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'

it's missing the element zapper and has some other limitations, but it works pretty well for the most part

combined with ublacklist and sponsorblock it's fairly good coverage for safari

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

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)

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

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

  $excel = New-Object -ComObject excel.application

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/faqs/html/ecb.fa...

Read the FAQ, it's about no longer relying on US payment processors for handling transactions in a different country that may not support your country's payment system

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

https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...

it's the cornerstone of their strategy to invest in local, sovereign ai models in an attempt to court attention from persons / organizations wary of us tech

it's better to understand the concern over mozilla's announcement the following way i think:

- mozilla knows that their revenue from default search providers is going to dry up because ai is largely replacing manual searching

- mozilla (correctly) identifies that there is a potential market in eu for open, sovereign tech that is not reliant on us tech companies

- mozilla (incorrectly imo) believes that attaching ai to firefox is the answer for long term sustainability for mozilla

with this framing, mozilla has only a few options to get the revenue they're seeking according to their portfolio, and it involves either more search / ai deals with us tech companies (which they claim to want to avoid), or harvesting data and selling it like so many other companies that tossed ai onto software

the concern about us tech stack dominations are valid and probably there is a way to sustain mozilla by chasing this, but breaking the us tech stack dominance doesn't require another browser / ai model, there are plenty already. they need to help unseat stuff like gdocs / office / sharepoint and offer a real alternative for the eu / other interested parties -- simply adding ai is mozilla continuing their history of fad chasing and wondering why they don't make any money, and demonstrates a lack of understanding imo about, well, modern life

my concern over the announcement is that mozilla doesn't seem to have learned anything from their past attempts at chasing fads and likely they will end up in an even worse position

firefox and other mozilla products should be streamlined as much as possible to be the best N possible with these kinds of side projects maintained as first party extensions, not as the new focus of their development, and they should invest the money they're planning to dump into their ai ambitions elsewhere, focusing on a proper open sovereign tech stack that they can then sell to eu like they've identified in their portfolio statement

the announcement though makes it seem like mozilla believes they can just say ai and also get some of the ridiculous ai money, and that does not bode well for firefox as a browser or mozilla's future

if people are meant to depend on your endpoints, they need to be able to depend on all of them

you will always have ppl who don't respond to deprecation notices, the best you can do is give them reliable information on what to expect -- if they hide the warnings and forget, that's their business

but intentionally making problems without indication that its intentional results in everyone (including your own team) being frustrated and doing more work

you cannot force ppl to update their code and trying to agitate them into doing it only serves to erode confidence in the product, it doesn't make the point ppl think it makes, even if the court of public opinion sides with you

cover your bases and make a good faith effort to notify and then deal with the inevitable commentary, there will always be some who miss the call to update

black markets and opposition members i’ve used / talked with focus on disposability not security

the premise of their communications is always “the platform is bugged” and in case of opposition members “the government can always just beat you and trick you into unlocking your phone”

deals happen on messenger all the time and burning messages / rotating phones and accounts is very common. for opposition members, messaging apps are purely for benign communication and actual discussion happens in person or in truly destructible formats or it’s not recorded at all

periodically anon burner message apps appear on app stores and rotate out pretty fast once they start getting too much attention

the idea of a perfectly secure app for communication is currently mostly a fantasy; if a malicious actor wants to get your info and communication they will. this doesn’t mean give up completely and be insecure but instead just be in a position to ditch the app when it becomes necessary, if you need that level of security

it’s better people be trained to understand the reality of what can be done with the communication methods they use and how they can be punked so they can make informed decisions — i’m fine with signal’s goals and efforts but i’m not a fan of signal advocates treating security and privacy like another round of the OS wars, that teaches people the wrong lesson and makes it harder to convince ppl privacy and security are a problem we need to take seriously not just for criminals but for everyone. privacy and security benefit us all or it benefits no one

depending on the resource you're accessing, you can get 5+ sections each with their own ui/ux on the same page/tab and it can be confusing to understand where you're at in your resources

if you're having trouble visualizing it, imagine an url where each new level is a different application with its own ui/ux and purpose all on the same webpage

The poor implementation is not really relevant, it's companies deciding they own the internet and can take whatever they want, let everyone else deal with the consequences. The companies do not care what the impact of their ai non-sense is..