[-] varsock@programming.dev 1 points 3 days ago

Out of college I did not work at a start-up but instead got a job at a "big, stable" corp. I got the following advice from the older engineers at big, stable corp. Some of those engineers are my personal friends 7 years later.

"Why work here where it's slow and stable? You're young, go take some risks, earn money, and most importantly get experience under your belt. Then come back with experience and coast. Your compensation grows slowly here so might as well come in with experience and start with a high salary. Also, everything is slow here, your peers at fast paced companies will out pace you."

That was some of the truest shit I've ever heard. I've since left big,stable corp and am working at a company who was a start-up but opted to grow instead of being bought out. I am working on a family so cannot afford the risks of a start-up.

Yes, I work many more hours but the pay is way better and in the last 1 year I've learned more than i've learned at big,stable corp. There is just much less process and red tape and we are more hands on and wear many hats. At times this is exhausting but I find comfort that if I were to lose my job, I have tangible experience to get hired again where as at Big,stable I was picking up skills how to do reviews on processes and techniques unique to the company.

72
submitted 5 months ago by varsock@programming.dev to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

The article discusses the use of targeted advertising data by government agencies, particularly focusing on how a technology consultant demonstrated the security risks posed by Grindr's data to national security agencies. It highlights the widespread availability and potential surveillance applications of advertising data, as well as the government's interest in obtaining and utilizing such data for intelligence purposes.

Why is this worth the read? It goes into detail how these data exchanges work and the mechanisms of obtaining such data. We often hear about the result of these actions, but how these actions are performed are described within.

(clear your cookies to read the paywalled article)

[-] varsock@programming.dev 29 points 5 months ago

Had a distinguished collegue (from the Bell Lab days) say to me recently:

"IDEs take up a lot of RAM on my machine. Vim takes up a lot of squishy RAM in my head. I need squishy RAM to hold info relevant to problem solving, not options available in my tool chain."

[-] varsock@programming.dev 24 points 8 months ago

I'd really want to know what's driving them

likely ego

[-] varsock@programming.dev 21 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The letter is a post on his own blog . Hard to distill into a summary so I recommend reading it get more context. But it seems to have boiled down to:

  • How It Was:

    • Strong adherence to the "don't be evil" ethos, focusing on societal good over profits.
    • Open, transparent communication and decision-making processes.
    • High morale, with a culture of learning from successes and failures.
    • Work focused on benefitting the web and users, rather than Google's immediate interests.
    • Collaboration and lack of internal silos, encouraging innovation and autonomy.
  • How It Is Now:

    • Shift from user-centric to Google-centric, and then to individual-centric decision making.
    • Eroded transparency and increase in organizational silos.
    • Decline in morale and a culture of distrust between employees and management.
    • Focus on short-term financial gains leading to layoffs and defensive employee behavior.
    • Lack of clear vision and leadership, resulting in confused and ineffective management.
    • Overall deterioration of Google's unique, innovative culture and values.
12
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by varsock@programming.dev to c/homelab@lemmy.ml

Hey everyone,

I wanted to poll the community and pick up tips on DIY cable labeling and management.

At work, we label both ends of Ethernet cabels using a Brady Label maker. They are awesome but run about $200 USD.

I don't need such an expensive device to create (one-time) 40ish labels.

I was hoping for DIY suggestions that balances durability and ease of installation. Was thinking tape, sharpies, or even thick zip ties etc. Some forums even suggested bread ties (but I'm concerned they will fall off in hard to reach places). And sharpies are great but can wear on some materials (like those plastic sticky tabs for books and notes)

What are some pros and cons of approaches you guys have tried?

EDIT:

I was pointed to this video which suggests you:

  1. Grid up a piece of paper so each rectangle's height is the size of a circumference of a cable. It will later be wrapped around the cable.
  2. Then hand write the labels.
  3. Cut out each label/rectangle.
  4. Then use clear masking tape slightly larger than the label to secure it to the cable by wrapping it around the circumference of the cable.

The finished product looks like those shrinking labels where the label is flush against the cable and text is behind a clear film and can't be smudged.

For those that suggested borrow the label maker from work or print them at work: that has occured to every one of our engineers on staff and now our printers are locked away and are signed out bc we would always find them either low on ink/toner or more frequently out of lable paper. Yes, ordering those supplies is negligibly cheap for a budget at work but the issue lied in whenever you picked up the label maker at work, you immediately had to either change the roll or ink. sigh this is why we can't have nice things :)

[-] varsock@programming.dev 19 points 9 months ago

to add to this, id like standardization of qualification and competencies - kind of like a license so I don't have to "demonstrate" myself during interviews.

I hate being in a candidate pool that all have a degree and experience, we all go through a grueling interview process on college basics, and the "best one gets picked." Company says "our interview process works great, look at the great candidates we hire." like, duh, your candidate pool was already full of qualified engineers with degrees/experience, what did you expect to happen?

[-] varsock@programming.dev 33 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I feel so powerless, so hopeless.

Bills aren't being passed by lawmakers because like many of us who care about privacy, they have not heard about the abilities of data brokers and have no visibility into how rampant and disgusting and invasive their behavior is.

Friends and family I talk to don't care. "Oh well, what are they going to do, find me personally?"

I feel if people were able to look themselves up in these databases, they would fear it as well

112
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by varsock@programming.dev to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

Below is a disturbing amount of information data brokers have ammased from buying your data from trackers in ads and apps.

"a staggering amount of sensitive and identifying information about consumers," alleging that Kochava's database includes products seemingly capable of identifying nearly every person in the United States.

... can access this data to trace individuals' movements—including to sensitive locations like hospitals, temporary shelters, and places of worship, with a promised accuracy within "a few meters"—over a day, a week, a month, or a year. Kochava's products can also provide a "360-degree perspective" on individuals, unveiling personally identifying information like their names, home addresses, phone numbers, as well as sensitive information like their race, gender, ethnicity, annual income, political affiliations, or religion, the FTC alleged.

... target customers by categories that are "often based on specific sensitive and personal characteristics or attributes identified from its massive collection of data about individual consumers." These "audience segments" allegedly allow advertisers to conduct invasive targeting by grouping people not just by common data points like age or gender, but by "places they have visited," political associations, or even their current circumstances, like whether they're expectant parents. Or advertisers can allegedly combine data points to target highly specific audience segments like "all the pregnant Muslim women in Kochava’s database," the FTC alleged, or "parents with different ages of children."

115
submitted 9 months ago by varsock@programming.dev to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

For all you USA peeps:

A bipartisan team of U.S. lawmakers has introduced new legislation intended to curb the FBI's sweeping surveillance powers, saying the bill helps close the loopholes that allow officials to seize Americans' data without a warrant.

The bill follows more than a decade of debate over post-Sept. 11, 2001, surveillance powers that allow domestic law enforcement to warrantlessly scan the vast mountains of data gathered by America's foreign surveillance apparatus.

106

A bipartisan team of U.S. lawmakers has introduced new legislation intended to curb the FBI's sweeping surveillance powers, saying the bill helps close the loopholes that allow officials to seize Americans' data without a warrant.

The bill follows more than a decade of debate over post-Sept. 11, 2001, surveillance powers that allow domestic law enforcement to warrantlessly scan the vast mountains of data gathered by America's foreign surveillance apparatus.

69
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by varsock@programming.dev to c/rust@programming.dev

The sudo-rs project improves on the security of the original sudo by:

  • Using a memory safe language (Rust), as it's estimated that one out of three security bugs in the original sudo have been memory management issues
  • Leaving out less commonly used features so as to reduce attack surface
  • Developing an extensive test suite which even managed to find bugs in the original sudo
[-] varsock@programming.dev 23 points 10 months ago

Had a client that couldn't understand a small dataset of data. They needed "something interactive to filter and sort the data for a human to review." We suggested putting it into an excel spreadsheet, and did it for them. Customer didn't know how to use excel so we had to create a knock-off excel table GUI that had buttons labeled "filter and sort".

some people seem to have money they don't know what to do with smh

19

I have a device that reached end-of-life support and I'm burned out loading ROMs to extend it's support. Upon from my return from the trip I plan on purchasing a new device anyway, so buying one while traveling is also an option.

I'm traveling to a European Market that has stronger privacy rules GDPR and their devices must have lower SAR (regarding phone RF emissions).

Regarding RF and SAR

My carrier frequency bands in my home country are supported by European phones I'm looking at (Android and Apple). But do the phones dynamically manage the RF emission based on locale or are the limited at hardware or software?

Would purchasing the device abroad have an effect I think it does when I bring it home?

Regarding Privacy

This one is tricky, typically the account (gmail or Apple ID) is associated with the locale. If I were to create a new account and set up my device while abroad, will this have lasting effects? I have a friend who have immigrated and set their devices up abroad and their locale is still their OG country. One of them changed locales (for android) because spotify (app) wasnt available in their home country locale. So I speculate this is a solid approach if I were to do so.

I know I might have issues with availability of content (downloading from app stores). But as far as accounts go, my Spotify (and netflix if i stil had it) account is associated with my home country so I will still be able to watch shows in my locale. Being able to download the app is the limiting factor but there are ways to get around that with side loading.

So yeah, if anyone has experience with this and could call out some things I didn't consider or validate my expectations, would be appretiated.

[-] varsock@programming.dev 32 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

fantasize of all the ways I can hand in my resignation.

Then 3 months go by and still no offer, lower the bar and fantasize of all the ways I can hand in my resignation - but nicer

9

Unit tests are meant to verify the functionality of isolated units of code. When dealing with code whose output depends on the system or system configuration, what are approaches to write effective unit tests? I feel this problem plagues lower level systems languages more so I am asking it here.

I solve this by writing "unit tests" that I then manually compare to the output of my terminal's utilities. It is the quickest way to verify units work as expected but it is obviously not automated.

Making a container or a VM to run integration tests seems like the next easiest way, not sure if there are other cost effective ways.

Scenario

Say I have a function called

get_ip_by_ifname(const char *if_name, struct in_addr *ipaddr)

Inputs:

  • string of interface name
  • pointer to variable where the returned IP address will be

Returns:

  • -1 if interface does not exist,
  • 0 if interface exists but has no IPv4 IP
  • 1+ if interface exists and has at least 1 ip addr (some interfaces have multiple addresses, only 1st is written to ipaddr buffer)
Test Cases and their dependencies
  1. Interface doesn't exist
    • easy to test, use uncommon interface name
  2. Interface exists has no ipv4 ip address
    • requires the underlying system to have a unique interface name which I need to hard code and compare to in my unit test
  3. interface exists, has 1 ipv4 ip address
    • requires underlying system to have the uniquely named interface with exactly 1 uniquely defined ip address. Both of which I need to hard code into my test
  4. interface exists, has 1+ ipv4 ip addresses
    • similar to item 3.

The way I might test something like this works is write a test that logs each case's output to the terminal than run ip -c a in another terminal and compare the info in the 2 outputs. I verify it works as expected manually with very minimal setup (just assigned multiple IP addresses to one of my interfaces).

I would like to test this in an automated fashion. Is there any way that wont be a time sink?

[-] varsock@programming.dev 21 points 1 year ago

A step in the right direction but until there are more robust privacy laws in place, this will not go away.

If their gov is restricted on buying from data brokers, are other governments, foreign entities?

The inherit issue is the American's data can be harvested and sold. Setting up legal restrictions toward certain entities will just cause those entities to "legally self identify" as another entity. Or do business with an entity that is allowed access to American's data.

216

Wanted to share a resource I stumbled on that I can't wait to try and integrate into my projects.

A GPT4All model is a 3GB - 8GB file that you can download and plug into the GPT4All open-source ecosystem software. Nomic AI supports and maintains this software ecosystem to enforce quality and security alongside spearheading the effort to allow any person or enterprise to easily train and deploy their own on-edge large language models.

1

If you didn't get a choice to work remote, how come?

419
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by varsock@programming.dev to c/meta@programming.dev

Drawing attention on this instance so Admins are aware and can address the propagating exploit.

EDIT: Found more info about the patch.

A more thorough recap of the issue.

GitHub PR fixing the bug: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1897/files

If your instance has custom emojis defined, this is exploitable everywhere Markdown is available. It is NOT restricted to admins, but can be used to steal an admin's JWT, which then lets the attacker get into that admin's account which can then spread the exploit further by putting it somewhere where it's rendered on every single page and then deface the site.

If your instance doesn't have any custom emojis, you are safe, the exploit requires custom emojis to trigger the bad code branch.

22
[-] varsock@programming.dev 22 points 1 year ago

it helps if you hold ChatGPTs hand and walk it through what you need. For example if you have a regex with 3 requirements, ask it to write a regex for the first requirement, then ask it to modify the previous output to add another requirement, and so on. that way you can sort of "audit" it as it generates the correct regex.

there is some more discussion of this in a similar post from a few days ago.

[-] varsock@programming.dev 32 points 1 year ago

look at it this way, necessities in USA are largely out of reach (health care, education, housing, funded retirement) and luxaries are easy to come by (phones, sneakers, branded clothing, streaming etc).

Whereas in Europe, the necessities are much more attainable for the population at any income bracket. Do you have much more "free cash"? No. Do you need it? No, you have a social safety net.

Even vacas in Europe are cheaper bc for an American to travel to Europe is very expensive by means of airplane. In Europe you can take a high speed train and be in any climate.

On the topic of trains, Public transit is more efficient there than it is to drive cars in the states. Imagine not having to buy a ~$30k car every 10 years? Not to mention fuel and maintain it.

[-] varsock@programming.dev 19 points 1 year ago

Not yet. The rumors are confirmed by Meta reaching out to a Mastadon admin, Kev, from fosstadon.org. He kindly made public the email.

Mail from Meta to Kev, from fosstadon.org, and reply

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varsock

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