Exactly, that’s why I feel pity for the people who destroy their lives to get paid extra 5% and having a pizza party with good boy remarks, and of course making someone else wealthier too. It’s not a flex to sleep in a tent at work, while neglecting your health, family, friends, maybe kids, this “grind” culture is pushed by corporations for obvious reasons.
Biggest jump is 400K and that's at L7, for Principal SE, the top level. Below that each level is about a $100-150K jump. Nothing to complain about, to be clear.
E6 -> E7 at Meta is $1M (which sounds a little bit crazy tbh). Google L6 -> L7 is 300k, but their numbers look smaller than what I'm privy too. A generic Level 6 to 7 (staff to senior staff) promotion can easily be $500k at a tech company.
And yet, how many people are actually happier with that extra $500k? It's one thing if you're not making enough to allow you and whoever else you might need to support to be happy and comfortable and be able to save enough for emergencies and retirement, but I'm dubious that someone only one other away from a half million dollar raise is in that position.
Something that's often overlooked is the time equivalent of money. If the average salary is $50k but you get $500k, you only have to work 1 year in every 10, and that's crazy.
yes thats true if you survive it. Have two friends with a salary over 300k a year. one worked 5 years and retired the other bought more luxury products to reflect his income and is now completly burned out after 3 years but forced to work because of his 300k a year lifestyle
And the feeling of safety that comes with it. I left my previous employer during an acquisition and took a year off and am taking my time to find the right next gig. I cannot imagine the terror of having to find a new job, any job, ASAP because otherwise we starve and lose the house. Substantial savings are honestly much nicer than spending on a lavish lifestyle.
at that price level as a senior engineer there are plenty jobs available, no stress on that point.
i have little savings but my life is great, my kids love me, my health is good, i work from home and i have time for my friends. honestly everyday is great.
> And yet, how many people are actually happier with that extra $500k?
A hella lot people, are you seriously that dense? If there were gladiator fights for 500k, I would be a fucking janitor cleaning up the bloody mess, because of how many people would die for a chance to make 500k extra.
I think you're overestimating how much making $800k versus $300k would actually make most people happier. You're welcome to disagree with me, but there's plenty of research indicating this might be the case (from a quick Google for "happiness self reported by income" this is the first result: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/does-more-money-correlate-g...).
If you think that everyone is the would either agrees with you or is "dense" without doing any sort of cursory investigation on whether the alternate view might actually be common or supported by evidence, I'm honestly not really sure why you're bothering to engage in discussion in the first place.
> The main finding of our reanalysis of MK’s study is that the shape of the distribution of happiness changes—slightly, but systematically—as income rises. The same increases of income have different effects on the happy and on the unhappy regions of the distribution. In the low range of incomes, unhappy people gain more from increased income than happier people do. In other words, the bottom of the happiness distribution rises much faster than the top in that range of incomes. The trend is reversed for higher incomes, where very happy people gain much more from increased income than unhappy people do. The upper part of the happiness distribution rises with log(income) at an accelerated rate in that range, while the lower 20% is almost completely flat.
So it sounds like this study is saying people who are unhappy and have low income or are already happy and have high incomes will become a lot happier with more income. The lower end would be consistent with people are are unhappy because of the lack of income, and I don't think would apply very much to people one promotion away from a $500k raise. For the other end, it seems like it would be consistent that people who have high incomes and are happy might be just as likely to become happier from other things instead of more income; maybe they're just people who are naturally happy whenever something good happens regardless of what it is, and because they have high incomes, they don't need to worry about existential life issues most of the time.
In other words, none of this seems to heavily contradict what I said, other than the caveat that if you are already happy, you might still be happier with more income (but we don't know that you might be just as happy from getting a new hobby or spending more time with your family instead of getting promoted). Even without that caveat, it does not seem like your link is nearly enough to make a reasonable argument that I'm dense for happening to cite an effect from an article that, according to your link, was a valid result according to both of the authors.
Tech people would be shocked and surprised to know how tech-illiterate non-tech people are. Reminds me of old days when the IT guy is AIO in some non-tech facility and is treated like god!!
Remember when Zuck called his fellow students at harvard who used facebook “Dumb fucks”? The US is accelerating into techno-authoritarianism, and all of these tech companies adopted “companies over countries” motto since the start, it’s not a surprise now.
The context is given, it’s all about users’ data. facebook, google, plantir, flock, you name it, the end goal is to harvest data as much as possible to sell it, profile the individuals, manipulate the public opinion (facebook did a mood-manipulation “experiment” back in 2012, you can only imagine now in the era of social media dependency and AI), invade people’s privacy, among many other things. Now add to that mix a mandatory digital ID, and let’s hear what these CEOs will call the public behind closed doors, I’m sure it’s worse than “dumb fucks”. Fun fact: Zuck early days business card printed with “I’M THE CEO, BITCH.”
it is fairly evident that contextualisation is paramount in objectively assessing a situation ... in the context of having god like power over billions , it seems entirely moot to debate the merits of why such a god like individual would label his subjects as idiots ...
In the sense that the US has been anti-intellectualist for decades, I'm kind of ok with it. All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are kind of getting their comeuppance. It's definitely cut off your nose to spite your face type shit, but does give me a little bit of joy. "You stuffed me in a locker and destroyed my social life because I read a book at lunch. I'm going to automate your job away and help billionaires make sure you'll never rise out of poverty."
> I'm kind of ok with it. All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are kind of getting their comeuppance
I have yet to see it. All the stereotypical “asshole jocks” I can recall from school tended to be from upper middle class families. They’re doing much better than many of the nerds many of who are unemployed NEETs.
Though I admit these sort of social cliques are much more complex in real life than in a corny 80s coming of age movie.
All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are running the government. Not sure this is the win you're painting it as?
How much does food and electricity cost you (if the electricity is even on for you at all)? Also, uh, this isn't high school anymore, and the "nerds vs. jocks" framing says a lot more about your own internal state than it does about the state of the world, which is being run into the ground by wealthy oligarchs. If you have bad high school memories to process, that can be done elsewhere.
Do you realize that many of those nerds who were bullied in high school are fighting on the other side, trying to take on even bigger bullies - the oligarchs, to save democracy? Meanwhile, many of those bullies have grown up too, realized how cruel and shameful their conduct was, and are now fighting on the same side!
I understand that childhood bullying can leave some scars. I have faced my fair share too. But life teaches you ever bigger lessons and shifts your priorities. There are much bigger problems now! But if you had the luxury of harboring your grudges against some kiddie bullies, then you have some serious insecurity problems and too much time in your hands. In fact, that's exactly the problem that convert some shy rich kids into destructive oligarchs who lack any empathy. They end up with the delusions that they're somehow special, extra-intelligent and the rightful heirs to the future of humanity. They see their former bullies as sub-human creatures who stand in the way of their and humanity's glory.
I'm not making this up. Go ahead and read the literature that guide these techno-authoritarians. You'll see this philosophy repeated time and again. If you don't want to put in that much effort, there are numerous articles and media that psychoanalyze them based on these literature. You can see that fingerprint in all of their destructive behavior, including their disdain for democracy. And then check your own comment. See how much it resembles them!
I don't think "the nerds" are really dishing out much comeuppance here.
Professionally, they're marginalized by finance-bros, who actually decide what gets built and which morals get followed. Privately, everything you might want to repair or tweak or invent is still getting locked down or patented or criminalized.
Per the article, the attacker can restart the camera and potentially find the accurate position of it. However, if the attacker can be physically in proximity within the camera range, they can MITM it and intercept the video feed. So it depends on your friend's threat model. If the camera is recording something in a public location and they don't mind the location being exposed and potentially the video feed (like plenty of live public cameras), then it shouldn't be an issue. Otherwise, they need to disable it until it gets fixed.
yes, everything can be automated, and as you people don't always have time to automate everything, so it depends if your area has many c200 which is a home camera, not outdoor
Great article. I have the same model and few months ago I did notice it was restarting in a non-scheduled time, and you can tell it restarts because it does a full rotation. First time it happened I ignored it but the second time I knew something was up so I disconnected it and since then been offline, it was recording an insignificant thing anyway.
Well, these measures are a bit outdated. To be tracked now you don't need to access someone's personal devices. You can be tracked with flock cams, ring cams, or any other thousands of cams out there that are already recording you and logging your car and your details. That grocery store you went to yesterday? Yep, you are logged from the moment you are in the parking lot till you leave. Oh, you used paid parking a day later? Your car is logged too, same goes with bus/trains tickets. Neighbors cams or building CCTV? That too. Your home address is also logged through many ways but primarily your tax filing and driver's license. Your home internet can be logged one way or another too, at router level (think of the many exploits against that). What about your laptop hardware? Definitely it isn't open source. Plus, have you checked your hardware if it's bugged? I personally know someone who ordered a laptop and an XYZ agency bugged his laptop (man in the middle) before it was delivered. A new laptop you order online and your bank info will trigger someone to intercept it and alter it in the middle. And many more details, like, are you sure someone won't stick an AirTag somewhere in/beneath your car to track you? FBI and DEA already used modified AirTags that won't notify anyone with an iPhone around to track drug dealers precisely. What about personal connections like friends and family or work that could be a weak link? and many ways without going into further details. So while your measures might work against some random internet attack or random stalker, against a surveillance state it won't. If they want to track you, they have all the resources (technical, legal, etc.) needed to do so.
>FBI and DEA already used modified AirTags that won't notify anyone with an iPhone around to track drug dealers precisely.
Don't Airtags now notify the nearby user if they are being tracked? I have heard of airtags getting modded to remove the speaker but Apple bypassed this with software updates that alert you out of band(as far as I know). Your assertion would require government to have special Airtags that iOS ignores no?
At least one (and I assume all) manufacturers of network hardware have backroom code sharing deals with the NSA, and likely only highest leadership and a single release engineer knows about it.
I personally know a trustworthy release engineer that described in detail they were the person that had to send all new source code for each release to an NSA owned FTP server.
Does that mean Apple is actually doing this too? Hard to say, but when there is no accountability it is best to operate under the assumption the worst is happening. Particularly given Tim Cook is very publicly sucking up to the president every chance he gets.
Im presuming you can't just directly ask the people you met if this mysterious modded Airtag exists?
Also on a side note: Did anything happen in 2025 regarding the saga from Defcon last year or did everyone just move on after 24? I apologize if this is still a sore issue.
I hear you, and if I was given such an order, even if it came with a gag order, I would never comply and would go straight to the press, consequences be damned.
Problem is everyone knows the people like me that would react this way, and those people go on vacation eventually or can be replaced. Pay attention when that happens.
If Trump asked Tim Cook for a favor, I bet it gets taken care of one way or the other.
I would not take your bet on any specific company at any specific time, but in the scale of the top ten tech companies over a decade, it is absolutely happening regularly with some of them and there is political will for it to be all of them.
If apple really wants to (and put their money where their mouth is when it comes to those stupid "Pro Privacy" ads they run), they can start by filing a CFAA lawsuit against said agencies.
The same Apple whose CEO actively kisses the ass of the president buying tickets to be close to him and making him fancy gifts? The same Apple that voluntarily gave the CCP control of all the HSMs controlling the supply chains of all apple hardware in China?
Any claims of privacy or consumer advocacy at Apple are completely just marketing to gullible consumers.
If Apple actually cared about accountability, which is a prerequisite for privacy, they would open source everything so security researchers could reproduce all binaries and easily inspect their sources.
> What about your laptop hardware? Definitely it isn't open source.
On some older Thinkpads you can install Coreboot/Libreboot. Or even buy them with that, if flashing the firmware seems to complicated/risky, or necessitating buying equipment one does not have at the ready. Same goes at least for some routers, with OpenWRT, or the likes, or depending on the used connection technology going 'full personal computer' with some Linux/BSD again, with even more options regarding Core-/Librebroot/Dasharo underneath. There are always some paths for at least some aspects of that stuff. Most funny thing, if you don't trust your switches is something like https://www.apalrd.net/posts/2025/network_smartsfp/ <-that's not the only one. Imagine a cluster of firewalls in your ports!1!!
The question is if it's worth it? Or maybe more like a hobby with the benefit of staying technologically fit, but at the end of the day more like LARPing 'prepping'?
I suspect the people who have jobs that have made them capable of building and flashing their own firmware are exactly the sorts of people the NSA would be more likely to target and thus these tactics become all the more important.
Things like Intel ME are a straight up backdoor in consumer CPUs though, which is a bigger problem that is hard to disable. Government workers buy special laptops from Dell etc that disable this for security reasons, but difficult to get consumer laptop CPUs as a civilian that do not have ME or a similar technology enabled.
Thankfully ME Cleaner is a thing for many consumer CPUs to defang it, though you want this done at the firmware level, and that is where coreboot becomes all but a hard requirement.
I am convinced it is critical for preservation of our basic freedoms that digital sovereignty becomes the norm.
Privacy is like diet, it is not a zero sum game. The less data we give to advertisers and governments the better. The point is to increase the expense of tracking and create as many holes in their databases as possible.
> You can be tracked with flock cams, ring cams, or any other thousands of cams out there that are already recording you and logging your car and your details. That grocery store you went to yesterday? Yep, you are logged from the moment you are in the parking lot till you leave. Oh, you used paid parking a day later? Your car is logged too, same goes with bus/trains tickets. Neighbors cams or building CCTV? That too.
E-Bikes do not require license plates and allow most of this to be mitigated when I use one of those and are what I would recommend for targeted individuals and demographics, but at some level the movements of my vehicle are tracked unavoidably but they certainly cannot remotely control the car or access microphones when they do not exist so these tactics still have value.
> same goes with bus/trains tickets
I pay cash for these and use them short term so little tracking value here.
> our home internet can be logged one way or another too, at router level (think of the many exploits against that).
I significantly reduce the chance of this by using VPNs and Tor for most personal traffic depending on use case, and layers of simple open source linux/freebsd etworking hardware I setup myself.
> What about your laptop hardware? Definitely it isn't open source. Plus, have you checked your hardware if it's bugged? I personally know someone who ordered a laptop and an XYZ agency bugged his laptop (man in the middle) before it was delivered. A new laptop you order online and your bank info will trigger someone to intercept it and alter it in the middle.
I full source bootstrapped my own operating systems and compilers and very often firmware (https://stagex.tools). I mostly use desktops, among them a Talos II which is open hardware/
firmware.
As the lead author of AirgapOS I recommend sensitive use case laptops be purchased randomly from retail locations with cash and document tamper evidence tactics in detail. These tactics are regularly used to move billions of dollars of value around by large financial institutions we advise, but I also recommend these tactics for targeted individuals like journalists as well, along with QubesOS depending on use case.
> And many more details, like, are you sure someone won't stick an AirTag somewhere in/beneath your car to track you?
If I force them to target me in person where I am much more likely to notice, my tactics have done their job and are good to recommend to the general public since they cannot do this type of targeting at scale and thus the tactics can protect most people. I really hope they try something this, because if they do, I am going to waste a lot of their time and have a lot of fun at their expense. I have quite an arsenal of radio forensics hardware and if my vehicle if ever transmitting anything, it is for sure something I did not put there.
> What about personal connections like friends and family or work that could be a weak link?
I do not share sensitive information with people with opsec significantly worse than my own. Everyone at my job uses the same opsec tactics I do for anything work related. We self host everything including E2EE encrypted chat, everyone uses qubesos, etc etc.
> So while your measures might work against some random internet attack or random stalker, against a surveillance state it won't.
My tactics create massive holes in surveillance capitalism and government tracking databases they would need to deploy agents in person to fill. If thousands of people use my tactics, suddenly they run out of agents to stalk people.
My goal is not to make tracking impossible, it is to make myself mostly invisible to surveillance capitalism and blackhats who are my most likely threats, and as a nice bonus require a government to get a warrant and spend a lot of money to track me or anyone using my tactics.
At least by reading all of the above, it seems they have something like Genode (running on https://sel4.systems/ , amongst others ), but instead of some academic research thing, widely deployed commercially, running on consumer ready devices of all sorts.
Lately all based on that HongMeng kernel thing, comparable in performance to SEL4, utilizing containerized Linux-drivers by way of compatibility-shim, still fast.
I really appreciate the scorched earth efforts to redo computing with security from the start, but personally I have reached the conclusion that compatibility is key to adoption, and that desktop focused linux distros like ubuntu with yolo security being used for servers is the practice causing the most harm we must end as soon as possible.
QubesOS falls really short in supply chain integrity, and server solutions, but IMO the overall hypervisor/IOMMU isolation architecture is the most practical and compatible way forward though nowhere near as elegant as some of the ideas in Genode.
In EnclaveOS my team and I chose to focus on remote attestation and best available security isolation technologies available to most server CPUs while still using (hardened) linux kernels. We talk about this here: https://distrust.co/blog/enclaveos.html
Maybe in US but in various parts of Europe this ain't true, you cross certain threshold for power or speed and license plate is required, with corresponding insurance - same for e-scooters.
Ie in Switzerland thats 20kmh so basically all of them since they often cut off at 25kmh. Almost nobody does that for weaker ones and thus police keeps taking them and then you see police guys riding around say Geneva on various e-scooters.
And yet a lot of services claim they are keeping the phone number as a requirement for registration to “prevent fraud and abuse”, pro tip, it is not, the real reason is to link your real identity to your digital one, and even that number can be tracked with cellular towers. So never trust any service who sells itself for privacy and all and still requires a phone number, and that includes Signal.
That emoji in the last pic felt like passive aggressiveness. I don’t have anything to say but it’s why I never put my eggs in one basket, and essential stuff are always backed up, but if your job is developing in an apple eco system and this scenario happens, it’s basically like getting fired and banned from working ever again!
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