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This would be a Booby Trap and is illegal, so it's not worth it for that chance of going to prison no matter the value in the safe, if you are a billionaire. It would be hard to find someone willing to help you.


Is it still a booby trap if the safe displays a prominent warning, "CAUTION: EMITS DEADLY GAS WHEN DAMAGED"?


Depends on your lawyer.

The law is someone less picky about armed guards, though, so you may just want to pay some thugs to watch your safe.


Gandalf - “But men are better than gates, and no gate will endure against our Enemy if men desert it.”


That's too bad - life would be better if we had a few fewer criminals around.


You can't leave it on a cliffhanger like that. Why does he end up a driver? Or provide more details. This seems like an interesting story.


His TC/NW was sufficient enough for him to leave the toxicity behind and start living his life.


Being a driver is "living his life"?


Maybe. Was attempting to end this cliffhanger on a positive note without judgement.

He had the means so he paid off his mortgage, invested in another property, took care of college fund.

Decided he didn't want to spend rest of his days wringing his mind and drenching off energy into deciding and debating whether it is ok to call a lambda from another lambda (yes I have seen this in production and the more experienced engineer decided to do it because he had been there longer and decided that's what he wanted to do... don't ask me which company was this but it was a FAANG) or setup a step function to orchestrate the two lambda calls... or some such equivalent problem he might have come across in his SGI days.. and instead picked a job that required little amount of cognitive effort compared to what he would have done if he was still in the same line of work but still managed to support the rest of his life/needs/responsibilities.

Might as well have been an artist, construction worker or he might as well have done nothing, absolutely nothing, and it could have been everything that one would have thought it could have been.

I won't judge knowing what I know at my age. People do what they do.

Feel free to imagine what you would imagine this ex-SGI engineer's life to have been and make it negative if you want it to be. No one knows until OP throws in more details if they have any.


Driving a taxi may increase your IQ. It increases the size of your brain. Also taxi drivers have healthier brains (less Alzheimer's):

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/05/harvard-taxi-drivers...

Macguire's original study on taxi drivers:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10716738/

BTW it's Fall! So here's to memories - "Four Strong Winds" written by Ian Tyson, sung by Neil Young:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnylI_9rmcs


Maybe he enjoys driving and talking to people.


If his income was enough for the lifestyle he wanted given his level of savings, I imagine more than most corporate workers these days...


Ageism?


He might not have been an engineer.


You would be surprised, I have never seen anyone who doesn't work in tech in my life who even knows that this is an option.


Yes, but in that case, it will be less likely to be blocked because the people requesting the blocking are not competent enough to ask for it.

Don't get me wrong, I wish this were not the case, but why let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough?


The most common human trait ever.... laziness


This is a widespread misunderstanding; there is no border anymore between Gaza and Egypt, as it was occupied by the IDF in the first year of this war. So unless Egypt went to war, there was nothing they could do.

And even before this war, the peace treaty gave Israel big control over the Rafa crossing. They have a camera and watch everything going in and out, and can ask for extra searches if they don't like what they see. And in all, it's just for individuals, not cargo. Whatever cargo goes through, there is just a limited amount that requires prior approval from Israel.

So Egypt really doesn't have any power over the situation unless they are willing to risk a war, which they can't win.


I'm sorry but why? Your government can use this data to actually hurt you and put you on the no-fly list, or even put you in prison.

But a foreign government is limited to what it can do to you if you are not a very high-value target.

So I try as much as possible to use software and services from a non-friendly government because this is the highest guarantee that my data will not be used against me in the future.

And since we can all agree that any data that is collected will end up with the government some way or another. Using forging software is the only real guarantee.

Unless the software is open source and its server is self-hosted, it should be considered Spyware.


You're making an excellent case for using AI during the interview. If you can actually code and do the work, you're hurting no one by using tools to get past these arbitrary barriers during the live interview. The system is clearly flawed when someone demonstrably skilled gets rejected over trivia.

I actually created a tool to help myself get through the live interviews, specifically by listening to the questions and giving me real time answers to things I couldn't recall under that kind of pressure. It's not about not knowing the material, it's about the ridiculous expectation to perform perfectly on demand.


Maybe your coworker searched for backpack zipper?


Or the ads were there before but ignored. Similar to the number 23 thing…


But would you use it to show ads if you have access to such a backdoor? That's an easy way for your backdoor to be found out. Something like this, if it exists, would be too valuable to be used en masse.


Well if I am a secret service I could either try to force google to do it and risk a leak or I could find a way that there is something in it for them that has the benefit of providing plausible deniability?


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