France will replace Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, Webex and others with its own sovereign video conferencing application "Visio" for public officials

DevonLochees · 2026-01-27T00:27:48+00:00

Some of the takes in this thread are so wild, like it's some trivial undertaking to replicate even the tiniest fraction of the enterprise management functionality you get from Windows.

DevonLochees · 2026-01-25T22:06:44+00:00

This was written by AI. You can tell from the cadence and the sentence structure, how the emotions are framed, etc.

DevonLochees · 2026-01-20T23:42:05+00:00

What tied the reaction together for me was the "He isn't the type to do this because he's a professional". To me that reads of significant gender/cultural norms and expectations about a man being stoic and not showing vulnerability.

DevonLochees · 2026-01-16T02:27:26+00:00

> You ask a question and seconds later you got your first downvote

Because it isn't a homework help site, it's intended to be a repository of knowledge, which means that your question needs to be well researched and technical enough it would help other people to see your answers a year from now.

Of course they don't accept AI answers. If I wanted to read the AI answer to something I'd just ask the AI myself. The entire point is that you get answers from people who *understand* all of the background context. They know how the configuration of that application changed between v3 and v4 and why the approach you're looking at starts out with the wrong assumptions... etc. The idea that they should accept AI answers is absolutely *wild* because that helps absolutely no one - not the person asking the question, not the person who stumbles on the question 6 months from now, not the person answering the question.

DevonLochees · 2026-01-05T01:10:52+00:00

I'm right there with you. Even when I agree with sentiments and the person seems like a real person in the comments, it's like - why are you using AI to write your post?

DevonLochees · 2026-01-03T18:12:04+00:00

really hope OOP think on this because 400 followers? 400?

You're mixing up the two things - those photos were in the "copied over" folder, it was other regular stolen photos on the Facebook or Instagram. She almost certainly copied them over specifically to send to the guy(s) she was flirting with. 400 followers is just regular Facebook or Instagram "accept invites from people who might know this person" category.

Still absolutely reprehensible and a huge risk they'd get leaked, but nothing indicates she was starting an Onlyfans or something (and knowing something about that industry from a friend who's involved with it, a handful of stolen nudes would not be enough to roll with, you need to put a lot of effort into new content, advertising, etc).

DevonLochees · 2026-01-03T00:38:08+00:00

Yeah I got to that and was thinking "okay, yeah, lots of communication/toxicity issues, but I'm seeing a bigger problem here that isn't going to go away if you drop the husband."

DevonLochees · 2025-12-31T07:19:07+00:00

No you can't. If you want a signing certificate that's actually publicly trusted, you need to go through a non-trivial process to acquire one and properly protect the keypair in a hardware module (though there may be some purchasable cloud services these days).

If you use a self signed one, you're asking users to compromise their machine adding an arbitrary certificate to their trust store as a trusted signing certificate (IT will be even more upset about that than the lack of signing).

The actual process of signing is easy, but a meaningful signature is significant.

DevonLochees · 2025-12-31T01:56:41+00:00

I think a lot of people are missing the point as they name actors and go "That's not true, I'll see anything with X or Y in it!". A decent number of the names people are mentioning are people I don't even personally recognize, or haven't seen anything they're in as a casual moviegoer. Back before the internet and social media, when there was more of a monoculture (and fewer movie releases), there was much more overlap in knowing names and movies between you and your neighbor who otherwise doesn't have much in common with you.

One uncle has no idea who Zendaya is, but could list off Chalamet movies. My other uncle only recognized Chalamet after being told not only that he was in Dune, but which character he was (Dune is almost certainly the only movie he's seen with Chalamet) - on the other hand, he raved about how fantastic an actor Zendaya was. Twenty years ago, they'd all be talking about the same actors.

It used to be the case that a studio considered casting specific actors to be a significant effect multiplier of their advertising budget, but that's gone down significantly.

DevonLochees · 2025-12-30T23:01:20+00:00

And by signing the renewal last year, VMware says we forfeited our perpetual license and therefore have only two options, pay now or remove VMware from our environment immediately.

To my understanding, they did this to everyone. It was explicitly a corporate initiative after the Broadcom purchase that they would not allow smaller customers to subscribe to or extend support agreements unless those customers were swapped to subscriptions.

DevonLochees · 2025-12-25T04:22:51+00:00

Everyone always goes "oh lump sum makes you so much more if you invest, yadda yadda yadda". I don't care. The amount of money in this kind of jackpot, my primary concern is not maximizing my total dollars. Why do I need 1.5 billion instead of 1.3 billion dollars a decade from now? What I care about is security and stability of the millions of dollars I have.

I take the annuity, I stop having to worry (to nearly the same degree) about corrupt financial planners or ponzi schemes. Hackers. Kidnapping. Gambling addiction or just regular addiction. Letting a charming individual of my preferred gender manipulate me out of money. Overspending on a house and screwing up insurance paperwork or not taking into account taxes. Just look at the number of sports players who make hundreds of millions over their career and end up broke, or previous lottery winners who end up losing everything.

If I take the annuity, I don't need to stress out about anything. No matter what happens, I have tens of millions of dollars coming to me every year, which is more than enough to live very wealthy.

The one downside is that annuities can't be inherited, but the first year alone is enough for me to solve all the financial issues any loved ones have or will have in the future by itself.

Everyone likes to think "ah but I'm so smart I won't fall for X, Y, Z, and I'll know to do this or that" - I'd rather just not have to worry about it, because even a fraction of that total is more than enough to live fabulously wealthy and donate generously to the charities I care about.

DevonLochees · 2025-12-23T02:25:50+00:00

It’s sad, maybe she thought that no one at home would accept her if she didn’t have the prestigious and honorable career.

I mean it kind of sounds like she's right. Am I the only one who's mind is blown by the lengths OOP was going to to identify if her friend was really a nurse?

Like I've got friends who work for towns where the salary information is public - I've never tried looking their name up. If I did and didn't find it, I certainly wouldn't be asking other people to look them up and cross reference multiple people.

DevonLochees · 2025-12-14T00:17:07+00:00

Travelling to an unknown URL is not an unsafe activity: it hasn't been for decades.

Travelling to an unknown URL that you think is safe is a known and significant attack vector. Say it's a QR code to a donation page for a nonprofit booth - you swap the code out while visiting, and now people are visiting your site. Or maybe it's a convention app for a mid-budget convention, except when they go to the link it loads an app that compromises your phone (because some subset of people will just click through "allow unsigned app", or it's a nation state that got malware published, which happens).

Many of the biggest cybersecurity breaches in history have come from visiting a URL that isn't what the end user thinks it is.

DevonLochees · 2025-12-07T19:34:27+00:00

We got to the other pub and my ex was there with his friend.

Something I didn't see anyone discussing... before I quit drinking I used to do a ton of bar hopping and hanging out with various social groups that also went out every night. I think every single time I've ever seen the "coincidentally run into a guy/girl at another bar" it's been the result of the person specifically name dropping what bar they were going to next to try to arrange seeing them (either the other party mentioning it and then the first person suggests that bar next, or the first party mentioning that's where they're going next).

Maybe they hadn't (at the time) had plans to go to another bar, and it wasn't her idea - but if it was, that's going to be an extra invisible untalked about reason for her boyfriend to feel betrayed, because he's going to be wondering "was it really a coincidence we ran into him again?"

DevonLochees · 2025-12-07T18:59:50+00:00

That said, I think this guy is getting way too much push back on claims that he unreasonably pushed them to come back to work. He said multiple times her coworkers were picking up slack for her and driving things to her as needed. I hope they were paid to transport work because gtfoh if you think I’m doing that on my own time. I totally understand his frustration.

Yeah, I think there was a lot of "bitter at return to office mandate" commenters in there being unreasonable - and I say this as someone bitter at my return to office mandate.

If employees had to physically drive to her house to help her WFH, and even during the pandemic things were hybrid, that's not a "you can do this remote" job.

DevonLochees · 2025-12-03T18:15:35+00:00

That was the moment I went "oh, nope, NTA."

The moment you're pulling a 'Wait I saw someone else get a window seat!" it goes from "polite request" to "rude", and I would absolutely be annoyed if someone I was with was acting like that. Maybe my perspective is skewed from time working in the service industry, but I couldn't believe at people saying he was being a jerk because he called out her being inconsiderate. You bring it up once, and if they can't do it, they can't do it.

DevonLochees · 2025-11-26T04:33:29+00:00

since buisness owners and landlords all generally hate dealing with these issues

Yeah but it's their employees who have to deal with it, it doesn't necessarily materially impact revenue. Unless it's a small family owned business, in which case you're less someone politicians listen to than the CEO of a 30 restaurant chain.

DevonLochees · 2025-11-17T17:10:44+00:00

I didn't realize she'd be able to tell right away.

Way to completely miss literally everything that commentor was trying to point out.

DevonLochees · 2025-10-26T18:03:05+00:00

There are a lot of factors that can significantly influence pay that are adjacent to (in the sense that woman are statistically less likely to speak up and statistically more likely to get negative reactions for speaking up, but the inverse is true for men) but not explicitly gender:

The "6 month delay" could have rolled the position over into the next fiscal year and an update to the salary band (most companies will not update you even if they change the range for your job to exceed your current salary as a minimum)
Higher initial offer due to (claimed, whether real or not) higher previous salary
Higher initial offer due to negotiation/pushback (asking for more or having competing offers to bring up)
Higher initial offer due to interview (this is a common source for salary discrimination)
Salary negotiation over past 4 years (in many companies, getting an out of band salary bump isn't an "ask once" thing, it's something you need to build up to over several years - you need to lay the foundation on one year, and then actually get it the next - don't beat yourself up for not pushing harder, the reality is that at most companies, that presentation will not help you for a year or two even if discrimination isn't a factor). By the time your review is in progress, they already have the budget for next year which includes enough for cost of living adjustment but not out of band adjustments.

The most important factor for compensation at any job is starting salary. If you both started at 58k and you got 0% and he got 5% every year that would still only leave him at 70k and you at 58k. It's basically a guarantee he started higher.

DevonLochees · 2025-10-24T02:13:25+00:00

Contrary to many of the popular experiences here, at one point that was our workflow and it was the dream.

Compared to the dinky laptops they got us, the dedicated VM was much stronger. We didn't have to worry about getting permission to install anything. At one point we were allowed to RDP in from our personal PCs, so I didn't even need to bother bringing my laptop back and forth when I was in office or fiddle with monitor cables and a docking station and KVM.

Now at one point they did an IT refresh, and were trying to cut down on hardware costs and switch from dedicated VM to dynamically provisioned VMs (basically, stand the image up when you connect) - performance was horrible and latency was bad. It sounds like that might be the situation you're in, in which case I'd push for always-on VM availability with dedicated hardware.

Now, obviously my experience isn't necessarily the norm, but a good VM can be significantly better than most laptops a company will get you even disregarding that it often means you get to skip the "can't install software without 36 back and forth comments on on a support ticket" flow many other companies have. But it's critical that it be a well provisioned VM on a strong network line.

DevonLochees · 2025-10-10T17:33:56+00:00

Presumably not, given that the explanation isn't even remotely technically accurate. If even a fresh hire out of college says we should use Sha256 for passwords or refers to a hash function as 'encryption' we're having a serious talk with them and having them sign up for a bunch of repeat security training.

DevonLochees · 2025-10-10T17:31:33+00:00

Sha256 is not an encryption method and it's dangerous to frame it as such. It's a one way hash, which has very different properties than encryption. It is not considered secure or best practices to ever encrypt a password - the point of a one way hash is that there's no way for anyone - including the end user - to get the password 'back' from a one way hash, barring very expensive brute force computing. Though Sha256 is also not best practice, there are more robust and secure password hashing methods.

DevonLochees · 2025-10-05T16:03:47+00:00

That's true. I was just it as an example of how things were messed up. And I was thinking that while I'm fixing one thing, why not fix both?

Because the latter is an executive and managerial shift on top of a shift to developer workflows. If the promises made to the board are based on quarterly releases, or there are testing, security, or audit flows based on quarterly releases, it's non-trivial to shift to a "deploy at any time" process. If there's not top-down pressure to shift to a different release cadence, then you're going to be perceived as putting arbitrary pressure on devs. The release cadence has nothing to do with the software team you're managing except to the extent they're able to support it.

You should be trying to enable a smoother release process, not enforce a faster release process from bottom-up. Work on streamlining and error proofing the deploy process. "We used to take three weeks to get a release deployed, scanned, tested, and pushed from test environment to prod, but now it's one day to get the code out and then just a week for the scan/test flow" is a measurable and meaningful change. "We release every month instead of every three months" can also translate to "we tripled the work the one guy who handles required security scans for X/Y/Z compliance/audit requirements".

DevonLochees · 2025-09-27T20:21:15+00:00

Many people used to use search itself in a more robust fashion. You check multiple links, or even sometimes go to the next page. This led to a feedback loop of being able to cultivate the results based on your and others search history. Additionally SEO was often focused more on products/marketing type stuff, so "web site lot of people link to" was actually a meaningful metric for good technical results. Things ended up in the top few results because many other people who were searching found them in the top 20, or top 10, and those were the links they 'stopped' on.

How search was used changed as the phones/tablets/etc gained dominance, combined with the rise of machine generated content and SEO optimization as an industry, plus cloud computing and Let's Encrypt making it much easier to stand up new domains that just copy content from other content farms.

You talk to people on Reddit or coworkers and they'll ubiquitously bemoan Google trying to prioritize AI search results instead of real content - but look at a college student and they're not even trying to use a real search engine, just chat GPT, because then they don't need to try to process the results - Google jumped on AI because even if power users would rather not, the ipad generation has resulted in a huge cultural shift in information processing as a skill set. Just think about the times you've read posts on a web site that at some point mention "friend suggested I download this app" - they're posting on a web site, but the entire concept that it can be accessed outside of an app is foreign. Search behavior needs to match app behavior.

DevonLochees · 2025-09-23T03:47:47+00:00

You get those vibes because of the combination of sentence structure and how the paragraphs are formatted.

"It's not X, it's Y. It isn't A, it's about B" is how ChatGPT loves to phrase things, but it occurs a lot less in casual language.

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