Starlink (and tech like it) provides so much obvious and apparent benefit that despite the valid complaints of astronomers, I think it’s worth it to make earth-based astronomy a bit worse.
In some ways, it’s like saying cities shouldn’t be built because you can’t see the stars anymore. The idea that progress makes everything roundly better always and immediately is quite a stupid one, when you think about it for a moment.
Apple claims 8GB is enough memory. Meanwhile, this is how much of my 128GB I am using (and I just closed down a photo editing application, so it was more):
I’ve been playing with Windows 11 a bit in a secured VM. God it’s trash. Just a terrible OS that’s obviously created to steal data and control you with little else being of any concern.
We are definitely in the dystopian timeline.
Try as they might to prevent me from controlling my own computer and browser, I still have some scripts working in Firefox that date all the way back to 2004.
It takes an army of developers to hold me back. 😉
It’s a hilarious idea that developers are supposed to replace me when I have to help them do such basic, absurdly easy, things.
Why hath god forsaken me?
Some time ago, I stopped a ransomware attack in its tracks that would’ve destroyed most companies and had them down for weeks if not forever.
If you think I’m an arrogant prat…well, I am. But also there are not many people who can do what I do.
Previously, I thought smartphones should be severely restricted. Now I’m convinced they should just be banned altogether. Humans weren’t made for this sort of thing. I think that would be equally true even under something other than capitalism, so it’s not just a sociocultural system problem.
I know that ban will never happen but dare to dream, right?
Clients refusing to work with off shore teams.
That’s a bargain not to have to work with offshore teams. I’d do it, too. When VMWare switched from formerly-US-based support to offshore, the quality dropped drastically. When I was running their products at scale back in 2009-2018, until the switch their support was great. Knowledgeable, prompt, reliable and frequently knew more than I did.
In 2016 or so when VMWare began to transition to overseas support, I always knew far more than the person giving me support. In fact, I often had to help the support person do their job.
So I just stopped calling them even though the hosting provider I was working for was paying VMWare $200,000 per year for support alone. Support that was not happening.
In general, any experience I’ve had with an offshore team, no matter from what country (because some people accuse you of racism if you don’t want to work with someone who doesn’t know jack shit), has been terrible. Maybe there is a good one somewhere but I have yet to run across it.
Facebook partner admits to eavesdropping on conversations via phone mics for ad targeting.
Remember when we were absolutely assured this was not happening, and were told we were conspiracy theorists if we claimed it was occurring? Well, about that….
Of fucking course this eavesdropping was happening. I saw direct evidence of it myself several times as a friend would talk about something and then her phone showed ads for it not long after.
Spent the morning troubleshooting a “network issue” that of course was not. It was a problem with some dev’s code. Surprise!
I would give it up but my job is not actually all that hard and I’m stackin’ cash like Al Capone. But looking for problems you know are not there does not spark joy.
Preach it, brother! Seriously, a lot of my IT knowledge does come from spending vast, vast amounts of time proving it’s not the network causing issues, but rather someone’s poorly-written code, poorly-designed application, or other completely non-network issue.
I’d estimate I’ve spent a solid six months of my entire life doing just that alone.
Why are so many roles paying so little?
IT is a worse field now than when I went into it, by far. The roles are vastly more complex and the pay has mostly stagnated or declined at all but the very top end. Help desk and sys admin jobs that paid 50K-80K back in 2005 still pay that now — and that is in nominal dollars, so that is an enormous pay cut in real dollars.
If I were to do it all again and having to start fresh, I would not go into this field. There is very little chance of advancement now, the pay is low, and the chance of your job being offshored or outsourced is high.
What is something good you made/did that got you in trouble?
When I was working at a fairly large hosting provider, I was on a team that discovered that our reporting tool was showing that backups were occurring that actually hadn’t been done recently, or in some cases had never been taken. Meaning that some customer systems had no backups at all, and for some the last successful one had been completed months or years ago (supposed to be done nightly).
I fixed the inaccurate reporting and this turned our main monitoring dashboard from all green to have a whole lot of red as it then correctly reflected that backups were in a terrible state.
Got blamed for “making us look bad” and “putting a lot of work on a lot of people” because the reporting had been made to reflect reality.
The clown manager who spouted off about a lot of work on a lot of people wasn’t even correct as I personally fixed most of the issues. Because I scripted it, but also because I had more experience with more OSes than anyone else.
So that was fun.
I’m pretty magical, but the above is also true. I’ve been fucking around with computers since I was four years old. That’s 44 years. I’ve been doing the same for nearly 25 years now professionally. I’ve seen a lot lot of things.
When one of my juniors asks how I could’ve possibly known what was wrong so quickly my answer often is, “Broke that in production 15 years ago.”
I don’t think about how terrible and treacherous the internet is for normies until I have to use some device that’s not behind my half-dozen layers of protection.
Yeah, we should’ve banned this early. This is not fit for any kind of person who can’t do all the tech shit I do.