Tech

Start Spiking

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

I am using Windows 11 on my work laptop now as I need to experience what my users experience.

And it is. Fucking. Slow. OMG SO SLOW. Who wrote this, a snail? It’s amazing how absolutely abysmal the experience of using modern software has become.

Take My Apple-cation

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

Is this serious?

While by no means perfect, Apple’s machines just work, are wicked fast and their laptops last a whole day on battery. Even their high-end machines. And no, I do not mean a whole eight-hour work day. I mean an entire 24 hours. I brought an M2 Macbook Pro to a three-day work conference, used it for hours after the conf each day and didn’t charge it the entire time I was there. Try that with any other machine.

The Macbook Pro might be the only actually-good laptop on the market. It is truly an excellent machine, the exemplar of what a laptop should be. Lenovo, Dell, HP and any other maker now just seems to churn out absolute crap in this category. They appear to have just given up. Using an Apple machine feels great in comparison.

The M-series chips are pretty damn innovative, by the way.

Apple’s products are overpriced only if you don’t care about quality, reliability, supportability, usability, resale value, and not having to fuck around with your machine for hours to get it to do something that Apple ones just do by default. Or in the case of Windows specifically, spending half a day evicting all the surveillance and ad infrastructure — only for it to be reinstalled on the next update.

And Linux — don’t even get me started. Using that as a daily driver is about as smooth as sliding 300 meters on concrete. Clarification: I use Linux all the time. I was working in three different Linux VMs today that I have doing various things on our network. But as my main machine? Hell no. Too much bother and hassle.

As I mentioned, Apple machines are not perfect. Finder is absolutely chock full of bugs, is ridiculously slow, and has not improved at all in more than a decade. Pseudo-security has been ramped up too much — as with most companies — so you have to actively fight your machine to make it do what you want.

But compared to using Linux or Windows? Or a tablet running any OS? It’s not even a choice. Apple is the way to go.

Crawlers

Chill Annoying, Tech

Only people who didn’t know anything about anything thought that was true.

I personally — and I mean with my own funds — could build enough infrastructure to crawl 90%+ of the web every few days and store the metadata. It’s just not that much data. It’d take about $200,000 of gear and connectivity. That’d buy me a dozen petabytes of storage and a couple dozen 10Gb links. And that’s enough. The software is all open source.

Google’s moat has nothing to do with the ability to crawl or digest anything and more to do with their former search algo dominance.

Hours Matter

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

Also, as most of you reading this are not familiar, at the true enterprise level hardware support simply cannot be that shoddy as what Synology is offering. Since that higher tier is what they are attempting to move to, having a drive show up “lol, whenever” is simply not any sort of acceptable answer.

I worked at a hosting provider a while ago. We had very large HP 3PAR SANs (60+ drives in each). When a drive failed in those we often had a replacement in two hours. Yep, two hours. Someone from HP literally drove from the distribution center with the drive or drives, showed up at our datacenter, put the drive in and verified it worked. We were by contract guaranteed a new drive within four hours but almost always received it much sooner. And we paid dearly for that, by the way.

Until Synology can offer something close to that, they ain’t enterprise shit. They’re just playing pretend; hoping to capture the margin but not providing what’s required by the true enterprise market.

Plot Lost

Chill Clowns, Tech

Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move.

I was previously a loyal Synology customer. No longer. I will never buy one of their devices again. Their lock-in model means paying more for drives that aren’t even as good as the ones I already use and are vastly slower to receive if something goes wrong.

And as the article points out, if Synology goes out of business you’re fucked. You will not be able to find working replacement drives.

Big nope. There are tons of alternatives out there. Shit, I have the skill to build my own NAS from scratch. And no, I don’t mean TrueNAS. I mean using the raw tools (mdraid etc.) and making it work. That’s what I did before Synology was even a thing. I can do it again if needed. All I really use a NAS for anyway is storage (not transcoding etc.) so it’s not even that hard.

I got into a rather salty exchange with some clown-ass Synology product manager I emailed directly about this, which was fun. Entertaining, at least. I’m very good at making people angry, which might not be that productive but is certainly enjoyable when I make a doofus fume.

No matter the price or even lock-in, a vendor that can’t get a NAS drive to me in 24 hours is fucking worthless. For home, but especially for enterprise. Just to make that clear.

So there are at least four major reasons to steer clear of Synology now: ancient hardware, lock-in, price, and donkey-based shipping.

Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Forwardness

Chill Tech

Linux kernel is leaving 486 CPUs behind, only 18 years after the last one made.

Now that’s extended support; I used my first 486 in 1991 or so. At the time, they seemed wicked fast. I remember those days of waiting expectantly for every upgrade, hardware or software, as it always offered real improvement. Now every update is dreaded as yet more will be taken away for fake security1, to show you more ads or to steal your data left and right.

Much was far worse then, but we had a lot to look forward to. Or so we thought.

  1. That shit-for-brains doofclowns buy into for some reason

Useful Glob

Chill Tech

Because cracksmoking MacOS likes to change the names of drive mounts unpredictably (mostly by adding things like “-1” and “-2” to them) when it gets confused, I had to use globbing to reliably identify a mounted volume/directory in my Bash scripts. Here’s what I did:

for VOL in /Volumes/myvol*; do
    # Check if it's actually a directory
    if [[ -d "$VOL/mydl/thisdir/here" ]]; then
        DEST="$VOL/mydl/thisdir/here"
        break
    fi
done

This finds the first item named “myvol” and in a later part of the script not excerpted here slaps what you want in there. But warning: this snippet like Cisco stuff takes action immediately on the first match only, so if you might have more than one match just be aware of that and modify as needed.

Algo Screaming

Chill Tech

I miss the silence of the internet before algorithms started talking over us.

Me too. The internet probably reached its peak in around 2004-2005. You could do most things that you can now but there was nearly no algorithmic crap. No AI. Propaganda was present of course but it was also painfully obvious. There was far less censorship and less useless repetitive squawking by clueless know-nothing doofshits.

Blogging was near its zenith and that was far better than Twitter, Bluesky and other platforms.

I know that those days will never return but it’s not just nostalgia to say that the internet was a superior experience then. (The mid- to late-90s internet was also pretty great, but had severe technical limitations.)

Fore Shore

Chill Tech

Company is offshoring all roles to India: is this happening elsewhere?

It’s happening everywhere.

The small company I work for didn’t consider replacing any development jobs with staff from India, but rather augmenting existing staff. That idea was nixed after it was determined that we’d most likely have to hire 5-7 Indian “senior” developers to do what one of our existing devs could achieve, and that’d also have to bring on 2-3 additional technical leads to manage this offshore staff.

In the end, there would’ve been no cost savings and development velocity would’ve likely plummeted.

I put the word “senior” in quotes because in India, someone senior does not resemble what that term means in the US. In America, “senior” means that the person has generally 8-10+ years of experience, can take on large projects with little outside guidance, and needs nearly no training in their areas of expertise.

In India, however, “senior” most often means only that they’ve heard of the technology and can speak about it for a 30-second soundbite. Most “senior” Indian IT/dev staff I would not put on Level 1 helpdesk for the tech they claim to know.

And if that offends you, so be it. That comes from deep and long experience.

First Compy

Chill Tech

I sure do, and it had nothing to do with Microsoft. It was a TRS-80 Model III sometime in 1980 and I dearly loved that thing. My family was poor, but my dad was absolutely obsessed with computers. Some doctor my dad knew had bought the machine and could not figure out how to use it. My dad got it from the doc as payment for fixing the doc’s car up1.

Back then, I’d play various games, write little stories and program a bit. My dad being captivated by computers set me up for my current career; I’ve been using them nearly every day since I was four years old.

  1. Which at the time was how my family got many things.

Survey Says

Chill Evil, Tech

Recall going back into Windows.

People in the comments are puzzled about what this undesirable product is for and why it’s being pushed so hard. But it’s not difficult to figure out. Recall is all about employee surveillance. Of course that is not being touted as its purpose yet. It’d never gain acceptance if Microsoft came right out and said that and they’d be foolish to do so.

MBA types, though, are drooling at thought of something like this existing, and that’s built right into the OS so it’s much harder to disable, get around, or fool.

They love it. And that’s who and what it’s for and why Microsoft is shoving it down our throats so hard.