mic_check_one_two @ mic_check_one_two @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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The truly diabolical way is to add an image to your resume somewhere. Something discrete that fits the theme, like your signature or a QR code to your website. Then hide the white text behind that. A bot will still scan the text just fine… But a human reader won’t even see it when they highlight the document, because the highlighted text will be behind the image.

Trump is a master of the Dead Cat Maneuver. Basically, if you’re losing an argument and can’t recover, just throw a dead cat on the table. Now everyone is talking about the dead cat, instead of the argument you were just losing. And you can deflect any kinds of “why did you do that” types of accusations back around to the fact that a dead cat is laying on the table, and someone should do something about it.

Trump always has a dead cat in his coat pocket, ready to flop onto the table at a moment’s notice.

I wasn’t in IT, so my hands were tied. If I tried running a network scan, I’d have been able to hear the screeching all the way from city hall.

You microwave the water with the tea bag already in it? At least drop the bag in after microwaving… The superheated instant boiling thing can be mitigated with basically anything in the water. Hell, my local water is hard enough to avoid it straight from the tap.

Source: Former IT guy here, who had to ensure that updates ran at the most convenient times possible for thousands of users.

I used to work at a theater owned by a city. So we used the city’s IT department, and their network. During COVID, live-streaming took off. The city wanted us to install a streaming video package. After a month or two of installing a full video system, we finally get around to testing the stream. Boot up AWS, and it runs fine. We’re streaming in full 4K. Great!

So the show rolls around. It’s Saturday, 7:30pm start time. We start the show… And the stream instantly shits the bed. Like we go from full gigabit upload speed, to less than a single megabit. We’re lucky to get 56kbps speeds. We’re getting one or two frames per second if we’re lucky.

Sunday, we test the stream ahead of time, and it works flawlessly. Show starts, and the upload speed drops to fucking dial up.

Monday morning rolls around, and IT strolls in to check their tickets. Sees a hundred from us, and gives us a call. They run a test on their end. No issues. They run a test on AWS. No issues. They run a test on the fiber backbone between the theater and city hall. No issues. They call the ISP. ISP said they didn’t have any issues over the weekend. IT shrugs, and marks the tickets as solved.

Next weekend, same thing. We’re wondering if IT is automatically throttling us, or if we have a malicious user on the network. We’re asking about QoS, or maybe automatic port control kicking in when the stream starts. Monday rolls around, and IT marks it as solved again.

Third weekend, same thing. This time, the city manager’s office is getting calls from angry patrons who paid for streaming and can’t watch their streams. Monday morning, IT rolls up. They run some more tests, and still can’t find anything wrong. They swear up and down that it’s nothing on their end, and it must be something on ours.

After four months of this back and forth, IT finally admits that they have all of their maintenance tasks to run at 7:30 over the weekend. Every single computer, server, and fucking toaster connected to the city network begins their updates at exactly 7:30. Thousands of city devices, all singularly focused on devouring our upload speeds. Servers run off-site backups. Those backups consume all of the upload speeds for the entire city network. IT refuses to change the time, because “this is what works for us. It’s after city hall closes, so we don’t have any users who are affected. It hasn’t been a problem in the past.”

I have a coworker like that with our office phones. Our phone system rolls over to ringing the entire office if the original person doesn’t pick up. Phone lines will be dead silent all day long. Then this one coworker goes for a quick 15 minute walk, and instantly gets six phone calls back-to-back, which inevitably rings the rest of the office for each call. Then as soon as the last call wraps up, she casually strolls back in from her walk.

Ah, so it’s the Hungarian version of the USPS Grumman LLV (Long Life Vehicle).

The United States Postal Service needed a vendor to produce mail trucks. They ended up signing a contract with an aerospace manufacturer named Grumman. The manufacturer retooled one of their plane factories, and started producing what they called the LLV. The company sold each truck extremely cheaply, but had an exclusive maintenance agreement to service the vehicles. Their goal was to make a profit on the service instead.

But Grumman made the vehicles too well. The LLVs were basically a thin airplane aluminum skin bolted to a pre-fabbed General Motors wheel frame, and the engines were rock solid. They skipped basically all of the modern design conveniences like AC/heating or a radio. It was basically a glorified go kart with a windshield that could do ~55MPH. It basically bankrupted Grumman, because the LLVs never needed maintenance. They spent a ton of money to retool their factory and sold a ton of LLVs basically at materials cost, then never recouped their expenses. The LLVs were produced all the way back in the 80’s and early 90’s, and the USPS is still actively trying to phase them out in favor of newer EVs. Grumman folded in the mid 90’s, after a decade of continuous losses from the LLVs.

Basically any American old enough to vote will know what a Grumman LLV looks like, even if they don’t know what it’s called:

Hospitals use pagers because the frequency band they run on is better at penetrating walls. Shorter waves carry more data, but are easily blocked by walls. Pagers don’t need a lot of data, so they use really long waves.

And hospitals are built like bunkers, to avoid the potential need to evacuate patients during an emergency. Things like fire breaks between individual rooms, earthquake protections, being strong enough to stand up during a hurricane, etc… The goal is to be able to shelter in place instead of evacuating, because a mass evacuation of bedridden patients who all need monitoring equipment would be a logistical nightmare.

But this also means hospitals are really good at blocking wireless signals, because the walls are all super thick and sturdy. So they use pagers, which use long waves and can reliably penetrate the bunker-like walls. You don’t want a doctor to miss an emergency call because they were sitting in the basement; Hospitals need a wireless connection that reliably works every time. And pagers just happen to fit that specific niche.

My point is that the “planes are safer” stat is, at best, disingenuous. Any single trip is going to be more dangerous in a plane. But people tend to fly less than they drive, so cars are cited as being more dangerous.

There are specific requirements for being exempt from overtime, even for salaried employees. There are three big exemptions, and each one has multiple requirements; You need to meet ALL of the requirements for any exemption in order to be legally exempt. I’d advise you to check the requirements here, because employers regularly misclassify workers and lie through their teeth about it to avoid paying OT. Intentional misclassification is one of the most overt ways that employers steal wages, but also extremely common in many industries.

Also, there’s a blue-collar clause that says all manual labor positions are non-exempt. So if they’re dumb enough to write manual labor into your job description, you’re non-exempt no matter how highly paid you are.

And here’s a reminder that it’s actually illegal to volunteer at the same company you’re employed at. Specifically to prevent situations exactly like this, where employers attempt to pressure their employees into volunteering, so they don’t have to pay overtime. If you’re working for your employer, you’re required to be on the clock.

Given, that only works if the rules are actually enforced. And this administration has done a good job of dismantling agencies that would be enforcing this.

Driving is orders of magnitude more likely to kill you at any second you're in a car, than flying is at any second you're in a plane.

This is an oft-repeated factoid that comes straight from the airlines bending statistics to meet their desires. It’s true that on a per mile basis, planes are safer. But on a per trip basis, cars actually win on safety.

And this makes some sense once you actually think about it. A car ride is typically going to be a frequent, short distance; An average of like 90% of all driving happens within 5 miles of the person’s home. Whereas air trips are infrequent and cover huge distances. So the accident-per-trip stat is watered down with cars having lots of trips, but the short distances tend to inflate the accident-per-mile number. In contrast, the accident-per-mile stat is watered down with planes covering a lot of miles per trip, but the infrequent nature of the trips means the accident-per-trip number is inflated.

And airlines conveniently only ever quote the accident-per-mile number when comparing safety statistics, because they have a vested interest in making airplanes seem statistically safer. If anything, seeing this factoid repeated is just a reminder that even math can be intentionally biased to fit a certain agenda.

This is dumb from a logistical standpoint. Professional lube-users mix their own using a dissolvable powder and distilled water. Because shipping water is expensive. The powder to self-mix this entire 275 gallon drum would fit in a grocery bag.

My guess is that the script ran repeatedly, even after a good connection was established. Telecom companies only billed whole minutes, so a call of 13:01 would be billed as 14 minutes. Or to put it simply, if her script made multiple calls every second, the library would get billed for multiple minutes per minute. If I made fifteen 1-second calls in a minute, I would get billed for 15 minutes of calls in that single minute.

Also, phone companies would typically bill a large flat fee for each long distance call. So making a ton of short calls was more expensive than a single long call. If her script was configured to reestablish the connection in between each upload (instead of simply starting it the once, then uploading multiple times), then the library would get billed a lot of those flat fees for each individual call.

I also found out the hard way that cell phone providers’ “free minutes” plans (back before virtually every phone plan had unlimited minutes) didn’t kick in if the call was started before the time. If your minutes were free after 8PM and you started a three hour call at 7:59, the entire call would be billed, instead of only the first minute.

Yeah, the unfortunate part about internet security is that everyone has to start somewhere. And that means there’s always a newbie making dumb mistakes that they don’t even realize are dumb. It’s not a personal failing, unless they fail to learn from it.

Ding ding ding. Capitalists are seeing the inevitable lack of blood for the blood god, and are starting to panic. Infinite growth in a finite system, after all.

Odd to think that Limewire (shut down in late 2010) and the 1070 (released in mid 2016) were separated by a smaller gap of time than the 1070 and today.

And the bike route is actually crossing several major roads.

It’s worse: The bike route is on a two lane highway with no shoulder. I’d be dead on Day 1 if I actually tried to walk/ride a bike.

Out of curiosity, which book?