It’s blame shifting. If the security people are allowed to make it impossible to work without breaking the rules, they’ve successfully moved all blame for anything that goes wrong away from themselves. “Oh, you turned your computer on? Well, the security guidelines clearly state that’s not allowed, so that’s your fault.”
At a certain point, I realized my choices were solipsism, deism, or autolatry. My dad raised me as a atheist secular materialist, and I was never allowed to read about Christianity. Out of curiosity, I read the gospels a few years ago and was shocked to discover that it was the best fit for my disposition at least. At first, I just LARPed it, but after a while I realized that I felt really good, and it got me out of lifelong dispair.
At first the cognitive dissonance was real. But, eventually, I realized that it was the process of exercising and opening the "Nous". I'm neurodivergent so it is really awesome to outsource a large part of my thinking to a "Christ disciple" game loop. Lot less stress.
> Real networks have security teams monitoring for intrusions, responding to alerts, and adapting defences.
I got some bad news if you really think most (even large) companies have ever once actually looked at what that big Splunk system is collecting for them.
The great irony is that now that Splunk audit trail will probably end up being consumed by LLMs on the lookout for threat actors who are probably also using LLMs to attempt intrusions.
Never been to London, got 6/9. Presumably anyone who did this and got a poor score isn't posting, so only people like me who got good scores by chance are represented.
I'm always stunned at how good GMail's spam filtering is, at least for me. I've been using the same email address since 1996 - that's 30 years now - and posting it with absolutely no thought to spam protection all over the place.
I get ~1000 spams per day. About 1-2 end up in inbox. Every so often I do go through my spam, and while it's possible I've missed something, I generally find less than 1 false positive a month and it's never anything especially important.
I've started to question if GMail's spam folder is marketing more than substance. I've used the same primary email address for nearly the same number of decades. The time I saw the "most" spam in a spam folder was only while it was hosted on Google Workspace. Actually trying to skim through those "1000s per day" a lot of them seemed suspect in strange ways (why was this even delivered anywhere?) and some of them even seemed like Google just dumping random ad copy from legitimate search ads into the folder.
(Also it says a lot that right now my two biggest sources of daily spam are Google Calendar Notifications and Random Firebase Accounts. Both of those further leave me questioning if Google's approach to spam filtering is sincere.)
I’ve had the same gmail address since it was first announced. It also gets email forwarded to it from another ancient email address that I used to self-host and that still gets occasional real mails. Most of the spam is addressed to that other address.
Just took a peek at my spam folder: 207 messages going back to March 18th, two false positives (both from mailing lists), but nothing critical. I think maybe I’ve seen one spam message across all my accounts in my inbox. Their filters benefit from a huge set of trainers on their data.
(As an aside, I would note that some newer addresses that I publish naked on some websites that I maintain get very little spam (14 messages between the two accounts in the same timeframe, most of which are from a single sender who decided that they should send me their press releases without any means of opting out.)
I've been a Fastmail customer for years and have been pretty happy with their spam filtering too. Anything that does get through either gets a custom rule to send it to the shadow realm, or gets sent to a special "Learn spam" folder that I set up which will train the spam filter on that message.
Fastmail here too, and my email address is older than Gmail, and probably older than a significant portion of HN posters. Fastmails spam filter just works. I get a few false negatives per month, and some months zero. I've set it to /dev/null the most obvious spam, and I can't recall the last false positive. It's happened, but extremely rarely. Google spam filter is not unique or magical.
And I never liked Gmail the client. It's not as godawful as Outlook, nothing even comes close, but it always gets in my way and does things in weird Googly ways. I'll stick with Kmail, thanks.
Have you noticed decreases over time by sending thigns to the "Learn Spam" folder? I'm a relatively new Fastmail customer - I setup a domain for some family accounts that I can manage on behalf of my aging family members so it's not receiving a lot of email _yet_ but I expect it to in the future.
I have noticed it for sure. The default spam filter catches most of what I'd consider spam, but the Learn Spam feature is needed for things that get through because they look legitimate. For example, I get a lot of those weird "You're an American, I'm from [China, India, etc.], we can make a lot of money if you go to all the interviews/meetings and then let me do all the work" kind of emails. They look like normal correspondence (maybe they are) so they occasionally end up in my inbox. When they do, I send them to the "Learn Spam" folder, and the next time I check my actual Spam folder I'll find that Fastmail caught several more just like it and sent them straight there.
Incidentally, those emails are definitely from less-than-reputable (and in some proven cases North Korean) actors trying to get footholds into Western Companies! Crazy!
Also Fastmail user for many years, with custom domain. I use specific email addresses per service with Bitwarden’s recent feature (by hand before this). My personal address is shared with few people.
I set up specific folders based on aliases. Thanks to GDPR I have found a few companies that have shared / sold my data illegally (the company-assigned address popped up somewhere else) and managed to have them delete my data right away.
I fret losing my domain, and that my recovery addresses are Gmail and Outlook - which could be lost at any time.
I would like to see government issue a lifetime inbox in the same way they issue you a SSN, a passport or driver license so I can have that as last line recovery.
But on the other hand, if we had that politicians would likely enforce mandatory identification across all web services…
I'm well aware that I'm in the minority, but I have never been able to focus on anything - especially programming - other than in absolute, total silence.
I don't know if you're in a minority. I think people just don't like a boring answer like "silence".
I was raised in a big family, and I prefer silence when I need truly deep focus. From my experience in open floorplan offices, a majority don't break out the headphones until it gets noisy enough. Some people would even come in early or stay late for exactly this reason.
It's really not. As a one-person IT department I'm now able to build things in hours or days that it previously would have taken my weeks or even months to build (and thus they didn't get done). Things people have wanted for years that I didn't ever have the time for, I can now say "yes" to.
Yeah the ops alone is a huge win. It’s such a win I didn’t even think to mention it ha.
Dangerous too of course. So many times I’ve had subtle unexpected side effects. But it’s all about pinning thins down well and that’s what we’re all still figuring out well
Well... I am sure someone made good money out of that.
In Slovenia, a post-Yugoslavian country, the school library coordinated a textbook borrowing scheme, where they would own all the material and lend it to students each year. Parents would pay a small "subscription", so each year or two one subject would get new books.
That's how it worked in USSR in 80s. The school supplied the books and they were the ones that the previous grade used. If they got busted beyond all repair only then they'd be replaced with new.
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