i saw your now dead comment about how no one you interviewed had an answer…
just it’s surprising to me that devops folk aren’t in an org that has backup software, cause this kind of testing is standard load out for most backup softwares, and they even solve the space and isolation issue with various instant restore / publishing capabilities where data from the backup is mounted directly to some staging server with postgres or whatever installed in an isolated area
not trying to knock the idea you are correct most ppl don’t test their backups, but it’s a bit strange no one you talked to used any of the most common backup softwares
definitely in favor of free solutions as backup software field is awful like many ent tech fields, but like the workflows do exist
One person I talked to had Veeam SureBackup running and still built a separate check for the database. As I know SureBackup proved the VM boots, but it doesn't know or care if your orders table has the right row count, or if a sequence is broken. That needs a tool that actually understand the specific platform or data, like Postgres, not only the underlying VM.
Also a lot of people I talked to were never use Veeam or Commvault, since they run Postgres on RDS, Supabase, or a simple VM. And even where the tooling exists, it's usually a separate infra tam running it, not the people who actually own this one database, so it never gets wired up for this specific check anyway.
This tool is more for people whose stack never had such a thing, or it's there and nobody's actually using it for this.
aha that’s sort of what i mean though — your concept is two parts: isolated restore and bespoke tests
the isolation part is something that is more difficult due to space and resource constraints, and a lot of backup apps handle that but expect the user to handle the bespoke testing part
your tool covers both but expects the user to provide both which isn’t always feasible for the application teams (not impossible but lot of red tape to request resources and a lot of resistance if the company already has recovery verification tooling)
if i were you i would refocus your pitch on making it work as part of those backup software workflows, “tell your backup team about this test suite and include it in their recovery verification workflows” and i’m sure you’ll get a lot of attention
most of the dba’s probably have a backup and recovery verification solution at their company with the isolation and resources but they don’t have the bespoke application testing
Didn't use AI for it, but had similar request for our team and we found it easier to build a tool that checks against our defined style-guide and auto-fixes what it can as opposed to generating and reporting on other violations of style guide. The idea was similar to latex, don't think about design while creating and let the tool flag / enforce the style-guide and design, and reviewers don't need to focus so much on what's wrong with slides and can pretty much focus on content
We use a simple PowerShell script to run the check (you can interact with any office doc as a ComApplication object) and it took only a few hours of digging through the properties / MS docs to get what we needed.
This takes me back. I had to do something similar, but in ASP (Classic), with .ppt files, and with dynamic data that was modifiable by the user. Quite an interesting rabbit hole. I eventually was able to build a solution using some COM components and custom code.
I miss those days, simpler, more fun times. I was given a problem and asked to solve it. No pressure on hours or anything else. (I did get it done relatively fast...a couple weeks I think). We didn't have SCRUM or sprints or anything, and we only had to give rough estimates for deliverables.
The problems were interesting, and there was always a challenge.
As in how to interact with office docs programmatically? It's in the second text blurb, you can make a new COM object. For example new Excel Workbook:
$excel = New-Object -ComObject excel.application
From there you have full access to all parts of the document as properties & can call whatever methods are available to edit the document.
As for how we enforce style guide on a presentation, each slide runs through a workflow checking the various style-guide rules that we have / corporate has
- Ensure correct template is used
- Set and enforce correct font
- Check text boxes for font size to check verbosity / readability
- Flag / remove animations (not accessible)
- Flag images without alt-text
and so on
for a 300 slide new release presentation, it takes about 45 seconds for the script to process and auto-fixes what makes sense to auto-fix (e.g., wrong fonts) and adds comments / generates report on what needs to be reviewed and adjusted
! calls are vital for your sanity if you ever do remote support
trying to write shell commands on a hypervisor console window within a remote session on a jump box is excruciatingly laggy and annoying, and that's assuming your remote session connection to the client is behaving well in the first place
I have a script that does virsh send-key of whatever I need to send. In my specific case the motivation was the mismatch between my keyboard layout and the keyboard in the VMs, so I couldn't send M-# or even C-... into the VNC console.
I'm way too paranoid to ever use "!". I want to see the command I'm sending.
age verification laws have little to do with protecting anyone, and social media companies are attempting to remove themselves from liability for their dangerous product by pushing for it
social media in its current unregulated state is harmful as has been demonstrated repeatedly with (suppressed) studies, and the push for age verification instead of regulation on the actual harmful content
age verification will always be a tool to censor whatever content certain interest groups want to censor and it is a wild violation of privacy as has been repeatedly demonstrated every time an identity verification firm gets hacked, they do not take this seriously at all, and all the while the actual harmful sites continue to do harm and have the ability to blame others for not 'protecting' people from the harm their product causes
it's a complete farce and has nothing to do with protecting anyone except tech companies peddling a harmful product
The social media company wouldn't be liable for not knowing someone's age but it would be liable if someone indicated as under-13 was shown porn or gambling ads or whatever they're trying to block. I see that as a win.
Note there's no verification in this law. "Age verification" is a deliberate misnomer.
> the push for age verification instead of regulation on the actual harmful content
_If_ you think there is content grown-ups should be able to see but kids shouldn’t be able to see without their parent’s consent, I don’t see what’s bad about this.
my experience as well. claude produces functional but over-engineered scripts fairly frequently with often very questionably useful safety checks, especially for powershell.
a common tell of ai generated powershell is a script that has dedicated functions to check types, often via several methods, and happily prints the output of the checks to shell. i do not get why it does this but it often adds dozens of lines that really serve no purpose but to make the shell output look fancy
It's frustrating when I catch it doing this because it's wasting tokens and time on what it reports as "one-off" scripts. Might add a requirement to never use shell scripting unless the task is truly a one liner.
>Yes, but those laws are pretty effective. They do deter murderers and thieves
This is really not true at all for violent crimes. Acts of violence are not really done by rational actors, same with many crimes. The death penalty / life in prison does not deter someone who has already decided that violence is an acceptable response to situations, and the story is similar with non-violent crimes; deterrence isn't really considered when someone has already made the decision to steal or do drugs. Deterrence doesn't change the conditions that contribute to those sorts of crimes; the law is more about restoring society as best it can, and in many countries it's about retribution / revenge more than anything.
With corporations, the conditions that lead to the undesired behavior is economical, and addressing the undesired behavior through economic methods seems appropriate -- if it's no longer economical to perform the undesired behavior, the company has to decide where they want to eat the cost.
In the case of the EU ban from the article, I suppose some companies may make the decision to pack up and leave, but my experience is many in the EU would be pretty okay with this with regards to clothing. There is a lot of interest in EU regarding sustainable, made in EU clothing and reusability, etc.
So if the goal is just to reduce clothing product waste in EU, losing fast-fashion companies and some luxury brands that most of the population won't / can't buy anyways probably isn't going to be such a big deal.
Yeah I think we should also move from giving financial penalties to bad corporate actors, to custodial sentences to their top execs and board members. If their own safety and livelyhood is at stake they will be a lot more careful. If we just fine the company they'll just take it as an extra cost in their business equation.
After all these people often say they deserve the high pay due to the high responsibility they have. But they don't, really. They screw up and they get a golden parachute. It was really sickening how the top of volkswagen got off scot-free after doing this calculated manipulation of their diesels. The buck should stop there. They blamed their lower engineers but it's not fair, either the top did know (the most likely option IMO) or they set such unattainable goals for their lower staff that they had no choice but to do this. Either way, it is the top's fault.
And indeed, the goal of the EU is to minimise fast-fashion. I have to say the quality of Shein stuff is also awful which makes these things something you buy and wear two or three times before they rip. Especially with the kind of stuff I buy.
I tend to buy handmade pieces that last me for years if you look after them. Made from real materials by craftspeople. I spend 100-200 euro on one but they really stand out between all the cheap shein/temu crap.
it's about the payment processors, not the card type, though the article makes it confusing by mentioning credit cards as it's really not about that at all
Read the FAQ, it's about no longer relying on US payment processors for handling transactions in a different country that may not support your country's payment system
Cute but like a lot of captchas misguided at this stage
The problem they try to solve is real, but I don't think that 'hacking minigames' are the correct direction to be looking to solve this, and ultimately end up making mandatory human identity verification seem more palatable as the less annoying option
games and challenges like this are more annoying / resource consuming to humans (i.e., time, patience), and can imagine it ends up excluding humans who cannot complete the challenge due to extenuating circumstances, like i have no idea if someone who uses sight assistance accessibility tooling can complete this challenge reasonably, and if this style of challenge takes off I am pretty sure the challenges will continue to exclude many humans who use accessibility tools
I worry this approach ends up being the next cookie banners (which were always malicious compliance in the saltiest, pettiest way)
anubis-style cycle burning approaches seem to be best, but have not looked for research on the efficacy of this approach. if it does have a positive impact for operators though, a method like that seems better
edit: to be clear, I do not want mandatory identity verification -- not at all it's awful, and my fear is that tools like this will only serve to make that option seem more palatable in comparison
I think this purely as an idea is pretty fun, and there is value in that. But beyond the initial impressions it's exactly as you say. It's not different at all from others in how it will get annoying over time.
Accessibility is a big concern with all kinds of CAPTCHAs it seems. Even without any disabilities, I've seen some that I cannot solve because it's illegible.
it's the cornerstone of their strategy to invest in local, sovereign ai models in an attempt to court attention from persons / organizations wary of us tech
it's better to understand the concern over mozilla's announcement the following way i think:
- mozilla knows that their revenue from default search providers is going to dry up because ai is largely replacing manual searching
- mozilla (correctly) identifies that there is a potential market in eu for open, sovereign tech that is not reliant on us tech companies
- mozilla (incorrectly imo) believes that attaching ai to firefox is the answer for long term sustainability for mozilla
with this framing, mozilla has only a few options to get the revenue they're seeking according to their portfolio, and it involves either more search / ai deals with us tech companies (which they claim to want to avoid), or harvesting data and selling it like so many other companies that tossed ai onto software
the concern about us tech stack dominations are valid and probably there is a way to sustain mozilla by chasing this, but breaking the us tech stack dominance doesn't require another browser / ai model, there are plenty already. they need to help unseat stuff like gdocs / office / sharepoint and offer a real alternative for the eu / other interested parties -- simply adding ai is mozilla continuing their history of fad chasing and wondering why they don't make any money, and demonstrates a lack of understanding imo about, well, modern life
my concern over the announcement is that mozilla doesn't seem to have learned anything from their past attempts at chasing fads and likely they will end up in an even worse position
firefox and other mozilla products should be streamlined as much as possible to be the best N possible with these kinds of side projects maintained as first party extensions, not as the new focus of their development, and they should invest the money they're planning to dump into their ai ambitions elsewhere, focusing on a proper open sovereign tech stack that they can then sell to eu like they've identified in their portfolio statement
the announcement though makes it seem like mozilla believes they can just say ai and also get some of the ridiculous ai money, and that does not bode well for firefox as a browser or mozilla's future
I get the intention but it's a bad idea, same with the article
if people are meant to depend on your endpoints, they need to be able to depend on all of them
you will always have ppl who don't respond to deprecation notices, the best you can do is give them reliable information on what to expect -- if they hide the warnings and forget, that's their business
but intentionally making problems without indication that its intentional results in everyone (including your own team) being frustrated and doing more work
you cannot force ppl to update their code and trying to agitate them into doing it only serves to erode confidence in the product, it doesn't make the point ppl think it makes, even if the court of public opinion sides with you
cover your bases and make a good faith effort to notify and then deal with the inevitable commentary, there will always be some who miss the call to update
just it’s surprising to me that devops folk aren’t in an org that has backup software, cause this kind of testing is standard load out for most backup softwares, and they even solve the space and isolation issue with various instant restore / publishing capabilities where data from the backup is mounted directly to some staging server with postgres or whatever installed in an isolated area
not trying to knock the idea you are correct most ppl don’t test their backups, but it’s a bit strange no one you talked to used any of the most common backup softwares
definitely in favor of free solutions as backup software field is awful like many ent tech fields, but like the workflows do exist
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