other roommates. The first was a girl who was 20 who we knew from school, but then she left and went to college out of state. The second was a girl our stripper roommate knew who was ALSO a stripper and had an inoperable brain tumor. Poor girl was 19 years old and was told she had 18 months to live. She quit school, became a stripper and dedicated her life to sex, drugs and partying. She was a complete mess and her friends + the gangster guy’s friends turned our house into an absurd party flat that got the cops called on us (for noise or trash or sketchy people hanging around) like once or twice a month.

(yes… this IS the story of how I became a Linux user, I’m getting there).

So terminally ill stripper girl just disappeared one day. Never came home, never showed up to work, we never heard from her again. We needed to pay rent and we were all poor young people. Gangster guy has a legit job as a dish washer at a Mexican restaurant and he’s like “Hey, this dude who’s a server there needs a place to live.”

Enter the 43 year old who is a TOTAL creep ball (imagine that). Just to cut straight to the chase, one of the first things he does is start regularly fucking 17 year old stripper girl’s 16 (or possibly even 15) year old best friend from middle school, who starts spending the night at our house almost every night (and also ditching school all the time). They don’t just fuck in his room, they fuck all over the house and don’t clean up. Like I had clean up their used condoms and cum tissues from all over the house.

The other thing 43 year old creep ball does is fucking use my computer to download a shit ton of porn while I’m not around. Here’s how we caught him.

Some friends and I are messing with my computer and we notice that… for some goddamn reason… AOL has been installed. Why the FUCK would AOL be there? I have a goddamn cable modem! So my buddy, who’s also a computer nerd and is starting to get into Linux himself and I uninstall AOL and it asks if we want to save local files. When we say yes, it dumps… a bunch of AVI files of the hairiest 90s porn you can imagine onto my desktop and all I can think about is this creep ball who’s used condoms I’m cleaning up sitting in my chair in my room when I’m not there jerking off.

SO… my buddy and I nuke my OS and install Debian. I leave the house and leave the computer logged in leaving a virtual console running.

Creep ball comes in to watch porn on my computer and is faced with the linux terminal. He typed (I’m not kidding)

• dir
• win
• win.exe
• windows
• start windows
• motherfucker!

That’s the 100% true story of how I became a Linux user.

thebardingreen, 18 days ago

IKR? XD

thebardingreen, 20 days ago

Our political system is an old, poorly maintained computer that sits at your grandparents’ house. It’s so clogged up with malware it can’t function and the scammers and botnets are doing whatever they want with it. It’s the only computer that your family has access to, and technically it’s supposed to be shared but in practice your grandparents only let you use it when they’re out of the house. Your grandparents don’t understand it and think it “runs fine” and are more scared you’re going to put commie or terrorist stuff on it than they are about the huge amount of viruses and spyware it’s already clogged up with. Your parents are too tired from working 3 jobs just to survive to care about it or pay attention to it and they “don’t use it anyway” so trying to get their help fixing it is useless.

You know that the ONLY WAY to fix this situation is to wipe the hard drive and reinstall, but grandma is worried she’d lose all her emails and grandpa says if there’s something wrong with it, he’ll fix it. You do see him messing around in settings all the time, but he clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing. He also talks to “Microsoft tech support” a couple times a week and sends them money. You’ve told him it’s a scam and he told you to “Shut up, you don’t know anything about computers.”

This isn’t even an analogy… it’s literally what’s happening. Legal systems are just complex code that runs on human beings. The constitution is the kernel, the US govt and all it’s bureaucracies are the OS and you could even think of the states as containers or virtual environments that run within the context of the bigger system. The OS has been completely hijacked by scammers (no, seriously, I’ve done subcontracting for big defence contractors), the users with the power to fix things don’t understand, don’t have the skills to fix it and are more scared of the people who want to fix the system than they are of the scammers. The other users who could help deal with the situation are too exhausted and burned out to care.

thebardingreen, 20 days ago

Nobilis has been the source of the best role playing experiences of my life. Imagine a party basically playing these gods you’ve created as a group of PCs.