_fat_santa (u/_fat_santa)

_fat_santa commented on Comet AI browser can get prompt injected from any site, drain your bank account twitter.com/zack_overflow... · Posted by u/helloplanets

_fat_santa · 7 hours ago

IMO the only place you should use Agentic AI is where you can easily rollback changes that the AI makes. Best example here is asking AI to build/update/debug some code. You can ask it to make changes but all those changes are relatively safe since you can easily rollback with git.

Using agentic AI for web browsing where you can't easily rollback an action is just wild to me.

_fat_santa commented on End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs theregister.com/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/rntn

gjsman-1000 · 5 days ago

It's not quite that hard. Hypothetically, you have a digital certificate, signed by the government, for your VPN provider with a list of VPN endpoints. Your client presents that certificate to the ISP, unblocking ports in that specific instance, to those endpoints. Otherwise, all common ports are blocked, and anything that smells VPN-y gets throttled.

Alternatively, the UK could have a self-service whitelisting system, when a legal entity signs a contract stating that traffic inside the tunnel is also filtered, at the endpoints listed.

Also: The UK government, believe me, does not expect 16 year olds to be capable of spinning up EC2. And if somehow they do, how are they paying for it?

_fat_santa · 5 days ago

> The UK government, believe me, does not expect 16 year olds to be capable of spinning up EC2. And if somehow they do, how are they paying for it?

Speaking from personal experience, never underestimate a bored 16 year old with access to YouTube and a generous AWS free tier.

_fat_santa commented on End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs theregister.com/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/rntn

gruez · 5 days ago

>The only step the UK can take is to force ISP's to block these VPN's which will kick off a cat and mouse game and for the reasonable technical, getting around any VPN ban will be as easy as spinning up an EC2 outside the UK.

They can make it very difficult if they want, just look at China[1]. It's not impossible to get around, but it's not as easy as buying a random VPS, and following a tutorial for openvpn/wireguard.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentat...

_fat_santa · 5 days ago

Personally I don't think China is a good comparison in this case. Yes China has the great firewall but they also a highly top-down government whereas the UK us much more like the US.

Beyond straight government control, there's also the politics of all of it. China being a one party system doesn't really care if something is popular with the public but with the UK's parliamentary system, one wrong move and your party gets voted out of power.

_fat_santa commented on End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs theregister.com/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/rntn

_fat_santa · 5 days ago

The UK is gonna realize real quick they can't just ban their way out of the mess they have created. Most VPN providers are going to be outside their jurisdiction and players like Mullvad will have no way to actually comply because of the way their VPN's are setup.

The only step the UK can take is to force ISP's to block these VPN's which will kick off a cat and mouse game and for the reasonable technical, getting around any VPN ban will be as easy as spinning up an EC2 outside the UK.

_fat_santa commented on Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity elliotcsmith.com/linkedin... · Posted by u/smitec

etra0 · 7 days ago

LinkedIn posts really read like an alternative reality (which I would not like to be a part of, lol).

I cannot take seriously most of what I read over there. The comments are also often toxic, the whole business is... just weird.

What's funny as a personal anecdote, I've found more jobs through Twitter (pre-X) than through LinkedIn.

Seriously. And I've tried using LinkedIn for job hunt.

_fat_santa · 7 days ago

LinkedIn I found has two very different purposes that often get mixed up.

1. Getting in contact with recruiters. Here you're basically inside the chat window 100% of the time, the only time you leave this is to connect with recruiters. I can speak from experience that this works, and will get you jobs.

2. Marketing. This is where you see the incessant posts from folks building "personal brands" but also folks marketing various products. While I haven't waded into that territory yet, I've spoken to many really good salespeople that have all said that LinkedIn drives leads for them like no other.

My takeaway from both of these is: "man LinkedIn is a goofy ass place but it works"

_fat_santa commented on Good system design seangoedecke.com/good-sys... · Posted by u/dondraper36

alixanderwang · 8 days ago

> I’m often alone on this. Engineers look at complex systems with many interesting parts and think “wow, a lot of system design is happening here!” In fact, a complex system usually reflects an absence of good design.

For any job-hunters, it's important you forget this during interviews.

In the past I've made the mistake of trying to convey this in system design interviews.

Some hypothetical startup app

> Interviewer: "Well what about backpressure?"

>"That's not really worth considering for this amount of QPS"

> Interviewer: "Why wouldn't you use a queue here instead of a cron job?"

> "I don't think it's necessary for what this app is, but here's the tradeoffs."

> Interviewer: "How would you choose between sql and nosql db?"

> "Doesn't matter much. Whatever the team has most expertise in"

These are not the answers they're looking for. You want to fill the whiteboard with boxes and arrows until it looks like you've got Kubernetes managing your Kubernetes.

_fat_santa · 8 days ago

This goes back to "interviews go both ways". All those answers you gave are very reasonable and if I was your interviewer I'd pass you with flying colors. On the other hand if you're interviewing at a place that doesn't pass you with flying colors for those responses, that really says more about them than it does about you and may not be a great place to work.

But to your point, many times one interviews for a job they don't really have the luxury of getting rejections and need to land somewhere fast so they can keep paying the mortgage. So while yes interviewing is a two way street, there's still quite a bit of calibration to make sure you land on the other person's side of the street so to speak.

_fat_santa commented on Meta appoints anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theorist Robby Starbuck as AI bias advisor thepinknews.com/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/pentacent_hq

iknowstuff · 10 days ago

The fuck? I can’t imagine anyone at Meta, a company full of smart people in the bay area, actually wanted to work with people like that?

Just how intertwined those corporations are with the government? Between this and the sudden shift against DEI policies even in companies who are staunch supporters of diversity I wonder what kinda pressure the gov is applying

_fat_santa · 10 days ago

They didn't do it willingly. His hiring was part of a settlement for an AI defamation case [1]

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-robby-starbuck-ai-lawsuit-s...

_fat_santa commented on Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated] cnn.com/2025/08/12/busine... · Posted by u/mastry

mark-r · 10 days ago

To be honest, I thought they were already completely gone. The article mentions them filing for bankruptcy in 2012.

They were pretty much doomed from the start. They had built their business by taking a cut from every picture you took, from the rolls of film to the developing to the printing. There was absolutely nothing in the digital camera realm that could duplicate that; their revenue dropped like a rock. If they had sold every single digital camera ever bought, it wouldn't have made up for it.

The contrast between Kodak and Fujifilm is fascinating. Fujifilm survived by pivoting to manufacturing critical components for LCD panels, which were exploding in popularity at the time. https://web.archive.org/web/20250704224940/https://petapixel...

_fat_santa · 10 days ago

I think where Kodak really missed in recent years is not jumping on the instant camera trend. Fujifilm has their Instax line and there's Polaroid with their "OG" cameras. It would have been easy for Kodak to become a leader in this space just with their brand cache.

_fat_santa commented on Meta accessed women's health data from Flo app without consent, says court malwarebytes.com/blog/new... · Posted by u/amarcheschi

_fat_santa · 10 days ago

My wife uses Flo though every time I see her open the app and input information the tech side of my brain is quite alarmed. An app like that keeps very very personal information and really highlights for me the need to educate non-technical folks on information security.

_fat_santa commented on Multimodal WFH setup: flight SIM, EE lab, and music studio in 60sqft/5.5M² sdo.group/study... · Posted by u/brunohaid

_fat_santa · 12 days ago

It's cool but also kinda wild to hire a design firm to figure out the layout of your home office. Personally my home office is very "personal" and one of the things I enjoyed the most is figuring out where everything should go.

To me this is the same as hiring a development firm to build you a set of dotfiles.