Hey, welcome to my blog. (I know, super original.) I’m not a writer, but I’m going to try my best to express my thoughts and ideas here. If IT taught us anything, it’s that we are a bit of a self-propelling hype train. Proof?
Remember Zero Trust? Building perimeters around everything. Least Privilege…
What about those folks that are pure sales, no technical background, that are able to sell you a solution that is not even ready for production? Eager to make that commission check, they will tell you whatever you want to hear. Loads of them ran to the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, etc. But honestly, I like the “vibe” Anthropic has. Why? They (claim) they are all about safety. See this YouTube video with Boris Cherny. He comes off as genuinely focused on the safety of AI. But I could also be biased as the story of learning to code on a TI-83 calculator is pretty cool, but also shared. Ok ok, mine was a TI-82, and no, it wasn’t used just for loading up “Drug Wars” (though it was used for that too). It was used to run some BASIC code to calculate Cramer’s Law for a math class. I had ample time during, call it, forced studying. Where deviation from that would be punished, with demerits. Demerits would result in not being able to go on visits. More on that later…
I had asked my teacher ahead of time if calculators were going to be allowed for the test and they would be. They obliged. With a smirk I walked into the classroom, sat for the test, and quite possibly finished in 10 minutes. I turned my test in, and the rest of the room looked at me like I was crazy.
I had then explained to my teacher how I finished the test so quickly:
“I used my TI-82 to calculate Cramer’s Law for each problem.”
His face lit up. He then asked me to share my code with him. I asked if I could gather my notes from my scribbles in one of those (age-old) composition notebooks. He obliged.
I came back and showed him the code and the notes, and he was impressed. He then took out his (much nicer) calculator, and said:
“Here is my code, feel free to compare it and see about making your code more efficient.”
I never really got around to it. But I did get an A on that test. And ended up finishing the year with honors and Dean’s list.
It’s not that I didn’t care, something told me…
“The code just worked, I knew how it worked, why change it?”
Function over form/beauty, all that. As a self-taught technologist, I have to play with things all the time to learn about them. That is just how I operate.
So… with that small aside… welcome to Cloudburn.dev. I will rant about cloud providers, tech, security, and most of all the challenges we (both geeks and non) face in this ever-changing world of technology.
Stay up…