There is something about Christmas time gift giving that makes me uncomfortable. I like to give gifts, but I'm not a big fan of receiving them. This is true for me when getting gifts from people that I'm very close to, but it's especially true when I'm not close to the other person at all e.g. getting small gifts from work colleagues, or "white elephant" type gift exchanges with extended family. Part of my issue, I think, stems from the same reasons I don't accept complements well. It always seems somewhat disingenuous because I never feel like I've done anything to deserve it. Yet I am always quite grateful, and that gives rise to the second major issue - I'm never sure that I properly express how grateful I am, so I mostly end up feeling something more akin to guilt. I know that the gift giving has nothing to do with me at all. People give because it makes them happy to do so. In that respect, my "worth" is irrelevant. A gift can't ...
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It feels to me like spending time making robots more human is a backwards approach to progress. Instead, focus on making humans more robotic. Quite a task to program intelligence, sentience, morality, etc. into a machine. Less so, I would think, to program greater physical functionality into something that already has the capacity for intelligence, sentience, morality.
It's been pretty frustrating to watch the early days of the Elon Musk Twitter acquisition. Mistakes are to be expected, but the consequences of some of these mistakes should have been obvious. Elon purchased Twitter and campaigned to rid the platform of bots and fake accounts, and then made the verified badge purchasable thereby creating an easy solution to add credibility to bots and fake accounts. Maybe he thought the $8 would be cost prohibitive, but it clearly has not been. The most severe consequences of these actions, like the Eli Lilly incident, were not some highly improbably scenario. They were the most obvious and easily predictable potential consequences. The badge is literally called the blue verified badge...it exists to show that an account has been verified to be who it says it is. It's in the name! I grant that Elon's responsibilities here are greater than they seem from the sidelines. The company needs to cut spending and make more money. Sponsors were had ...
All of the Republican pushback to Biden's student loan relief efforts seems like a pretty poor political move to me. I get that it caters to the most vocal, solidly right base, but that's a smaller percentage of the population than it appears to be. I'd wager that a good percentage of consistent Republican voters have hefty student loans and they're going to miss that that $10,000 once it's yanked away from them. It's very difficult to be so ideologically consistent as to overlook personal gain in favor of some perceived greater philosophical good. I suspect that there's a significant percentage of conservative leaning voters that are going to suffer noticeable harm if these student loan relief efforts are yanked away from them forever. It's very easy to lie about who you voted, and I think most people are predominantly self-interested and will vote in ways that best satisfy those self-interests, even if they don't always admit to it.
I recognize that Elon's attempt to monetize verified status on Twitter seems to completely misunderstand the point of verified status while opening the door for more legitimate looking bots and scams. I understand the irony given that fixing the bot and scam problem seems to be a major campaign for him. I also recognize that a sizeable portion of the complaints about monetizing verification have no substance and originate from a population who wants to retain all of the functionality and convenience the internet provides, without actually have to bare any of the cost. I think Elon is wrong about monetizing verified status, but he is right that bills have to be paid which is always challenge on a platform that can be used by anyone for free. Any worthwhile argument against the monetization of verified status needs to be of the form "This idea you have is bad, here's why, and here's a better idea that accomplishes the same goal."
I've started to prioritize health again and I almost certainly spend more time researching routines and calculating macros than I do actually working out. Paralysis by analysis is without a doubt my greatest weakness. I want to do everything as efficiently as possible, and if I can't then I just won't do it at all until I figure out how to.
I feel I've suddenly developed a heightened sense of taste. It took me a while to really notice, but it's now been consistent enough that I don't think it was just a weird tasting piece of food. Started with a soft taco at Taco Bell then an inedibley odd tasting double cheese burger at burger king, and just a few minutes ago a regular Halloween candy sized packet of M&M's. Very odd.
I applied for a job as a digital forensic examiner with the local police department. I'm pretty sure I'm unqualified. My penetration testing / hacking skills are getting better every day, but I haven't spent much time learning forensics tools. In any case, I thought it was worth a shot. I could potentially suffer a fairly dramatic cut in pay, but there's over time opportunities and my potential to earn more in the long run is greater. It would be a job firmly placed in the infosec world and I think the significance of the work would make it worth it. Still...a pay cut is rough right now. I'm comfortable where I am, but I'm not really going anywhere and I really need to always be moving upward to be happy. It's all likely not worth the amount of thought that I've put in to it. I think it will be a job with a lot of applicants, and I think most of them will be better candidates. I did get called for a phone screening. That's round 2 of a multi-round pr...
I’m working in this tic tac toe game in python. it's nothing special, but it's relatively complex considering where my python skills currently are. I have all the functions written and working, but I’ve yet to figure out how to all make them together. it's frustrating because I thought I was so close...but I still really enjoy spending time on this stuff. I don't know if I enjoy it so much because I enjoy the logical algorithmic thinking, or because I like to do stuff and watch that stuff work the way it's supposed to. It's a little of both I think. the logical thinking goes without thinking, but I find the making stuff work part manifests in my life a lot. for example, I like working on my car...or at least I did when I had a car, I cared about...and I think I like it for the same reason. figure out the problem, diagnose the cause, do some stuff, and then watch the car work. that last part, when you see things works the way they're supposed to, that's a...
without fail the most difficult part of a resume for me happens when i'm forced to enter a certain number of references. i know a lot of people, but i've worked in a large variety of industries so many of my professional references are irrelevant to the job i'm applying for. 4 is a lot. i'm always stretching by the end.
one of the main reasons i started this blog project was to document my transition into pentesting as a career. i suppose i should do more of that considering i have't actually done any at all. it's a bit of a long story to get from the beginning to this point so it's probably best just to start here and work forwards, explaining backstory when appropriate. i'm doing approximately 3 hours of python and 4 - 5 hours of tryhackme a day. i'm making a lot of progress, though it's difficult to quantify how much and how fast. i know a lot more now that i did last month and an infinite amount more than i did when i started. almost all of what i'm learning now is useful for relatively easy ctf exercises. i have no idea how much of it will be useful in real world pentesting. i think what i now understand conceptually is valuable, even if the actual commands i'm working with don't often apply. maybe most importantly, i've been keeping extremely detailed not...
i get it but...why does every informative article on the internet have to come with some multipage story about how the author used to cave dive in fiji? i really crave efficiency here. just put the answer to the question right on up their at the top. no need for anything else. not everybody who is helpful on the internet needs to be a journalist.
today a user asked if they needed to "restart the computer or just restart". i had no idea what that meant. turns out restart the computer = restart, and restart = log out. one of the most important lessons ive learned in tech is to not assume what people know, not to be indignant if they know less than you think they should, and start the troubleshooting process at the very beginning.
i remember struggling with functions during the last python course i took. specifically, defining functions with the appropriate parameters, calling those functions from inside other functions, and returning the results i needed. during my most recent course all of that material came to me so easily that i had forgotten that i ever struggled with it. i think brain breaks are important. if i can't figure it out, sometimes the best thing to do is just walk away and come back later.
I really like coding. I probably like it because what I'm doing is relatively simple and of no consequence, but I enjoy thinking through a problem algorithmically. trial and error. problem solving. etc. i've really taken to functional program. it feels efficient. i've been working a lot on trying to rely on function calls as frequently as possible in order shorten code and make it more readable. this was a fun one. it took me a day for things to click, but it felt pretty rewarding when it all worked out at the end.
i've completed somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen entry to intermediate level Python courses over the last couple of years. i always enjoy them, but a "certificate of completion" doesn't give me much to add to a resume. so i decided to pursue the PCEP certification from the python institute. this is my first time learning about bitwise operators and binary shifting and i have to say...i don't much care for it.