It doesn’t sound like you have a good grasp on the differences between this case and Ross Ulbricht.

I wasn’t aware Silk Road was taken down via FISA. I’ve read all of the long form accounts of it that I’m aware of and I don’t remember FISA being mentioned at all. Can you share a source?

The baseline cloud certs should be much cheaper. AWS Associate tiers are something like 150/test.

You might also have luck with the big consulting companies. NTT, Slalom, Accenture, stuff like that. Might be less permanent but will pay pretty well.

If you are able to find a US govt job and can make it through the whatever period you need to be a contractor until you get hired on as a federal employee, this should cover you. I have a contact in a similar situation except cluster headaches. It’s going to pay less than private sector and you might have to learn some new skills for the right role. IIRC Softrams just landed a huge federal contract and hires warm bodies; might be a great place to start.

I’ve got a lot of contacts on the market right now struggling to land a gig that wouldn’t have struggled a few years ago. Do you have DevOps skills? Any security qualifications? Get both. Are you working on certs? Do some. Have you hired a resume service? Do so. The last two are things I normally think are kinda bullshit but they are edges that seem to matter right now.

As for a recruiting firm, I feel like all the good recruiters I’ve worked with would have advocated for me. That’s a total fucking crapshoot tho. I’ve worked with plenty that have shafted me. I don’t think there’s a specific firm for this problem.

The only feature that vanilla Make doesn’t have over this is solid Windows support.

I’ve evaluated a ton of these tools for CI/CD processes and common task management. So far I have found that Make is the best solution for task management unless you need strong Windows support. If you want to go crazy, you can use Autotools but that’s really only for builds not tasks. I get it; it’s cool to reinvent the wheel with a new feature that makes one thing a little bit easier.

I can’t find this being a problem. What circles do you move in where “jerk” is a problematic word?

All of these packaging systems have plenty of tutorials. Speaking from experience, many maintainers were not developers when they started maintaining packages for distros other than the official distros. I have worked with several maintainers who do work in tech and know socially several who had no background. This could be a great place for you to start!

You bother because FOSS is as much paying it forward as it is getting shit for free.

I mean it’s FOSS. Have you considered opening a PR to contribute what’s missing? You can be the change you want to see. I wouldn’t normally comment something like this. Your emphasis on “still” raised my hackles a little bit and led me to ask why you still haven’t made your own.

As soon as I read about the shoe cell modem, I thought Eudaemons. It’s rad Ars called that out too!

If you’re writing a grant illustrating its military applications I don’t really care what else you want to use it for. Looks like we disagree about intention so have fun with that.

Did man write grants to show how said fire had military applications? If so, how dare they! If not your straw man is kinda lacking.

If you’ve read stuff like Hackers by Levy or Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner, there’s a very happy, “look at this cool shit we built” attitude to everything (both books are fantastic and worth the read). Levy’s Crypto begins to dance around some of the dangers when he writes about Diffie-Hellman. MIT AI especially has its roots in this gnarly defense world even though it’s usually portrayed as anything but. The amount of computing used for RAND to support the war in Vietnam is terrible.

These are great questions! Rather than pull individual citations, I’ll point you at these books

• Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine
• The Pentagon’s Brain by Annie Jacobson
• The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberg

Your last point, suggesting that it’s possible to take DARPA money without intentionally developing weapons, is part of the whitewashing we’ve done of computing that’s incredibly wrong. Make no mistake, I am directly saying a majority of computing pioneers in the US are trash people while respecting their achievements. Their work was done explicitly under the knowledge it was for military purposes. Levine has a few great anecdotes about engineers watching protestors and asking for extra security.

Your example of Berners-Lee is an interesting one. He’s trash for modern opinions. I don’t know much about the military history, if any, of CERN, so I don’t know their culpability. Conway took DARPA money and architected DARPA projects. That’s her culpability, unless you’re able to show she was coerced and didn’t know about the widely discussed military connections scientists had to know to write their grants for funding?

Edit: fixed the Weinberger link

Fantastic! She was a huge part of the military-industrial complex in computing and her entire work has to be viewed through that lens. While her contributions to the field are numerous and incredibly meaningful, she also wanted to help the military develop machine intelligence and is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children.

I agree with you. I think the responses to your comment are missing a few key points

• Calling an Apple product something weird with “i” or “Apple” is Jobsian slavish devotion to branding
• Under Tim Cook, innovation has arguably stagnated (see comparisons to Ballmer
• Cook has not leveraged the value of Apple’s innovation successfully eg Apple Silicon being limited to Apple devices vs PowerPC days, the Vision Pro being horrible, the recent hilarious iPad creativity crusher ad.
• A company with Apple’s market cap can do dumb shit and still appear valuable just because they have Apple’s market cap.

I read OP as “names are dumb and this is just Apple trying to be different in the same way everyone else is.” I think all of that is true and I think it’s valid criticism of the product. My last point about Apple’s value is probably the most important. They can do a lot of dumb shit before it matters.

I’d argue it was taken from us several years ago when Raspberry made the decision to prioritize business customers over education and hobby during the chip shortages.

If you were able to buy one at the beginning of the pandemic it was great. If you weren’t, then the 4 was annoying as fuck because it was impossible to purchase at anything less than 3X MSRP.

Your on-call experience is not the norm. That alone should cause you to seek another position. Experienced SREs are always in high demand. Find a place that isn’t abusing your off-hours.

In general, if my on-call engine are paged outside of business hours, I do not expect them to come in on time the next day and we’re having a postmortem ASAP. If we can’t fix the page, we’re evaluating the page’s necessity. It’s either something we can fix, something we can’t fix and don’t care about because we can’t fix it so we’re going to kill the alarm that causes the page, or ephemeral enough that we don’t think it’s worth the time chasing down. My team’s off-hours are not to be abused by stakeholders not giving us the resources we need to resolve issues and I will back that hard. In your case, you need more money and your company needs to either devote the serious resources in R&D to fix this shit, pass on the support cost to the customer at such a high level it’s actually painful for them making them get off the fucking pot, or both. For example, if a contract will affect my team’s off-hours and they’re making a bullshit alarm, they will will pay us a huge amount of money for that support. Usually the contract gets signed because stakeholders are dumb and then the first fucking time that fee hits that stupid alarm gets redlined out because financial stakeholders are smarter.

In the forty years since its introduction, most of the people that support the broken windows theory are the police and the people that disagree with it are basically everyone else. Not a great foundation for any computing conversations today.

Do you mind calling out the questions you think are inappropriate or exist for rage clicks? What constitutes a good article for you if this is a shitty one?