Daniel V.

Software Automation 🤖
Cats 🐈‍⬛
Linux 🐧

I break shit for a living.

Certified Pissed and ready to throw hands with this goddamn regime.

You'll get mostly pictures of my lovely Bean (cat), occasional politics posting, and some general yapping about tech.

"I'm glad to know that the Software Engineering department isn't the only team that expects Daniel to break everything"

Trans Rights are Human Rights 🏳️‍⚧️

(Please have some posts or an introductory post on your account before following)

Pronouns: They/Them, He/Him, A/Problem
Cat’s Name: Bean

Last Notes

2025-12-08 15:59:55 UTC

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It looks like the bid isn’t for Netflix but for WB, basically trying to swipe the deal out from under Netflix.
(Still a bad situation wrt monopolistic tendencies within the media space)

2025-10-31 17:36:42 UTC

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profit sharing, NDA, termination clauses, etc

2025-10-31 03:09:35 UTC

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I got the LitterRobot for Bean because early after I adopted him I caught something being off as he fussed about with the catbox for a bit, and it was the start of a UTI that I caught super early on. Trip to the vet and ordering the litter robot so I can track frequency and check for changes and such is super important for me. The convenience is Nice but is Secondary for why Ive got it.
Knowing that if the company ever enshittifies that I have a backup solution to run it entirely offline and wrap my own services and such around it makes me feel SO much better, because it means I have an out in case something goes wrong and I don’t have to spend a ton a second time on a replacement.

2025-10-31 02:19:13 UTC

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Skipping the LLM and instead rigging up a speaker to praise my boy anytime he uses the catbox and then scolds him when he goes to fight it when it is cycling.
Or using the LLM to make each compliment special.
(He likes to smack the litter then it “waterfalls” back into the base)
(It hasn’t been damaged somehow in the 3 years he’s regularly boxed with it but it will trip the bonnet sensor)

2025-10-31 01:30:58 UTC

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Awesome, thank you so much!

2025-10-31 01:26:54 UTC

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do you have the link for this handy? 👀

2025-09-10 15:30:09 UTC

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the pdf has a bunch of other interesting stuff as well, touching on immigration enforcement, executive orders vs lawsuits, and other stuff too.
I’m going through it right now and learning a bunch from it. (I looked it up and only skimmed to find the graph in the screenshot for posting but am finding more in here as well that isn’t at all roses and kittens)

2025-09-10 15:25:32 UTC

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this is where the charts are from, it’s in the pdf linked on this page:
https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/nam/en/insights/latest-and-featured/eotm/fair-shakes

2025-09-10 15:21:09 UTC

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The screenshot is from a JP Morgan article released last week where it discusses how Capital Expenditure towards AI is fully 35-45% of the entire US economy GDP for the past 3 fiscal quarters.
We are fully in a recession/depression except for one industry that is a statistical outlier of fanatics with more wealth than brains dumping into a dead end technology stack at the expense of basically everything else.
Our economy is kept afloat by a Spider Georg outlier industry.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/115/180/653/965/899/690/original/56f91e43f4cafe58.png

2025-09-02 01:24:02 UTC

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https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/115/132/087/727/639/831/original/c7f9df93e4d64630.jpeg

2025-06-29 19:15:56 UTC

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I really super appreciate your thoroughness in your answer, thank you for taking the time to explain it all in depth like this. Ive conceptually known about a lot of these bits, but I’ve never spent the time to think about them as a consolidated whole like this. I super appreciate the insight a lot. The hardware angle in particular for x86_64 in particular is one that I hadn’t thought about, but did have in mind specifically when I got an iPhone. Funny how that works lol
Off the cuff, and no worries if you’re busy I can look it up later when I’m a little more free to do some research, do Pixels have a similar process of hardware security between components like we see with iPhones, and are those measures more widely available across the Android ecosystem or is it mainly just Pixel (if they do support them)?

2025-06-29 18:25:37 UTC

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can you expand a bit on what you mean for the latter paragraph? Let’s go with an assumption of using either Linux or a BSD variant on for the laptop. (Unless the assumption was just using Windows the Yeah, absolutely that would be the case.)
If one is using FDE with LUKS and airplane mode properly powers off the LTE modem, would this not be a setup that gets similar degrees of privacy? Maybe with some additional steps for obfuscating finger printing and such when on the browser as well if we are aiming for GrapheneOS levels of privacy.
I’m more than happy to read links to documentation and such, don’t feel any obligation to break it all down for dummies if you can point to some learning resources about it. But I’d appreciate the insight that you can offer about it a lot

2025-06-29 13:21:10 UTC

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hear me out:
Laptop with an LTE card so it can receive those texts and also have mobile data while not being a smartphone

2025-06-16 22:20:25 UTC

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anyone wanna help me figure out connecting my old TRS-80 model 100 to the internet? and figure out an ActivityPub implementation that is written in basic and can run on… I think it’s got 16Kb of memory?

2025-06-06 20:33:29 UTC

Since I've left my last job, I've been thinking about the guy who used me as an alternative to ChatGPT whenever he hit a problem that he couldn't vibe code the answer out of at work.
He basically rotted his own brain by compulsively using ChatGPT in lieu of actually thinking with most any of the projects he was working on. Instead of taking the time to read through code in our framework, look up documentation, or do any sort of debugging, he instead just begged and pleaded with ChatGPT to try and get somewhere because "it was faster." Basically just really hammering his brain with the Programmer's Slot Machine. ([@davidgerard](https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard ) wrote a really good article here about this specific gambling addiction angle here. I highly highly recommend reading/watching the corresponding YouTube video:
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/ )
Back to the story; When that wasn't working, which was a significant portion of the time, he'd then just turn and use me as a "more informed alternative" to ChatGPT.
I worked fully remote and the majority of our interactions was via a Teams chat. which apparently crossed some wires in his monkey brain and made him start just... Basically verbally barraging me like he would with the company ChatGPT instance. No thoughts at all, just an immediate process of:
- Ask vague question
- Get guess for an answer with a request for more details
- Try applying the guess blindly without thinking if it's applicable at all
- Have it not work and just report back that it didn't work.
- No follow-up details, no further explanation of what was going on or what he's trying to do. Nothing added past the original vague situation
- If lucky, I might get a screenshot of part of the error, meticulously sliced before it gave something useful in the output because he stopped reading error output to things and made no attempt to understand it. (Why? ChatGPT can do that part!)
- Rinse and Repeat until I get fed up and get into a call with him
- Fix the thing in less than a minute, pointing out that he should have been able to tell what was wrong almost immediately if he actually dropped a break-point and debugged the code at *literally any point* along the way
- Fuck off immediately after getting his fix, no thank you or anything
- start the process anew the following day when he vibe coded himself into a corner all over again
I literally had to go to leadership and make them have a talk with him and get him to leave me the fuck alone at work, after repeated attempts to establish boundaries about it, due to how much time it sucked out of me being able to work on other projects. Effectively just doubling up my work and slamming me with burn out right at the start of the year for absolutely no reason other than his belligerent insistence to just Not Do His Job Without His Hand Being Held By A Chat Window.
It rapidly went from a "He sometimes asks informed questions that I can answer and help him with. I enjoy working with him" to "The dude isn't even trying in the slightest and is now basically offloading his work onto me because he broke his capacity to actually do work independently of an external chat window. I fucking hate him and I hope he gets in a car wreck so I can get a break from the bleakness of dealing with him every goddamn morning"
ChatGPT has basically just been an absolute blight for me since it's inception. Going from the team being generally pro-crypto to intensely pro-genAI/LLM because their favorite scammers (er.. I mean YouTubers) had them hooked on a fantasy of some day making it Big by jumping from one Hype cycle to the next. I sincerely was very close to just finding an entirely different career path altogether because of just how incredibly shitty it was working with that team on just about anything, but lacking the job experience on the resume to land someplace else.
Nobody wanted to be an actual expert, nobody really wanted to learn anything. They had their degree and ChatGPT, which means they learned all they ever will need. ...While working in an industry that tends to re-invent itself every half decade or so while half-assing solutions with an outsourced bullshit generator. 🫠
All in the name of "Well it got me from point A to point B faster." and leaving it at that, despite taking significantly longer than they should have from the get go over it.
I've seen and lived what an AI Fueled future looks like:
Mediocre men harassing their talented and likely autistic peers until their peers just up and fuckin leave to a different organization out of frustration and exhaustion.
I think down the road, we'll be able to measure the negative impact using LLMs has on people's cognitive faculties by comparing it to horse kicks to the head, and only be exaggerating it by a little bit.

2025-06-06 16:56:22 UTC

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this is one of the first things I noticed about using LLMs and talked about it as such for a while.
It’s gambling addiction Programmer Edition and that recognition of that fact made any respect I had at my last org just plummet once I realized how hooked the techbro leadership was with their new favorite slot machine.
It’s no wonder the biggest AI hyper at work were also the same people who were super into cryptocurrency. 🙄