The oldest vehicle I’ve owned, a 2004 Ford escape couldn’t even make it to 17 years old. The axle snapped due to rust damage. Road salt is so terrible for vehicles, roads and the environment

Don’t forget while sitting in the oval office trump tweeted about how something that was hurting him was a “deep state conspiracy”

“[Twoflower] also believed that anyone could understand anything he said provided he spoke loudly and slowly, that people were basically trustworthy, and that anything could be sorted out among men of goodwill if they just acted sensibly.” -The Light Fantastic, Terry Prachett

By my foggy memory of the mandatory money laundering training from when I worked at a bank a few years ago, basically any unusual transactions are supposed to be reported to the IRS, and bank employees will notice multiple large withdrawals in short succession. Also if I remember correctly the mandatory reporting amount is not per lump sum but includes over time as well. While I worked there I overheard plenty of bonkers reasons people decided to do strange things with their money so just withdrawing a large sum of money for any reason is fine. It’s your money to do with as you see fit .

Simply put, don’t try to hide what you’re doing. Just do it and own it if/when asked

Oh the best part is it was all to fix a problem on Microsoft SharePoint. Not even on-prem SharePoint!

Yeah Powershell has way more weird limitations than Bash but it’s way better than using cmd.exe

I actually had to do that due to something preventing me from upgrading to Powershell 7 on my workstation. Adapted my script for Linux and ran it in Powershell in Linux

As an administrator, powershell is an essential tool these days. There are tunables that Microsoft simply only exposes via powershell even in their cloud Microsoft 365 environments. Just last month I had to rely on Powershell to trim previous versions on SharePoint, and 2 weeks ago I had to use Powershell to adjust a parameter on Exchange.

But also being able to pop a Powershell session and quickly apply a registry fix or run a diagnostic command or even just install a piece of software without disrupting a user’s work is absolutely brilliant (plus saves a call when I can just email back and say “I’ve pushed it remotely, reboot and it should be sorted now”)

I love how this very specific topic is posted in an Autism community and not any of the tech communities and yet it’s getting potentially better engagement than if it was posted to a Linux/IT community

But onto the subject at hand, I work at an MSP at the moment (and probably not for long due to management issues) and the one thing I’ve noticed is that the MSP industry is all about risk, and deploying something they’ve not deployed to customers before is a huge risk. They’d much rather work with “the devil you know” than take the risk on something they haven’t worked with yet. Commercial vendors also have the benefit of being able to hawk stuff onto their support to free up your own techs to take more tickets (and therefore make more money) plus of course the extra cost to customers is either a non-issue or a plus due to more margin (because everything an MSP sells you is sold with a margin, usually ~20%)

I will say, this experience has further solidified my belief that paying for outsourced services will cost more than doing it in-house for most businesses. About the only way outsourcing makes sense is if you literally don’t have enough work to hire one dedicated employee to do the thing.

Not long ago I managed the claims database (among other duties) for a large company that contracts with industrial facilities. Built a report for accident free days that also happened to have a count of employees and other metrics. I quickly realized that safety was clearly a matter of the facility and/or the people running the gig and not so much related to company policy or training. Seeing some facilities with an accident every few days and others that haven’t had an accident since the turn of the century, and no obvious trends related to the number of employees it was interesting to say the least

Oh I saw something where they demonstrated there’s zero security to BIMI, so it’s just a B2B scam to invent a new thing to charge their business customers for. I’ll see if I can find it

Edit: so on a quick skim Google’s fix was literally to require valid DKIM to use BIMI so BIMI is still pretty useless as a security tool, but probably can be effective at getting organizations to actually setup proper email security

That’s fair, and if you’re buying and have the choice, getting 7th gen or newer would be absolutely ideal

I think suggesting a system with a GPU before there’s a need for a GPU (especially when one could be added later) is a bit over the top though. Especially since local AI is kinda niche within homelabbers and media en/decoding can be done on the iGPU (and realistically for Jellyfin everything should ideally be direct-play since so much quality is lost with the real-time transcoding, so it shouldn’t be hit too hard for what transcoding does occur

Of course I say this all with my home server running off a 4th gen i5 and Jellyfin configured for GPU accelerated transcode on the iGPU. I’m sure it would be better on a better CPU and GPU but meh

As a parent with a 5 year old, Minecraft has been very educational for her. She’s learned some brilliant spelling and keyboard skills, building hand-eye coordination, etc. plus Minecraft can be limited to just single player or private servers (I have a private server setup just for my family for example) so they won’t be interacting with inappropriate content or unvetted individuals

I’m much less happy about Fortnite for example, since that has random voice chat, is always online and forced Windows-only via anti-cheat

I think the not knowing how to parent part was a joke. Parenting is always figuring out how to navigate whatever new problem your kids are having, and if your kids are playing Minecraft together they definitely have an parenting experience mediating in-game disputes

Why CUDA? I don’t see any services listed that would benefit at all from a GPU, and even if they later spun up a Jellyfin or similar that can always be mapped to the integrated GPU.

Better to start with something cheap and imperfect to learn what you actually need then upgrade from there

Nah then I’m bored at work, and I hate being bored at work. 70% is the happy medium between not overextending myself and keeping myself busy and engaged enough to both enjoy my work and impress my superiors

My tactic is to maintain an average workload of about 70% of my potential, that way I’m relaxed and able to maintain my work on the bad days when I might not be 100% up to the task, plus I have the extra bandwidth for when SHTF so I can look like a hero. Apparently my 70% effort is more than enough because I’ve now had multiple bosses try to court me to return after I’ve left roles

Truth is, he wasn’t trying to. Vance wanted to show off his zombie Jesus costume, but it turned out to be a killer costume!

(I just wanted to throw something in that isn’t the same jokes everyone else is making)

Does she have the eyesight to see the quality difference?

Unfortunately this seems to be exactly the case for learning all of the weird quirks is that you just have to experience them as they happen. Fortunately most windows admin career paths include a period in an MSP where you’ll see lots of cursed configs exposing lots of edgecases, but basically keep your eyes and ears open and try to learn on your feet