I tried the DevOps pivot, but wasn’t real happy with it. Maybe some of it is just being located near a big tech hub right now, but I found most of the roles tied to startups that were just going to reinforce the kind of burnout I’m in.

Cyber Security is the new pivot. I figure the sysadmin background will give me a good leg up and there’ll always be a call for security.

Cyber Security. It’s close to the IT/Sysadmin world I know so I feel like I’ll have a good start. I figure there’s no such thing as job security anymore, but there’ll always be a need for strong security.

Hey thanks, I sincerely appreciate the offer, but I already have plans in the works 😊

I don’t wanna dox myself too much here, but I’m getting ready to return to classes after a career as a sysadmin.

More than just politics, it’s the lack of regulation in the tech industry (which is also politics, yes, everything is). I don’t think people realize how rapidly the tech industry is eating itself alive. There is a gigantic crash coming and it feels like it’s already started, we’re just trying our best to keep the tower stable for as long as possible because no one really wants this crash.

But there’s no place for me anymore. No one does internal IT because it’s too expensive, everything is cloud hosted and MSP provided. And those MSPs are all onboard the AI train to further cut costs and offload support tickets. What little humanity is left is just grease to keep the internet going 24/7, god forbid you can’t access the skibidi toilet fandom site without 99.9% uptime (oops, wait, we say 99.999% uptime now in the cloud). The economy is crashing and no one can afford the ever increasing prices of games and services so they’re going to cut hard wherever they can which is just going to result in even more layoffs.

I’m done, man. I’m cooked. I’m in my 30’s and I’m burnt out as god damn hard as I’ve ever been and when this is all done, maybe if I’m lucky, I can be the sysadmin for a rural little bank in Lithuania making extremely modest wages but enough to feed myself and my cat and buy what little books and games and tea I need to get through existence. It’s not much, but I know I won’t find it here anymore.

AI is succeeding at exactly the things it’s supposed to: laundering accountability and responsibility. This measure will succeed in accomplishing that. Not everyone is a true believer, a lot of them just see the possibility of using “super intelligent AI” as a smoke screen to completely hide the need for statistical deaths to drive profitability/reduce costs and the responsibility of making those decisions while shutting out the average person’s ability to engage with any system beyond that AI smokescreen.

This is exactly the kind of thing I’d expect from Newsom. Remember his podcast interviews with Bannon and Kirk? It was obviously a failed political wiggle to the right when he thought that was the way the winds were blowing, but fate has brought this new opportunity to his doorstep.

His motives should be seen as nothing more than political ambition. Now that he’s found a worthy opponent in Trump, he’s seeking to scramble to the top of the oppositional hill, the Democrats. That’s where his ambitions end, just another unsuited Democrat for the current climate who wants to return things to the status quo. He’ll be another Biden but this time with an undeniable scrap of charisma.

Isn’t that part of the benefit of federating, too? If Bluesky turns heel, just cut it back off again.

Camp is when a movie maybe isn’t good, but you still want to give it a gold star for trying. It’s making a joke and you’re laughing with it more than you’re laughing at it (but you’re still laughing at it). Even stuff like The Room by Tommy Wiseau which I think most people agree is a pretty bad movie; it still comes from a place of sincere vision.

This is in contrast to stuff like Epic Movie where it is trying so hard to be camp that it is just terrible instead. And this is all obviously subjective.

Cocaine Bear (2023) is surprisingly good. You think it’s gonna be one of those overly campy movies like Sharknado, but it’s pretty well written. I mean, don’t expect too much, it’s still a very solid 7/10. But the thing it understands best is it actually takes enough time at the beginning of the film to develop extensive cast of weird characters so once they all get thrown into the blender (cocaine bear) you actually care enough about them and what’s going on to care about the outcome.

So many movies these days forget you really need to care about those characters.

Fun time, give it a go some night when you’re bored and got nothing else to do.

We must act as one.

I get that the point you’re trying to make is something about unity, but it’s weird to say that. That’s a weird thing to say.

Pretending like one person can go off and do whatever they want and it won’t effect the whole is how we get people like Trump.

This is my exact argument against billionaires. They are acting alone, making these sweeping decisions by themselves.

The money is gone. It isn’t coming back.

Disagree. It’s never too late to get the money back, you just need politicians that are willing to take the initiative to go after it. Currently I don’t see any, so I continue to say things that I hope will help focus people and bring attention to continue advocating for these policies.

I will concede that there are very few (read: nearly none)

K. Why we arguing? No good billionaires.

we should praise efforts like that so that they might continue. What’s the next billionaire gonna do when they try to give their money away and see that “All Gates got was vitriol and death wishes.”

Charity is not something you do for praise. I’m sorry the billionaires are so thin-skinned my insults would hurt them.

but I think we should agree that the money finally leaving the 1% to help the remaining 99% is a good step.

If I meet you on the street and beat you up and steal your wallet, then donate it to a local homeless shelter, are you gonna be mad at me? It was a good cause, bro, why you mad? It’s in the hands of people who need it more now. I admit the analogy is a bit strained, but that’s only because the means by which the billionaire class have gotten and maintained their wealth is more obtuse. Obscuring those means is how they continue to operate as they do.

I don’t want to argue with you, I feel like your heart is in the right place and you are coming from a place of unity. But billionaires stand so far outside any sort of class consciousness with the likes of us. There is no point, no good that comes from defending billionaires for anything they do, they should not exist and the longer they continue to the more of a blight on the rest of humanity and the literal ecosystem of the world is at risk.

See so many other responses in this topic about how this is just PR, the money is being used to push AI solutions, the amount of wealth spent not really leaving Gates’ control because it’s being shuffled through different orgs, etc.

Windows 8 was actually pretty decent and had some good improvements under the hood. It handled dual monitor setups waaay better than 7 ever did, I don’t know if people remember how rough the support was for a lot of these modern amenities we now take for granted.

In typical Microsoft fashion, 8’s biggest sin was simply not letting people customize the GUI to their workflows and forcing that damned full screen Start menu. Once they shrunk the tiles to create 10’s Start menu it became my favorite, so of course they trashed it for 11’s generic look. Been using KDE now and it’s near perfect.

1. What could it possibly matter to you, personally, if people praise a billionaire?
2. No. Absolutely not, every time, no. You don’t get to be a billionaire by any legitimate means (note I did not say legal, this is a separate matter). That’s money that should’ve been collected into taxes, paid into systems to help the American people, and if properly supported, donated to Africa through the appropriate institutions.

You don’t just get to be a billionaire and then donate BILLIONS at the end of your life to wash away your indiscretions. Fuck him and every other billionaire.

Agreed.

And what’s particularly galling about this is that it’s never made any sense to me. Are you telling me an Android app, on compromised hardware or otherwise, could send malformed data that would for instance deposit $1M into my bank account? That doesn’t sound like an issue of local security. An app is just a frontend, all validation would still be through the banking infrastructure.

Hey man, yeah, I get it. I worry a lot about sounding like a conspiracy theorist; a real Chicken Little.

But when I look internally and ask myself why I make these posts, why I conspire so much about unknown futures, I come to two most likely outcomes:

1. I’m trying to trick you into installing Linux for some reason. Selfishly I guess if there’s a larger userbase demanding support for things then I can expect better support for myself. Or I’m just trying to sound like a pompous smartass in front of internet strangers. But those are a little obtuse.
2. I see a bunch of people standing in what I perceive (possibly incorrectly, but nonetheless) a trap and I’m shouting, “Hey, get outta there now before it springs!” because I have general empathy towards other people.

Worst case I’m wrong and I look a fool. I really don’t have a problem with that. I know who I’d trust if the positions were switched 💯

Ya boy Richard Stallman agrees and has been saying this for years (although this article is more recentish), https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html

“Treacherous computing” is a more appropriate name, because the plan is designed to make sure your computer will systematically disobey you. In fact, it is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer. Every operation may require explicit permission.

As of 2022, the TPM2, a new “Trusted Platform Module”, really does support remote attestation and can support DRM. The threat I warned about in 2002 has become terrifyingly real.

Actual, honest to god reasons to upgrade to Windows 11 are already vague and questionable. Your average user probably doesn’t even see any particular reason and only perceives the nuisance of it. But it’s hard to fully close your iron fist around a platform when TPM enablement is so sparse in the consumer space. So what better way to do it than a mandatory OS upgrade with it as a system requirement and assure all (or a vast majority of) systems align at once?

Of course there are ways for stubborn users to skirt those requirements, but that misses the primary point of Trusted Computing. While the OS may baseline function to some degree, there’s no telling what functionality may be crippled by not being in a trusted state. EDIT: For example, this could easily tie into games with anti-cheat such that they will refuse to run on Windows 11 unless TPM is enabled.

I don’t know the future any better than anyone else, I’m just trying to read the winds at the moment. I suspect they may not try to pull the entire trap closed all at once and that Windows 11 may continue to more or less function as we’ve seen past iterations. But the pieces will be in place by then and it’s only a matter of time before some greedy exec gives the word …

The article focuses a lot on the security of the boot process, but there’s no reason the TPM can’t be used for DRM as well (as an example, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5283799). It’s correct when it points out the locked down nature of consoles and phones.

We could conceivably be in for a future where Windows refuses to run code that’s not validated even after the OS boots. Or where it sees pirated software on the system and refuses to function in some manner until the software is removed/corrected to its liking.

There are so many possibilities here and all of them are bad.

• Forced online accounts so Microsoft always knows when/where you login
• Stored encryption keys so Microsoft could theoretically provide access to any computer the government requests
• Telemetry already reporting god only knows what metrics about what and how you use your software
• Forced AI that literally watches everything you do on your screen storing it in a known location making for a valuable target and also potentially/likely being used to create more telemetry and insights into your habits
• Eventual full control over your hardware by enforcing “trusted platform” restrictions

It’s so fucking brazen I’m gobsmacked. As an elder Millennial, I get it, I can already hear most of you tallying in your head if having to care about your OS is gonna be the final straw . This is no longer a nerdy request to please use Linux, this is a five alarm fire. Add to all this how much Microsoft is in bed with the US government and potential issues with all that on the horizon and I really, truly believe it’s time to switch, for your own good.

Please. Even if you’re not going to run out and install Linux tomorrow, you need to start mentally preparing yourself for the inevitability of the task. Get yourself accustomed to the idea and when you’re ready to dip your toes in, just know how many resources are out there for you.

And to the Linux community out there, there are going to be a lot of newcomers who don’t have the technical skills to undertake this and enjoy/appreciate this in the same way as you do. Be kind to them, the need for us to support each other has never been greater. Please.

https://www.pling.com/p/2142966/

Maybe not all that close, but it’s the best I can think of right now.

I think it has the general old school vibe, maybe you could tweak the colors to be a bit brighter like your example?

My last job tracked it, because of course they did. They could tell how often we logged into the AI tools and how many queries we ran a week and if we didn’t hit a certain number, we were reprimanded.

It was a support job. They wanted us running customer tickets to train the AI, we were basically training our replacement. And it’s obvious to everyone, we’re not stupid, so morale was absolutely in the fucking gutter.

If we’re talking realm of pure fantasy: destroy it.

I want you to understand this is not AI sentiment as a whole, I understand why the idea is appealing, how it could be useful, and in some ways may seem inevitable.

But a lot of sci-fi doesn’t really address the run up to AI, in fact a lot of it just kind of assumes there’ll be an awakening one day. What we have right now is an unholy, squawking abomination that has been marketed to nefarious ends and never should have been trusted as far as it has. Think real hard about how corporations are pushing the development and not academia.

Put it out of its misery.

https://x-plus.store/products/n150-netbook

I picked one of these up after it got some buzz the other week. Still waiting for delivery, though, will report back once I’ve had some hands-on time with it! Probably just going to do Arch.