Buy a bit of paracord, make a simple net, toss as appropriate.
Paintball markers are also cheap, reasonably accurate and don’t involve yeeting a bullet on a ballistic arc.

Trump’s order serves as guidance, not a mandate, since shots required for school attendance are set at the state level, rather than by the federal government.

Like a lot of his crap, this is purely performative and will only impact States dumb enough to follow his suggestion That sucks for the millions of children who won’t be vaccinated, but it also means it won’t effect most children. Federalism can be a huge PITA when trying to pass good and useful legislation, but it’s also a pretty good bulwark for when stupid gets a turn at the wheel.

Let me guess, he’s never actually done any sort of child care. Especially for children with any sort of developmental or behavioral special needs, that shit is hard work.

Let me guess, he’s never actually done any sort of child care. Especially for children with any sort of developmental or behavioral special needs, that shit is hard work.

Even when a company is doing things pretty well with a VPN, all it takes is one mistake and the cat is out of the bag. At one of my previous employers, we had a fairly good setup with VPNs using single sign on via our IdM provider. IdM enforced SSO and the VPN had a number of policies setup which kept good control over what users could login. And then someone had the brilliant idea to take an old VPN appliance, reset it to factory defaults and configure it just enough to work on our network and then hung it out on the internet for some sort of test (our configuration management left a lot to be desired). Of course, that led to it being left there for a couple months and an attacker finally found it. They also had a valid username/password combination which got them in the door.

Security is hard and often expensive. But still, compared to “we put out OT devices on the internet” a basic VPN is a huge step up.

Sadly yes, this is exactly what happens. And it ends up being IT holding the bag at the end, with the managers having long since cashed out their stock options and left.

The hacks target internet-facing programmable logic controllers (PLCs)

Why the fuck
is your PLC
facing the fucking internet!

Jesus Zombie Christ an a pogo stick. Has no one been paying attention for the last two decades? Seriously, we learned this sort of lesson in Two Thousand and fucking Three. Your critical assets do not get public IP addresses.

If you really care that little about what happens to your corpse, why does having it stuffed in a box with your family bother you so much?

Think of it this way: It makes him happy and it resolves one of the issues your own loved ones will have to deal with after you die. Things like burials, funerals and graves aren’t really for the deceased, they are for the people who cared about the deceased. They are expressions of and a way for them to deal with their grief. So, when you kick it, the people who cared about you will be having to deal with all that. It’s rather nice of your father to be saying, “here, let me take care of that problem for them.”

UI’s for movie streaming services are not designed to help you find something to watch. They are designed to keep you “engaged”, which means in the platform and not realizing that the pool of actually interesting things is about as deep as a puddle. Everything about streaming sites’ design is user hostile and this is a classic example of that.

Are you really worried about the case where a thief steals the hard drive but not the rest of the computer?

Even if the thief steals the entire computer, BitLocker/LUKS and SecureBoot provide a reasonable level of protection against data theft. Yes, the drive (or bits of it anyway) are automatically decrypted (the whole drive is never decrypted, just the data requested by the OS). However, it still prevents the attacker from accessing that data outside the intended operating system, which makes data theft much harder. An attacker would also need a valid account to login to the system to start accessing data. It’s not an insurmountable hurdle, but it does mean that just having the computer isn’t the same as having the data.

Without encryption, once a thief has the computer, they have the data. They don’t need a valid account to access the data and they can even boot into a tool to reset passwords on the primary OS and start using it. Last I checked, chntpw still works with Windows 11. That sort of thing fails with encryption, even with TPM only. The TPM will not release the encryption key to an OS if SecureBoot fails. Granted, there is the YellowKey backdoor, but that was probably Microsoft giving the FBI a helping hand. But, that falls outside the intended design.

What is going on in the Middle Eastern countries is horrific and it really does get far less attention than it should. At the same time, it does pale in comparison to the scale and scope of the slave trade in the Americas. The US in particular also demonstrated an amazing level of hypocrisy in both having and keeping slavery for so long. When your entire country is premised on the phrase:

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.

And then you turn around and have slaves and institutionalize that they only count as 3/5 of a person. And also have a rebellion fighting to keep those slaves. It rather sticks out.

All that said. The fact that we treat modern dictatorships and slavers like our closest friends is utterly reprehensible. I really look forward to the day we can shift most energy production and transportation off fossil fuels. Those dictators will find themselves without friends and a ready source of wealth.

The AI is a tool argument is getting tired. I haven’t seen it do anything useful at all that helps my day to day life.

I’ve also never had a use for a rib spreader. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful in the right setting. I talked through it in a different reply (feel free to use AI to find it), but LLMs and image classifiers do have use cases in particular settings. Just because some folks abuse them and use them for entirely the wrong use cases, doesn’t mean they aren’t useful in the right ones.

I might need to ask chatgpt to reply to this comment. In fact if i ever see your username around i will put it into chatgpt and ask it to generate a reply for me, because i can’t think for myself.

Go for it, it might be kinda funny. A bit of irony in it too, as it would offloading the critical thinking required to engage with an argument you disagree with.

i don’t believe i’ve ever asked calculator to answer biology question for me.

Nor should you, you would be using the wrong tool for the job. I’d also not use a calculator to drive screws, that doesn’t invalidate the point. Tools are useful when we use them the right ways. And ya, AI is a terrible tool to offload critical thinking onto. There are use cases where AI makes sense though. Things like image classification and fuzzy searches on large data sets are good use cases for various AI models. One of the problems with AI, at the moment, is that it has been sold as some sort of cure-all that will replace humans and critical thinking. And it’s absolutely not that. It’s in much the same place as cocaine in the first part of the 20th century. Hucksters are putting “AI” on the label and claiming it will solve everything. The reality is much more nuanced. It has it’s uses but they are far more limited than the hucksters are claiming.

Large language models really can be useful for fuzzy searches in large data sets. To give an example from my own work, Copilot is really good at searching Microsoft documentation for me. Could I find the answers with a regular search? Probably, it would also take me longer. Instead, I send Copilot chasing after the answer to that question and go do something else while it finds the answer. They can also help in re-writing for different audiences. I write a lot of technical reports and those need to be summarized for managerial audiences. Yes, I could do that manually, I’ve done it for years. I also hate doing it. Clippy is good enough at doing it that it can give me a first draft and I can finish it up in far less time and effort.

The biggest issue I have seen with LLMs is exactly what you point out, that people trust them too much and don’t think critically about their answers. Again with my work, we use a product that uses an LLM to summarize cybersecurity issues and provides suggestions for response and investigation. It’s a pretty well trained model and it’s suggestions are pretty good most of the time. But, it falls down spectacularly bad from time to time and the analyst needs to be able to recognize that and respond to the alerts appropriately. Some analysts are better at this than others and this is now part of our training for new analysts. We teach them to use the LLM, but to also always think about the basics and question the LLM when it doesn’t seem right.

Image classifiers are another area where I think AI has some good use cases. Consider the job of reviewing images and videos for sites like FaceBook, TikTok or YouTube. The folks who do this work are exposed to a lot of very violent and disturbing media. I used to work with a guy who did computer forensics in a law enforcement setting and he finally left that work because he could deal with having to review CSAM images any more. This seems like the perfect place to slot in an AI image classifier, to make a first pass at it. If it can correctly classify the vast majority of that sort of content, that greatly lessens the workload on the analysts who will need to deal with the borderline stuff and reports of false positives and negatives.

The new normal is people just follow what billionaire said, and you think it’s okay.

Not at all, but I also think the reactionary “fuck all AI” isn’t okay either. It’s a tool and it’s going to change things. We need to navigate that with a clear head and careful consideration.

Do you disregard people IRL who you know use a calculator for everything?

If that sounds like a ridiculous question, it’s because the use of that tool has become so ingrained in our society that we don’t question its use anymore. AI is a new tool and one which can offload a lot of mental work. Such tools have always been controversial. If Plato is to be believed (and that isn’t necessarily a given), Socrates complained that writing made men lazy and their minds weak, because they didn’t have to exercise their memories and were not taught things, just read facts.

AI is a tool, and it’s going to be worked into the fabric of our society, for good or ill. It’s also facing a lot of push-back, as have many tools, but that is unlikely to stop it. Will AI make us lazier? Absolutely. That’s kinda the point. If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is the father. So much of human invention is all about ways to not work as hard. Sometimes, this is because we need to improve how we do something, sometimes its because we’d rather be down at the pub sipping a brew while a machine does the hard stuff. Often, it’s both.

That said, there is likely to be a lot of pain in the short term as we adjust to the new reality. And it will likely cause another shift in how work happens. Businesses used to have hundreds of people doing nothing but tabulating accounts. Rooms would be full of people just doing math. Now, we have Excel and most of that tedious work is now done by one person at the click of a button. The main problem with the rollout of AI may be one of speed. The same speed which empowers Excel is making the disruption of AI happen at a much faster speed than many of our institutions may be equipped to handle. Or not, there’s been some reporting lately that the promises of AI have been severely over-hyped (shocker, AI companies over sold the capabilities of AI, whodathunkit?). We won’t really know until we’re well past the point of disruption.

So, does it annoy me that people use (and believe) AI to answer relatively simple questions? No not really. Sure, they could take the time to look it up with google, but that is slower and harder. Or they could look it up in a book, which is even slower and harder. Or they could just memorize it and avoid that new fangled writing thing, which is making kids lazy. But, that sort of thing is a dead end. Ai is here, it’s a tool people will use. We just need to find a way to educate people about its strengths and limitations. And that is a hard problem, but maybe AI will help us solve it.

If you’re bothered by other people asking questions in an online forum, it’s well past time to log off and go outside for a bit. Especially in a community named “No Stupid Questions”, its reasonable to expect a lot of low quality questions. The thing which can make that interesting is that, sometimes it can spark interesting conversation. But, there will be a lot of noise to sift through to find it.

If you don’t like a question, ignore it and move on. If you really must get your knickers in a twist, downvote and move on. If someone (or a bot) is spamming a bunch of low effort questions, block the user and move on. Watch, it’s easy, I click on the down arrow next to your name, click “Block User” and bingo, I never an bothered by you again.

Unfortunately, we know so little about the person whom the biblical Jesus is based on that it would be really hard to say. Keep in mind that the myths about him in the Christian bible were written well after he was claimed to have died.

The earliest written of the Gospels is likely Mark. And it may have been written by someone with either first or second hand knowledge of Jesus, around 70 CE. Which would be a few decades after the claimed death of Jesus. So, the author (or authors) were dealing with memories at least a few decades old. And they were likely an adherent to this messianic cult, which means they were not exactly objective in their writing.

While I’m glad these guys are going to jail, this does go to show that one should not use Windows if they care about OPSEC.

Don’t worry so much about sports, as finding something you enjoy which gets you moving. The important thing is to try stuff and find something that works for you. Really, the best exercise you can do, is one you will actually do. It sounds like you have issues with team sports, so maybe try some stuff which doesn’t involve other people. Also, accept that you will likely suck as whatever you do, if you keep practicing, you might find you suck less over time.

I’m not a “sports person”. In fact, I suck as most sports I have tried. But, I discovered that I enjoy indoor sport climbing. I sucked amazingly bad at it when I first started. I mostly climb top rope and was struggling to finish a 5.9 climb. But, I kept at it and now I can finish most 5.10a climbs on my first attempt. I’m not some super climber by any means, but I have become kinda competent. I enjoy the challenge and have met some great people along the way. I also get excited when I walk into the gym and see a new set of routes. It’s like being handed a new set of puzzles to solve.

Slavery is hardly new, novel or confined to a single group of people. Slavery has been pretty common through out human history. So much so that we have archeological evidence of it back to Sumer. The real answer to someone bringing up slavery in other contexts is, “so what?” Yes, some native American tribes had slaves, that does not less the impact that slavery had on African people kidnapped and dragged to the Americas as slaves. Nor does it lessen the impact that a century of discrimination has wrought on Black Americans.

Honestly, it sounds like you have fallen into the Myth of the Noble Savage. Humans suck, we have always sucked, and that has been true across cultures. Every once in a while, we figure out how to suck less. But that tends to be rare, fragile and fleeting. Also, it’s often a lie and we just hide our suckage.

…including stating that on multiple occasions he had found himself mysteriously transported from two different starting points in Georgia. In one incident, Mr. Phillips said, he had suddenly found himself inside a Waffle House

Why do I have the feeling that this story starts out with “We was drinkin’…”