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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2025

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  • You have a good point… and I’ve worked on both sides of the fence. Currently, I’m at the “healthy culture” camp, but it wasn’t always that way.

    While I was working at companies that had a not-so healthy culture, there were things I did to “bring visibility” to these non-work tasks. However, I should add that at these types of companies didn’t really offer a lot of financial compensation for this non-work, but at no-time did anyone challenge my productivity.

    Basically, I’d suggest:

    1. Be (technically) opinioned and make it visible. Often, it’s not your boss you need to impress (as they see your work every day), it’s your boss’ boss. If you have a reputation within the company as a guru in something, it’s easier for your boss’ boss to “see” that you’re bringing “value” outside of you day-to-day tasks.
    2. Bring visibility to these (side quest) discussions. At one company, I created a chat room to use as a sort of “technical self-help”(for all Engineers) and any DMs I got, I would ask them to funnel the discussion into the chat room. I asked them to do it “so others can find the answers to similar questions” and more importantly “to bring visibility to these discussions”. You, your boss, your boss’ boss can see how much time you invest in these topics and they can see that this help does not come for free.
    3. If your not meeting your goals (or are stressed out) , due to these side-quests - tell your boss. Explain (as early as possible) that project X will slip if you keep focusing on unblocking others and let them decide what to do. If you followed-up with Point 2, you’ve got concrete evidence to justify where your time is being spent.
    4. When people ask you “what are you doing?” (like during your Stand Up). Do not answer “nothing” or “supporting others”. Be detailed, mention the actual technical topics (and if you’ve got this chat room, reminding yourself is much easier).
    5. Last bit, which might not be helpful. If it’s the same questions or some fundamental misunderstandings that your often answering: maybe offer a Dogo/training for anyone who’s interested. When you offer it, shout it from the highest tree top - it’ll go far in establishing yourself, in the company’s eyes, as a guru (even to those who don’t understand the topic) and it’ll (helpfully) reduce the amount of questions in that topic.

  • But from the companies perspective this is a net-gain.

    You’ve just unblocked 10 people so they can continue to work… and even if their weekly individual productivity is 25% of yours, combined they’re doing more than twice the amount of work you’re doing and it only cost the company a week of your time.

    Yeah, at times it’s frustrating and distracting, but hopefully you’re getting compensated for the knowledge you bring inaddition to the work you deliver.






  • Take a look at ssh-agent. It’s bundled with ssh-client and designed to solve this problem.

    The quick usage is, create a terminal and run:

    eval `ssh-agent`
    ssh-add /path/to/your/encrypted/key1
    #type in password
    ssh-add /path/to/your/encrypted/key2
    ... 
    
    # all commands in this terminal will use the keys above w/o asking you for a password 
    git clone git@githib.com...
    git push... 
    etc
    

    So, basically you type your credentials once during the life cycle of your terminal.

    If you really want to go full power-user, simple run ssh-agent (without the eval) and you’ll see it just sets some env-vars, which can be imported into any terminal/shell you have open.

    So, if you put some logic in your shells rc file, you can effectively share a single ash-agent between all your shells, meaning you just need to type your password for your keys once when you log into your system… and your now passwordless for any future terminals you create (this is my setup).

    Also, if you’re interested take a peek at the man pages for ash-agent. It has a few interesting features (ie: adding a password lock for your agent, removing keys from the agent, etc).


  • OP, what bluGill said is exactly your problem (assuming your DMARC and friends are setup correctly).

    The concept is referred to as “email (or domain) reputation”. The implementation details are closely guarded secrets, unique for each email receiver.

    One of the metrics for establishing a positive email reputation the “How much email does your mail server sends?” : the more the better**

    If you’re a large company, it’s fine… but if it’s just a personal domain with < 20 per week, you’re not going to establish a reputation and (depending on the receiver) you’re email might just get dropped.

    The other (frequent) metric is: “Of the emails that are sent, how many are read, and how many are flagged as spam?” In order, for these crowd sourced spam filters to work, they need you to send large amounts of email. Receivers like Gmail/Google are pretty forgiving. However, Outlook/Microsoft are very aggressive, meaning if enough outlook users flag your email as Spam, then future emails sent to outlook from your domain will probably automatically be marked as spam. Obviously, these are all black boxes, so I can only offer my personal observations (take it worth a grain of salt).

    As bluGill mentioned, there is a solution, but it involves moving your custom domain to a larger (re: paid) email provider. If you were to move to Google (for example), it doesn’t matter if your custom domain sends 5 emails per week. Those 5 emails are being sent from Google mail servers (using your custom domain) , which means they’re gaining the “reputation” of google and you can be certain that your emails will arrive, even if it’s (non-obvious) spam. Because, the email receiver assumes that Google will shut you down, if you’re a spammer.

    It’s a sad state that one of the original “pillars of the internet” (email) has degraded to feed only the big tech companies… but unfortunately this has been the case for many years.






  • Actually, those steps are the ones necessary to recover from a hard brick (re: the device is unusable because you did something you shouldn’t have as root).

    The actual process to root the device is simply running a few adb commands (so a prereq is having Developer Mode enabled).

    Once you have ran the exploit, your root escalation is temporary until the device is rebooted or you take additional steps to persists your root privileges (thus, potentially leading you towards a hard brick).

    source: The docs



  • How do you think this technology would be abused?

    If the device included full audio and video surveillance - I’d totally agree. However, the device does not include video (and it would be a real hard sell to include that).

    If all parties are aware that monitoring will occur (maybe include a sign in the door), I’d argue that minors are aware of what this means.

    Perhaps, it would mean that students “finish up” faster, rather than loitering and vaping (or bullying, etc)… and if that’s the case, I guess the device has fulfilled it’s purpose.

    The article did mention how a hacked device could be used to “play sounds” or trigger false calls for “help”, or gunshots. But I’d argue this would be the modern day equivalent of falsely pulling the fire alarm.


  • An interesting article and tbh, I’d actually support the device (… and I’m usually very privacy focused).

    According to the article the purpose of the microphone is to listen for certain keywords (ie: “help”, “call 911”, gunshots, etc) and to detect when people are vaping, etc.

    I mean, I would never install one in my home, due to privacy and security concerns. But if you’re in a public place, like a school such features make sense.

    If you’re being bullied or need help, having a facility member “hanging out” in the schools public bathroom would be weird, creepy, and more of an invasion of privacy than a mic in a smoke detector.

    That said, students and facility should be aware of what this device is doing and why. However, this article does a very good job of summarizing that.

    Yes, the devices security is rubbish, but was patched. It’s not the first IoT device to do that and it won’t be the last (unfortunately).

    Thanks for sharing the article OP.



  • It could be the quality of your headphones.

    I’m not an audiophile, but back-in-the-day I bought some analog “sennheiser studio monitors” as opposed to “just headphones”.

    I actually returned the first one and exchanged them, because when I listened to a live recorded CD, I kept hearing loud “pops” that I didn’t hear with my “regular headphones”. I assumed they were defective.

    The exchanged sennheiser had the same “pop” in this CD. It turns out, most “regular headphones” didn’t have the same depth in sound frequency as studio monitors and the “pops” were accidental artifacts that were mixed into the CD.

    For other CD’s, I’d hear telephones ringing and sirens in the background.

    Eventually, I got use to it. Then after a few years, I replaced my CD collection with mp3’s… and I could tell a different in songs/albums I was really familiar with. The base wasn’t as deep, the high sounds weren’t as high, I didn’t hear telephones ringing in the background.

    I had the same sennheiser, it was just that the nature of mp3’s “flattened” the music.

    Now, with Bluetooth and the disappearance of 3.5 mm jacks, there are too many layers of digital conversion happening. I’ve given up… and now just have some cheap ear buds I listen to.