I may not know AI very well but I know that automatic sinks, soap dispensers, and toilets don't work for me because they weren't tested against people with my skin tone. And these are low-stakes use cases.
I really don't like thinking about that same problem, but with AI thrown in the mix. And I'm not even factoring in malicious intent yet.
I may not buy in to the "Horizon Zero Dawn incoming" mentality yet but I do know there's great potential for great harm if we don't get ethics in place before AI really takes off.
When I was younger lightning struck our apartment building and it killed my consumer router. I replaced it and put it on the surge protector.
A few months later we got struck again. The router survived but the building caught fire.
Now that I'm older I just accept the risk that "sometimes nature hates you". Instead of jumping through hoops to protect my gear from nature I just set aside money to replace anything I can't afford to lose.
Life's too short to play tug of war with the planet and I'd rather set aside $50/month to pay for replacements when I need them.
>Yes, I agree, but he's bringing that from prior experience, not our company...
That's exactly what I'm saying! I don't think he's guarded because of you guys but I do think he's guarded. It's gonna take effort to get that guard down- especially if he's been formally punished for asking for help before (again not saying you guys have done this to him- just that it's possible it happened to him at some prior point in his life, like childhood or a previous job). I see this less as a "hey man, not asking for help is hurting us" and more of "what can I do to support you better?"
Especially if he spent 2 weeks on an urgent issue- was everyone else so swamped that they couldn't coach homeboy? Was this not actually an urgent issue? I would ask the team "how did we even get here? How did we let this task slip so far without progress? What can we change today to prevent this from happening again?" Note that I'm explicitly calling out the entire team, because at the end of the day a teammate struggling and not getting help is a whole team issue even if said teammate never asked for help.
Personally I think this can be solved with coaching for the whole team ideally but at the very least, have homeboy job shadow/pair program with a mentor for a while. If you guys aren't Agile I'd see about adopting those principles- 2 weeks of silent churn on a 2-day issue feels like a much bigger problem to me than someone not asking for help when they need it- either that wasn't a 2-day issue (just because YOU could do it in 2 days doesn't mean EVERYONE could) or it was a classic case of "calling something urgent to get people to act on it but not treating it like it's actually urgent." Not a knock to you guys at all- "storming" is a healthy part of team-building! As you all develop more as a team problems like these will be a thing of the past.
EDIT: the first job was a hellhole. The second job I delegated something I probably shouldn't have- that was my mistake 100%. The second job was very well led for the most part
That does make sense but try to look at it this way: if YOU got burned for asking for help before would YOU individually forget that experience and ask for help again?
It's really easy to think about it from one perspective- even if that perspective makes logical sense to is- but how you perceive it and how another does are going to be different. Absent formal policy explicitly stating that "being wrong is okay" someone that's been slapped once for this is likely not going to put themselves in position to get slapped that way again.
I don't know the guy so you very well could be right about him, but from my experience people that do stuff like this tend to do it for fear of punishment, much like how a child will lie to their parents face about something the parent clearly saw them do
>"...Throw in access to a smartphone where you’re bombarded with images and videos of the best version of everyone you know’s lives and you start feeling even more like you are the problem and are more likely to take your life when in a vulnerable position..."
This is exactly my point- it is NOT the smartphone's fault. This is the fault of social media/advertisers and the fact that people refuse to get off of social media (because why work for money when you can just trade your privacy for a sponsorship deal and 10k followers). Nobody is "bombarding" you with anything if you just don't use those services, and if you replace "smartphone" with "Internet", "computer", "TV", etc... Your statement is still 100% true. I'm no expert but to me this is a dead ringer that the _smartphone_ isn't the root problem, and it would be unreasonable to blame this on "every device capable of displaying a webpage."
This is a "corporations suck" issue- not a technical issue. Smartphones are a convenient punching bag to blame, just like how millennials were "being corrupted" by violent video games.
Your other points are absolutely rock solid- no objections (especially the always-on camera bit, and not just because of bullying). It's this one point I take issue with. The social media and advertising companies are at fault- not the technology those companies use (yet. I love VR/AR but I do NOT like where it's going right now).
If it helps make sense of how I view this problem, the gun industry is a direct parallel. To fight gun violence we want to go after the sellers. Replace "gun" with "smartphone" and ask yourself: "does it make sense to go after smartphone manufacturers and sellers to stop cyber bullying? Is it fair to hurt the eCommerce, gaming, telephone, etc... Unrelated companies because ad companies are driving kids to despair?" To me the answer is "no", because I don't think it's fair to impact other digital companies relying on smartphones for business because a few of them are problematic. I also don't think it's fair to punish sport shooters, hunters, etc... By impacting their rights to (legal) gun ownership just because sellers want to protect their bottom lines.
Something needs to change, but I don't believe it's smartphones. We need to make it illegal to base a business model on the suffering of others.
I don't want an office. I don't even want to go outside.
More pay would absolutely bring me into the office though- especially if it means I can afford the wear and tear on my car plus the 20 hours of my life drained being stuck in traffic each month.
But at the same time, I'd much rather be given the freedom to prioritize life over working... So I'd consider coming in every business day if I could make full-time rates at part-time hours. Just cut my salary and working hours in half and let me do my thing!
It jumbles my jimmies hearing about outright rejection of modern tech by industries that would best benefit from said tech.
I'd almost be willing to bet money that your landlord would charge a "renewable energy" fee even if they're just dumping power back to the grid for $$$ even if they had the panels
So I actually "repurposed" a riser cable from an old ITX build to slap it into my primary proxmox server to play around with home-rolled VDI. Surprisingly, it worked. If you're feeling bold you could try that route
IDK, back in my edgy years I was suicidal due to "loneliness"- even though I had friends and family. I even (kinda) had a partner.
I had no money, because you can't pay almost $100K in student loans and $900/mo in rent when you make $37K/year before taxes. I never went anywhere when my friends did.
I was the only person in my friend group that liked certain hobbies and social media wasn't that big back then (my main social media sites up until that point were blackplanet and geosites- Facebook had JUST come out) so there was no way for me to connect with like-minded individuals about things I really cared about.
I went to school ~600 miles away from my family in a city of ~35k people and only 88 of them were the same ethnicity as I, so I had to suppress most of my personality to "not stand out", which strained my relationship with my partner and led to a surprise breakup.
By the time I hit 22 I was legit prepared to end it all- I even left a "final farewell" note on /b just to give them one last "rofl" on the way out.
A full decade later I look back and realize that it wasn't my shitty job or financial situation. It wasn't being in a minority group in a hostile school or the breakup. I wasn't (committed to being) suicidal. I was literally just being an edgy dingleberry. My problem was 100% made up and I was just looking for ANY reason to stay trapped in a cycle of sadness. Eventually it just... Went away? At some point at 24 something changed in my brain where all of a sudden I want thinking about how lonely I was.
None of it had anything to really do with social interaction, at least not ACTUAL interaction. It felt like I was just bitter because I couldn't do all the stuff I WANTED to do, and that stuff just happened to be related to social interaction. Maybe my scenario isn't the same as what you're describing but I don't think smartphones/social media were my issue. I just needed to mature a bit more and not be so focused on what I COULDN'T do.
Having said that while I think smartphones are one of the most influential inventions to come out since the turn of the millennium... The biggest social media sites are a net drain on society and I would not be sad to see them go in the slightest.
Not an expert on this but I've both seen it and done it: fear of punishment for asking for help/admitting weakness was why I did it.
I've had a boss that used our team as his scapegoat to cover his ass whenever he fucked up. When I was fresh out of college at my first real job said boss fucked up his budgeting and blamed us for being unproductive. I offered to work extra to get us back on track and while I was successful... The fact that the project went way over budget and that only 3 people on a 16 person team was at 100% utilization made it to senior management (who was responsible for assigning out work? The boss). Guess who got thrown under the bus for it? It was eventually sorted out but that was the most miserable week of my career at the time wondering if I was seriously about to be fired for sacrificing my time to help on a project that wasn't even mine. Ever since that I made it a point to get between "bosses" and my teammates to try and prevent anyone else from going through the hell I went through until I finally left that job.
Flash forward some years, a colleague missed a key deadline and I wasn't as aggressive about offering assistance as I really should have been. When leadership came knocking I had to fight the urge to defend myself and openly admitted my mistake, because although it wasn't my task to do the work it WAS my responsibility to see it through and I was the one accountable for it. My logic was "just as it felt shitty to get blamed for something I didn't do, I refuse to let someone else take the fall in my place. Give me liberty or give me death." It stung and it stung hard. I got absolutely no reward for the honesty and got reprimanded anyway- lost half my bonus, skipped over for senior even though I had the same responsibilities as the seniors, and didn't get a merit raise that year or the year after- but I felt good for sticking to my beliefs even when the only outcome was punishment. It was even more amplified when that same coworker went on to become an analyst and later a product owner years after the incident, showing growth and confidence that may not have been realized had I thrown them under the bus like my boss did to me all those years ago.
I think this is 100% a leadership problem. If the guys at the top are too afraid to take their whooping like a man how can they expect the grunts to do it? If leadership won't formally implement a "no stupid questions" policy what do they think their staff is going to do when they NEED to ask a "stupid question?"
Nobody needs to lie to cover their asses if their asses aren't at risk just for being human, but (on the US, at least) many walk on eggshells to avoid being the goose/gray duck in a sea of ducks/not-gray ducks.
This stings because I lost a few close friends to suicide and gun violence last year. It's really sad that we can't/won't do anything to stymie the trend
When I say "do CI/CD first" I do mean "make a commit and watch it go brrrr". You could build a pipeline yourself if DevOps engineering sounds fun but my experience with it professionally is "do whatever the DO guys say to make sure your changes reach prod". I dabble in my spare time out of curiosity and because I like punishment, lol.
I took a nonstandard path into infosec- I never actually went to school for it because it just wasn't taught where I went at the time. I learned by reading a lot and testing what I read against my own (and sometimes not my own) machines and my previous employment gave me a solid foundation since all of my professional skills were transferable. I was a dev for 2 years and a security-focused business system analyst for 6 years before getting my first job in infosec, and I'm 100% sure I passed my CISSP solely on dumb luck because I just "picked what made sense to me." I never took Sec+, Net+, OSCP, etc... certification because by the time I found out those certs existed I was already a CISSP and working to shore up my blue team weaknesses (blue team = "don't hack me bro", red team = "IT'S PWNIN' TIME". There's also purple team where you do both, I see this being the future of the craft much like how development and operations has pretty much merged).
I definitely recommend reading up about cybersecurity topics- maybe even take a Udemy or Coursera course or two on the fundamentals. Even if you get an entry level role I have no doubt you'd be able to ramp up quickly. You DO need to understand networking concepts so that might be new but it's seriously not THAT in-depth and you can skirt by initially with the basics (know how networks work, and be able to both capture a packet and read a PCAP file) and pick up more as you grow into the field. You'll need to pick up soft skills to help you frame technical concepts into terms laypeople can understand for your reports, which can be a challenge at first but you get the hang of it after doing it a while. As long as you're on a decent team any weaknesses you have can be covered by an ally- DO NOT BE AFRAID TO ASK FOR HELP WHEN YOU DON'T KNOW SOMETHING!
I do need to be transparent- my skills are more on the security management side (I could talk for HOURS about security risk) and most of the roles I've seen advertised (including the one I just left) are for security operations center staff. Hopefully another security professional here more skilled than I can chime in to keep me humble and honest!
If you're interested (ISC)2 has a "Certified in Cybersecurity" certification intended for people new to the industry. I'd take a look at the exam material for that and see if it interests you. You may be tempted to jump for CISSP, CISM, a GIAC cert, etc... Save those for later in your career when you KNOW you're ready (also I dunno about CISM but CISSP requires at least 5 verified years of professional security work and the endorsement of another CISSP. I don't think the GIAC certs are as strict but they're WAY more expensive). They're NOT easy, and there's a real risk you'll end up like me if you successfully take the shortcut, a CISSP that excels at the really hard stuff but has no interest in/sucks at the grunt work.
If you can get a mentor for cybersecurity that would be a huge plus- not just for helping you find a job in the industry but it REALLY helps fight off the inevitable imposter syndrome (I have met exactly ONE security professional in my entire career that didn't deal with imposter syndrome at some point in their career. That one guy has a higher IQ than my car has horsepower).
It's interesting that you mention PoE nature cams- I designed a PoE home surveillance system for a friend that involved setting up a solar panel on a 30' pole that fed a box with a shitty camera system in it at ground level. From there he set the cams around his property- particularly where the foxes and coyotes would travel to get to his hens. The whole project was apparently about $800 aside from the solar panel (I just gave him the idea- I didn't help him build it).
He eventually got rid of the cameras because, well... They were shitty and only told him the critters were near AFTER he popped 'em. I think he's got a for-purpose system (in his own words "the new cameras didn't fall off a truck") now but it was a fun project!
I really don't like thinking about that same problem, but with AI thrown in the mix. And I'm not even factoring in malicious intent yet.
I may not buy in to the "Horizon Zero Dawn incoming" mentality yet but I do know there's great potential for great harm if we don't get ethics in place before AI really takes off.