Yup. I’m still living paycheque to paycheque.

I’m at a prime age for “midlife crisis” I just need my finances to agree that I can have.

Got a new job last winter, I’ve gotten two raises since. Maybe I’m moving in the right direction? I hope so. (I’m a bit less than 5% above where I started after 11 months)

I like the new job too. So IDK.

I can imagine.

You should too. You can do it, I believe in you.

Okay, I’ll just say it.

Everyone has it rough right now. Mostly because we’ve been thoroughly railroaded by corporations for most of our lives, but still.

Everything sucks.

Oh Jesus.

Anyone have some valid Stargate addresses? I’m done with this stupid planet.

I think this is the first time I’ve seen a still picture move this much.

Hot damned.

It’ll snuggle you for the rest of your life.

That’s a very normal reaction. You’re putting your life in the hands of technicians and engineers, to build, maintain and service the aircraft so it functions, qualified inspectors to certify that the plane is safe to fly, and pilots to fly the aircraft, and you, safely to your destination. Pretty much everyone you’re putting your life in the hands of, you’ve never met, never will, and it’s unlikely you’ll even know their names.

It’s a lot of trust to put into people you don’t even know, to keep you alive in your chair in the sky.

If that reality doesn’t at least give you pause, or some concern, then I’d be worried there’s something seriously wrong with you.

Rest assured that statistics are on your side. It’s far more likely for you to get to your destination without any significant complications then it is for any complications to happen, including any that might lead to a crash or a fatality. Statistically, it’s comfortably one of the safest, if not the safest, method of travel.

There’s nothing wrong with having some apprehension, fear, or worry, over placing your life in the hands of complete strangers; despite how qualified each and every one of them might be, they’re still strangers.

All I can say is, if you’re bothered by it, learn how to parachute solo. It’ll take a while, but learn it. Then just pack your own parachute any time you fly. Problem solved. If you lose confidence in the pilots to keep you alive, bail.

Thanks. I think a lot.

Probably too much

Not a stupid question.

Between the training required for a solo parachute jump, and the cost (and more importantly) weight of the equipment, plus the relative safety of commercial flights, it’s simply not justified.

In more than a few cases we’ve seen airliners make emergency landings that are gnarly, but the majority survive. In more cases than I can count, there’s checks and balances that ground flights because of safety concerns either at the departure point or at the destination (icing, high winds, etc), or due to mechanical concerns.

It’s rare that a fully inspected and functional aeroplane will fall out of the sky, and we do everything in our power to ensure that all planes that leave the ground are fully inspected and functional. Short of a freak occurrence, like a fast forming weather phenomenon, there’s so many checks and balances that airliner crashes are exceedingly rare.

So not only is a crash rare, there’s no guarantee that a crash will be fatal, usually the pilot can at least get the plane on the ground without killing everyone aboard, and the fact that it’s a massive amount of extra weight that requires training that the average person doesn’t have, there’s little point and nearly nothing to gain from doing something like that, while it would have significant downsides on flight efficiency and increase the costs of fuel per flight due to the extra weight.

Then there’s the consideration of, even if they were able to successfully parachute to the ground, what then? It’s pretty much a guarantee that nobody has a radio, and that you’re far enough away from civilization that your cellphone doesn’t work, so now you have hundreds of people spread out over potentially thousands of miles of terrain/water/whatever that you now need weeks to search and rescue everyone. Taking weeks on search and rescue, pretty much guarantees that you’ll find people who landed safely, then died from exposure to the environment.

On the flip side, if everyone is in the plane when it crashes then all you need to do is find the plane; everyone will be in that general area, whether alive or dead.

There’s just too many downsides to having parachutes on board to make it feasible.

I think when the hype dies down in a few years, we’ll settle into a couple of useful applications for ML/AI, and a lot will be just thrown out.

I have no idea what will be kept and what will be tossed but I’m betting there will be more tossed than kept.

TIL.

This is about as close as I’ve ever seen anything come to what I believe in. I usually tell people I’m an atheist because it’s easier than trying to explain what I actually believe.

This is pretty much spot on. Thanks.

How dare you!

To be fair, as long as they haven’t been trying to get a parking fee waived like, every day or every week or something, I’d be like, yeah, seems legit, and waive the fees too.

I mean, as dumb as the request was, it basically reads as ‘i made a mistake’.

As long as they’re not making mistakes constantly, why not forgive it? Silly wording or not.

According to their own book, no man will know the day or the hour IIRC. So anyone who says they know, at all, is by default wrong, and you can guarantee that it won’t happen at that time.

Everyone is a sinner. Especially the religious types.

All I can think is that it has a very…

… feel to it.

I prefer security keys. At work I use a yubikey, and I have Google’s security keys for my personal stuff. I tend to use totp as a backup.

For everything not banking, it’s great, I agree. I still prefer my security keys to everything. It’s hard to duplicate a digital key when it only exists on protected storage on a physical device, where that key never exists outside of that physical device.

In case anyone doesn’t know: FIDO works using a pair of asymmetric digital keys, the public key is sent to the remote site, and only the private key can decrypt anything encrypted by the public key. So a challenge (usually some mathematical calculation, not sure), is encrypted by the site/service that is handling the login, it sends over the encrypted request, which is passed, in it’s entirety to the fob. The fob requires a physical activation to process the challenge (usually a touch, but some require a fingerprint). The challenge is then decrypted, processed, the response is encrypted, and sent to the site for login, which decrypts the response with the public key, and compares the result to the result of the challenge that was sent.

There’s no part of this that can really be compromised. An eavesdropper can obtain the encrypted challenge (unable to be decrypted in any reasonable manner), and the response/public key… The public key isn’t useful, and the response is only valid for that specific login because there are aspects of the challenge that are unique per login.

All information in flight is unreadable nonsense. The only unique information to the key that is sent anywhere is the public key, which is supposed to be public.

Totp has the vulnerability of needing to relay the seed, usually by QR code. The only vulnerability there is when you set it up and the seed is shared to you, it can be intercepted. If that seed is stored anywhere that becomes compromised, then it becomes meaningless. It can be mined from an authenticator, or captured in flight.

Both of these are better than alternatives. Email/sms codes can be intercepted, either by an administrator or by an internet relay, or by sim duplication, etc. You know that already.

I don’t hate totp, I just recognize the faults in it.

There’s problems with physical security keys too, mainly in the fact that, if you lose the fob, you’re screwed. So it’s recommended to have a backup. Either in the form of a second fob, which is setup for all the same accounts which is stored securely, or in the form of another authentication method like totp.

Personally, I use a backup FIDO key for my accounts whenever possible. I also have a password manager that can store my totp so everything is in a single vault. If the vault is compromised then I’m screwed though… 90% of my accounts use a password reset email which is not stored in my vault. Only two things are not in my manager: that recovery email login (secured by my Fido key) and my bank (obviously also the vault login).

At work, I use the yubikey for everything that supports it, with totp as backup in my work’s duo authenticator account (duo is also setup to use my yubikey). So it’s all Fido/totp.

The only service I really want to use my security keys with that doesn’t support it, is my bank account… I suppose, also my government stuff, but almost all of that is informational. I can’t really make changes to my government stuff from their webpages. It’s generally just the government telling me things about my tax returns and whatnot (all SMS secured).

I hate the trend of companies requiring an app for 2FA… Something that’s not totp, but similar. You have a specific authenticator app for a single service on your phone only and it’s not great… Obvious examples include steam and Blizzard. Fuck that. I hate it. Go away. Give me normal MFA options… Dick.

I’ve ranted enough. Back to work for me.

Well, I have no arguments with what you’ve said. I think security keys/FIDO tokens should be more prevalent too. Otherwise this is 100% correct and I feel the exact same way.

I dunno about this analogy. I think the doctor proved that with enough time, anything can become a door.

Your story reminds me of something that my bank started doing. I got a robocall about something to do with my credit card, and the voice said to verify using x and y using my keypad, I think it was day/month/year of birth or something and I immediately noped out of the call. I hit all the wrong buttons until it got me to a person and I ripped them apart, and their supervisor for basically training their userbase to answer security questions given by an automatic voice on the other end of the line with no way to verify who is calling.

You can spoof your caller ID, you can get a text to speech robocall bot with DTMF recognition and just spam call a whole area where the bank operates and gather a bunch of personal information because it sounds just like the bank and there’s no way to prove who called.

What a crock of shit. It’s a security nightmare.

I did call my bank after at a known valid number, verified them as they verified me, and there was something going on, so the call was legit, and totally unacceptable.

These clowns want us to trust them completely, and give us no reason to do so, but they want us to bend over backwards to validate ourselves. Fuck that.