Fwiw, I use Tailscale/wireguard and take care to ensure the source IP gets fed to apps properly. This makes it easy to guarantee I have a reliable way to identify myself on my webapps and auto-auth.

Open System Settings, click "Sound" in the sidebar. Under the "Sound Effects" section, you'll find a toggle labeled "Play sound on startup". Turn this off to permanently disable it. Otherwise, the startup sound is tied to the audio level you had before last shutdown.

Let's also recall that almost nobody changes their mind when engaged in these types of conversations, and the more confrontational the more likely you cement existing biases.

Where you do stand to make a difference is with more casual observers and people on the fence. A show of patience and respect bolsters a good argument better than perhaps even the argument itself.

What does tend to change people's minds is forming good relationships with people who hold differing opinions and their desire to make the relationship work. Logic and rationality are secondary considerations. Hopefully they will accept better conclusions for these reasons, but it's quite unlikely without adopting the kind of approach espoused by Dig1t.

I was selected to represent my high school as a candidate for computer science at a state-level competition. The teacher in charge of selection made it clear that he very much didn't want to pick me -- there just weren't any better options. He explained that my portfolio was all based on user skills. Nothing showed a deeper understanding of the underlying principles of computing. I didn't incorporate any of this feedback and was thoroughly humbled later on. It was a well-deserved loss.

Twenty plus years later and I've still never had more useful interview-related feedback and I'm still grateful he was willing to share that criticism. Now, having been on the flip side of the process quite a bit, I especially appreciate how hard it is to provide meaningful "negative" feedback.

My little Databricks story: we setup hosted model inference for an in-house model. Worked great for several months!

But then they did maintenance and broke the entire feature. Reconfiguring everything from scratch didn't work. A key part where a Docker image is selected was replaced with a hard-coded value including a long system path (and employee name -- verified via LinkedIn).

Because of constant turn-over in account reps we couldn't get any help there. General support was of no use. We finally got acknowledgement of the issue when we got yet another new account rep, but all they did was push us towards paid support.

We exhaustively investigated the issue and it was clearly the case that nothing could be done on our end to resolve it. The entire underlying compute layer was busted.

Eventually they released a newer version of the feature which did work again, but at this point it has become impossible to justify the cost of the platform and we're 100% off.

Good luck to them, but from my experience the business fundamentals are misaligned and it's not a company I hope to ever work with again.

But thats exactly what you get when you ask questions that require shifting, specific contextual knowledge. The model weights, by their nature, cannot encode that information.

At best, you can only try to layer in contextual info like this as metadata during inference, akin to how other prompting layers exist.

Even then, what up-to-date information should present for every round-trip is a matter of opinion and use-case.

> The model weights, by their nature, cannot encode that information.

This is mostly irrelevant no? A binary digit by definition cannot encode more than 2 dates; so therefore we devise a more elaborate system (of using multiple digits).

This is very similar to NYT's lawsuit against OpenAI where in addition to other claims, they claimed OpenAI maintainted a DB of NYT articles that they would directly grab from for a response. It's seems very feasible to maintain a DB or system of looking up real-time values like dates / weather.

I'm sure I don't really have to point this out, but...

The last thing you would ever want to do is associate your domain name with gross, offensive content like this. The web is crawled all the time for snapshot data.

Additionally, you're more likely to cause your own (potential) users to stumble on this than anything else.

IMO, the best policy is almost always transparency. If you were to redirect users (and referrer-based redirects are a fragile thing), send them to a phishing/spam awareness page and explain that they most likely arrived from such a source.

Caught a senior sysadmin in a small company using a proxy on our infrastructure to hide misc web browsing from oversight. The logs were the give-away. It was typical misc IT/nerd news stuff... the kind of thing a different company culture (which did come later) would actually encourage.

I was sure the right thing to do was to report it to the CEO (there wasn't anyone else higher in the hierarchy to consider) for certain chastisement and correction. I was commended and the sysadmin got a browbeating.

I definitely did right by the policies in place. However, not too long after I realized there was certainly a better way to handle it and my behavior had more to do with scoring points than doing the right thing.

This was also someone who went out of their way to mentor younger employees and help kindle a passion for this line of work. I was a major beneficiary of this, so I look back upon that incident with nothing but regret.

A humble and honest story of growth.

Normally, depending on the circumstances, you might have a quiet and subtle word with someone about something they really can't be doing, whether because it's a real problem, or because of some silly political reason.

But it's also worth mentioning that someone's slightly mischievous "just something to browse reddit" could actually be cover for a covert channel or backdoor, intended for some darker other purpose, such as exfiltrating data, or providing access to criminals. Or it could have innocuous intent, but be a weakness exploited by an attacker. Or it could someday inadvertently be a red herring diversion that slows response while investigating a real attack.

Thanks for sharing!

So, a question in balancing the regret against knowing what you know now. This situation sparked a change in you to recognize how to handle these situations better. Would you make the same mistake again in order to learn the lesson?

Absolutely not. I would hope to learn the lesson some other way.

In hindsight, it equates to kicking someone hard in the groin for laughs. It hurts my foot, them a lot, and it's just a poor way to learn how to earn "respect".

Thank you - I appreciate the perspective!

That is a hard one. Best to report it I think.. but it is not clear cut in general.

There would be times when going against your employer by blowing the whistle or covering up is the more moral thing to do.

Deciding where that line is not simple and there is no guide.

It's a guy browsing the internet a bit. This is not some deep philosophical question. You're just advocating being the type of person we'd all hate to work with.

“It’s a guy browsing the internet a bit” can be game over from a security perspective. Some machines should never execute code from public web pages, full stop.

So it is a philosophical question of why the restrictions were in place in this scenario. If it was “employee productivity”, then sure, who cares. If it was an IRS computer with thousands of people’s tax returns on disk and access to millions more, then reporting was the right move.

If he was the most senior sysadmin it's already his responsibility to keep things safe anyway, so if you trust him for all the rest of the infra you can trust him for a proxy.

The reason you report is to make the call if he should have had that level of trust in the first place.

I'm not so sure.

I can imagine trusting someone to set up (and even enforce) eg an alcohol policy, but still be prone to alcohol abuse themselves.

Weak wills are a thing. Or people thinking they are smarter than the protocols that apply to the masses.

All I mean is he is the person paid to do this already so it's not extra dangerous. It's like a policeman doing a citizens arrest if they spot a crime on the off hours. It's frowned upon but you know it's the same thing they do in their job.

Our HN user, mr-wendel, worked at the company, but I'm not sure they said what their job was. It might have been sysadmin, but since mr-wendel talks about snitching on a senior sysadmin directly to the CEO, it's save to say that the sysadmin did not report to mr-wendel; and I presume that mr-wendel was a lot lower an the pecking order.

I don't think the senior sysadmin was paid to hide browsing from the oversight?

I'm not defending running rogue workloads on your employers infrastructure, that's obviously wrong. I'm just saying from the description, and the role of who did it, it probably wasn't super problematic in terms of security.

I think this thread highlights nicely that context is everything.

In this case, I think vasco's take is correct: the sysadmin was indeed trustworthy enough to exercise this discretion in response to overzealous employee productivity rules without at all undermining his primary responsibilities.

The proxy was definitely in a place to essentially trivialize it's impact. I'm pretty sure thats why it was placed where it was, as opposed to make it harder to find. If that was the chief concern, disabling logging would have obviously been the first thing to happen.

You never know... I've seen an instance where it turns out an employee was watching pr0n at work and downloading the materials to their shared profile directory. Discovered when the IT Admin was requesting a new NAS server because the current shares were full.

edit: to be clear, it wasn't the admin downloading the content.

I can't agree. By far the biggest lesson that you can verify even on this thread, is that the biggest tech problems are actually people problems. Even things like tech debt are all over the place framed as project/people management rather than tech stuff at its fundamentals.

The comment already established the senior sysadmin is generally a valuable person who does a lot to flourish the company. Going out of the way to be a encumbrance towards someone who is verifiably doing their job anyways, means you're actively creating a people problem. I;d rather people learn the correct, bigger lesson here.

> By far the biggest lesson that you can verify even on this thread, is that the biggest tech problems are actually people problems.

The opposite lesson is also useful: sometimes you can turn people problems into tech problems, and that's how you can 'solve' them.

Slightly hypothetical scenario: assume your team keeps all the source code on a shared drive. You are supposed to coordinate with your coworkers before touching any code. Sometimes that goes wrong, and looks like a people problem.

If you introduce eg git and automated-tests-before-merging, you can turn that into a technical problem.

My thesis is that organisations (and people in those organisations) can only solve so many people problems. If you lighten the load by automating some of the problems into tech problems, you have more levity on the remaining people problems.

(This happy state of affairs isn't always possible. And sometimes it can backfire.)

Why would it be good to report it? Depending on what “infrastructure” stands for here, unless it is something absolutely unwise security-wise, why?

When I was young, I thought that being a man of my word meant that, as I'd given my employer my word that I would follow their security policy, I should follow it to the letter - for example, never holding the door open, even for a colleague I'd worked alongside for a long time.

And I thought that petty rulebreaking was a corrosive force, something that would snowball into bigger problems down the road. As a man of honour I would work precisely my contracted hours, never a minute less, I would consider it shameful if someone so much as stole a pen from the office. The rest of the team is heading to the pub at 4pm after a lengthy day of planning meetings? Sorry guys, I don't finish until 5:30pm.

Later in my career I chilled out a lot, and learned that the actual rules are often different (and a lot more nuanced) than the written rules. And that if you've worked with a guy for a decade you can, in fact, hold the door open for him and the sky won't fall down.

> I thought that being a man of my word meant that, as I'd given my employer my word that I would follow their security policy, I should follow it to the letter

This basically sums up my "cover story" nicely so I didn't have to admit to myself that it was more about scoring points for my own position.

Dressing up vanity as integrity is a dangerous thing.

Thanks for sharing, I had difficulty empathising with the OP but this puts it in perspective.

I’m curious, did these ideas come from your upbringing?

Your values are the guide.

If your values are to report someone to win brownie points with your boss, it’s probably time to revisit them.

Another great guide is asking yourself what you’re trying to accomplish.

Imaging to do different was only one part of the lesson. The other, and bigger, part is acknowledging the difference between wanting to do the right (for not just me) thing versus that was sure to score points with authority.

Ditto here. I thought I'd try Apex Charts on my most recent project and regret it:

- mobile support works, but is poorly done - very heavy library to load - RAM intensive; a few charts w/ lots (e.g. ~100) data points spirals out of control (e.g. memory spikes from 60 MB to 700 MB). On mobile this basically guarantees that the tab crashes. - UI interactions feel laggy and lack responsiveness (e.g. panning is pure guesswork)

I thought the SVG vs canvas focus would be nice, but not at these costs.

Not exactly what you are asking, but I quite like "Technology Connections" videos on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections/search?query=...

Lots of great data points (and a little bit of snark)