Happy ~~Sunday~~ Monday Friend!

Welcome back to another musing! I’m glad you’re here. Here are your Sunday Musings, a quick dose of what I’m exploring and thinking about. If you find it useful, please feel free to forward this along to friends!

I’m a little tardy this week.

Quote I’m Musing

“The situation before us may not be your fault, but it’s our responsibility.”

-Too many to attribute

I looked it up, variants of this have been around for decades. But this exact quote is what I said to a room full of leaders recently. We were in an unhappy event where we needed to account for things that hadn’t been prioritized by our predecessors. Should it have? From the point of view of today, in our position, yes. But we weren’t in our predecessors’ position, nor did we have the luxury of their perspective. Further, there’s nothing we could control about what happened before we took the position. What we can control is what we do about our present situation.

We are responsible for things that aren’t our fault, or of our doing, all the time. It’s a part of life.

Let’s start separating fault and responsibility. Fault is past tense. It is derived from choices and decisions that have already been made. There’s almost nothing to do for it. Responsibility is here with us in the present. It’s the choices and decisions we are making right now; our reaction to what has happened or happening. Granted, it’s my fault that the words on this page are poorly written, but you’re responsible the conclusions you draw from them.

Many outside factors, including people, may be to blame for our happiness or unhappiness. They cannot be responsible for those feelings, that is our responsibility. As Epictetus says, our reactions and how we feel are up to us alone.

Success and happiness are something we all like to take responsibility for. Responsibility for our problems, our unhappiness, our failures is much more important. That’s where we learn about ourselves and grow.

Things are hard, and things can be scary. While most of them aren’t your fault. They’re your responsibility. As a leader, as a mentor, as a parent, as a friend. People look to you for experience and guidance, as the example.

In the News

CAPTCHA Alternative

Cloudflare has released Turnstile, its CAPTCHA alternative. The CAPTCHA technology has been around for a while now and is getting easier for AI and bots than for humans (find all the pixelated fire hydrants). Turnstile focuses on background data analysis (browser API, proof-of-x) rather than visual puzzles. I’m, personally, happy to do something other than CAPTCHA.

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CISA and NSA Top 10 Cybersecurity Misconfigurations

In a joint advisory, NSA and CISA highlight the most common misconfigurations in large organizations and break down how malign actors exploit them. No surprise, DEFAULT configurations tops the list.
TLDR:

Default configurations of software and applications
Improper separation of user/administrator privilege
Insufficient internal network monitoring
Lack of network segmentation
Poor patch management
Bypass of system access controls
Weak or misconfigured multifactor authentication (MFA) methods
Insufficient access control lists (ACLs) on network shares and services
Poor credential hygiene
Unrestricted code execution

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OpenAI adds Vision Support to Chat GPT

I’m a fan, and shade-tree prompt engineer, of AI and adapting it to useful daily activity. OpenAI’s adding vision support means we can upload images and then ask questions about them or ask the agent to do something with them. User Borriss (@_Borriss_) has some of the best examples in a thread here. I think #6 is going to be the biggest time saver for me while #4 is going to be my favorite for travel!

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Shoot Me Your Feedback!

Which musing is your favorite? What else do you want to see or what should I eliminate? Any other suggestions? Just send a tweet to @erichaupt on Twitter and put #SundayMusings at the end so I can find it. Or, eric@erichaupt.com for long form email.

Have a wonderful week, I’ll see you Sunday.
-e