But it won’t stand still in the pot long enough for us to just melt it’s hooves.

Somewhere there is a Russian Intelligence Analysts whose primary assignment is watching prediction markets. And he’s probably providing solid intel from it.

Microsoft’s partner portal website mysteriously said his account had been deactivated, without specifying why.

My money is on Microsoft’s AI based detections causing false positives again. I spend way too much time chasing ghosts from Defender. Their machine learning based signatures are especially egregious. You get an alert with a name like “Win32/Wacatac.b!ml”. That last “ml” bit denotes that it’s machine learning based. And then you get fuck all to help you determine why the alert fired. Sure, it might actually be a trojan. More likely, it’s a false positive. But who knows, because Microsoft won’t provide enough information to perform a reasonable analysis of the binary.

And MS has been pushing CoPilot hard. It’s in everything and it’s happy to slop up answers for you. The accuracy of those answers though can be a bit spotty. I’d certainly never turn it loose on tools which can have business impact. But, I doubt Microsoft has any such reservations about letting CoPilot slop all over third party devs.

Seems people have to relearn this lesson every few years:
If you don’t want something to be public, don’t put it on the internet. “Privacy” controls from these companies fail regularly, sometimes by design. If you put something on the internet, it will be public eventually.

By “de-shitify” they meant removing all the shit which isn’t owned and controlled by Microsoft.

Yup. With the ease and low likelihood of being caught, piracy has become a pressure relief valve on shitty content practices. Make things too hard to get and people will recognize that setting up a VPN and torrent client aren’t all that hard. Make the experience really bad, and you’ll get dedicated people creating entire software platforms to lower that barrier to entry for piracy even further. Sure, some of those software platforms will get knocked down, but they usually result in the code being released and other folks come along and build on them.

As consolidation and enshitification rise, I expect us to see piracy rise again as well.

Steam made it easy to buy, download and play games. So much of the competition was focused on preventing piracy to the detriment of the user experience. Steam was buy, download, and play all your games in one place with a minimum of bullshit. Then they implemented Steam Greenlight. It let some smaller studios get onto a major platform and proved out that there was a demand for those titles. They were then smart enough to realize that trying to gatekeep those studios with the “Greenlight” process was stupid and opened the flood gates.

Really, this goes back to Gabe Newell’s comments about piracy (a decade and a half ago [1]):

We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.

Steam was a real competitor to LimeWire/Kazaa/etc. The other options, at the time, were stuck in the mentality of treating their customers like pirates. And once people bought into the Steam ecosystem, getting them to buy into any other ecosystem was almost impossible. Steam’s main trick wasn’t building a community, it was building trust. Users trust Valve to not fuck them over. That’s a hard thing to create and it’s fragile. If you look at a competitor like EA’s Origin, many folks won’t even consider it. EA’s reputation of fucking customers is well established. No one wants to sink hundreds to thousands of dollars into a storefront with such an anti-user reputation.

nasa is about to remote into the computer

I’ve dealt with slow RDP sessions while fixing servers in the past, but the lag on this connection must really suck.

Yup. Being young and stupid, a group of us were lighting those rose fireworks (the kind which spin and light up on the ground), putting them in a water balloon launcher and flinging them into the sky. While we were aiming for a river, this also meant we were aiming for some brush. Unsurprisingly, we eventually had one land short while still burning and started a bush on fire. We ran down and started trying to put it out with dirt. This wasn’t going well until we remembered we had a small container and a ready source of water (the river) and managed to douse the fire.

While I did enjoy Tom Bombadil in the books, I’m not surprised he never made it into any adaptation. It’s this odd coda in the story which isn’t all that important to the overall plot. Sure, it helps to build the world out and show that there are strange things outside the power of the One Ring. But, he’s a Chekhov’s gun problem. Tolkien sets him up as this amazingly powerful entity, who could probably solve all the problems Middle Earth is facing and who promptly fucks right off for the rest of the story. And his tendency to fuck off is mentioned later to explain why he isn’t fixing anything. In the end, he serves no purpose for the story which cannot be easily dealt with otherwise. It just seems like Tolkien really wanted to include him somehow, stuffed him in and didn’t have a competent editor to say, “look Ronald, I know you love this character, but this bit really needs to be pulled.”

Given all the troubleshooting you have done, let me ask a potentially stupid question:
How old is the nozzle?

A worn out nozzle can result in all kinds of odd printing behavior, especially around inconsistent extrusion. I chased my arse for way too many hours on my previous printer, on;y to have a nozzle change resolve nearly everything.

Along with that, have you taken a good look at your extruder? A worn/broken gear can cause all kinds of headaches.

I’m not familiar with the Snapmaker U1, what I am finding is that it’s a tool changing machine. So, does the problem persist across multiple tool-heads, or is limited to a single tool-head?

I regularly use CoPilot to search Microsoft documentation for me. E.g. I needed to find a particular interface in Entra and couldn’t remember where it was. So, I asked CoPilot and it got me to the right spot. I’ve thought about asking it about Microsoft licensing, but I figure that might result in CoPilot becoming self aware enough to kill itself.

I also use a number of AI agents built into the cybersecurity tools I use on a daily basis. Generally stuff along the lines of “find all the cases related to this system/IP/user/etc” type queries. It’s also good for questions like “how do I tune this alert” so I don’t have to remember whatever bullshit process this vendor put together for tuning false positives. Our primary SIEM/SOAR tool has an AI which does initial triage and investigation work and it’s not terrible. It struggles with correlations for more complex events, usually highlighting events which have no bearing on the event in question. But, it often provides a good first pass and description our first line analysts can use to start a real investigation.

AI is a tool. And like a lot of tools, it has it’s benefits and limitations. The problem is we’re still figuring all those out and the people marketing these tools don’t want to admit to the limitations and they over-sell the benefits, then blame the user when those benefits don’t materialize. Given how much modern economies are based on information and knowledge, I do expect AI to have some lasting impact, but I also expect that we’ll adapt and it will just be another way of getting things done in a generation or two.

It’s the return of the Glasshole.

If you have the time, put some resumes out before accepting the first thing to come along. I don’t know how things are in Germany, but I’ve always believed it’s easier to find a job while you are still working. That said, if the new position, pay and work culture seem good, taking the position for now may be a good choice. You can always job hunt later.

As for how you conduct yourself, I’d always suggest conducting yourself in a professional manner. While you may have zero intention of coming back to this organization, you never know when you are going to run across the people you work with again. And the next time they may be in a position to help or hurt you. For example, I worked for a company really early in my career which started falling apart quickly. Towards the end of my time there, they announced they were closing the office I worked at and basically gave my department a big “fuck you”. I could have gone out causing trouble or just worked my time until I left for greener pastures. I did the latter. Years latter, I was applying for a job I really wanted and an important member of the hiring team had worked with me at the first job. Not as my boss, just someone in another department. He remembered my work and work quality and had effectively said, “yup, hire this guy”. While I have long since left that job as well, his confidence in me changed the trajectory of my career.

Maybe it’s different over there, but I’ve always heard that “it’s who you know, not what you know” that gets you hired. And I’ve run into that in my own career. You don’t want to be a pushover, but keeping professional relationships professional can pay dividends down the line. Do the job you are paid for, don’t make messes for other people and at least try to be professional in your dealings with others. You may be able to climb the ladder quickly today by being an asshole, but you never know if the fingers you step on today will be attached to the hand you will need to help you tomorrow.

I’m literally reading this in an airport terminal. And people like me can keep waiting in security lines until the Gestapo gets muzzled. That’s far more important than travelers being inconvenienced. The DHS was yet another bad idea made in the wake of 9/11. It’s already been a generation that rotten crap has been allowed to fester. Now is the time to clean that mess up.

Time to bite the bullet and move the phone to Linux as well.

Also, what idiot decided that only one settings window is allowed open at one time?

Microsoft engineers were worried that people missed the joys of MS-DOS and having only one application running at once. Next up, will be the return of base memory versus expanded memory versus extended memory. This ends when they devolve Windows to prove Bill Gates right that 640kB should be enough memory for anyone.

Simple, NoPilot can just erase all your files. Binaries can’t take up memory of they can’t be loaded.

What are you more worried about, third party, MitM interception (e.g. IMSI catcher) or Google knowing who you are communicating with? The former is technically harder for an attacker, but the use of such devices is well documented and poorly controlled. Google is, well Google. And you can expect them to monitize any bit of data they have on you. Also, that data will almost certainly be handed over to local law enforcement, especially if they have whatever the local equivalent of a warrant is.

As with most security, there are trade-offs. You have to decided what risks you are willing to accept and what you are not.

A joke is a lot like a frog, it can be informative to dissect it, but the patient usually dies in the process.