🇺🇦 Para's Thoughts

Well. It only took a great many trips to the hospital for them to finally diagnose my issues... I have officially been diagnosed with chronic pancreatitis. Yay, now I have to change my whole diet.... I see a lot of fish and chicken in my future..

It's been almost 3 weeks. After watching his behavior, his name is Noodle. He just... Plops. Randomly. He's like a wet noodle. If you pick him up to move him, he dangles like a noodle. Welcome to the family Noodle.

I still miss you bud, no one will ever replace you. However, it was time for another buddy. Teach him your ways my friend! Our newest addition, exploring the house.

And I'm about done with these people. This morning, I ask how everything is going, they say "we are live" Well, yeah, I knew that, but are you having issues? Then suddenly a few minutes later, full panic, "I'm taking our team off the system right now".... Okay, before you do that, can you tell me what you are seeing so I can check the servers / network, and identify the issue? "Not those kind of issues" Get on call with them: TL;DR - they don't have enough employees to answer calls. They are rolling back off my system because they can't handle answering the phones.... FML

Actual words I heard spoken on a meeting today. Context: phone system I'm working on, a team (on a very different network than other teams, many firewalls to pass through) was having audio issues. Namely, audio wouldn't go quite for a moment then come back. I was explaining that yes, this would be consistent with UDP, which we use, since audio is over RTP. If it were TCP, it would sound robotic / delayed. (Funny enough, someone on the call very soon had audio issues, and I was able to go "ooo see! That's TCP!") Then I heard this gem: "So what if we switched from UDP to IP?"

lol. Friend has an e-bike. Company decided out of nowhere to lower his max speed on the bike... For context, laws have a max speed e-bikes can go. Their fastest bikes were over the limit, so they lowered the speed on them.... And the lower models so the pricier bikes were still not as fast. So really, he got scammed in a way. So he reaches out to me, I take a look at the app, figure out how to set it back to his original speed / bypass the limit. (He's still within legal limits). In the process of doing so however, I find a lot of security flaws, password leaking, customer data leaks, Google API keys, Twitter API keys, etc etc etc. I reported these issues to the company, and after a couple weeks.... My free e-bike (normally $1800, currently on sale for $1700) is now on the way.

It's an interesting thing. In America, if you have a large platform ("influencers, politicians, anyone that has a large following), you have the money to take care of yourself. People who don't, and need surgery.... well, you're shit out of luck usually. My point is that people who don't have a large platform, but are most affected by costs of.. anything, are the people who can speak to an issue. The people who can speak to an issue but have money, don't. It's not an issue for them. Example: I don't have a large platform, nor do I have a lot of money, and I need surgery before I end up in the ER again. Haha! Welcome to America! We'll do the surgery if you show up in the ER again, and ruin your credit in the process! Seriously, fuck the US. So tired of this. How's Vancouver this time of year? Can I be Canadian?

Confirmed. Security has acknowledged that CrowdStrike chose to "contain" me. Apparently I'm a threat XD. They are working to release it.

I have now also learned - it will disable your laptop. Since then (I work on both the laptop and my personal PC), I discovered yesterday that my laptop will connect to a network (wireless and wired), but will have "no internet". After hours of digging / wireshark / etc - We use CrowdStrike Falcon at our company. It uses AI/ML to identify threats and automatically take action. It has locked me out. The ONLY network traffic my work laptop can make - is to CrowdStrike Falcon. Everything is is blocked so fast, it doesn't even show up in a packet capture

Today I learned: Attempting to run plink on my work laptop will cause security to call within minutes.

I Used Flipper Zero to Score Eponas in 'Tears of the Kingdom' | WIRED https://www.wired.com/story/flipper-zero-horse-rave/

Absolutely gross. https://www.databricks.com/blog/introducing-english-new-programming-language-apache-spark (Thanks to our favourite dot for sharing this with me)

On that note, protogen joke.

As someone who was toying with AI art generation (because technology is neat, but just because you "made" something with AI does NOT make you an artist), I know how much hell the prompts are. I also know from my career how bad clients are about describing what they need. In order to replace designers with AI, you'll need designers, who know the right way to prompt the AI.

Noodle has given birth! Say hi to Flower!

I figured rather than spam this channel with a ton of photos, I'd upload them and make a big post here: https://imgur.com/gallery/QizvtMu

A small preview of the editing I'm working on. When done, I'll upload to YouTube or somewhere instead, to save bandwidth for people. This is Conch Island, which is really just a place the fishers toss the empty shells after harvesting the meat. It's been "growing" for decades, and as you can see has its own little ecosystem at this point.

Saying goodbye to this wonderful little house we stayed in. I'll be back home in a couple days, where I can finally edit the GoPro videos and get stuff uploaded. (By the way, the previous video of the lionfish... Was taken by my phone. It just amazes me what phones can do these days)

I found a lionfish!!!

Oh, and I do have some fun GoPro videos to share, but that probably won't be until I get home so I can edit / upload. Again, signal here is... Lacking. But that's to be expected when visiting a remote island in the middle of nowhere