As usual, Halvar, great thoughts to ponder.
I’m kind of fond of my glasses, although I’ve yet to hit the point of yelling “get off my lawn”. If you look back we should be proud of what we’ve built (be it on stilts at times) but never lose sight of where that ship seems to be sailing to.
A lot of us are at the “tail end” of our careers, with many building that career on “unmentionables”. It was good to us then, fairly good to us now (not going to rant on ageism), but I think we need to get more into “mentor mode” than most of us are at the moment. For the last 10-15 years, I haven’t seen much of that. Please prove me wrong, folks.
And Tom Q, good to see that post from you. Hope that working with me 20 years ago helped you out today, and that I was a mentor and friend that hopefully made a difference. I’ll never wind up in some “CSO Hall of Fame”, but I never cared to be either :)
If we leave this scene better than when we found it, we’re doing the right thing.
All the best, Ken
On Aug 20, 2022, at 8:59 AM, Thomas Dullien via Dailydave dailydave@lists.aitelfoundation.org wrote:
Hey,
One of the benefits of aging is that one gets to focus deteriorating eyesight on the past through rose-tinted glasses. Fond memories of times that feel simpler in retrospect, but didn't feel simple as they were happening.
Software, like a tide that keeps rising, has eaten the world, and ARM cores outnumber humans.
A lot of us have built lives, careers, and considerable material comfort on top of something that people told us to stop doing for most of our youth.
The software tide lifted a lot of boats, including the poorly constructed skiffs we took out.
A few observations:
Old-timers like us are terrible sources of career advice. Aside from survivorship bias, the environment we acted in was drastically different than today's environment.
A field with no curriculum, few prospects, and that is generally treated as a bad habit will attract very different folks than a "promising career path".
For those of us that thrived on avoiding the conventional path, and for whom that formed a part of their identity, having gone mainstream is a bewildering experience.
What's next?
If you find a beautiful spot in nature somewhere, do you tell anyone?
Cheers, Halvar/Thomas
On Wed, 17 Aug 2022, 01:06 Dave Aitel via Dailydave, dailydave@lists.aitelfoundation.org wrote: As you wander the halls of the inaptly named Caesar's Forum, amidst a living sea of the most neurodiverse Clan humanity has ever seen, you cannot help but stop for a second to close your eyes amidst the cacophony and mentally exclaim, "Look. Look at the world we have created!"
Sitting in the one cafe in the Paris hotel with food, a tattooed thirty-something who has been to Defcon twice gives you advice on how to do the conference. "Take the unirail." they say. "Also, you should have a hacker name! Mine is 'youngblood''"
"Noted!" you respond. These are good ideas. The unirail in particular, probably, because Vegas is overflowing - and decent food options and anywhere to sit that is not beeping at you or showing grungy dystopian TV ads the Cyberpunk 2077 developers would find over-the-top are impossible to come by, making the conference ten times more exhausting than usual.
In that sense, you miss the Alexis Park days, sitting with Halvar Flake next to a pool where everyone was more larval than they knew, watching Dildog lauch BO2K to a thousand screaming fans in the same room Dino Dai Zovi explained Solaris hacking an hour earlier.
Some of the best talks this year had no attendees at all - Orange Tsai's talk was over Zoom, to a huge room, but with few butts in the seats. There were a hundred "Villages" it seemed like, living a half-life between physical space in the conference room and a Discord channel.
Defcon may be the worst and best place to learn anything in that way - the environment is hopelessly chaotic, with two talks happening inches away from each other, and only feet from a DJ pumping out house music. But perhaps the best environment to learn in is the one in which you are most inspired?
My friends, we've conquered the world. What's next?
-dave
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