I'm wondering, what's you guys/gals/linux kernels/however you identify yourself 'superpower'?

I think that nearly everyone has something which can be extremely useful (maybe not healthy) and which not many other people you know have.

In my case it's that i can manage with extremely variable sleep patterns and when needed, I can sleep very short for days in a row (3-4 hours a night) and I'm all good. Nearly all friends/family that I have NEED regular sleep patterns + at least 8 hours of sleep but i can very much manage without those. Very useful when having disruption service and stuff.

Please post yours in the comments if you're comfortable with that!

Long rant ahead.. so feel free to refill your cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂

It's completely useless. At least in the school I went to, the teachers were worse than useless. It's a bit of an old story that I've told quite a few times already, but I had a dispute with said teachers at some point after which I wasn't able nor willing to fully do the classes anymore.

So, just to set the stage.. le me, die-hard Linux user, and reasonably initiated in networking and security already, to the point that I really only needed half an ear to follow along with the classes, while most of the time I was just working on my own servers to pass the time instead. I noticed that the Moodle website that the school was using to do a big chunk of the course material with, wasn't TLS-secured. So whenever the class begins and everyone logs in to the Moodle website..? Yeah.. it wouldn't be hard for anyone in that class to steal everyone else's credentials, including the teacher's (as they were using the same network).

So I brought it up a few times in the first year, teacher was like "yeah yeah we'll do it at some point". Shortly before summer break I took the security teacher aside after class and mentioned it another time - please please take the opportunity to do it during summer break.

Coming back in September.. nothing happened. Maybe I needed to bring in more evidence that this is a serious issue, so I asked the security teacher: can I make a proper PoC using my machines in my home network to steal the credentials of my own Moodle account and mail a screencast to you as a private disclosure? She said "yeah sure, that's fine".
Pro tip: make the people involved sign a written contract for this!!! It'll cover your ass when they decide to be dicks.. which spoiler alert, these teachers decided they wanted to be.

So I made the PoC, mailed it to them, yada yada yada... Soon after, next class, and I noticed that my VPN server was blocked. Now I used my personal VPN server at the time mostly to access a file server at home to securely fetch documents I needed in class, without having to carry an external hard drive with me all the time. However it was also used for gateway redirection (i.e. the main purpose of commercial VPN's, le new IP for "le onenumity"). I mean for example, if some douche in that class would've decided to ARP poison the network and steal credentials, my VPN connection would've prevented that.. it was a decent workaround. But now it's for some reason causing Moodle to throw some type of 403.

Asked the teacher for routers and switches I had a class from at the time.. why is my VPN server blocked? He replied with the statement that "yeah we blocked it because you can bypass the firewall with that and watch porn in class".
Alright, fair enough. I can indeed bypass the firewall with that. But watch porn.. in class? I mean I'm a bit of an exhibitionist too, but in a fucking class!? And why right after that PoC, while I've been using that VPN connection for over a year?

Not too long after that, I prematurely left that class out of sheer frustration (I remember browsing devRant with the intent to write about it while the teacher was watching 😂), and left while looking that teacher dead in the eyes.. and never have I been that cold to someone while calling them a fucking idiot.

Shortly after I've also received an email from them in which they stated that they wanted compensation for "the disruption of good service". They actually thought that I had hacked into their servers. Security teachers, ostensibly technical people, if I may add. Never seen anyone more incompetent than those 3 motherfuckers that plotted against me to save their own asses for making such a shitty infrastructure. Regarding that mail, I not so friendly replied to them that they could settle it in court if they wanted to.. but that I already knew who would win that case. Haven't heard of them since.

So yeah. That's why I regard those expensive shitty pieces of paper as such. The only thing they prove is that someone somewhere with some unknown degree of competence confirms that you know something. I think there's far too many unknowns in there.

Nowadays I'm putting my bets on a certification from the Linux Professional Institute - a renowned and well-regarded certification body in sysadmin. Last February at FOSDEM I did half of the LPIC-1 certification exam, next year I'll do the other half. With the amount of reputation the LPI has behind it, I believe that's a far better route to go with than some random school somewhere.

The railway service in Sydney is called CityRail.

Fuck CityRail!

It's so unreliable that service disruption is to be expected when the weather is too hot, too cold, too wet, or too dry. If it rains, some services will be cancelled while the rest face delays.

Fuck CityRail!

The rail network is so dilapidated it costs the government millions of dollars each year for maintenance, despite charging a fare that is one of the most expensive.

Fuck CityRail!

Now I'm typing this because I've be stuck on this train for the last hour and there little hope for me to reach home before fucking MIDNIGHT!

FUCK CITYRAIL!

They initially offered replacement service but later retracted.

Fuck CityRail!

So, for the last year or so, we've been playing with a natural language A.I.
The goal was to predict port, truck and rail service disruption due to social unrest.
The trick here is that our AI would "read between the lines" of today's news articles and spit out keywords that were likely to appear in near future articles, thus giving us an early warning before some union or army start blockading roads.

It... did not work as intended. But some very weird results came out.
Apparently, we made a robotic "kid that screams that the emperor has no clothes", yielding unlikely (but somewhat expected) keywords when fed collections of articles.

We gave it marketing content about our company. It replied "high suicide rate".

That feeling when the cluster your ovh vps runs on goes down the exact moment your application is supposed to go live, and everyone is blaming you :|

Well fuck Amazon. I am trying to get into my account because for some fucking reason they say my payment method is faulty while they actually write off the subscription of prime of it. But to get into my account I need to login again with 2FA as I have that turned it on. So far so good. But since it's an old phone number I can't login. Well just change the phone number wouldn't you think? Well yes but to change the phone number I need to login in with the old phone number to which I have no longer access 🤦‍♂️. Eventually found a phone number I could call. I get a lovely lady on the phone which guides me to resetting my password but for that, you guessed it, I need to do the 2FA again. I get send through to the next person as she can't change it for me because of privacy reasons (oh well). That guy first askes the last 4 numbers of my creditcard like 5 times because he can't remember it (write it the fuck down then asshole) then he starts mistaking the 6 for 9 (like how the fuck do you do that) and then the text messages don't come in while I am on the phone with him which he tries to blame to my service provider because they would block Amazon (like why would they do that?). But since I got a text message of them 15 min before I shot that down quickly. Then he finally admitted that they might have a disruption going on. So I think we'll fine I'll just ask my question to him how it's possible that Prime stops working as I am watching it because my payment method is faulty according to them (but manage to write off the subscription) and he starts talking just shit. Just admit that you don't know and connect me to someone who does know how that can happen. In the the end I just hung up because I knew I wasn't getting anywhere with this guy and don't you know it, as I start writing this the text messages come in. Problem solved you would say just out that number in the website and you can change your phone number. Well no because I have to tell the number to the guy who I hung up with because the texts weren't coming in 😒. Now I should call them back but I think I'll wait till tomorrow hopefully the day shift will be a bit more knowledgeable on how shit works and can actually remember 4 digits.