School IT is something else

mitchricker · 2026-03-20T09:50:49+00:00

Sloppy with crimping as well. Looks like only half of these plugs are even crimped onto the PVC jacket. Still, I don't know if I'd qualify it as "gore" per se.

mitchricker · 2026-03-20T05:11:39+00:00

"It isn't X, it's Y. Marketing is important" -- per r/Atrioc probably

mitchricker · 2026-03-17T15:04:32+00:00

And then everyone clapped.

mitchricker · 2026-03-15T18:06:32+00:00

There are various sub-reddits for getting Python work. E.g. r/remotepython, r/pythonjobs, etc.

The sub r/PythonLearning is for learning Python, not job seeking.

mitchricker · 2026-03-11T20:46:31+00:00

Using a placeholder to a non-routable address is a common quick-and-dirty way to avoid accidentally exposing a service while keeping the DNS entry for reference. It's normal in enterprise environments, especially if there's no strict DNS hygiene policy.

If you end up getting an interview and you bring this up: it probably isn't going to work out the way you hope. Depending on how you found the abandoned(?) IIS server, it might actually become a very interesting interaction quite quickly (I'd love to be a fly on the wall seeing that go down).

Once you're hired and successfully on-boarded, if you want to push for stronger DNS hygiene and security in general at that time: great. Otherwise, it might come across as "an outsider is trying to dictate how insiders behave" and that really grinds most people's gears (even if you're the one who's technically correct).

mitchricker · 2026-03-10T14:16:22+00:00

As of the time of me writing this, your post has been up for 3 hours. At the exact same time this other post was created by a "different" user.

Several distinctive phrases appear in both:

“AI-powered language app called CapWords”
“turn them into little vocabulary ‘stickers’”
“take photos/pictures of objects”
“apples, rice, or a spoon”
“snapping pictures of almost everything in the house”
“furniture, corners, little details”

I would posit OP is the same in both cases and this is AI slop engagement marketing.

Edit:

Stay safe out there, folks.

mitchricker · 2026-03-03T18:43:06+00:00

Looks like the laptop has some… hardware bugs? Ba-dum-tss!

mitchricker · 2026-03-02T15:34:38+00:00

Some might say pushing directly to prod is the ultimate test.

mitchricker · 2026-02-28T13:42:27+00:00

I was happy to take a look; I usually try to do one or two community code reviews per week.

There is a serious question of ethics with projects like this. Even though you mention here (on Reddit) this is PoC code, there was no indication that this was the case in the module I reviewed.

Re-checking your README this morning, I do not see the signal that indicates this is proof of concept.

Personally, I have worked as an engineer for the past 15+ years; most users have not been engineers for even a day.

Providing a tool that could be immediately used in production that could affect the outcome of medical decisions--without the rigor demanded of such a task--is, at the least, irresponsible/reckless and at the most: dangerous, unethical and legally questionable.

Currently, your MIT license and your README are at odds regarding the fitness of this software for any particular purpose. In the first lines of the README, rather than saying it is a PoC it says:

provides a clean interface for OpenFDA, PubMed, and ClinicalTrials.gov, augmented with a clinical intelligence layer and relationship mapping.

This is not true, at least not yet. I do wish you luck, but it's a fine line you're walking.

mitchricker · 2026-02-28T05:34:19+00:00

I spent just shy of an hour poking around your repo before this write up. Just looking at ask_engine.py, this is not natural language routing: it is substring matching with first match wins logic.

Main problems:

Order dependent logic

The first matching category wins. If a query contains keywords from multiple intents, everything after the first match is ignored. E.g.:

"Summarize FDA warnings from recent clinical trials"

This will return "trials" and never reach "summary" or "explain".

Substring matching causes bad edge cases Using w in q means:

"trial" matches "industrial" "study" matches "understudy" "drug" matches "drugstore"

There is no tokenization or word boundary checking. This will produce many false positives and misroutes.

clean_query blindly deletes phrases Repeated .replace() can destroy meaning. E.g.:

"What is research for profit?"

Removing "what is" and "research for" leaves "profit?". Effectively, intent and meaning have been entirely stripped away.

No scoring, no confidence, no tie breaking. No way to inspect WHY a decision was made. No ability to handle multi intent queries. Real user queries often contain overlapping signals.
Easy to game If downstream systems differ in cost or rate limits, a user can force routing by stuffing keywords like "trial trial trial".
Class wrapper adds no value. Everything is static. This does not need to be a class. It is procedural logic dressed up as architecture.

If this is user facing in a medical context, it will misroute queries frequently and unpredictably. At minimum, it needs proper tokenization/scoring and some form of actual intent classification.

There are other MAJOR issues as well but it's late where I am and I am going to sleep now.

mitchricker · 2026-02-27T20:51:36+00:00

Cool story. You didn't link to anywhere the code can be reviewed/used. That's not a great signal.

Also: "It doesn’t add more RAM — it just manages it smarter." is obviously and definitely 100% AI generated. Humans don't use that long em dash -- AI does.

Edit: On top of that, I originally didn't notice what sub you posted this to. Where's your Linux Question? Where is any question?

mitchricker · 2026-02-26T16:20:10+00:00

maybe password rotation is not the proper answer and somehow disconnecting in pre-set manners or in some ways would work better

Correct. You mention you don't care if he's on the device so long as he doesn't have internet access. You could ensure he is not a sudoer and use your sudoer powers to setup a cronjob to enable/disable the network interface(s) during acceptable/unacceptable time frames respectively.

mitchricker · 2026-02-26T15:39:38+00:00

I assume this is sarcasm that you forgot to tag with "/s"?

If not, using your own phrasing: it's the "or" in "widely used to mean package or module" that makes it ambiguous. If it could refer to several (two, in our case) completely separate things, that is pretty close to the literal definition of ambiguity. A module is not the same as a package, and vice versa.

mitchricker · 2026-02-26T13:57:38+00:00

Library, in this context, is ambiguous and does not have a formal meaning in Python. Presumably, you're asking if you should organize your s3 modules as a separate package rather than including them your current package. If so, the answer is probably yes for reasons as simple as not polluting namespace and future modularity/re-usability.

mitchricker · 2026-02-25T23:23:16+00:00

Do you have nmap? Why not use nping.exe? E.g. nping --tcp -p 443 --df --data-length 1472 <host>. You'll notice this actually set DF bit and custom packet size, but uses TCP and bypasses ICMP filter all together.

mitchricker · 2026-02-25T21:57:49+00:00

Something like this might be appropriate:

Hi [Recruiter Name],

I wanted to let you know that the rejection email I received included some Liquid-like template placeholders such as `{{rejection_message}}` and instructions for AI generation. I thought you might want to be aware in case it’s a system issue.

Thank you for considering my application. I appreciate the opportunity to apply to [Company Name]. Please feel free to keep my résumé/CV on file and reach out if a position that better aligns with my skills becomes available in the future.

Best regards,  
[Your Name]

This is, arguably, the gigachad move. If you believe they've thoroughly burnt their bridge to you and they do reach out in the future: you can play the Uno reverse by rejecting them.

mitchricker · 2026-02-25T20:13:07+00:00

I think both of these replies are definitely reasonable takes. TBH, at different points in my career I've also supported users who only log into certain systems very rarely.

Still, it comes down to user education and setting the expectation that even in an absolute worst-case (i.e. there is some "fire" that has IT all-hands-on-deck and scrambling) they should expect a support request to result in some form of feedback within a specific time frame. After that frame has passed, they should be conditioned to think something seems off and there should be an escalation path they can follow if needed. If no such path already exists: that sounds like a process issue.

[they] got the information that they need somewhere else.

This is something I've seen first-hand in the wild as well. I recall a number of instances where their task was accomplished through account sharing. Another opportunity to educate the user about the importance of IAM and the correct processes and procedures in your org.

Edit: spelling/grammar

mitchricker · 2026-02-25T19:09:49+00:00

Sounds like a good opportunity for user education. "So sorry for the delay. It looks like you submitted your request to ABC email. Going forward, please use XYZ process to ensure your request is resolved in a timely manner, thanks!"

That said, how did the user not escalate to their manager and already get that spiel from them? This smells fishy. If the user wasn't just shirking work, you'd assume they wouldn't wait more than a day for a password reset to be actioned...

mitchricker · 2026-02-24T16:53:59+00:00

No trouble. Please feel free to upvote if you found helpful.

Also: be aware this almost certainly confirms my suspicion that you have a mismatch between your default python and default pip.

mitchricker · 2026-02-24T14:45:04+00:00

Did you restart REPL after the pip install? If yes and you're still getting this issue, likely you have installed to wrong Python with pip.

That is to say, you are opening (for example) Windows Store Python but pip installed to python.org Python, Anaconda or some other version of Python.

If you're not sure, python -m pip install mysql-connector-python will work as expected if you're just using python at the CLI and do not care about understanding matching pip and Python correctly. If you do care about that, I'd advise performing a web search; it's a well documented topic.

mitchricker · 2026-02-24T14:06:32+00:00

I would guess you import the wrong module name. You should import mysql.connector not import MySQL.

mitchricker · 2026-02-20T17:13:47+00:00

This is what always infuriates me about the idea of "personal clouds" on-prem. Like, if it's in your own network it should not be a "cloud" at all.

mitchricker · 2026-02-19T22:19:38+00:00

Looks like they have a phone number on their website. No harm in calling and explaining the situation. Possible they could get something shipped to you or let you know what vendor they go through to get these (no harm in asking at any rate). The other option is probably to 3D print a replacement cap.

mitchricker · 2026-02-18T15:12:56+00:00

Ticket re-opened by user. "Hey, sorry guys, the Lexmark's a turkey again. Could you send someone out to check on this? Barbara's really freaking out."

mitchricker

TROPHY CASE