Now that everything corporate is forced into the cloud, using a VM doesn’t carry all the extra downsides it used to.

and the bonus is that, when the workday is done, I have a machine I actually own and can use without breaking policy.

I would be amazed if there are not interlocks to prevent an update while in drive. On normal updates there is definitely an interlock, plus a timer, but theoretically it is possible.

You can envision some version of post LLM find/replace, but then the context wouldn’t match if you asked it a direct non-exact question.

And most importantly, you can just test each of the instructions and see how it reacts.

58 (pay) - 21 (tax) - 13 (rent) -13 (transit) leaves $900/month or $30/day.

Full time grads are around $20k higher….so roughly triple the amount left over.

Or you commute further. I’m mid career and commuted more than hour most of my career because it let me get a better/cheaper apartment while affording a used car.

The main issues are, in general: 1) increased regulation, which includes internal self-regulation. Lots of rules that are preventing potential minor problems, but have a lot of overhead to follow. 2) large projects are treated like a Christmas Tree. Everybody expects their vaguely adjacent hobby horse to be addressed by the project… so scope keeps growing. There is ALWAYS something you can point to that has a good cost/benefit; and always addressing these ensures that the project never actually finishes. 3) lack of decision making. There is a general analysis paralysis and fear of making the wrong call. It’s often cheaper to just move ahead and risk rework. By not moving ahead, change orders are being incurred anyway.

As much as a hate saying it, the best thing for any large project in these orgs is being run by a semi-dictator who has enough political capital internal to the org, and who strongly objects to anything outside of scope.

(For others, it’s a method to follow people across multiple services without being a normal feed. A person who updates only shows up once.)

The bigger problem is the freights just have no interest in sharing the tracks with passenger trains, and requiring heavier and more expensive passenger trains is a convenient way to price the project to death.

The fact that Sharepoint sucks* doesn’t matter… because anything else is seen as a risk.

* folders with lots of files are hard to scroll through because each page is lazy loaded, the automation functions are buggy, logins between different M365 tenants breaks and is not correctable by a normal site admin, human readable URL paths aren’t standard, search is shit, tables/filters are buggy, the new interface hides a bunch of the permissions logic, some things like permission groups need to be managed via outlook, etc etc. I’m sure a bunch of my gripes are technically fixable, but these aren’t things that should need a web search in order to use/fix.

But it still makes some dumb mistakes. It is not ‘full self driving.’ It’s 99% percent Autopilot… but I still need to pay attention to the road. (And it enforces this more/better than it used to via the driver camera camera)

I don’t want to guess how long that last 1% will take to be a low enough level of risk. All I can say is that 4 years ago it would do something hazardous every couple minutes. Now I can go hours without disengaging for a safety issue. Most disengages I have now are because it is more cautious than a human driver, or because a scenario is something that I wouldn’t be able to react fast enough to fix IF it did the wrong thing.

Since passenger trains are usually short and often have a wired bus) they don’t really need this system.

1) The brakes take an extra couple seconds to apply (note: this is only used on long trains… so stopping is over a minute anyway)

2) The emergency brakes apply. This is considered a safe condition, and for Positive Train Control is considered the ‘safe state’.

If someone tries to utilize this vulnerability, the EOT device will be shutoff. On the few tracks where it’s actually required, there are mitigations to still operate safely.

This would be really easy to annoy a single train crew. This would be really hard to do to geographically diverse trains.

‘Slamming in the brakes’ is the default safe condition for a train. The freight train Positive Train Control does this automatically if the operating engineer breaks certain speed/location rules. It probably happens thousands of times a day at speed.

This whole thing is FUD.

The system with the vuln is just an overlay.

Except for 1 train in the US, no passenger trains use this function. It is only for long freight trains.

If you block it, the train still brakes…. Just the propagation is at the speed of sound instead of speed of light. Functionally, it doesn’t matter.

You can theoretically cause the brakes to apply, but then this system just gets cut out anyway. It’s not really required.

Old school Open-CV was able to see tracks well from an onboard monocular camera, but calibration and scale was annoying. Track width is accurate enough that I was able to use it to input a bunch of head-end video to map the tracks.

It was mostly just a modified edge detect where the tracks approximately would be. Once finding the tracks, you could automatically calculate the camera's height, lateral location, and angle.