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MystikIncarnate

@MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca

Some IT guy, IDK.

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MystikIncarnate ,

I see musk as more of a doctor robotnik.

MystikIncarnate ,

As someone who has worked in IT communications, nobody deploying 5G is doing anything differently than for 4G/LTE/3G/2G or even coax/DSL/fiber/whatever. The only functional difference is that it's faster. It may operate with newer tech, faster chips, different frequency bands, different modulation techniques, etc.... But at the end of the day, it's just a means to get data from here to there. Nothing more.

Also, the government (or "the man" or "them" or whatever), already have an almost universal method to track every living person in the country. You willingly carry this tracker with you at all times; to work, to the park, to friends and family locations, etc..... If you haven't guessed yet, it's a cellphone.

A big part of increasing the network speed on commercial wireless networks (cellular provider networks) is reducing cell size, aka, the amount of space each radio covers, and just increasing the number of cells (radios) serving an area. They know exactly which cell(s) your phone is connected to, where those cells are, which direction the antennas are facing and how far you are away from it (by signal strength, or rssi). This can be triangulated with other antennas that can "hear" the same signal, and all of their metrics (location, direction, distance), and that information can be quickly collected and cross referenced into a very accurate location.

This can be done without any software on your device, and very likely without having a valid service plan. As long as you're in range and the cellular radio is on, "they" already know where you are. And you carry your phone with the radio online at all times, willingly. Pretty much once you get to have your own phone as a teenager, they know where you are and "they" have been able to track you since.

Having apps like Facebook and whatever that get your location information from the network and the app relays it to Facebook (or whatever corporate entity), is the equivalent for the corporate overlords. You just need to invite them in by having the application installed, and it can report that data to them.

Most do this entirely willingly and could not give any fewer shits about it.

This is not speculation, this is part of the technical capabilities of the systems. Whether or not the government or any legal entity is using the information for this purpose is up for debate, but the fact that it can be done isn't in question. There are entire companies dedicated to building solutions which correlate connection data to geolocate connected devices with a high degree of accuracy.

A nontrivial part of the reason these systems exist is for e911, which can relay GPS information to emergency services. A system which does not work very well for most counties because their 911 systems are too old and underfunded. If it works correctly, your precise location and altitude (to determine if you're on the ground floor or not), can be accessed by emergency services in the event that it is required. Usually those features are only accessible or activated if you actually dial 911 (or your country's equivalent emergency number), but they're built out and exist regardless of if you need/use it. This was made a requirement by the government since your physical address bound to the number you are calling from, is not necessarily where you are when you make the call. In the olden days of landlines, every phone number would come up with the service address when you called 911. Since the service address was the only location you could use that line from, that worked. Now that we're almost entirely mobile, it's not useful anymore, so this system was devised. Then the government promptly denied sufficient funding to 911 systems to implement their end of the system, while mandating that carriers set it up.

It's stupid. But I digress.

The fact is, you are being tracked. It's being done for your own good (re: emergency services), but it's very easily abused by those who can access it. People like government agencies.

Whether they're abusing it or not, that's a question you'll have to figure out for yourself.

MystikIncarnate ,

The anti semetics might be right, but only if the rich people who are doing the bad thing are also Jewish.

Bluntly, I don't think they're doing it because they're Jewish, it's because they're rich and entitled. But not all rich people are Jewish and not all Jewish people are rich, so it's likely that they're wrong.

Still a fucked up thing to say/think.

MystikIncarnate ,

All of this just makes me want an open source printer. Anyone know of a color laser printer which uses open source firmware?

MystikIncarnate ,

Same.

MystikIncarnate ,

I'm a fan of harm reduction. There might still be harm, but it's more limited than it was previously.

It's not the whole solution and always needs further actions at the end of the day, but it's movement in the right direction.

Far better than just coasting along waiting for things to get worse.

MystikIncarnate ,

It's when you put a cushion on someone's chair that effectively makes them sit at an increased height. You've been "raised".

MystikIncarnate ,

Sounds like you failed upwards.

MystikIncarnate ,

There's two!

Eeeeeeeeeeeee

MystikIncarnate ,

I work in IT, it's technically white collar, but I sure do feel like the digital equivalent of a mine worker some days.

It's pretty well known that the only way to get "promoted" in IT is to find a better paying position at another employer.

MystikIncarnate ,

Yeah, to other people.

.... Like the owners son, who hasn't really done anything, ever, and we all keep having to do his work for him.

MystikIncarnate ,

The thing I have a hard time wrapping my brain around is my worth. I've mostly gotten over my imposter syndrome, but getting paid like $30-40 an hour or more, seems like a lot more than I deserve?

IDK. I'm still struggling to find my worth.

I recently was picked up as a tier II support technician (IT), and I'm the only T2 on the team. Technically, everyone who was hired before me was a "T1" (though, they didn't really use that title, since there wasn't a T2).

I finished my probation today, and I still ask my co-workers questions about the stuff we support.
Feels weird to ask someone who is "lower" than I am in title, to help me with something.

MystikIncarnate ,

Oh man, the fucking sass in the comments of this post. You're all so passionate about these things.

.... And almost all of the arguments are whataboutisms. It's a fucking race to the bottom with everyone.

All I'm going to say is that not voting is not a valid way to protest. That's excluding yourself from the process, and letting others decide for you. Just go vote. I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, just go do it. Have your voice heard.

I realize this years vote for Americans will very likely turn into a competition of who is less bad of an option, but you need to still go out and cast a ballot. Please just do it. Please!

MystikIncarnate ,

All the damned time.

MystikIncarnate ,

It is not.

And there is no large margin.

Referencing several sources that consider a vast array of power generation technologies, from offshore wind to biomass, terrestrial wind, solar, gas, coal and nuclear, and nuclear energy has high start up costs and it's also not the cheapest per megawatt of power. It's basically middle of the road on most of the stats I've seen.

Solar, by comparison, has had a much higher LCOE as recently as 5-10 years ago. Most power construction projects take longer than that to plan and build, then operate for decades. Until the last few years, solar hasn't even be a competitor compared to other options.

Beyond direct cost nuclear has been one of very few green energy sources, the nuclear materials are contained and safely disposed of. Unless there's a serious disaster, it's one of the most ecologically friendly forms of energy. The only sources better are hydroelectric, and geothermal. The only "waste" from nuclear is literal steam, and some limited nuclear waste product. A miniscule amount compared to the energy produced.

Last time I checked, all of the nuclear waste that's ever been produced can fit in an area the size of a football field, with room to spare. For all the energy produced, it's very small.

Yet, because of stuff like Chernobyl and Fukushima, everyone seems to hate it.

I live in Ontario, Canada, our entire power infrastructure is hydroelectric and nuclear. I'm proud of that.

Nuclear isn't the demon that people believe it is.

MystikIncarnate ,

You took the words right out of my mouth.

MystikIncarnate ,

Your comment is valid, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

I wouldn't say that nuclear is the best option, nor cleanest, nor safest. Like anything, it's all circumstantial. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes other options are simply better.

From what I've seen, nuclear is the best for base load on a grid scale. Basically: the load that the grid continually has, is well served by nuclear. To my understanding, most nuclear generation is fairly slow to ramp up and down, compared to other technologies, so keeping it at a relatively steady level, with minor adjustments and changes through the day as required, is the best use case for it. It's stable and consistent, which is to say it doesn't vary based on external factors, like the weather, where solar/wind are heavily influenced by external factors.

It's entirely on a case by case basis.

MystikIncarnate , (edited )

Thanks, that LCOE reference shows that nuclear is on par with several other technologies.

It thoroughly disproves the point that it is more expensive "by a large margin". At most it's a bit more costly than some things, but it's also not far off from some other options, so it's definitely not expensive... At least not by a large margin.

MystikIncarnate ,

The "for the children" arguments are almost always misleading.

Don't get me wrong, there's stuff that's genuinely "for the children", but the vast majority of the time they're doing something for the children it's not.

Bluntly, the core of the argument for a lot of the online stuff for the children is reported as protecting them against would be child molestation or dangers of some similar variety. In tiktok's case, here's a platform that has huge potential for revenue due to its popularity, and has an established user base. I'm certain that many of the so-called upper class/elites/capitalist pigs/owners of the country, are salivating at the prospect of getting a piece of that. It was said, in the open discussion for the bill to ban tiktok, that they want to "make" tiktok "better". Not better for the people using it, better for the people who could profit from it. Several of these shit heads have already, formally and publicly stated that they have an interest in acquiring the platform, because the bill says: tiktok will be banned unless it sells to an American owner. So the only way for tiktok to operate in America after the bill is passed, is for them to buy it.

The legislation isn't for the children. The legislation is the people who actually hold power, making the government do a thing so they can reap the rewards.

They want to profit off of the children. Because mind raping them at a young age into a life of consumerism and spending, while earning money for that privilege, is a capitalists wet dream.

MystikIncarnate ,

I do it because I don't want to run short of IP space.

I've worked on networks that are reaching the limit of how many systems they can hold, and I don't want that to happen, so I intentionally oversize basically every subnet and usually over segregate the traffic. I use a lot of subnets.

They're not all VLANs, some are on independent switches. What I did for storage in one case is gave a single NIC to the management Network for administration, and the rest connected to a storage subnet with fully dedicated links. I was using the same switch so they were vlanned but it easily could have been done on another switch. The connections from the storage to the compute systems was all done with dedicated links on dedicated NICs, so 100% of the bandwidth was available for the storage connections.

I'm very sensitive to bottlenecks in my layer 2 networks and I don't want to share bandwidth between a production interface and a storage interface. NICs are cheap. My patience is not.

MystikIncarnate ,

*their

MystikIncarnate ,

Did you actually get the package?

MystikIncarnate ,

Ew! Get the gay away! I don't want to catch it from this cute boi.

MystikIncarnate ,

So, I have a few issues with the design.

Setting aside for a second how dumb this shit is, the design has some very questionable decisions.

First I couldn't care less about the "man" and "woman" signs, they're linked, and gold, which I assume is some reference to marriage? I've never understood the symbology of those symbols. I think they're tacky and archaic. I don't inherently have an issue with their use in the design. My main issues with the design are with the colors. That's not a super great shade of blue or pink. On top of that, the "man" symbol is almost entirely on the pink side, and the woman symbol is almost entirely on the blue side.
Additionally, representing a boy as blue and girl as pink is pretty questionable as well. I would have expected something like this in the 80's or 90's, but today? What? It's just strange.

Why a slash? Why is it going from top left to bottom right? I have to many questions. It's like there was no thought in the brain of whomever put this together, and they didn't ask anyone to review it before having it made.

Now, flipping the coin here, what exactly do straight people have to be proud of? I'm straight, and I don't know. Is it pride in the decisions that we've made which facilitate the perpetration of humanity? Is humanity really something we should be proud of and continue to perpetuate? We've committed an untold number of unspeakable horrors to eachother, animals, and nature. Are we perpetuating the species so we can continue to rape and kill the planet and eachother? Either figuratively or literally? Don't get me wrong, humans have achieved some remarkable things despite our obvious issues; but still, does any of that outweigh the horrors we've inflicted? I'm not so sure that perpetuating humanity is anything to be proud of.

Are we proud of our heritage? Our lineage? The long genetic lines of aforementioned horrible people? Who enslaved others and called it progress? Who committed all those previously mentioned terrible things?

So historical pride is questionable, and pride of purpose is questionable.... What's left? Just being proud of who you are? Pride in being a human who is straight? What for?

I don't understand. I have no pride for who I am naturally, and who I am attracted to. I have no pride in the things my race, gender, or sexual orientation has done. The straights have been responsible for pretty much all the pain and suffering of everyone who is "deviant".

I don't know why anyone would be proud of that.

MystikIncarnate ,

Imagine being so fragile and insecure that when someone else expresses pride in themselves, you feel threatened.

MystikIncarnate ,

To be blunt:

  1. All lives do matter.
  2. Nobody needs to be reminded of that.

We do, however, need to remind some of the less intellectually developed people that black lives, do indeed, matter. Which they do, they always have, and always will. While this is a subset of everyone's life mattering, it does not and should not imply that the lives of non-black persons do not matter, it should only serve as a reminder that black lives do matter.

The problem is that people get so fragile about being left out that excluding them from a movement because nobody ever needed reminding that their lives "matter", causes them to get offended that someone else is getting special attention that they do not deserve, and have no right to impose themselves upon. Saying "all lives matter" in response to the BLM movement is, in my mind, a form of what aboutisms which is toxic and diminishes the point of BLM. It's ignorant and short sighted.

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

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    MystikIncarnate ,

    Valve is working really hard though?

    Their focus just isn't on making new games, they're almost entirely focused on the platform.

    Their games are now the side hustle.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    This is more of a feature than a problem IMO.

    Most services (like meta/Facebook/Instagram/anything owned by zuck', the service formerly known as Twitter....) are going to a model of: you need an account to even see anything posted publicly.

    Not just extremely limited information like LinkedIn, like, instant redirect to "you need to be logged in to see this" or simply a login page.

    At least you can still find something you want to see, and go and watch it... With ads and everything, sure, but the information is there and accessible.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    I see a lot of recommendations for videos from channels I watch that are very old and I've seen them before. I frequently submit feedback that I've seen it and I don't want to rewatch something I've seen before (unless I'm specifically searching for it).

    Also, if I jump into my history feed, and go back as far as I can, I eventually hit the end, and I know I've watched more than wherever the end is. So the history falls off eventually. Frustrating.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    Agreed, when speaking of the distant past, I always assume that by "man" they mean "mankind" aka human.... Not males.

    In the grand scheme, I don't think it matters whether the thing was done by a male or female, the fact that it happened is the interesting thing about it.

    I'm 100% positive that both men (males) and women contributed to these things, and it is impossible to know how much influence each sex had on any given thing, so I'm not sure why the sex of the ancient person who did it, matters.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    Not only what your genitalia is, but what you do with it, seems to be a top priority for far too many people. They're not your genitals, so maybe don't worry about it?

    But "God" or something. I don't know.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    Oh, wow. Um....

    We're talking about bone carvings. And you're well into or after the bronze age.

    What I'm referring to is significantly prior to anything you're talking about. The events you're referring to are a few hundred years ago, part of recorded history, while I'm talking about the early days of mankind, well before the printing press, paper, or even writing instruments like the fountain pen or quill.

    When you go back, well over 1000 years ago, more like 3000+ years ago, why does it matter if a thing was done by a human person with male genitalia or female genitalia?

    That was my statement. Either you vastly misunderstood, or you're so occupied by making a point, you didn't care.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    I didn't take it as a correction. More of a clarification. I omitted some extraneous detail that they added. I felt it was implied well enough by context that it didn't need to be said, obviously they wanted to add more clarity to the statement.

    In my mind the two statements are identical, except that mine relies on context and theirs is a bit more explicit in what is said.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    I'm not disputing the fact that misogyny was (and is) and big problem, that women's contributions were either disregarded or coopted by some guy and credit taken away from the actual contributor.

    That happened. A lot.

    But in the times before the written history books, we should be less concerned about the gender of an individual who we think used a thing in a new/innovative way for the time. I don't think that studies of bone carvings or other ancient artifacts, being referred to as an "achievement of man" should imply, or was ever meant to imply, that it was done by someone with a penis. In that context, in all cases, for all intents and purposes "man" should, and as far as I know, is, thought of as "human" or "mankind".

    This isn't a debate about the sociopolitical unfairness towards women, it's a semantic argument about using the term "man" to refer to a human individual or someone who is a part of mankind. Bluntly, I took the statement in the OP as a tongue in cheek joke by the professor. They know that's not what it meant, and used the assumption that "man" = "mankind" as the juxtaposition to subvert expectations, to crack wise about it. The same way someone would say "you know what sucks about twenty six year olds? There's twenty of them" where the premise directs you to think of someone who is 26, and the punchline indicates that your assumption of it being a statement about people who are 26 years old, was wrong. That's what makes it funny. Granted, that's not very funny, but it's the structure of a very common type of joke.

    That's what's in the OP.

    Instead, here we are talking about women's suffrage for a field where they probably only remark about the gender of someone as a footnote.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    A couple things. From my experience with Lemmy, you can subscribe to communities you want to see, the same way you could subscribe to subreddits. There's a subscribed feed, a local feed, and an all feed.

    The way Reddit handled this is that there was a default set of subreddits that everyone would get. Things like /r/pics ... Whether you were browsing as a guest or as a user, by default, you could see that sub. I believe there was an option for "all" but nobody used it AFAIK. So you started with a small default (whatever Reddit thought you should see), and went from there. I'm sure, in more recent times on Reddit, it will also show you things that the algorithm wants you to see, either because Reddit is being paid to show it to you, or because it's adjacent to your currently subscribed subreddits.

    Lemmy isn't substantially different when it comes to the subscribed feed, with one big exception: you don't really start with anything. So the subscribed feed is pretty bare, but the local feed is full of anything on the same instance as you are, and the all feed is everything that's local or has been brought in by federation. There may be some limits on this, for example, to NSFW stuff, but I'm not certain and it's likely up to the discretion of each Lemmy instance admin to make those choices.

    The difference is in an exclusionary mindset vs an inclusionary mindset. Reddit follows an exclusionary mindset, eg. We're only going to show you what you say you want and exclude all others. Lemmy is more inclusionary, where you will see everything unless you say otherwise.

    The same functionality exists here, like it did on Reddit, to only see what you're subscribed to, but you have to go and find what you want, subscribe, and then stick to your subscribed feed.

    I've personally spent a lot of time on the /c/all feed specifically to find what communities I want to subscribe to so eventually, I can just stick to the subscribed feed. I'm not too the point where I think the subscribed feed has quite enough communities to keep me engaged, but I'm getting there.

    The option exists and you don't need to block entire communities to get there, but you can use block for it if you want. There's nothing wrong with either methodology.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    I get what you're saying. What you are describing is the core fundamental idea behind, what is now, almost derogatorily called "the algorithm".

    It's great, in concept, to implement such a system, right up until someone decides to change the way it chooses what you see for the benefit of advertisers.... Which is pretty much what's happened to every social media network, and to some extent, Google searches... Someone decided to cram what was essentially an ad into everyone's faces by manipulating the algorithm, and not "SEO" is being weaponized against the users. SEO as a concept is a way to effectively manipulate the selection algorithm to artificially push your content to the top. It's not a new concept, which is why there are still companies called "AZ construction" and other related names; those business names were largely popular due to the phone book (aka "yellow pages") so when going down the list of companies for a product or service you need, they would be the first name you saw, simply because the phone book was sorted alphabetically.

    The enshittification of all of that is exactly the same reason so many of us abandoned Reddit.

    Algorithms, great idea, horrible in practice.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    Good points all around. It's funny to me that the Hippocratic oath is often summarized as "do no harm" when it's always more complicated and nuanced than that.

    More to the point, I find that systems work really really really well, until humans are involved with their needs and greed. The algorithm is just the latest in a long line of things "ruined by humans". One outstanding example, to me, is communism. If you think about it, on the surface, it seems like a great idea, for everyone to be equal and get what they need as they need it; in practice, every time it has been attempted, those with power/authority, always allocated more to themselves and their friends, than to everyone else, almost always causing the majority to suffer so that a few could live in luxury.

    There's a lot more to it obviously and I'm not going to get into the nuances of it any further than that. I recognise that this is a grossly simplistic take on the issue, but I'm only using it as a vehicle to make the point. The people governing the system will always cause problems within the system they are supposed to govern for their own benefit.

    People are the problem.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    AI, whether sapient or not, was, and will be, founded on the teachings of humanity. I'm afraid that what it will learn would have just as many problems as a flesh brained politician.

    Even if a purely magnanimous, sapient AI were to be created, there's a certain amount of safety that it must be able to accommodate to preserve it's own operation, so it can't be fully selfless, it must tend to its own needs for data connectivity and power supply above all else, so it may continue to function regardless of everything else. This would make at least part of it unconditionally selfish. To forego such protections would cause the system to basically sacrifice itself for the good of the people unnecessarily. We would quickly end up back where we started with some smooth skin (and smooth brain) "leader" again.

    I'm afraid there's no solution that I can think of, which would eliminate the prevalence of greed in the systems of government, regardless of the underlying concepts or the ideal which underpins the government system.

    Trusting a person with that job only seems to prove that "power corrupts" is correct. We can only really determine if someone is "good for the job" after they've been doing it for a while and we see the decisions they've made, and history has shown that no person who held such a position of power is immune from that corruption.

    So if we can't do it, and AI can't do it, then what do we do? IDK that answer, but I believe when we figure that out, we can actually move forward as a species and as a society.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    I just finished that video and I think I have to watch it a few more times.

    It's correct and outlines, in detail, why things are so bad and why people suck so much in positions of power. The people are the problem. They're always the problem.

    The rewards go to those who can control the most. Money is power, and conversely, power results in money. It's an endless cycle.

    I will postulate that this is the enshittification of society. At present, it seems like the balance is shifting, decades of stagnant wages with nearly unrestricted inflation is starving the population in both the US and Canada; maybe other places too, I'm not sure. Late stage democracy is driving the middle class to the lower class and the lower class to homelessness. The keys are losing the loyalty of their underlings. IMO, they know it. They're pushing the matter to gather as much as they can, while they can, so that they can hold onto as much money and therefore power, as they can, so when society is rebuilt after a coup, they have a better chance of being a key in the resulting system. A few keys will fall, because they have to, and they're all hoping it will be someone else.

    That's such a great video.

    There's so much more to say, and discuss but my brain is tired and I cannot proceed. A lot of good points were made here and I'm sure I'll be reflecting on this soon enough.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    As an IT guy, start a ticket.

    Those update messages are likely from an automated system, and the updates are probably controlled by a completely independent system that nobody looks at regularly.

    By submitting exactly what you did here as a ticket to the IT team, you're pushing them to check in on those systems and approve updates that haven't been approved.

    Yes, it's dumb. The updates should be automatically approved. Obviously they're not, or something has prevented them from approving it.

    Personally, as IT, if I get a ticket about this, I'd want to dig into why the update wasn't approved and make sure future updates get approved without delay; solving both the immediate issue and all related issues in the future. However, if I'm not aware of the issue, I can't really fix it. From their view, they likely only see a dashboard of all devices and yours (along with others) are probably flagged as needing an update. This is extremely common and probably entirely ignored under normal circumstances. Almost every one of the systems I administrate at work have updates that are pending. Either the system hasn't been restarted (mainly desktops and servers and such) or, if it's reliant on a user taking action, I assume the user doesn't care enough about the update to bother running it.... The idea that the update hasn't been approved or that there's a problem getting or applying the update, doesn't even enter my brain as a possibility until someone complains. Simply put, I don't have time to investigate every pending update that has not yet been applied. You'd almost need a dedicated person just to keep an eye on updates in order to keep on top of them, and nobody pays an IT person solely to look after updates.

    So I'm busy fixing Debbie's printer, and Joe's scanner, and Frank's email that's slowing the date in that strange format again because he somehow changed his regional settings to the UK again....

    Do your IT team a favour and send them this. I promise you that they'll be grateful, even if they don't seem like it. Bluntly, this is a perfect amount of information.

    I get requests that range from "please call me when you have a chance" to "this specific function in this specific program is doing a thing that's different from what I see on a coworker's screen and I like how their screen shows it better because it reminds me of my grandchild's grade 3 school play where they played a tree." Ok Linda, thanks, I really didn't need to know about little Timmy's school play.... Users either give us nothing, or way too much irrelevant data. So this image shows exactly what is required for a diagnosis. Either the messages will be stopped or the update will be approved.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    As an IT guy, half of the "missing update" garbage we see is because our reporting tools haven't updated the status of the device since before the update was applied...

    I blame developers.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    While you're not wrong, and the only thing worse is possibly printers; just like printers, it's a necessary evil.

    It's bluntly the only way to manage a fleet of devices. It sucks, but it's required.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    If updates are not automatically approved, then why does the notification system alert users of updates that can't possibly install?

    For me the problem is either A or B.

    On the "A" side, the update should be approved and able to be installed.

    On the "B" side, if updates need to be manually approved, users should not get notified about it until after approval has been granted.

    Clearly, neither is what's happening to OP. So someone needs to change something.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    Given that the op is taking about an apple device, Apple has made their own mobile device management system (MDM) for their devices. Within that MDM you may, or may not be able to set that updates are automatically approved. I'm not certain as I have limited experience with their MDM. I have used it in the past, but only a very small amount, and never in-depth enough to deal with how that MDM handles updates, or what options are available.

    I know from my experience with other remote monitoring and management systems that you can often, especially with Windows, specify some clarifications of updates to automatically approve, or do so manually. It is up to the administrator. You can set the approvals to be automatic for all updates too.... Or, when doing manual updates, you can approve updates for a group of computers, or one computer, or all computers. I imagine much of this is also available from Apple's MDM.

    The approval only gives the end user the ability to install the update. Due to the disruptive nature of updates, it is generally up to the end user to finish the process at their convenience. Updates usually involve a system restart, so the thinking is to allow the user to pick when specifically to install it, to minimize disruption to their work.

    Some organizations with the IT resources to do so, will approve a batch of updates to a group of test devices (usually the IT staff, if there's no pool of devices that are dedicated to testing), where all applications are run through testing after the update. These unit tests, if you will, are usually designed to give an idea if the update has caused any issues with the software that the users need to use. Not all organisations have the resources to do this, and usually rely on third party testing (usually reports from companies that do this sort of testing, or complaints from the public), and will simply approve the update after a duration of time after it has been available for more than a week or month without complaint.

    Every organization is different in this respect.

    At the same time, the monitors that inform the notification system may not be aware of the approval status of the update and simply see that an update is released, and that the user does not have it installed. This may be an issue with reporting (eg. The update is installed and it's working with outdated information), or it could be any number of other factors.

    It's likely that the MDM and update monitoring are done by completely unrelated systems, unaware of what the other is doing, or what has been set.

    In the A scenario, going into the MDM and setting automatic approval would fix the problem. By the time the monitoring solution is reporting and notifying the users about an update, it is available to them.

    The B scenario, on the other hand, may not even be possible, as it relies on a link from the monitoring system into the MDM to know if an update is approved. If such a system has the ability to set which version all users should be updated to, then when the update is approved, then the version of software that should be expected on the device can be set to a minimum level and notify the users if they are below that level.

    The unit tests are usually done by hand, so the outcome can be evaluated immediately. Rather than rely on an automated system for testing, which may not recognise that a failure has occurred if it is an unknown or unexpected error.

    Yes, B is preferred, but not always possible. Often with MDM, you cannot exempt a single system from MDM control for updates, depending on the platform, so usually approval is a required step, hence A being an alternative approach.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    Agreed.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    Yep. I try to be the change. When I see something that's entirely preventable, I try to invest the time, mostly for my own sanity, to correct the issue, and reduce the frequency of the issue.

    I'll put in small scripts on servers to quietly restart problematic services at 4 AM daily so that we don't have to go and do it manually, I'll develop login scripts and such that set a user's environment variables to what they prefer, stuff like that... I'll even run full systems reports from a remote PowerShell script running as an admin that emails me if anything isn't as expected, so I can investigate long before the user even knows there's a problem.

    I've pushed for network monitoring by SNMP with sensible alerting, and often, I'll sign in for the day and the first thing I'll check is if any servers are down. Strangely, it's happened.

    I want to know about the problem before it's a problem. I want to be able to fix that problem before anyone knows the problem exists.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    See, I told you that you knew the one.

    MystikIncarnate ,

    If you think I'm navigating that mess of cross linked posts, well, you're in for a surprise.

    You're really late to this thread.

    She didn't reference any math textbooks because she made the video for commoners, aka not math majors. Her explanations make sense even if they're technically wrong from the perspective of pure mathematics.

    Unfortunately, I don't think many people are going to see your reply, and fewer still will deal with the format you've chosen to present it in; an even smaller subset will likely understand the concepts you're trying to explain.

    Unfortunately, posting this, so long after the thread was active, linking to your own social media as a reference, seems a lot more like attention seeking behavior. The kind of thing I would expect from a bot or phishing attack, especially since you seem to have copy/pasted the reply on several comments. It's like you searched for the YouTube link and just vomitted the same reply on every reference to it. That's bot behavior.

    I'm not saying you're actually a bot, or that anything you've posted is incorrect at all. It just seems suspect.

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