Lea Kissner

As a security person, I SO appreciate great bits like this open letter around bad security advice ( www.hacklore.org/letter), especially given that it's got reputable people like @leak.bsky.social signed on.

I agree that outdated advice and half-truths are just as bad as giving wrong advice.

Your books belong in *my* library not *your* home.

(My bookshelves protest otherwise.)

I didn't know you were on here! Long time no see

I considered adding a picture of my study but the piles of books are sprouting piles of books.

And I just ordered some more books.

Treating the law as an inflexible programmable automata famously works well. Just ask the guy who my spouse went to grad school with who cutsied himself into prison for tax evasion.

a cup of coffee with a smiley face on the top of it Alt: a cup of coffee with a screaming face blown into the top of it

That is somehow worse than the fact that 100% of the tests for the Google RPC libraries back when I maintained them were bash scripts that fired up a client and server and had them send messages to each other

I'm guessing that things got a smidge personal

On my next flight the airline will supply pyjamas and slippers. Somehow this is not in my top 100 list of worries about flying in the US.

The comment thread here is the embodiment of :lolsob:

There is legitimate promise to LLM-assisted coding, but there are also legitimate risks. Like this. And no one here is malicious!

Is the quote "cryptography reduces everything to a key management problem" or "nobody likes it when I'm right"?

now everyone together quote @leak.bsky.social

The whole podcast is really excellent, BTW, basically someone being incredibly enthusiastically geeky about all aspects of clothing. "Enthusiastically geeky" is honestly my favorite genre of just about anything.

The "Gear" series on the Articles of Interest podcast has convinced me that if for some reason I was in the armed forces (and I wasn't doing the obvious things for me to do) I would want to be in the quartermaster corps. The complexity in clothing alone 🤯

www.articlesofinterest.co/podcast

It's also entirely possible that the role someone wants and might be very well suited for doesn't exist in that company. I had someone in my team once who *loved* event planning. That simply wasn't available and I really didn't need event planning, so...

I don't know, but my best uninformed guesses would be conflict-averse management and lack of better roles to suggest. Especially when headcount is tight, someone may not have as many open roles and *need* a particular role filled.

I don't have data points for most of the US, but when I moved to the Boston suburbs as a kid... well, that's where I learned racial slurs.

(And got called possibly the most illogical slur ever, which takes some doing.)

My gamer child informs me that "everyone" hates FaZe Rug because they make clickbait videos.

If my emails ever get leaked, just know that I'm not sub-literate, I'm lazy.

Curious how much detail you were hoping for, like "it's a way of storing files in a hierarchy so we can find them again and we want it because... uh... storing things locally is useful because we like to run programs and have data"?

Side note for people who are or are interested in being a manager *or* a senior-level individual contributor: I highly suggest Ask A Manager. People-wrangling is hard.

I want to help everyone, so I want to help early. But when it comes down to it, I'm responsible to everyone.

This is getting long, so I'm not including my tips for how to run a caring PIP here, but let me know if that's interesting.

/end

It's very easy for a manager to focus on the person on the PIP and themselves, since they're most immediately involved.

It's recognizing that a manager is responsible to the *whole* team that helped me understand just how critical performance management is.
/6

... but when someone persistently isn't pulling their weight, that's not fair to the rest of the team. If the person is being unpleasant or disruptive, that can be even worse. It's really hard on the team to be in the situation where someone needs to be on a PIP.
5/

But I think it's deeply underappreciated how difficult this is for the entire team. Your teammates rely on you. When someone is having trouble, other folks often try to pick up the slack. We're all human and we do this for each other sometimes (my teammates very kindly did this for me recently ♥️)
4/

This absolutely sucks. It's very stressful to be having trouble getting your work done. I would also assume that anything which would lead someone to be intensely unpleasant to their coworkers would be no fun. Being worried for your job is also stressful. Been there (for other reasons). Sucks.

3/

It's hard on the person going through a PIP (obviously). There are two major good reasons that folks end up on a PIP:
1. They're having trouble getting their work done effectively.

2. They are making people around them unhappy (e.g. yelling or other personal interaction issues)

2/

A performance plan (PIP) is incredibly hard on everyone involved. The person going through it, the manager, and *the entire team*.

When I'm running one, I deeply want to help the person going through it find whatever's missing so that they do an awesome job and we can keep working together.
1/🧵

Up until a few weeks ago, the conversation virtually always went like this:

Them: "why are you wearing a mask?"
Me: "because I don't want to accidentally kill my mom. Plus I hear COVID is no fun."
Them: *vivid story of how terrible COVID is*

It sounds less fun than wearing a mask, y'all 🤷

New life goal unlocked

If you want public key encryption specifically, think of it like everyone has a copy of a lock. They can use it to lock something up and only you can get it out because you have the key for the lock