Notes for October 20th 2023
- 23andMe, the DNA testing platform and social network, had a serious security breach. Hackers are slowly leaking trenches of customer data onto forums. And 23andme decided to blame it's customers. Apparently customers reusing passwords is the reason. Which is absolute nonsense as it's a large-scale breach of security, and trust.
- It's my opinion, having worked in tech for 15 years, that these companies should be heavily, heavily fined if they have a security breach. We, as a society, are far too lax on these companies. The fine should be a hefty portion of annual revenue (not profit). Security is no joke.
- This week my 3-year-old got sick. Which is awful, because he has been properly sick. We reckon it's a viral infection, which will just shake out of his system. But watching a 3 year old not properly eat, throw up a bit, and just generally be down when he's normally bouncy, is awful.
- We're approaching review season in work. Which is a bi-annual (maybe even tri-annual at this stage, I've no idea) event to check-in in a pseudo formal way. For my team members, we run a light process because I frankly make a weird amount of effort to get that working. I have a new boss, and am very curious as to how she will approach this. As frankly, while the company I work for is fabulous and my colleagues are amazing; I am two or three steps behind where I would have been had I not moved to the company in the first place. Some folks know, and can see this. But she's too new to have figured that bit out. How I steer that conversation may wind up being more make-or-break than it needs to be.
- "The I in LLM stands for intelligence," is one of the funniest phrases I've seen this week.
- Last week Ireland, almost predictably, was knocked out of the rugby world cup at the quarter finals. Which is agonising in itself given how strong the team is. But knowing that the entire tournament draw meant that the top 4 teams (France , South Africa, Ireland and New Zealand) were on the same side of the draw. And they were effectively playing a different sport to every other team.
- News this week includes Paddy "Web Summit" Cosgrave weighing in on the middle eastern saga. His 'hot takes' are usually a lot hotter. And this one was pretty mild. But he has a history of mouthing off, and thus this is low hanging fruit to cancel him or move away from Web Summit. Intel, Gillian Anderson, Stripe, Google, Siemens and a number of others have declared that they're pulling out of the event. My only story that I can share about Paddy is that I once quipped (via quote-tweet) that he would only hire students from Trinity. I think his original Tweet was about hiring folks onto his team. Within a few hours, I was contacted by Web Summit (not Paddy's own) legal to cease and desist, or else. So I did by tweeting what happened and that I'd delete the messages. I did that, but enough folks sub-tweeted (i.e. took a screenshot and posted after) that Paddy looked a bit of a dope. That alone means I can never really have any sympathy for anything he does.
