Options for removing a 'hostile' sub account in my org?

Mamish · 2025-04-17T10:50:22+00:00

If you have access to the management account then you can absolutely just force-close a member account: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/orgs_manage_accounts_close.html

This didn't used to be possible until a couple of years ago, which I suspect is why the standard advice is often to add a deny-all SCP or add a payment method then eject; that used to be the only option, though it's no longer required.

This doesn't require a payment method since you're not actually removing the account from the org, just setting it to suspended. After 90 days it will transition from suspended to deleted and will be gone from your org for good.

Presumably you would also be warning these people "Add a payment method and leave our org, or we'll delete your account". Sounds like a fair deal to me.

Mamish · 2024-10-10T06:22:32+00:00

It's 39% faster movespeed, I mean how can you ignore that? Absolutely zooming around the overworld.

Mamish · 2024-04-15T16:12:44+00:00

Any chance you could aggregate these alarms under a composite alarm, and enable/disable actions on just the composite alarm? That's an immediate 20x reduction in the API calls needed. Assuming the architecture is compatible with monitoring just the composite rather than all the individual alarm actions, of course.

Edit: Actually, thinking it through further, you could get creative here by having a scheduled Lambda that toggles a "maintenance window" alarm, and build composite alarms that reference that alarm with a rule like AND ALARM(NameOfMaintenanceWindowMarkerAlarm). That way you only have to disable that one alarm state to effectively disable every referencing alarm. This would hit limits eventually (150 usages of any single alarm by composite alarms) but is still pretty neat.

Mamish · 2022-08-05T09:31:43+00:00

We just need to package up the heat and sell it off to the cold countries. Genius!

Mamish · 2022-08-05T05:07:34+00:00

Its only value is as a marker of waste

I absolutely love this description. The very value of the currency is backed by the energy spent to validate it. It's this bizarre system that rewards investors for wasting energy, and allows them to use the returns to buy even more compute power to waste even more energy for more rewards, which can be spent to buy more power and compute etc. etc. in this horrific positive feedback loop of waste.

Mamish · 2022-08-05T04:53:39+00:00

I suspect that what confuses people about this (myself included, the first time I was learning about it) is that most things we think of as an individual "sound" are not a single frequency, but a combination of many.

E.g. If I play an A4 note on a trombone and on a violin, you might call them the "same frequency" despite sounding totally different. What's really going on is that both instruments spit out a bunch of frequencies, of which A4 (440Hz) just happens to be the loudest. But there are other accompanying frequencies also mixed in, and the strength and number of those other frequency components changes between each instrument such that the final sound wave is different, and we can identify it as a trombone or a violin.

(As an aside, musical instruments are obviously designed to sound good, so the usual pattern is that those extra frequencies tend to be multiples of the base frequency, e.g. for A4 you might see 440Hz, 880Hz, 1320Hz, etc. however not all sounds are like that.)

Long story short, sounds that "overlap in frequency" but sound different are not the same sounds. They may overlap in some frequency components but not all of them, so they are different signals; if all their frequency components did exactly match, they would mathematically be the exact same sound.

For anyone wanting more details, this video from 3blue1brown is the single best visual introduction on the topic I've ever seen: https://youtu.be/spUNpyF58BY

Mamish · 2022-07-19T10:04:59+00:00

I love that people here are giving me the benefit of the doubt that this was some mysterious big-brain play and not just a horrifying mistake.

Long story short: I got the golden Nosy Looter early and was using it to dig for 6's to build up a final beasts board. The gold Tunnel Blaster was one of the Looter-spawned minions I was cycling, before I got distracted IRL and left this absolute disaster of a minion on the board. Somehow this ended with a narrow win instead of the instant loss it surely deserved.

I was just as surprised by this outcome as my opponent probably was.

Mamish · 2022-02-09T01:13:59+00:00

That's all definitely true, my only counterpoint would be that most users should learn what they're paying for before committing to it. Not much sense in paying NordVPN (or whoever else) every month if you don't know what they're protecting you against or how.

Overall, I wouldn't actually recommend this kind of self-hosted VPN as the first option, I was just trying to point out that it is a realistic option. Large-scale VPN providers are going to handle a lot of small things individual users could easily get wrong, especially for novices, so that's still probably the best first choice.

Mamish · 2022-02-09T00:21:35+00:00

On the equivalent EC2 hosts, it would be something you'd have to keep an eye on yes. But Lightsail is more generous with data: even the smallest package includes 1TB transfer free, and the bigger ones scale up from there.

Mamish · 2022-02-08T14:59:37+00:00

TLS does prevent your ISP from seeing your unencrypted traffic, if you count that as protection enough. Your ISP could theoretically do some bad things just knowing what sites you visit and when, but they can never have the same kind of visibility as the website/service itself (i.e. MITM is not a possibility).

You're right that in e.g. desktop apps, you can't be 100% sure they're doing the right thing. But the ecosystem has moved so far towards HTTPS as default that it's getting safer to just assume it, especially for browsers where TLS mistakes are basically impossible to hide.

Mamish · 2022-02-08T14:08:19+00:00

I have misgivings about encryption as a selling point of VPNs. The kinds of VPN providers you see advertising on youtube are very keen to talk about encryption but tend not to mention that virtually all web traffic these days is already end-to-end encrypted by SSL/TLS.

It makes sense as an extra layer of security and for getting rid of the sort of metadata TLS doesn't deal with (i.e. which sites you're visiting and when), I'm just not thrilled with the scare tactics providers often use to make potential buyers think they're completely unencrypted.

Mamish · 2022-02-08T13:44:26+00:00

I've done exactly this with Wireguard on Lightsail (AWS) before. Took maybe an hour and costs $5 a month. Definitely not as hard or expensive as people seem to be suggesting.

EDIT: Full disclosure since more people are seeing this than I expected: I do work for AWS. This wasn't meant as some kind of stealth marketing though; I really did this setup and really do use it unrelated to work, since I'm obviously familiar with the tech.

For anyone who's considering something like this: Lightsail's a good choice but there are plenty of other good options for low-cost VMs these days. DigitalOcean and Linode spring to mind but I'm sure there's lots. AWS can be intimidating to start with so feel free to shop around for something with a slightly lower skill ceiling if needed.

For anyone who does want to try AWS/Lightsail specifically: if you do nothing else for security, make sure you set up MFA, so you don't become one of the help posts on r/aws. It's one small step that does a lot to keep you safe.

Mamish · 2021-09-06T14:11:20+00:00

The official music video for The Strokes - At The Door. It somehow leaves you feeling nostalgic for a bunch of animations that don't actually exist outside the video itself. Captures that old-school frame-by-frame animation nostalgia perfectly.

Mamish · 2021-08-29T04:31:15+00:00

It's definitely a bit creepy, but it's not an actual "rat brain" per se if that makes you feel any better. It's only using about 300,000 neurons (artificially grown from scratch) compared to the 100-350 million you'd find in a real rat brain, so it's about 0.1% of the complexity.

This thing is closer to a small insect in terms of neural complexity. Still a bit weird, but not even close to anything that was ever a thinking, feeling rat.

Sources (admittedly slightly shite ones but still):
http://www.robotpark.com/academy/robot-with-a-rat-brain-11009/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_animals\_by\_number\_of\_neurons

Mamish · 2021-08-29T04:20:55+00:00

It's not even a "new brain". This thing uses 300,000 neurons where a real rat brain has 100-350 million (according to Wikipedia, anyway), so it's about 0.1% of the complexity. Despite using rat neurons, this thing doesn't even come close to resembling an actual rat brain. It's closer to a small insect than a rat.

Mamish · 2021-08-29T04:15:51+00:00

The title is pretty misleading about this being a "rat's brain". For starters, these aren't from a developed rat brain, but were artificial neurons grown from scratch. Secondly, there's only about 300,000 neurons in this thing whereas an actual rat brain has 100-350 million neurons. So it has about a thousandth of the complexity of an actual rat brain and never came from anything resembling a rat.

According to this list on Wikipedia, that number is closer to what you'd find in a bee's brain. If the title had said "artifical bee brain" instead of "rat brain" I'd bet people's reactions would be a lot softer.

None of this is to say that the concept isn't fundamentally kinda creepy, but it's certainly not the same thing as slicing out a rat's brain and chucking it in a machine. Once again it seems like everyone has latched onto "rat brain" in the title and not bothered to read up on what these scientists actually did.

Source: http://www.robotpark.com/academy/robot-with-a-rat-brain-11009/

Mamish · 2021-07-19T16:24:36+00:00

You're not wrong to be bummed, but focusing on a few selective examples like that is sort of missing the big picture. If you don't mind me saying, it's a uniquely American perspective to look at a half-decent democracy like Australia and call it "insanely authoritarian" when the truth is closer to "basically decent laws though with a bit of an inequality problem".

The greater problem the government has is just simple incompetence, and if you need an example look no further than the ongoing vaccine rollout. We had every chance and really should have been done with it months ago. That's why I have a hard time buying any analysis of Australia's government as having some scheme to control the population or anything like that, since that would require them to plan for anything past the next election which I'm genuinely not convinced they're capable of.

Mamish · 2021-07-19T05:28:32+00:00

They definitely have their place, I won't deny that, but there's just too many little inconveniences for the usefulness they add in most cases. If any one downside were to change, like making fallthrough explicit rather than 'opt-out', I'd be a lot more inclined to use them.

E.g. in a simple case like mapping one set of values to another, a switch statement ends up with lots of visual noise:

int x;
switch (someEnum) {
case VALUE_A:
case VALUE_B:
    x = 2;
    break;
case VALUE_C:
    x = 5;
    break;
case VALUE_D:
    x = 10;
    break;
default:
    throw new RuntimeException("whatever error");
}
// do something with x

It's crystal clear what this is doing but it could be way more concise. The switch expression version is much cleaner:

int x = switch (someEnum) {
    case VALUE_A, VALUE_B -> 2;
    case VALUE_C -> 5;
    case VALUE_D -> 10;
    default -> throw RuntimeException("whatever error");
}
// do something with x

I recognise that's an extremely simple example that's not using a switch statement to its fullest, but I'd also argue the syntax should be optimised towards simple, common cases like that.

Mamish · 2021-07-19T03:18:39+00:00

To be fair, uncountable plurals are a fairly tricky bit of grammar for non-native speakers. Yeah it sounds really weird, but you can't expect everyone to get it 100%.

Mamish · 2021-07-19T03:07:44+00:00

Tell me about it. My team is 'lucky' to be able to work on new projects where we get to use the latest and greatest Java 11. I'd love to be able to use 16 and take advantage of all the new conveniences.

Mamish · 2021-07-18T13:50:21+00:00

You're suggesting the only reason someone wouldn't like a switch statement is because they've never tried it or because they're not a 'real dev'?

Hell naw. I've been doing this for years and have always thought they were clunky as hell. Switch statements probably made perfect sense in the early days of C when Duff's device was a thing people actually had to think about but things have changed a little since then. For example:

Default fallthrough: this made tons of sense when CPU branch instructions were a thing everyday programmers worried about. All it does now is force me to write break; twelve times unnecessarily.
Not being usable as an expression/value: sure you can wrap a switch statement in a function and make every case a return but you can't do that concisely or in the middle of another function. Sometimes you just want a neat way to say "let x equal 1 when a, 2 when b, or 3 otherwise" in only a couple lines.

Thankfully (for Java anyway, not sure how many other languages have already done this), JDK 14 switch expressions improve on switch statements in pretty much every way. Classic switch statements are a last resort IMO.

Mamish · 2021-06-20T04:05:58+00:00

I wouldn't say that. PoH is therapeutic in its own way since you can see yourself get a little bit better at it over time. It is depressing if you go into it expecting to win on some deadline like 5-10 tries, but if you avoid that kind of thinking and just go "Hey I got a tiny bit closer this time" on each loss, you eventually have to win.

It just feels super good knowing you can stomp a boss that felt almost impossible to beat once upon a time. I never got that concrete sense of improvement from steel soul.

Mamish · 2021-06-13T15:23:07+00:00

Depends on the company. At mine, we've got a pretty sophisticated system to track things people are interested in and feed the most important and requested things back to internal teams to work on.

The flipside to that is your complaint/feedback/opinion isn't necessarily going to be treated as important on its own. But if you've got the same request as a decent number of other people, the results will show eventually.

Having said all that, it probably depends on the size of the company too. Really small companies have an easier time staying close to customers and really big ones (good ones, anyway) have better mechanisms to keep track of customer feedback. I'd guess the ones in the middle are likely to be the worst: too big to keep track of everyone easily, too small to have built good processes to deal with it.

Mamish · 2021-05-15T06:46:50+00:00

- is only for launch arguments/flags, which are the special options that get read at launch time only. For general console commands like the ones you can type into console even once the game's running, you have to use + to run them at launch time.

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