That sounds more like a feature than a bug. I remember when Twitter was actually useful. You could sort by “new” as the default and your feed only included stuff from people you followed. And then it went to complete shit with the sort defaulting to “fuck your preferences”, sponsored content and your feed being littered with click bait, paid content and all the other bits of enshitification. And that is all built on the algorithmic selection of content.
Step one, take a deep breath and realize that, unless you own the company, killing yourself to save it is dumb.
That said, there are some things you can do to try and improve thing:
Learn to “talk business”. Yup, this one sucks, but it’s also the only way you are ever going to get traction. Take that Windows 7 system, why do you want to upgrade it? “Because security”, right? Well, how does that translate into costs to the business? Because, businesses don’t care about security. I work in cybersecurity for a large (Fortune 500) company and upper management has given exactly zero fucks about security for a very long time. They only started coming around when that lack of security starting costing them real money. They still give zero fucks about security, but they do care about risks to the business and what that might cost them. Having security and money linked in their heads means we can actually implement better security. You need to put the lack of security of that Windows 7 system in terms of dollars potentially lost. Something like the Annualized Loss Expectancy. If that box gets popped, how much would it reasonably cost the business to recover from? Is that something which you expect to happen once a year, once every five years? These numbers will be mostly made up and wildly inaccurate. But, the goal is to just get in the right ballpark. How does that cost compare with the cost to upgrade? What about other possible mitigating controls you could use to protect it? Does it need to have internet access? Could you VLAN it off into it’s own little world and keep it running with reduced risk? Give management the expected costs of that system becoming patient zero in a ransomware outbreak and then give them several options and the associated costs (upfront and ongoing) to secure it. Have multiple options. A high cost one (e.g. replace the box), a low cost one (FW and VLAN controls) and the one you actually want right in between (OS Upgrade). Managers are like children, they need to feel like they made a choice, even if you steered them into it.
Next, don’t try to boil the ocean. You’re not going to fix everything, everywhere, all at once. Get some small wins under your belt and prove to management that you aren’t going to break the business. Show that you aren’t just some greenhorn cowboy who is going to break the business because you think you are so smart. If you can make a plan for that Windows 7 system, show the costs involved and actually get the job done smoothly, then you might be able to move on to other things. Sure, you might actually be right; but, you could also end up breaking a lot of stuff in your quest to have perfect security (which you’ll never actually achieve). Take one one or maybe two things at a time. It’s a slow process and it leaves things broke far longer than you will like, but it builds trust and gets more action than just screaming about everything at everyone. Slow is steady, steady is fast.
Moving on, be aware that you probably don’t know everything about the business, and the business functioning is paramount. Why does everyone have local admin? Because that’s the way it’s always been and it has always worked. If you start pulling those permissions back, what processes get broken? This is a tough one, because it means documenting other people’s processes, many of which probably only exist in the heads of those people. How often are people moving around critical files using CIFS and the share. It’s fucking stupid, but there’s a good chance that the number is greater than zero. You pull local admin from people, and now work doesn’t get done. If work doesn’t get done, the business loses money. You need to have a plan which shows that you have considered these things. Design a slow rollout which phases local admin rights out for the users who are least likely to affect the business. Again, slow is steady, steady is fast.
And thins brings us to another point, auditors are your friends. No really, those folks who come in and ask you where all your documentation is and point out every single flaw in your network, ya, they deserve hugs not hate. You’re in healthcare, where does your business fall on regulations like HIPAA (US-centric but similar regulations may apply in other countries)? 'Cause nothing says, “fuck your wallet” to a business quite like failing an audit. If you can link the security failures of the business to required audit controls, that’s going to give you tons of ammunition to get stuff done. I’ve watched businesses move mountains to comply with audit controls. Granted, it all becomes “checkbox security” at some point; but, that is vastly better than nothing.
All that said, company loyalty is a sucker’s game. I’m guessing you’re early in your career and an early IT career likely means job hopping every 3 years or so. Unless you get a major promotion and associated pay bump in that time, it’s probably time to move on. Later in your career, this can slow down as you top out in whatever specialization you choose (or you get lured in by the siren song of management). So, there is that to consider. It might just be time to go find greener pastures and discover that pastures are green because the cows shit all over them. But, it can feel better for a while. Having your resume up to date and flying it out there usually doesn’t hurt. Don’t job hop too fast or you start to look like a risk (I stick to a 1 year minimum). But, don’t stick around trying to save a sinking company.
Along with that, remember that you don’t own the company; so, don’t let it own you. When you get to the end of your day, go the fuck home. Don’t let the business consume your personal time in actions or thoughts. If they place burns, that’s the owner’s problem, not yours. Do your best while on the clock, do try to make positive changes. But, killing yourself to make the owner just a bit richer makes no sense. The only person who is ever going to truly have your best interests in minds is you, don’t lose sight of them. Say it with me, “Fuck you, pay me”
So, where to go from here? Well, you sound like you have a good plan at the moment:
I am also looking into getting my Linux+ (currently only have my A+)
Sounds solid. If you care about security, let me recommend poking your head into the cybersecurity field. I’m am absolutely biased, but I feel it’s a fantastic field to be in right now. Following up the Linux+ with the Sec+ can be a great start and maybe the Net+. The A+, Net+, Sec+ trifecta can open a lot of doors. And you now have some IT/systems background, which I always suggest for folks (I look for 3-5 years in IT on resumes). As a lead, I get to be in on interviews and always ask questions about networking, Active Directory, email security and Linux. I don’t expect entry level analysts to know everything about all of them; but, I do expect them to be able to hold a conversation about them.
Good luck, whatever path you choose.
Do you really want Musk starting a game console company?
It’s a dick move, but I can kinda understand why SpaceX would make it. There has been a push to “de-risk” supply chains, after the disruptions caused by Covid, Russia’s invasion of Ukranie, and other world events. This type of de-risking was partly responsible for the CHIPS and Science Act. The US Government has a strategic incentive to have a stable and resilient supply chain for semiconductors.
For SpaceX, having critical components be only available from fabs in Taiwan is a risk to business. China has been more and more vocal about it’s desire to annex Taiwan. With Trump taking office, one can imagine that the US commitment to protect Taiwan may not be quite as iron clad as it has been in the past. It’s not hard to imagine a future where China launches an invasion of Taiwan and the US does little more than shrug. At that point, any business which is solely reliant on Taiwan for semiconductors is going to see major disruptions.
So ya, it’s a complete dick move. But, I suspect SpaceX will be far from the last company looking to build a supply chain outside Taiwan.
I don’t think that Republicans need to kill the filibuster further. It’s already dead for judicial nominations, which they have used to full effect.
I’m not sure I agree that this removes the incentive to kill the filibuster. A lot of what the GOP wants to do will require passing legislation. Sure, they can kill a lot of existing legislation via the courts and I also expect “budget reconciliation process” to re-enter the political lexicon in full force again. But, there is going to be stuff they want to do, which will be blocked in Congress, via the filibuster. And I think that will raise the specter of killing the filibuster in some wings of the GOP.
Also, the map is much more favorable to Democrats in the next two Senate election cycles.
Ya, and this is why I mentioned there being wings of the GOP who understood just how useful the filibuster is.
I’m not completely sold on that idea. While I’m sure there are wings of the GOP who will buy into the idea of never losing power again, I also suspect that there will be members of the Senate who are old enough to know from experience that things never quite go to plan. Yes, we could be in for an end to Democracy, that possible. But, if we’re there, the filibuster doesn’t mean a thing. If our institutions are strong enough to hold up for the next four years, then the filibuster will be as contentious as it always is, when the majority has only a slim hold on power.
Even worse, it appears that Republicans have also managed to win majorities in the Senate and House. While thin, those majorities are enough that we can expect some of the Republican priorities to start getting passed. My major question for the first six months of 2025 will be, does the filibuster survive? I know many folks on the left wanted to kill it, when Republican Senators were using it to obstruct anything more progressive than not kicking puppies. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, will the left suddenly fall back in love with the filibuster? I suspect so. I also suspect that the MAGA wing of the GOP is going to be keen to kill the filibuster the first time it gets in the way of their project. And I wonder where the less dickish members of the GOP will come down on the issue.
Fuck
Personally, I don’t find Evangelical support of Trump all that surprising.
When you get down to brass tacks, this is an election between two candidates. Almost no one is going to look at those two candidates and find a perfect fit. It’s quite possible that people won’t even find a good fit. But, they have three choices, either one of the candidates or not voting at all. The latter of those choices is pointless, if one has policy preferences that they want to achieve. That only leaves picking the closest fit among the two candidates.
In may corners of Lemmy, and in this community specifically, there has been a very strong push towards the sort of “vote Blue, no matter who” message, which has been around for several cycles. And this message is not wrong. Harris’s position on the war in Gaza has a lot of detractors. But, the choice is not between Harris and someone with a better position. The race is between Harris and Trump, whose position on Gaza is likely worse for those detractors. If those detractors don’t want things to get worse, they pretty much have to accept the situation as is, vote Harris and push for changes. And I suspect a lot of folks will support Harris, some enthusiastically, in spite of that policy difference. Because they will find other policy positions that they strongly support are also supported or championed by Harris. Better a flawed candidate that one which is diametrically opposed to the policy positions which one holds most dear.
The thing which seems to be forgotten by folks who wonder “how can Evangelicals support Trump?”, is that this same problem cuts both ways. The people who hold GOP aligned policy preferences hold those beliefs just as strongly as Liberal/Progressive folks hold their own. That they would fall into a “vote Red, no matter who” mindset should not be surprising at all. And for Evangelicals, I’d argue that this mindset may be even stronger. These are folks who believe that, not only does this life hinge on their actions, they also truly believe that the here-after does as well. As much fun as we might make of people for believing in an invisible sky-wizard, they really, really believe all that stuff. And their entire self-identity will be built on the version of that belief system. And let me stress that it’s specifically “their version of that belief system”. The various versions of the Christian Bible have a lot of ambiguous and contradictory stuff in them. It’s easy enough to dig out justifications for nearly any positions one wants to take. And Trump’s messaging has been pretty well aligned with the mainstream Evangelical version of policy positions on all the major topics. Harris’s positions, on the other hand, are in direct oppositions to those positions.
Why does that matter so much? One of the deeply important policy positions to Evangelicals, for several decades now, has been overturning Roe v. Wade. And for all the shit one might say about Trump, he actually got that done. Nixon, Regan, Bush, and Bush all failed in that one, paramount goal. Trump, did it. Stop and imagine for a moment, a politician whose personal life you find distasteful, yet they managed to accomplish the one single policy goal you hold above all others, would you go vote against them? Especially when their opposition is loudly campaigning to undo that major policy win for you? Oh, and that opposition is also campaigning against just about every other social policy position you hold. Anyone saying “yes” to that question is bullshitting themselves.
Now, is Trump going to get anything else done for the Evangelicals? Who knows. But, Harris certainly isn’t and she’s actively hostile to their worldview. And Trump already got “goal number one” done. It seems like a reasonable bet that someone who already won the top line fight might win a few of the other ones as well. And all that “fascism, threat to democracy stuff”? Ya, that’s just liberals whining because they are losing. It’s Godwin’s Law in action. The lawsuits and criminal convictions, that’s just liberals weaponizing the DoJ to stop Trump, since they can’t stop him legitimately. And Trump’s past as a horrible person? A personal turnaround story of a “lost soul coming to Jesus” is damned near a foundational myth of Evangelicalism.
No, Evangelicals supporting Trump is neither surprising, nor unexpected. And you can bet they will latch right onto the next GOP candidate to come along. And it’s not all that hard to understand. If you have ever bought into any version of “vote Blue, no matter who”, then you are intimately familiar with the same logic. From their perspective, the US is in the grips of an existential crisis which is being perpetrated by Democrats. The very foundations of their self are “under attack” as society moves further and further away from their central truths. And, from my own perspective, I don’t see that there is really any way to convince those folks otherwise. Trump isn’t the Devil in the desert tempting Jesus. To them, he’s the flawed man who is going to save their version of the US the only way he can. He’s a vigilante, bending or breaking the rules, because the rules are stacked against “the righteous”. That’s the mindset you are up against.
War rarely decides who’s right, just who’s left.
Can we follow this up by murdering most of the generic Top Level Domains (gTLD)? I have yet to see anything except spam and malware coming out of the .top domain.
there wouldn’t be any reason to tweak and replace it all constantly.
There really wasn’t.
There is the legal concept of Mens Rea which has to do with the mental state of the person committing the act. And I think that applies in this case. Archeology has generally been about learning and providing knowledge of previous cultures. While the methods, mindset and actions of 18th and early 19th century treasure hunters left a lot to be desired, some of them did make some reasonable attempt at documenting their finds and preserving the context to provide that knowledge. Modern archeologists go to painstaking lengths to properly document finds and preserve as much knowledge as possible from finds. Grave robbers do none of this. Their motivations generally revolve around personal gain and they will destroy any context and knowledge in their attempt to make money.
Consider your own reading on the Valley of the Kings. Where did all of the information we have on the Pharaohs in those tombs come from? It’s from the work of the archeologists documenting everything found in those tombs. While there is certainly an argument for leaving things in the same state they were found in, that also means that the artifacts will continue to deteriorate and any further knowledge which might be gleaned from them will be lost. Sending artifacts to a museum isn’t all about putting them in cases for people to gawk at. It also means that actions are taken to preserve those artifacts and maintain them for observation and study in the future. Sometimes this does cause damage. Again, 18th and early 19th century preservation was often just as, if not more damaging than leaving those artifacts in-sutu. But again, the intention was to preserve, not enrich.
So, that’s how I would draw the line, based on the reason and methods used for the removal of grave goods. Is it done with the intention for the furtherance of knoweldge of previous cultures? Or, is it just done to enrich someone? And is the work being done using the current understanding and methods to best capture and preserve that knowledge for future generations?
While I would never support it, the main way to improve online discussion is by removing anonymity. Allow me to go back a couple decades and point to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. People with a reasonable expectation of anonymity turn into complete assholes. The common solution to this is by linking accounts to a real identity in some way, such that online actions have negative consequences to the person taking them. Google famously tried this by forcing people to use their real name on accounts. And it was a privacy nightmare. Ultimately though, it’s the only functional solution. If anti-social actions do not have negative social consequences, then there is no disincentive for people to not take those actions and people can just keep spinning up new accounts and taking those same anti-social actions. This can also be automated, resulting in the bot farms which troll and brigade online forums. On the privacy nightmare side of the coin, it means it’s much easier to target people for legitimate, though unpopular, opinions. There are some “in the middle” options, which can make the cost to creating accounts somewhat higher and slower; but, which don’t expose peoples’ real identities in quite the same way. But, every system has it’s pros and cons. And the linking of identities to accounts
Voting systems and the like will always be a kludge, which is easy to work around. Any attempt to predicate the voting on trusting users to “do the right thing” is doomed to fail. People suck, they will do what they want and ignore the rules when they feel they are justified in doing so. Or, some people will do it just to be dicks. At the same time, it also promotes herding and bubbles. If everyone in a community chooses to downvote puppies and upvote cats, eventually the puppy people will be drown out and forced to go off and found their own community which does the opposite. And those communities, both now stuck in a bias reinforcing echo chamber, will continue to drift further apart and possibly radicalize against each other. This isn’t even limited to online discussions. People often choose their meat-space friends based on similar beliefs, which leads to people living in bubbles which may not be representative to a wider world.
Despite the limitations of the kludge, I do think voting systems are the best we’re going to get. I’d agree with @grue that the Slashdot system had a lot of merit. Allowing the community to both vote on articles/comments and then later have those votes voted on by a random selection of users, seems like a reasonable way to try to enforce some of the “good faith” voting you’re looking for. Though, even that will likely get gamed and lead to herding. It’s also a lot more cumbersome and relies on the user community taking on a greater role in maintaining the community. But, as I have implied, I don’t think there is a “good” solution, only a lot of “less bad” ones.
Like many of the differences, I suspect that one came out of the attempts as English Spelling Reform, which took greater hold in the US. Ultimately, the process hasn’t succeeded, but it has excised some of inconsistencies from the English. Though, it has also led to some confusion, as in the tire/tyre case.
This article brought to you by the manufacturers of the interceptor missiles.
If we were actually in a hot war or expecting one very soon, yes we would want to ramp production like the US did during WWII. Right now, the excessive costs of wartime production should not be considered. It’s always best to remember Eisenhower’s words:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
You have to get out away from cities. We get them in our yard every summer and our kids run about catching them.
Ya, in fairness to MS, Windows XP was a good release (post SP1, like most “good” MS releases). But, the fact is that MS is going to push the latest version, regardless of how ready it is for use. MS was hot for folks to switch to Windows ME. And holy fuck was that a terrible OS. MS also did everything short of bribery to get folks to switch to Vista (anyone remember Windows Mojave?). The “upgrade, or else” mantra has always been their way. Not that I blame them too much, it does need to happen. It just sucks when the reason for the new OS is more intrusive ads and user tracking.
Many years ago, I attended a Windows XP launch event. The Microsoft presenter had the perfect line to describe how MS views this:
“Why should you upgrade to Windows XP? Because we’re going to stop supporting Windows 98!”
This was said completely unironically and with the expectation that people would just do what MS wanted them to do. That attitude hasn’t changed in the years since. Win 10 is going to be left behind. You will either upgrade or be vulnerable. Also, MS doesn’t care about the home users, they care about the businesses and the money to be had. And businesses will upgrade. They will invariably wait to the last minute and then scramble to get it done. But, whether because they actually give a shit about security or they have to comply with security frameworks (SOX, HIPAA, etc.), they will upgrade. Sure, they will insist on GPOs to disable 90% of the Ads and tracking shit, but they will upgrade.
For a similar story, which isn’t a urban legend. My mother used to be the main resource for an archeological information center in the US Southwest. When work crews dug up a body, she’d get a call from the coroner to ask, “is it yours or mine?” While both are going to want to know the cause of death, the coroner isn’t going to open a criminal case for a Native America burial.