csydas

^^^

agreed, and it's a bit disappointing to frame the very real current problem with dependency on us tech with the framework of 'you won't get all the ai magic'

we have an example of the icc judge who has basically been removed from modern society because of ridiculous sanctions, and there was the threat to the UK for sanctions over the mere suggestion that they would be investigating musk and twitter for the actual csam content and deep fake content being produced

any place and anyone that depends on us tech companies or us payment processors are a single social media post from deranged american politicians away from being removed from modern society -- this is a real and present danger, and it's a bit pathetic to frame it as 'you won't get to enjoy the wonders of ai if you get banned'

oh ty, I legitimately didn't know I usually hide extensions icons in safari

Feedback and issues you need to troubleshoot with your projects is a good indicator of your audience level, and from my experience it’s helpful to understand that documentation is always under development just like the code

from experience in ENT support where i was sending instructions & quick fix scripts to technically capable persons, you will learn very fast when you’ve missed the mark with your documentation / instructions. tons of times i had ready made solutions that i thought “just copy and paste and go what could possibly go wrong?” and was caught off guard how often a little too much knowledge lends to confusion. i am not blaming the users here it is my fault that i didn’t explain things like “no don’t change this date in the fix that is a special date when the issue could have earliest occurred and it’s there to avoid grabbing more than we need to parse”, but i didn’t tell that so of course people changed it to all sorts of dates thinking they had to

such feedback and issues also got me way better about writing code that avoided chances for such mistakes as i didn’t want users to have to read a novel to understand what to do; it’s a fine balance between what to solve with documentation and what to solve with code

just for reference most enterprise backup products are not affected by this and will have vddk for backups and restores. if your backup product supports cross platform restores likely migration is not blocked for you, and many free / trial editions are likely generous enough for most small - medium shops to migrate on the free offering

if you already pay for an ent backup product check if it can restore from vmware backups to another platform and you’re prolly fine (for now)

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

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

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

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.

! 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

it's not

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

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

>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.

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