Posts by Catch-the-Pigeon 47 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2025
IT guy - " yeah simple , we just change the region, run the code , restore all the stateful stuff , update DNS and it's done"
in reality, there will problems all the way , code doesn't work as expected, stuff done manually in the portal, databases not backed up , etc. Still it's a good learning exercise for the next time
with today's politics and the possibility of China taking Taiwan, no-one wants to be reliant on TSMC being there forever, although they have diversified into the US. Along with data sovereignty , comes chip sovereignty and in today world trust no-one , not even your so called allies. The UK private sector should fund the same way as Japan, problem is there are not many large British corporates left in the IT sector which aren't diluted with foriegn investments.
A number of years ago I was working at JPMorgan when they had outsourced their IT services to IBM, who had won the contract as the lowest bidder. However, the agreement included professional services billed separately from the core contract.
By the time I joined, the arrangement had been running for several years, and it was widely understood internally that almost any change was classified as professional services. The associated costs steadily accumulated and, over time, likely matched or even exceeded what some of the higher bidders would have charged in the first place.
As I understand it, JPMorgan eventually decided to terminate the remaining contract early and bring it all back-in-house (backsourcing). This may have not been the only reason because there was a merger at the time and I guess there probably were a few reasons.
I did a contract at Accenture about 20 years ago in the City. At the time, people used to joke that it felt a bit robotic in there. During my stint, my line manager was extremely committed to the company — it was more than a job for him — and he ran the team like a hard line communist.
Bods that did more than 90 hours a week, got a piece of paper and cheap bottle of wine , mostly newbies who will realise later in life they were mugged of their early years.
Some colleagues were incredibly loyal and fully immersed in the corporate culture, exactly what they want to ingrain. I was on a six-month contract but decided to wrap up after five, which didn’t go down particularly well with my manager. I never went back — and given he’s now a partner, I suspect he’d probably remember that decision if I ever tried :)
I was planning to install it just to try it out, but during setup it requested multiple API keys for integrations. That gave me pause, so I decided not to proceed as it felt too risky.
There are safer ways to test tools like this — for example, running them inside a dedicated VM or on separate hardware that isn’t used for anything else. That way, if something goes wrong, the blast radius is limited.
it's similar to losing a credit card, rotating and replacing every key can take time and cause disruption, so it’s worth being cautious upfront.
The governments around most of the world are chasing buzzwords because other have told them to and they think it's the best way to go. There are so many things this money could fix in India but would get tired of trying or wouldn't see much benefit from it whereas in reality it would add alot.
Also they must've seen the issues with water and power other countries have, from this it might be worth speeding up that rollout of bit barns before the compeTITors grab it all. And I don't think even a few monsoons will cover the amount of water required.
I wonder if it will get to the point that it's not worth taking on large clients , since the risk of data exposure by either user configuraion errors or external hacking attempts will make the company liable to large fines and lawyer fees which, in some cases, might exceed the pricing of the original work
pay per view , this could/would be their best revenue model and might even exceed the license fee. People choose to see what they want and what they don't , occasionally the beeb still comes out with excellent sitcoms and drama's like line of duty. They could also get revenue stream from the old sit coms and comedies which I still watch like the two ronnies, porridge etc. The bbc isn't about money but about free speech but in an ever increasing competitive world sometimes there is no choice and the need to survive
they should use the datacentre's to serve themselves first from a souvreign point of view which with the segragation of the world today is more pressing. Also getting others to build more datacentres for their own purpose is going to take a big strain on power and water infrastructure. Create an Indian cloud first and sell this abroad
Looking at the spec of the z17 it does look like it's suited to AI usage with on-chip AI acceleration , real time high volume inference data. Also support for AI workloads including transactional ML, LLMs and gen AI.
With the large memory these machines have running into TB holding a large LLM into memory for fast access isn't an issue.
If you are into contracting to recover some or more of your tax money get skilled up in palantir tools, it's not easy since they're quite bespoke but with the lack of people around to do it you're likely to get a contract for 1000+ per day, and looks like most contracts are 1 year and ongoing. In this case even without practical eperience do what most do , make it up, quids in eventually. For the rest it's read it and weep
Saw a post on linkedin for palantir consultants, daily rates for these are around £1000+ mark, more for some products. With the geo-political issues in the US and the worries about data sovereignty this is a shrewd move by Accenture. As mentioned above the various givernments will just pay whatever it takes , in the end the suppliers of consultants is an easy "loads of money" contracts.
also the govenrment uses stats from ONS called life tables , they know roughly certain percentage won't reach pension age so they can rely on this money being used in other areas. The figures vary depnedning on the area and are average 15% , slightlly higer for deprived/less affluent areas.
exactly , the socially engineering attack could happen with any third party, changing it doesn't achieve much but maybe it's easier to tell the shareholders we can blame someone else for the lack of judgement with these types of attacks. There's no mention of blame but I guess the change almost covers it
reminds me of the dot.com or dot bomb bubble in the early 2000's, all went crazy with over-evaluations of companies. I was working for an online news company which started with 4M VC in 1998 and it went to a valuation of 200m with no revenue, companies just going to get online to get higher stock valuations from the market makers etc. What happened in the crash was probably more of a correction than a crash but it did mean alot of the free stuff started to become subscription services. There were lots of free cloud drives around and this all changed to tiered charging.
High interest rates at the time and less VC available also didn't help with the crash.
We might see the same with AI subscriptions going much higher from the ones that manage to survive. ?
part of the blame lies with the companies themselves, some not even bothering with security and some others do but are pretty lame defence. Find all your endpoints and tie them down with WAF rules, audit and alerting on, Also whatever happened to the UK Gov' Cyber Defence Force ? Is it still on, or has the money for it been divi'ed out ?
those signal repeaters for stealing cars have been around for more than 20 years, have the manufacturers ever done anything to fix it, nope, they could if they wanted to. They want the cars to be stolen and they want the insurance premiums to rise, the manufacters and insurance companies are the winners and the people buying the cars get penalised and the other bonus is someone in eastern europe or even further out gets a decent car pretty cheap.
Similar situation in the 80's , our ford cortina estate got stolen a few times , turned out you could just use a coat hanger wire to open it, similar for other fords as well, it took Ford years to put this right.
one advantage of this might be if you don't want to encrypt EBS volumes and use the native db encryption instead, this means the machine and disk are easier to image and copy to other regions or attaching the volume to another instance for recoverability is easier ? but in general most would enable the default settings of encrypting EBS volumes or equivalent in Azure. Has the disadvantage though it would offload encryption to the instance CPU's rather than let if offload ot dedicated hardware.
I've resigned from my current place , I'm on 3 month notice and work and on critical infrastructure for the company , building out all their AWS/Azure components. In some places, where they have enough people they probably would let me go and pay for the 3 months and avoid any issues. In this case , there's only two of us so I have to sit it out and this is where a level of profressional is involved.
The above just leads to reputational damage , on both sides but mostly on the sacked individual and the outcome is obvious espcially for future work
What is interesting is when the likes of Crapita et al signs a contract with one of the government agencies, when these roles move to their domain they start hitting another 30-40% more basic salary and a typical pension contribution circa 5-10%. These roles are all charged back to the government , is it because it's tax payers money , they don't advertise high rates of salary , so the tax payers thinks they are all paid low but the pension makes up for it. Also there's probably stats on how many die before they even get to pensionable age which might be in the govenments favour.
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