I always saw Ken as just as out of touch as the rest of the characters, but I think you're right. Relatively speaking, he is the straight man character. TIL.
IcedRaktajino
joined 7 months ago
Thanks!
Veep is, obviously, about D.C. and I'm from Maryland which is not far from there, so the eastern dialect "vah" is what everyone uses here. So I guess Kent is correct.
I'm similar but it's a side effect of my general gluttony. I'll watch one episode and immediately want more. I didn't intend to wait until the season was over to binge it all, but it just sort of happened because of life being hectic right now.
Either the aliens have listed Earth as a no-contact planet or we are probably alone in the universe.
If it turns out to be the former, I don't blame them.
I used to buy their stuff and use tuya-convert to flash Tasmota onto them. But they kept updating the firmware to lock that out, and I ended up returning a batch of 15 smart plugs because none of them would flash. They were too much of a PITA to try to crack open and flash the ESP8266 manually so I returned the whole batch as defective, left a scathing review, and blackballed the whole brand.
Nice. I've got the Anker version but it's half the capacity at 1 KWh. It charges exclusively from 800W of PV input (though it can only handle 600W input) and can push out 2,000 W continuous and 3000 peak.
I've got a splitter from the PV that goes to both the Anker and a DC-DC converter which then goes to a few 12v -> USB power delivery adapters. Those can use the excess from the PV to charge power banks, phones, laptops, etc while the rest goes to the Anker (doesn't seem to affect the MPPT unless there's basically just no sunlight at all). Without the splitter, anything above 600W is wasted until I expand my setup later this spring.
All I can say for it is that it absolutely rocks! On sunny days, I run my entire homelab from it, my work-from-home office, charge all my devices, and run my refrigerator from it if I feel like running an extension cord). It's setup downstairs, so I also plug my washing machine into it and can get a few loads of laundry done as well.
All from its solar input.
Solutions that work for a corporate application where all the staff know each other are unlikely to be feasible for a publicly available application with thousands of users all over the world
This is something of a hybrid. There will be both general public users as well as staff. So for staff, we could just call them or walk down the hall and verify them but the public accounts are what I'm trying to cover (and, ideally, the staff would just use the same method as the public).
Figure if an attacker attempts the 'forgot password' method, it's assumed they have access to the users email.
Yep, that's part of the current posture. If MFA is enabled on the account, then a valid TOTP code is required to complete the password reset after they use the one-time email token. The only threat vector there is if the attacker has full access to the user's phone (and thus their email and auth app) but I'm not sure if there's a sane way to account for that. It may also be overkill to try to account for that scenario in this project. So we're assuming the user's device is properly secured (PIN, biometrics, password, etc).
If you are offering TOTP only,
Presently, yes, but we're looking to eventually support WebAuthn
or otherwise an OTP sent via SMS with a short expiration time
We're trying to avoid 3rd party services, so something like Twilio isn't really an option (nor Duo, etc). We're also trying to store the minimum amount of personal info, and currently there is no reason for us to require the user's phone number (though staff can add it if they want it to show up as a method of contact). OTP via SMS is also considered insecure, so that's another reason I'm looking at other methods.
"backup codes" of valid OTPs that the user needs to keep safe and is obtained when first enrolling in MFA
I did consider adding that to the onboarding but I have my doubts if people will actually keep them safe or even keep them at all. It's definitely an option, though I'd prefer to not rely on it.
So for technical, human, and logistical reasons, I'm down to the following options to reset the MFA:
- User must contact a staff member during business hours to verify themselves. Most secure, least convenient.
- Setup security questions/answers and require those after the user receives an email token (separate from the password reset token). Moderately secure, less convenient, and requires us to store more personal information than I'd prefer.
- Similar to #2 except provide their current password and a short-term temporary token that was emailed to them when they click "Lost my MFA Device". Most convenient, doesn't require unnecessary personal info, possibly least secure of the 3. Note that password resets require both email token and valid TOTP token, so passwords cannot be reset without MFA.
I'm leaning toward #3 unless there's a compelling reason not to.
Life Pro Tip: Cannabutter on your pancakes.
I thought about generating a list of backup codes during the onboarding process but ruled it out because I know for a fact that people will not hold on to them.
That's why I'm leaning more toward, and soliciting feedback for, some method of automated recovery (email token + TOTP for password resets, email token + password for MFA resets, etc). I'm trying to also avoid using security questions but haven't closed that door entirely.
- Not every
<input type="text">is suitable for political opinions. - Political opinions are like assholes: we all have them, they all stink, we all think our own doesn't stink, and the world is a better place when everyone doesn't have them on constant display.
- People who inject politics into everything are generally insufferable and there's a reason major communities have rules prohibiting politics.
Today, we take office software suites for granted. But in the 1970s, you were lucky to have a typewriter and access to a photocopier. But in the early 1980s, IBM rolled out PROFS — the Professional Office System — to try to revolutionize the office. It was an offshoot of an earlier internal system. The system would hardly qualify as an office suite today, but for the time it was very advanced.
The key component was an editor you could use to input notes and e-mail messages. PROFS also kept your calendar and could provide databases like phonebooks. There were several key features of PROFS that would make it hard to recognize as productivity software today. For one thing, IBM terminals were screen-oriented. The central computer would load a form into your terminal, which you could fill out. Then you’d press send to transmit it back to the mainframe. That makes text editing, for example, a very different proposition since you work on a screen of data at any one time. In addition, while you could coordinate calendars and send e-mail, you could only do that with certain people.
In general, PROFS connected everyone using your mainframe or, perhaps, a group of mainframes. In some cases, there might be gateways to other systems, but it wasn’t universal. However, it did have most of the major functions you’d expect from an e-mail system that was text-only, as you can see in the screenshot from a 1986 manual. PF keys, by the way, are what we would now call function keys.
The calendar was good, too. You could grant different users different access to your calendar. It was possible to just let people see when you were busy or mark events as confidential or personal.
You could actually operate PROFS using a command-line interface, and the PF keys were simply shorthand. That was a good thing, too. If you wanted to erase a file named Hackaday, for example, you had to type: ERASE Hackaday AUT$PROF.
Styles
PROFS messages were short and were essentially ephemeral chat messages. Of course, because of the block-mode terminals, you could only get messages after you sent something to the mainframe, or you were idle in a menu. A note was different. Notes were what we could call e-mail. They went into your inbox, and you could file them in “logs”, which were similar to folders.
If you wanted something with more gravitas, you could create documents. Documents could have templates and be merged with profiles to get information for a particular author. For example, a secretary might prepare a letter to print and mail using different profiles for different senders that had unique addresses, titles, and phone numbers.
Documents could be marked draft or final. You had your own personal data storage area, and there was also a shared storage. Draft documents could be automatically versioned. Documents also received unique ID numbers and were encoded with their creation date. Of course, you could also restrict certain documents to certain users or make them read-only for particular users.
More Features
PROFS could remind you of things or calendar appointments. It could also let you look up things like phone numbers or work with other databases. The calendar could help you find times when all participants were available. PROFS could tie into DisplayWrite (at least, by version 2) so it could spell check using custom or stock dictionaries. It also looked for problematic words such as effect vs. affect and wordy phrases or clichés.
The real game changer, though, was the ability to find documents without searching through a physical filing cabinet. The amount of time spent maintaining and searching files in a typical pre-automation business was staggering.
You could ask PROFS to suggest rewrites for a certain grade level or access a thesaurus. This all sounds ordinary now, but it was a big innovation in the 1980s.
Of course, in those days, documents were likely to be printed on a computer-controlled typewriter or, perhaps, an ordinary line printer. But how could you format using text? This all hinged on IBM’s DisplayWriter word processor.
Markup
Today we use HTML or Markdown to give hints about rendering our text. PROFS and DisplayWriter wasn’t much different, although it had its own language. The :p. tag started a paragraph. You could set off a quotation between :q. and :eq. Unnumbered lists would start with :ul., continue with :li., and end with :eul. Sounds almost familiar, right? Of course, programs like roff and WordStar had similar kinds of commands, and, truthfully, the markup is almost like strange HTML.
The Whole Office
IBM wanted to show people that this wasn’t just wordprocessing for the secretarial pool. Advanced users could customize templates and profiles. Administrators could tailor menus and add features. There were applications you could add to provide a spreadsheet capability, access different databases, and gateway to other systems like TWX or Telex.
History and Future
Supposedly, the original system was built in the late 1970s in conjunction with Amoco Research. However, we’re a little suspicious of that claim. We know of at least three other companies that were very proud of “helping IBM design PROFS.” As far as we could ever tell, that was a line IBM sales fed people when they helped them design a sign-in screen with their company name on it, and that was about it.
The system would go through several releases until it morphed into OfficeVision. As PCs started to take over, OfficeVision/2 and OS/2 were the IBM answer that few wanted. Eventually, IBM would suggest using Lotus Notes or Domino and would eventually buy Lotus in 1995 to own the products.
Scandal
One place that PROFS got a lot of public attention was during the Iran-Contra affair. Oliver North and others exchanged PROFS notes about their activities and deleted them. However, deleting a note in PROFS isn’t always a true deletion. If you send a note to several people, they all have to delete it before the system may delete it. If you send a document, deleting the message only deletes the notification that the document is ready, not the document.
Investigators recovered many “deleted” e-mails from PROFS that provided key details about the case. Oddly, around the same time, IBM offered an add-on to PROFS to ensure things you wanted to delete were really gone. Maybe a coincidence. Maybe not.
Have been thinking it over for a few weeks and finally decided I wanted to go ahead and get in on the first batch.
Not sure if the receipt number is PII, but better safe than sorry.
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Disclaimer: : All of my LLM experience is with local models in Ollama on extremely modest hardware (an old laptop with NVidia graphics) , so I can't speak for the technical reasons the context window isn't infinite or at least larger on the big player's models. My understanding is that the context window is basically its short term memory. In humans, short term memory is also fairly limited in capacity. But unlike humans, the LLM can't really see (or hold) the big picture in its mind.
But yeah, all you said is correct. Expanding on that, if you try to get it to generate something long-form, such as a novel, it's basically just generating infinite chapters using the previous chapter (or as much of the history fits into its context window) as reference for the next. This means, at minimum, it's going to be full of plot holes and will never reach a conclusion unless explicitly directed to wrap things up. And, again, given the limited context window, the ending will be full of plot holes and essentially based only on the previous chapter or two.
It's funny because I recently found an old backup drive from high school with some half-written Jurassic Park fan fiction on it, so I tasked an LLM with fleshing it out, mostly for shits and giggles. The result is pure slop that seems like it's building to something and ultimately goes nowhere. The other funny thing is that it reads almost exactly like a season of Camp Cretaceous / Chaos Theory (the animated kids JP series) and I now fully believe those are also LLM-generated.