cecilkorik

If only it were that easy, if you do that, the managers will be grateful certainly, but they will also endlessly demand more proof and validation that the system is now completely safe from certain doom until they feel comfortable, which is never. In a lot of cases it’s simply easier to convince them that the system was never vulnerable to certain doom in the first place, because you were of course already 5 steps ahead of this even in the planning stages, and for some reason they have an easier time accepting that, as long as they still have every reason to believe you are a brilliant tech god who would never personally fall victim to such a common vulnerability. I suppose it’s really less about the reality of the situation and more about what kind of corporate image you are cultivating and maintaining for yourself.

I mean, that’s literally Accenture’s default business model (same as almost any consulting/professional services company), so it shouldn’t be surprising. My point is that it’s not an indictment of AI, and their AI usage isn’t actually going to go down; it’s just Accenture doing Accenture things. They’re not a charity, they’re not using AI for fun, they’re using it to make profit, and they make profit by charging their customers for every cent of AI they use on their behalf, usually with a hefty markup, in addition to everything and anything else they can justify charging against their customer’s accounts. It’s a very profitable business model, and I’m sure they love using AI for it and will continue using AI just as heavily if not even more in the future.

The title is misleading. They didn’t cap it, they just declared that if you are spending more than that, you have to be able to explain what you’re spending it on and why, giving it a business reason and a project to associate the costs to, which I expect almost all Claude users at Accenture probably can. This is simply an accounting change, not a company-wide shutdown of Claude.

Heavy use remains possible, but it now needs a budget owner.

Fair point, but not any less fulfilling than my day job already was, arguably maybe a little more fun to be spending the company’s money on nonsense. My job pays my bills very adequately, that’s normally the only fulfilling thing about it.

I build a Linux system with multiple NICs. It’s heavyweight for a router, and probably not very efficient, but it does the job very well and I love it. I’m using foomuuri to manage the NFTables and NAT and it was very easy (although it’s a very obscure piece of software and the documentation and community isn’t excessively comprehensive, you might have better luck with something more common but it works nicely for me). It can pull in all the adblocking lists and all that fun stuff. I find it pretty intuitive to configure, at least compared to the horrors of most networking/routing configuration nonsense.

For DHCP I tried using the ISC’s new “kea” in the hopes it would be modern and clean alternative to the venerable old isc-dhcp-server but it turned out to be a horrible mistake. They made some awful, insane, unjustifiable design decisions in that software. It gets confused about IP addresses already being claimed (by the exact same host/MAC) address because some arbitrary value changed in how it identifies itself, and then does absurd things with static leases, it just randomly decides to give it a dynamic lease instead, and then will fixate on that dynamic lease and never let it have the static lease back, I fought with it for months, it kept breaking my network for absolutely no reason and it was a nightmare.

Back to trusty old isc-dhcp-server for me. And of course bind for DNS, I’m a bit old-school but it’s very comfortable.

dnsmasq might be a lighter-weight and easier alternative you could consider, I think it does DHCP as well, convenient.

And of course, being a full Linux server means you can put all kinds of other stuff on it too. Stuff that needs to be both publicly visible and privately visible on the LAN seems like an obvious fit, but in fact it’s probably the worst place to put those services, because you run into issues with NAT hairpinning and other nonsense. For services that are strictly intended for the private LAN/VPN, or services that are strictly public facing, it can handle those just fine by restricting them to a specific interface. But you should avoid stuff that needs to listen on both sides of the connection, it can be done, but it’s tricky and annoying and not ideal.

If you need both internal and external access, port-forwarding from the outside through the NAT to another dedicated internal host is a much better solution if possible, it’s still a bit tricky (you may have to override the DNS for that domain internally to use the private IP instead of the public one) but it’s quite reliable and functional once you have it set up.

None of this is really for the faint of heart, it’ll likely require a fair bit of trial and error and physical access to the machine to resolve issues. But it’s a fun project and I think the end result is worth it.

I’m not sure that’s an accurate or defensible perspective on why they failed. From Wikipedia:

Pets.com lacked a workable business plan and lost money on nearly every sale because, even before the cost of advertising, it was selling merchandise for approximately one-third the price it paid to obtain the products.[22] Pets.com tried to build a customer base by offering discounts and free shipping, but it was impossible to turn a profit while absorbing the costs of shipping for heavy bags of cat litter and cans of pet food within a business field whose conventional profit margins are only two to four percent.[22][23] The company hoped to shift customers into higher-margin purchases, but customer purchasing patterns failed to change and during its second fiscal year the company continued to sell merchandise for approximately 27% less than cost, so the dramatic rise in sales during Pets.com’s second fiscal year only hastened the firm’s demise.[22]

It’s the “Pets.com” of AI.

It’s a DDoS attack on human capacity, effort and attention, always has been.

I’m from the 40+ demographic but also weird and I don’t think it’s really about age or generation. I don’t care about how you reached this particular stage of enlightenment; all that matters is if you’re on the fediverse, y’all are my people.

Good man(/woman/person/other-identity-that-represents-you)!

My biggest complaint is calling it “Pi” anything, there are already way too many things called “Pi”, some of which are for Raspberry Pi, some of which aren’t, and then there’s Pi itself (the number) it’s just an all-around confusing name and it sometimes makes related things incredibly difficult to search for and find.

The biggest issue with the Pinto was not the Pinto itself, it was how Ford discussed the potential issues with it internally. It was their very well documented preference for money over protecting human life that caused the controversy.

We know this really happens all the time, at all companies and in all industries, but Ford was punished for saying the quiet part out loud (amongst themselves) and getting caught doing it. We are all supposed to at least put on a show of human lives being more important than money, and Ford failed to put on the show, and for that they were punished.

We still don’t care about human life, but at least we all felt better about it afterwards.