There are at least dozens of us doing this. My $5k bloated corporate laptop sits in my office 24/7. The 25% of time I’m traveling is with a $300 Chromebook with Linux Mini, a Bluetooth mouse, and logged into to a Windows VM.
Now that everything corporate is forced into the cloud, using a VM doesn’t carry all the extra downsides it used to.
and the bonus is that, when the workday is done, I have a machine I actually own and can use without breaking policy.
I think the root of much of this are money laundering rules. The feds want to be able to punish bad guys without actually proving the crime they are suspected of. There are now a large set of rules which the government isn’t efficient enough to enforce, so it has actually become the banking industry’s legal responsibility. Once such things are normalized, they get stretched.
I would be amazed if there are not interlocks to prevent an update while in drive. On normal updates there is definitely an interlock, plus a timer, but theoretically it is possible.
It is doable but highly location based and still really tight. I’m in a tier 2 US city. Our interns wage would equate to $58k annually. A car isn’t needed if in the city. Most people have a roommate, which works out to just over $1k a person.
Full time grads are around $20k higher….so roughly triple the amount left over.
Or you commute further. I’m mid career and commuted more than hour most of my career because it let me get a better/cheaper apartment while affording a used car.
State governments do this too. NY under Cuomo just dictated a 10% cut to invoiced labor. It was widely understood that saying no meant no more work in the future.
Alon Levy being brought up on this topic always tweaks my “but somebody is wrong in the internet.” I’ve been on several of the projects he talks about. He’s right about the macro numbers and the general vibe, but often wrong when he starts talking about he details.
The main issues are, in general:
1) increased regulation, which includes internal self-regulation. Lots of rules that are preventing potential minor problems, but have a lot of overhead to follow.
2) large projects are treated like a Christmas Tree. Everybody expects their vaguely adjacent hobby horse to be addressed by the project… so scope keeps growing. There is ALWAYS something you can point to that has a good cost/benefit; and always addressing these ensures that the project never actually finishes.
3) lack of decision making. There is a general analysis paralysis and fear of making the wrong call. It’s often cheaper to just move ahead and risk rework. By not moving ahead, change orders are being incurred anyway.
As much as a hate saying it, the best thing for any large project in these orgs is being run by a semi-dictator who has enough political capital internal to the org, and who strongly objects to anything outside of scope.
Is AmEx any better? I’m planning to cancel my Mastercard with this gatekeeping as a reference to why. It seems to be the most effective lever most of us have.
It’s done in various places. NJ Riverline is an example. There are a bunch of others.
The bigger problem is the freights just have no interest in sharing the tracks with passenger trains, and requiring heavier and more expensive passenger trains is a convenient way to price the project to death.
As a mid size company that does work with government agencies, it’s near impossible to use anything ‘better’ solution. Cybersecurity requirements are getting so onerous that Sharepoint is too commercially feasible of an option to use anything else for a shared file store between organizations.
The fact that Sharepoint sucks* doesn’t matter… because anything else is seen as a risk.
* folders with lots of files are hard to scroll through because each page is lazy loaded, the automation functions are buggy, logins between different M365 tenants breaks and is not correctable by a normal site admin, human readable URL paths aren’t standard, search is shit, tables/filters are buggy, the new interface hides a bunch of the permissions logic, some things like permission groups need to be managed via outlook, etc etc. I’m sure a bunch of my gripes are technically fixable, but these aren’t things that should need a web search in order to use/fix.
Having H1-B visa employees introduce overhead. Not all companies are willing to do it. We’ve recently decided to stop H1-Bs for anyone that isn’t a senior hire.
I wish they’d named FSD as Autopilot. FSD is amazing and I use it door to door wherever I drive. I got a LOT better about a year ago.
But it still makes some dumb mistakes. It is not ‘full self driving.’ It’s 99% percent Autopilot… but I still need to pay attention to the road. (And it enforces this more/better than it used to via the driver camera camera)
I don’t want to guess how long that last 1% will take to be a low enough level of risk. All I can say is that 4 years ago it would do something hazardous every couple minutes. Now I can go hours without disengaging for a safety issue. Most disengages I have now are because it is more cautious than a human driver, or because a scenario is something that I wouldn’t be able to react fast enough to fix IF it did the wrong thing.
I believe this is only used on one passenger line in the entire country. This is really a freight based system intended to transmit brake apply signals as speed of light instead of speed of sound.
Since passenger trains are usually short and often have a wired bus) they don’t really need this system.
Yeah. Exactly. The consequence of this club is either:
1) The brakes take an extra couple seconds to apply (note: this is only used on long trains… so stopping is over a minute anyway)
2) The emergency brakes apply. This is considered a safe condition, and for Positive Train Control is considered the ‘safe state’.
If someone tries to utilize this vulnerability, the EOT device will be shutoff. On the few tracks where it’s actually required, there are mitigations to still operate safely.
This would be really easy to annoy a single train crew. This would be really hard to do to geographically diverse trains.
It’s really frustrating seeing all this about something I know about.
‘Slamming in the brakes’ is the default safe condition for a train. The freight train Positive Train Control does this automatically if the operating engineer breaks certain speed/location rules. It probably happens thousands of times a day at speed.
I've actually used this fact in a related way, for wayfinding.
Old school Open-CV was able to see tracks well from an onboard monocular camera, but calibration and scale was annoying. Track width is accurate enough that I was able to use it to input a bunch of head-end video to map the tracks.
It was mostly just a modified edge detect where the tracks approximately would be. Once finding the tracks, you could automatically calculate the camera's height, lateral location, and angle.
Now that everything corporate is forced into the cloud, using a VM doesn’t carry all the extra downsides it used to.
and the bonus is that, when the workday is done, I have a machine I actually own and can use without breaking policy.