I think the most alive you could be would then be some manner of homeless drug addict. You have no power over your life, so no notion of what any day will look like.

This quote kinda rubs me the wrong way because it treats predictability the same as banality.
If you want a job where you never know what the day is going to look like, work for a poorly managed company. You never know what you’re going to be doing, sometimes the project you’re working on one day is cancelled without warning and now people are mad at you for not having been working on the new priority for the past month. Sometimes you go in and you work 36 hours straight without warning because someone else messed up and your boss doesn’t give a shit who’s responsible and you’re the one who knows how to fix it, so fix it or fuck off. Better hope you don’t have a family or you’re going to have to make choices.

Knowing what you’re going to do tomorrow is just having work of any consequence. Food service knows what they’re doing tomorrow. So does a CEO, a software developer at a competent business, or a project manager. I can think of very few jobs whose scope of work is limited to a day, and is so variable that you just don’t know what you’ll be doing. Temp? Personal assistant to an eccentric actor? (Not the manager type assistant, they need to know the schedule. The one that buys coffee, six turtles and a pair of roller skates and doesn’t actually exist).

I could just be dead inside because I know that tomorrow is going to go a particular way that I like.

It wasn’t the crypto key pair part I was referring to, it was the part where fido is geared towards interactive user auth, not non-interactive storage.
It wouldn’t have surprised me if the ssh devs hadn’t put implementing fido support for host keys high in the development list, or that it was tricky to find documentation for. Using something like a tpm is the more typical method.

There’s no technical reason it can’t work, and the op got it to work so clearly the implementation supports it, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most expected setup, which means it might have unexpected gaps in functionality or terrible documentation.

Unfortunately, I think you’re going to run into trouble because fido authenticators are geared towards working as user authenticators rather than as device authenticators.
It certainly should be possible from a technical perspective, but implementation-wise, it’s very likely that the code focuses on making fido devices work with client keys, and using tpms for host keys, since that’s much more focused on headless server functionality.

Oval peg in a round hole.

Eh, sounds like they grabbed a stock photo to edit into the main image without seeing that it was AI. It’s not like they produced it despite their commitment not to, and they pulled it and apologized when it was pointed out.

I don’t really feel disappointment that they picked the wrong stock photo.

The biggest issue is that the birth certificate is typically done at a very local level, usually the county, and not anyone can file one. It’s often the case that a particular person at a hospital or a registered midwife needs to file the application. Parents can report a live birth outside of an institution but you need to physically go to a courthouse with the baby.
A different group of people is responsible for social security cards.

If one county clerk files a huge number of birth certificates and uses them to back social security card requests, it’ll be noticed.

There’s always a way around the paper trail, usually by just making sure no one bothers to look at it, but they all involve adding more people to the conspiracy, which adds more risk.
No one will notice that one doctor delivered 500 babies in one day if no one looks at the paperwork, but each person involved increases the likelihood of a mistake causing people to look, which almost certainly will cause those details to be noticed.

It’s similar to how people do a huge amount of any fraud, and then once a thread of detail gets noticed the entire thing is unraveled.

Your best bet is to minimize the number of forged documents. I would predict that a single person could most easily get a non-citizen us national passport for someone to assume an American somoan identity. Since there’s comparatively few non-citizen us nationals, a passport is the federally preferred method of identification. Since the territory is an edge case, there’s more room for slipups, and since you’re not posing as a citizen, you have an excuse not to have some records.

True! I tend to power off if I use the software button, and suspend if I close the lid. I think it’s the difference between “packing up” and pausing for a minute.

Typically, yes. I have a tendency to use sleep when I’m coming back in some set period of time, and power off when I’m “going”.
If I’m walking to a different room I’ll close the lid and stick in under my arm which makes it sleep, or going to the bathroom or cooking dinner or something. If I’m leaving and sticking it in my bag, I tend to power it off.

It’s a combination of not wanting the battery to die in sleep mode, and not wanting to put a heat generating device in my bag even if it’s greatly reduced.

Thinking about it, powering down also drops the drive encryption keys from memory so it’s arguably more secure. Not in the least why I do it that way, but it’s an advantage now that I think about it.

Since I’m more likely to use the laptop like a super-phone, I appreciate it when it becomes usable fast regardless of what state I left it in.

That’s brutal. Is it clustered data storage of some sort? All the most offensive startup and shutdown sequence I’ve seen are giant storage systems.

For a server? Absolutely doesn’t matter as long as it’s not preposterous. Turning a server on can be done entirely linearly for almost every server and the slowdown is irrelevant.

For a desktop? Almost irrelevant, but it should be fast enough so you don’t get bored enough to actually start doing something else.

Laptop? I actually like those to boot fast. I’m much more likely to pull one out to do something real quick, and so my laptop booting in a few seconds makes standing with my laptop on my arm to send a file real quick as I’m going somewhere feasible.

The whole thing is great, but for me 3:50 is where you can really pick up the whole vibe in just about a minute. Particularly the perfectly respectful way of handling not knowing how to pronounce someone’s name. And then lapsing into a hallucinogenic zone out time.

Do you have a reference for that bit about ceramic coating? My understanding was that enamel was a glass coating, and ceramic was a, well, ceramic coating.

I’ve found my preferences have been creeping up in price again, but only because I’ve found I want an actually physically lightweight laptop, and those have been getting more available, linux-able and capable.

I only need a few hundred dollars worth of computer, and anything more can live on a rack somewhere. I’ll pay more than that for my computer to be light enough I don’t need to think about.

Accept “I have no idea” as an answer, and don’t use it as an opportunity to push things in the direction you want.
learn to account for people being wrong, and don’t punish them for it.

Engineers want to be accurate. They don’t want to give answers that they’re unsure about or just speculating.
Early in their careers they’re often willing to, but that gets beaten out of them pretty quickly by people with deadlines. Expressing uncertainty often means the person interprets the answer in the direction they want, and then holds the engineer to that answer.
“It could be anywhere from 2-8 months I think, but we won’t know until we’re further into the design phase” is taken as 2 months, planned around, and then crunch Time starts when it starts to go over. Or revising an estimate once new information or changing requirements are revealed is treated as incompetence, even though more work taking more time is expected.

It’s in the self interest of the engineer to be cagey. “I don’t like to give estimates this early” is much harder to turn into a solid commitment than an earnest best estimate given the current known state of the project.

Similar for resources required or processes. Anything you don’t say is unlikely to be held against you.

Eh, anything interesting is going to be inside and out of sight. The desert is so big that people aren’t going to be sneaking up on it without you noticing.

We’re not going to rely on obscurity to keep our research sites secure. People who have worked at similar secure sites report parking at the meeting building, changing into their work coveralls, going through a security screening and then being driven for an hour or two in a bus with blacked out windows to work in a sealed building with no windows before being driven back in similar conditions.

Using your existing classified development facility has the advantage that you can keep activities at it at a roughly constant level, so anyone watching from a satellite can’t tell if there’s more or less activity that would indicate something interesting. Just make sure that a dozen busses show up every day, regardless of how many people are in them.

It’s similar to how you can tell the Pentagons level of alert by looking at pizza delivery wait times at off hours on Google maps.

Eeeeh, more debatable since someone would actually need to write the capability for the bot to talk to the platform. It’s still a much lower threshold, but it’s not a free ride.

They don’t actually hate Wikipedia. They hold that it’s not a primary source for things that require citation, and that it’s not a great textbook.

Reading the Wikipedia page for optics is a bad way to learn optics.
It’s also difficult to cite as a source because you can’t actually specify who you’re citing, which is why Wikipedia, for research purposes, is a great way to get a quality overview and the terms you need, and then jump to its sources for more context and primary sources as you need them.

Encyclopedias in general are overviews or summaries of what they reference. Teachers would typically like you to reference something that isn’t a summary or overview when writing one, sincenthat what most of those reports are.

Information without context can create a different narrative than that same information with context.

You see this in racially biased crime reporting. Without context, you see that one demographic is disproportionately prone to being arrested and convicted of crimes. The conclusion being aimed for is the expected racist one.
With context, you see that criminality is roughly equally distributed, but that certain classes of crime are enforced with prison more often, that different demographics get disproportionately more attention from law enforcement, and that due to socioeconomic factors different demographics are more likely to inhabit income brackets where the likely types of crime are more likely to be harshly enforced.

Information without context can be misleading. If someone seems to care about the conclusion you take away more than some bit of context that makes that conclusion less forgone, thats a sign they might be pushing a narrative.

There is, unfortunately, a contrasting rhetorical trick where someone provides such an overwhelming amount of context that you cannot possibly handle all of it in a reasonable amount of time.

Exactly where the line is is unfortunately not something I think there’s a simple answer for determining. I try to determine if it seems like the person is using the information to support their point, or if they’re using it to drown out opposition.

I would lean towards no. I’m me. I don’t consider the things that people seem to associate with their “inner child” to be exclusive to children, so I don’t feel a tension between my desire to act responsibly and my sense of wonder, joy, and playfulness.

Age isn’t a mask hiding the inner child, it’s a toolkit that helps them appreciate and engage with those things. My childish delight at birds flitting about the bird feeder is only enhanced by being able to buy my own, keep them filled, and the ability to understand more about everything that goes on with them. I have the experience and faculties to answer questions I have, which only deepens my appreciation for the “common” wonders we see everywhere. Experiencing more of life and it’s lows only makes the highs sweeter.

A child plus age and experience is an adult. You don’t need to lose the happiness to get there.

I figured it was more about fresh snow. :) fresh snow in the city is at least white, and pretty in a … Chaotic sense.

If it’s not snowing, it’s still not green. It’s just grey. Grey is worse because at least the snow is pretty.