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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubtomemes@lemmy.worldUsed to consume not produce
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    15 hours ago

    When you don’t understand the tools, every possible solution that reaches your end goal seems equally valid, no matter how convoluted. Unfortunately, the design philosophy that attempts to make every tool as compatible as possible with every other tool enables this sort of Rube Goldberg-esque nonsense (and creates development hell and permanent legacy dependencies).

    It’s… difficult for someone who does understand the tools to even imagine being in the mental space of someone who doesn’t, which is why IT people frequently come off as arrogant, judgy, even rude - they expect other people to understand things the way they do, when they’ve been taking computers apart since high school. What seems reasonable to you is perfectly opaque to them. Also… sometimes people who are technically literate are the hardest to pull out of their batshit processes (doctors are the worst patients).

    When you are trying to help someone, always keep the XY Problem in mind. They’ve arrived at a solution which seems insane to you, not because they’re unreasonable, but because they ran into an obstacle and bounced off of it in a path-of-least-resistance direction and they have shit they need to get done. Try to solve the real problem, not the problem that is presented.




  • I need to store my emails for later reference, so I print them out.

    But I don’t want to keep stacks of printed emails around, so I scan the prints and save them as pictures because that’s what the scanner does automatically.

    But I need to search through the emails, so I found a browser plugin that can scan a picture for text and give me a summary in a new file.

    But my company computer won’t let me install browser plugins so I email the scanned pictures to my personal address and then open them on my phone and use the app version of the browser plugin to make the summaries and then I email those back to my company address.

    But now I want to search through the summaries, which are Word documents, but Office takes forEHver to load on my shitty company computer so I don’t want to use the search in it, so I right-click -> Print the summary files and then choose “Print to PDF” and then open them in Adobe Reader so I can search for the information I want that way. I usually have 200 tabs of PDFs open in Reader so I can cross-reference information.

    I have a great custom workflow. I’m the most computer literate person in my office.












  • ever since libraries have been a thing, the majority of developers have just used the libraries without really understanding what goes on inside them. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing — the entire point of abstraction is so that developers can focus on the stuff they need to get done while ignoring the already solved problems.

    Nobody but nobody has time to know what’s in every library they might need to use. Who among us truly understands their network stack, all 8 layers?

    senior devs have to spend all their time doing code reviews and editing and refactoring codebases that nobody else understands.

    That’s OK we will just train AI to review and refactor for us! I’m sure everything will be fine.

    Vulnerable code will be with us forever. The system will always be Swiss cheese. If you think you understand common mistakes, enough that you can review other peoples’ code for them, there’s work for you in infosec for sure.