When they say, the disaster was unimaginable. What they usually mean is, paying the price for preventing the disaster was unimaginable.
Category Archives: Talk
Talk about politics, society, science, computers, internet, psychology, and philosophy.
Chrome: How to get rid of “Managed by your organization”. (Without frying your settings)…
So, you surfed into your work SharePoint to check something with your private browser on your private Mac, and now the bottom of the menu says:
“Managed by your organization”
Well… It’s likely NOT YOUR organization… It’s your boss’s organization, and only Zeus knows what he’s doing with your browser… time to disconnect.
There are several different ways this hook can be sunk into your a**, but in my case, I found the culprit in chrome://policy/ where there was a LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls with the following value:
[ "https://EVILCORP-my.sharepoint.com", "https://EVILCORP.sharepoint.com"]
“Replace” EVILCORP with your own special EVILCORP.
Those guys don’t really belong there, do they? So let’s get rid of them. This is how you do it on a Mac.
Start by verifying that this is indeed what’s happened in your case. Open a terminal and write the following (for details, see the manual for the defaults command… YES, REALLY, you shouldn’t just paste stuff from the internet into a terminal window without verifying what it does first… Check the manual! I can wait…😆):
defaults read com.google.Chrome LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls
The reply should be:
( "https://EVILCORP-my.sharepoint.com", "https://EVILCORP.sharepoint.com")
Found em! You can’t run! You can’t hide! EVILCORP.
So, let’s get medieval on their a**es.
Very important! You must, MUST verify that the “LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls” is at the end of this command, or you’ll reset your whole browser back to factory settings! Don’t reset your browser accidentally!
defaults delete com.google.Chrome LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls
Now verify you did indeed send them EVILCORPERS packing.:
defaults read com.google.Chrome LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls
The reply should be along the line:
The domain/default pair of (com.google.Chrome, LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls) does not exist
Now all you have to do is restart Chrome.
The “Managed by your organization” should disappear from the menu, and chrome://policy/ should no longer contain the LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls policy.
Well, you may also want to install a site-blocking plugin to deny access to EVILCORP.
Though, since it’s effing around behind SharePoint, you’ll probably have to block everything that contains EVILCORP to not even get the login prompt. I suspect this crap comes back as soon as you log in, regardless of whether your EVILCORP.sharepoint.com is blocked or not.
Another tip is that if you have to access your work network from your private computer in the future, you might want to use another browser for that. So your private one can block your boss’s a##.
Well, at least, now you know how to get rid of the crap without having to fry your whole browser. Just remember to add that LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls behind the delete, or you’ll do just that.
Aggressively
If you assume everybody who communicates with you does so aggressively, guess what? Most of your communication will be aggressive.
0% Sycophancy!
Gemma 4 via Ollama and AnythingLLM, 0% sycophancy!
Me: Thanks! Could you summarize X (also attached) as if it were a Wikipedia article on this topic?
Gemma 4: In order for me to summarize X as a Wikipedia article, I first need information about X itself. Kindly attach or paste the text about X so that I can create a summary of X in the desired style.
Me: Information about X is attached to this workspace in the document “X.md”. Can you see it?
Gemma 4 makes a “summary” on X that is longer than the original document… and has emoji-decorated headlines… also, no comment on the RAG faux pas or anything… straight shooter…
Me: …
LOL! At least we won’t waste time on pleasantries 😀
Burning Brain
“Your brain is on fire.”
“How could you ever know?”
“From what comes out of it… for sure…”
The Fermi Paradox Answered
You’re really asking where the aliens are? Have you not seen how humans treat aliens? They for sure have…
Swedish Apple Spell
How Swedish spell checking in Apple Spell apparently was created:
Apple: Give us a list of correctly spelled Swedish words.
Swedish language professor: What do you need it for?
Apple: We’re doing spell checking.
Professor: Oh, you can’t do it like that.
Apple: We’re Apple! We can do anything!
Professor (making a joke list): Here, make spell checking with this.
Apple Spell just marked “spådan” (a misspelled “sådan”) a correct word in Swedish.
I mean. Sure, it is a correct Swedish word (a compound of “spå”—fortune-telling, and “dan”—the day… so, “the fortune-telling day”).
I tried to Google it, but was unable. It defaulted to “spådam” (fortune-teller) which ever way I tried to make it not. (Coincidentally, this is also a compound of “spå” and “dam”—lady… Swedish do compounds galore!)
What pisses me off most is that this ungoogleable compound exists in this shit spell checking but not some very very very common ones, like:
- Lättstörd—easily disturbed (e.g. sleep)
- Maglevtåg—maglev train
- Obäddad—unmade (bed)
- Prästinnorna—the priestesses
- And several thousand other words that are not conlang words I have in my local dictionary (currently at 3536 words… I may be a prolific conlanger… but no, not that prolific)
That’s why I think Apple Spell is the result of a Swedish language professor jokingly showing Apple that, no, you can’t do anything even if you think so.
And no, I know what you think. Why don’t you install a Hunspell dictionary? WHY DON’T YOU TRY TO INSTALL ONE? You’d be one of a handful having tried and failed, and none of those people work at Apple.
Microsoft Word may not be good for much when it comes to fiction writing, but it does do Swedish spell-checking about a million times better than Apple Spell.
Planning to fail
“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
—Benjamin Franklin
Now you know why so many American politicians with “great” plans makes asses of themselves.
Shocker: Military strategists (worth their salt) does in fact have failures included in their planning.
“No plan survives the first contact with the enemy.”
—von Moltke the Elder (paraphrased)
Scarier than dead bodies
“Oh God! You scared me.”
“Really? You work with dead bodies all day.”
“So if something moves, it’s likely a dead body.”
“Really? Does that happen often?”
“Did my reaction gave you that impression?”
Parent-Child is the only way to define a hierarchical relationship concisely
In software design, especially database design, you sometimes come across hierarchical relationships like a folder containing files, or a department containing other departments, or any other relationship where the hierarchical order or who contains who is important.
Let’s take an example. You’re the programmer using a web content system where there are folders and these folders have a many-to-many relationship to each other (meaning any folder can contain any other folder, even itself).
Unfortunately you’re tasked with placing a lot of folders inside other folders programmatically (no support from the UI, and by the way, your time budget doesn’t allow f-ing around with the UI to try to figure this one out… “it should be simple to do”, your manager says and give you very little time…)
How not to do it
Here are some examples of database table design (or rather column names) that will likely end up forcing you to redo the job and use 4 times as many hours:
- objectID, referenceObjectID
- connectedFrom, connectedTo
- id, relatedId
- topId, bottomId
Yeah yeah yeah, seeing that mess, you should definitely create a test connection to see what means what.
But what if you display the folders in the UI with components like “List connected from objects” and “List connected to objects”.
Looks good, right, we have two lists and one list can contain only one item and maybe that list can even be designed to look like it’s only one object.
Until someone else connects another object in “the wrong way” and suddenly that nice looking one-object display goes scrolling, swelling, wrapping and overflowing the whole UI.
Or hey, this being a many-to-many-relationship after all, maybe your UI can handle it just fine…
How about your users? How about the support staff?
How about the assumptions of other programmers about what contains what, or what is located where?
I mean, sure, it could be hilarious. A system where the employers can fire their boss or at least lower their wages, or where Texas is located in Austin, or you don’t eat hamburger, but hamburger eat you… like in Soviet Russia…
The ONLY way to do it
There is ONLY one way to describe a hierarchical relationship between two objects in a way nobody can misunderstand ever:
- parent
- child
Now, for sure, if you have problems with parent-child relationships, don’t take it out on your software, take it up with your therapist.
This. Is. The. Only. Way.
Before, after, left, right, center, above, below, alpha, beta, lalala, isn’t going to cut it.
But what if…
No what-ifs.
Parent.
Child.
Period.
Talkwards 