Recent content by alavaz

Have you been to Redmond? Spend some time there if not and feel it out. It's uber expensive to live within an hour commute of MS. I used to commute from Tacoma and getting stuck in traffic on the 405 for 2+ hours in the morning was not uncommon. Other than that, MS pay and benefits are top...

I've been rocking the Mudi 2 for a couple of years. Works great with any SIM i've thrown in it. I actually like all of the GL products. I use the travel routers pretty extensively for work with various VPNs and they've all been solid.

Just saw this, but most of the work that I do as an integrator involves planning out some kind of system-of-system and then executing. So we may have a task like displaying a manned ISR feed on some TV's that are side mounted to the wall of a helicopter (this is a simple but recent example). So...

Ever consider shifting to Systems Integrator in like Aerospace / Defense? You already have all the skills more than likely.

It's probably a wise decision not taking a job you know you wouldn't like... that being said my emergency plan for if I ever got laid off by surprise would be to take any job that pays me more than unemployment (and that shouldn't be hard) and then immediately start searching for a more long...

AI models are choking on junk data | Fortune - No one saw this coming

I've always used olt.com - it's ancient and janky but relatively clear to follow and I've never had to pay to file federal taxes. The state stuff is like $8 which is also the cheapest I've found. https://kb.olt.com/KB/articles/indiv_article_detail/schedule-c-2025-report-business-income-deductions

I'm a little worried that all of the chip makers are going to shift to making these AI tensor bullshit chips and good old fashioned general purpose computing is going to be hard(er) to come by. On the security topic, I've seen some wild stuff than can happen with model poisoning and other AI...

For the type of work that I do, I would definitely think I am hitting the ceiling on salary (tech companies included). The big pay raises would come from jumping to specific tech companies and probably involve taking a more managerial type role. I'm sure one day I'll go this direction but the...

I find myself valuing job satisfaction over money these days. Or at least that's what I am telling myself lol. I am 100% dead sure (not shooting for a weird brag here - I promise) I could probably get close to 100k annual more than what I make now, plus all of the stock wizbang shit. The...

Ironically, we've been doing this for a couple of years. You can add RAGs pretty quickly to your own LLM chatbots and create collections of documentation for it to reference. It's a poor mans enterprise search but it's been way better than anything we've had up until now. It obviously doesn't...

They probably have Nessus or something running a canned DNS attack surface scan. It can be a real vulnerability - i.e. you have a CNAME of company.com pointing to myshit.s3.amazon.com, but deleted the myshit bucket. Someone could theoretically take the "myshit" name and then your CNAME will...

Pretty much every big tech company is getting after this in some form or fashion. Microsoft is trying to sell us on their Purview product that they claim is like "zero trust for AI". With a buzzword salad like that, how could it not be good? I do try to maintain a little bit of hygiene with my...

I recently used Claude to replace an ugly shell script I've been maintaining for 5+ years that would configure XML for a java application that we have to run. I was using environment variables along with shell to do a bunch of regex against a default xml config that the app generates but...

For the past 5 or so years I've kept a running log of things I do in Task/Action/Result format. Even for meetings I use that format so that my impact (or lack there of) on attending can be quantified. Then I can copy/past these notes into all the Jiras, SharePoints, emails, and other BS I have...