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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • I worked as a DOD contractor for several years. The downfall of Boeing is a case study in toxic leadership. Boeing was once known as the juggernaut in the industry, capable of engineering amazing feats that only someone as large as them could pull off. Over the past decade, that reputation has become inverted. They are of the butt of many jokes. Their merger with Douglas brought out the worst in Douglas and drove out the best in Boeing. I worked for a competing firm, but in many situations we have to cooperate with competing firms in order to deliver on contracts. When I say that interactions with Boeing have left me bewildered, I am speaking conservatively. Management has become overrun with penny pinchers and career MBAs. Engineers are no longer leading the company, and it shows. The quality of components coming out of Boeing these days is frankly terrifying. I book flights with Delta and unfortunately, they have opted to contract for several Boeing MAX airliners. I will cancel my flight if my itinerary shows that I will be flying on such an aircraft. The odds of an incident are incredibly slim, but having worked in aerospace, I will not take the risk. Vote with your wallet and do the same.



  • People really dislike it when you point this out, But the security model on Linux is lacking. Yes, we have things like apparmor and SELinux, but compare it to sandboxd on macOS. The windows sandbox isn’t perfect, but it’s really user-friendly, and it works in most cases. Linux doesn’t have a direct equivalent. We’ve made great strides with making immutable distros through things like flatpack, and snap, but something that they failed to do is implement a least privilege model that is as robust as sandboxd on macOS.




  • A lot of the sci-fi of the era was based off of the assumption that corporate power would rise to rival that of governments. That runaway capitalism would birth “high-tech low-life” as the state of society at large. Yes, the stars are aligning between the interests of the powerful in the present, and the future postulated in those stories; those stories were made on the basis of human nature and self-reflections on the contemporary. They are being proven right because they assumed plausible futures with likely outcomes. Want a solar punk world? We have to buck the trend and disrupt the trajectory we’re on now. Will we have pivotal moment like that of Americana circa 1929, or slide further in a hellscape? I know what future I want but I don’t know if we’re going to get it.



  • We ran into this bug in a production system a few months back. We had a legacy cluster of windows workbenches which connected to each other using an encrypted communications API on an isolated network. We initially couldn’t determine why the system clocks fell out of sync in a rather cascading fashion. Guess this explains it. We ended up resolving it by bridging them to the internet and forcing a sync with time servers. A few months later, it happened again. At the time we thought it to be a bug in Windows. Go figure it was.