A lot of the tech world has gone from attempting to make thing easy for users, admins and managers to now only working to make them easy for developers. I think this might be just a numbers thing — there are now many more developers than there are of the other types. And it didn’t used to be that way.
So now in an inversion of how things should be, the primary optimization is to make development easy while everything else is getting more difficult.
I hate that my career field has been made into another shitty development job, except that to be competent I have to know 10x as much as the average developer.
I mean, that’s easy for me. But it still sucks.
I worked helpdesk and near-helpdesk jobs for a number of years. And one thing I found is that about 2% of the users are responsible for 95% of helpdesk work, calls and tickets. It’s an extremely uneven distribution.
At one place I worked where we tracked tickets and non-ticket contacts, one woman alone was responsible for more work and tickets than the entire rest of the company combined. She had constant “problems” with her machine, with her network, with remembering how to do anything more complicated than clicking on an icon and innumerable other nearly all self-caused issues.
At one point all three of the techs I had working directly for me were involved in various of her tickets (as in actively troubleshooting) — and thus were unavailable to help any other users.
The first time I brought it up to management they said, “We’re here to help all users, even the less competent.”
And then when those other users started complaining my techs were not available for them, I let management know why, showed them evidence and let them decide what to do. That week, the woman was banned from using the helpdesk at all without going through two layers of management first. We rarely heard from her again1.
Admittedly, she was an outlier (though not that unusual). But the truth is a relatively-small contingent of the utterly incompetent will monopolize the average helpdesk, especially at a smaller company.
Laptops have worse specs now than they did 4-5 years ago.
I was talking with a colleague about why that was and we speculated it’s an attempt to force people into using cloud services. Less storage, less processing power, less of everything means you’re more likely to be forced by “convenience” to cloud crap.
This decrease in laptop specs has become a real problem for our development team. Laptops with memory and storage options that we used to be able to get in 2-3 days years ago now take 6-8 weeks to be shipped. For instance, machines with 64GB of memory. Our devs still all do development locally so they need that much mem; Visual Studio alone eats up tons.
So much in the world just seems to be getting worse now, even apart from Trump and Musk.
hot take: the word 'spyware' has virtually disappeared from internet lingo not because it went away, but because it became applicable to nearly every major website and widely used software.
— gabsmashh (@gabsmashh) March 4, 2025
That’s true. We made hell and decided to pretend it was a fun place and the way things should be.
HELP – Deployed Firewall Policy To Block All Outbound Traffic.
No testing of such a consequential change? Love it. I don’t believe “accidentally” at all.
And no local admin? Clownish setup. Sometimes it is fun to see how bad a lot of my competitors in my field are.
It is a terrible loss. I’ve said and written this before and I will probably do so again, but Steve Jobs envisioned computers as “bicycles for the mind.” Instead, we’ve made them into manacles and straitjackets that serve the rich and the authoritarian.
I’m old enough to remember when I could easily make my computer do anything that I could think of or had time to figure out. Now, you’re lucky if you can get a machine to run something “unauthorized” at all. Mozilla and Google clowns et al. will tell you nothing else is possible because of “security.” Why, they are protecting you from yourself “for your own good!1 But remember: the only security they actually care about is keeping the computer secure from you, the user.
I need a browser that can keep every tab I have ever opened forever while simultaneously indexing its contents and metadata into a database that has a nice and responsive front end.
I need more powah.
The next phase of putting the information genie back in the bottle is increasing (US) state-level tech regulation that de facto bans services like Mastodon and anything else similar to it.
This will be done under the cover of protecting “privacy” and “for the children” but will really be for the purpose of making sure nothing that’s not large-scale and easily-controllable can exist.
It’s already starting. And many so-called liberals will be right on board with this.
Microsoft retiring yet another useful tool for one that’s pants 
.
That Microsoft Graph stuff deeply sucks. All of the things I could do in PowerShell in 2 lines of code now takes dozens to hundreds of lines in the terrible Graph way of doing things.
All to make it more “developer friendly,” for whatever reason. And developers love complexity. Sysadmin types do not — and I think that’s a fundamental split between us. Devs dominate now, though, so they get what they want.
So now I can waste two hours doing what I used to be able to achieve in 10 minutes. Fuckin’ great.
Anyone else have a drawer like this?
Drawer?
Try multiple closets, drawers, boxes, shelves…it’s bad. I’ve been at this shit since 1980. And my partner is also a tech nerd. Some tech crap I still have from the 1980s, too.
This tiny NAS device fits in the palm of your hand and can take up to 32TB of sweet SSD storage.
Cool, but those 8TB SSD drives are $600 each, you have to put your own OS on this puppy as well as know how to configure it (easy for me, hard for most), it only has 2.5Gb Ethernet (10Gb would be better) and those drives are gonna get hot in something so small.
Also, 32TB is a notional capacity. You’d want this in a least something like RAID 5 or ZFS RAID-Z1 single parity, so you’re talking around 24TB or 21TB actual capacity, depending.
On the other hand, you could buy two 20TB spinning rust drives, slap them in a cheapo NAS in RAID-1 and then you’d have 20TB of storage with roughly the same speed (due to network limitations) for less than a Cleveland1.
In the SSD variant you’d pay $2,600 for the same speed and storage amount with no significant increase in data safety
So, bad deal. Very bad deal. But it would be quiet at least.
I miss AbiWord.
It was small, got out of your way, and just did the stuff I needed. There should be a lot more software like that, but instead we have the absolute garbage there is now.
I want to decimate villages every time Microsoft fucking Word tries to force me to save something to the cloud.
One of my biggest millennial complaints is that there are now "apps" in Windows.
Who is this for? People who are too intimidated by "application" or ".exe?" Why are we phone-ify-ing everything? Can the zoomers read?
— Alan Cole (@AlanMCole) February 4, 2025
I always think they’re talking about “appetizers.”
And no, largely, Gen Z cannot read and has very poor social skills. It’s like they got the worst of both worlds in a corporate hellscape. Bad deal, man.
Why I Chose a Tented Split Mechanical Keyboard.
Wow those keyboards are fucking terrible. Just unusable. It amazes me that anyone can use something like that. I bet their typing really slowed down but they probably won’t admit it.
This is probably an ad anyway.