Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
This display of a man hoping AI reclaims the awe in technology he once felt as a 17 year-old:
Sam Altman is the snake oil salesman who might restore Silicon Valley to its former glory https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2024/06/25/opinion-ai-altman-silicon-valley-revival/
Its former* superfund glory.
*Oh wait https://mastodon.social/@ashleygjovik/112668309100333232/
One last hurrah for the EPA and the clean air act before the scotus shanks the administrative state in a day or two.
unironically saying “the sharing economy” in the year of our lord 2024 is… certainly a choice
also
God knows we old-timers tried to be cynical about ChatGPT, pedantically insisting that AI was actually just machine learning and that Altman’s new toy was nothing but cheap mimicry. But the rest of the world knew better
idk dude I’ve talked to the rest of the world about this and most of them actually seem to dislike this technology, it seems like maybe you didn’t actually try very hard to be cynical
I’ve had this open in a background tab, reading it in pieces as time allows, and I only just noticed one of it exhibits one of the things I like noticing about various publishers’ system fucking up: a lurking page title before a post-publish edit
the page title as it is in my browser right now:
Opinion | AI boom led by antihero Altman is reviving Valley dreams. the page title as it displays in the content area:Opinion \n Sam Altman is the snake oil salesman who might restore Silicon Valley to its former glory.the url slug also seems to be mostly the former - most of these renames on various publishing platforms seem to do that (keep the original slug instead of a rewrite+redirect)
can’t make direct guesses as to the exact reason why this one was updated whenever it was, but I expect public perception/reception might’ve been part of that?
it is also something that’s been of passive interest to me over some years: things as published often shift underfoot, and the time at which someone reads something then shares on and then someone else reads … there might be quite a substantive difference in the contents of such things at the times. this ranges from the benign (inserting late-received comments, errata, etc), to a complete contextual/content rework. I’ve often thought that there’s a possibly for a really interesting part project there…
lol, Bruce Sterling posted this to bsky: (image)
I don’t understand the hate for transition lenses. You don’t have to get them in frames last fashionable in 1982.
I guess the point is the dude won’t have lasik.
transition lenses = photochromic lenses
(i thought for a moment it was another term for varifocals, but no, Transitions is a company that makes photochromic lenses)
Duh, my bad. I thought it was something like varifocals too.
Photochromic lenses were a nerd staple when I was a teenager. Dunno if/how popular they are now.
i am the guy of that age, and i would never get anything else, and yes fuck they are
Lasik? Rip those eyes out and put cybereyes in! For one hole glorious year I could see in infrared. (Sadly the company went bankrupt and they repo’ed my eye, so that is why there is a hole now, at least I didn’t splurge for both eyes).
Lasik doesn’t work for every vision problem.
That’s because it doesn’t use AI…
@dgerard @froztbyte given that anecdote from William Gibson about how realising that his first computer actually *used a spinning disk full of rust to store its data* crushed his romantic ideas about technology, this rings true
yeah it’s a new meme format with an AI wojak generator
seemingly yet more chatgpt jailbreaks just by providing input that barrierbreaks some n times, and then readily provides details
y’know, if I were the one making safety nets for these systems, I’d make them return such kind of results (or other typical honeypot type behaviour). and it’s possible that that’s what oai did. but it seems extremely unlikely that that’s what they did, because it goes again the bayfucker gottagofast philosophy (and, frankly, against the level of competence I’ve seen displayed in the genml space overall)
It turns out the ‘I’ in “AI” stood for “Linux” all along!
User friendliness aside (who in their right mind would want arbitrary code execution except shitty and indeterministic?), I sandbox stuff at my job* and it’s hard to evaluate how secure / privacy preserving this is without more details.
If they’re running a full fledged VM and super extra careful around the sandbox boundary** it’s probably fine; otherwise it seems perhaps a bit loosey-goosey.
Someone will eventually try to run a Monero cryptocurrency miner in it if they haven’t already. So I hope they have their timeouts and resource limits in order (actually I hope they don’t, for the lols).
* But like no one told me how to do it or gave me a certificate or anything I just had to do my best
** This is often way scarier than programmers are used to, unless they’ve written a secure parser before. I wrote a vulnerability into my code a few years back when I was younger and foolish, by trusting an array length from inside the sandbox. My coworker found it while fuzzing the code.
Zuckerberg Accuses Rivals of Trying to Create AI-Powered God
Title says it all
okay at this point I should probably make a whole-ass perplexity post because this is the third time I’m featuring them in stubsack but 404media found yet more dirt
… which included creating a series of fake accounts and AI-generated research proposals to scrape Twitter, as CEO Aravind Srinivas recently explained on the Lex Fridman podcast
According to Srinivas, all he and his cofounders Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho wanted to do was build cool products with large language models, back when it was unclear how that technology would create value
tell me again how lies and misrepresentation aren’t foundational parts of the business model, I think I missed it
A couple of examples Srinivas gave on the podcast is “Who is Lex Fridman following that Elon Musk is also following,” or “what are the most recent tweets that were liked by both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.”
Questions asked by the terminally deranged.
Or somebody looking for ‘the worst posts online’ cringe compilation. Musks CEOs must be able to build their companies products not be able to read spreadsheets was a good example.
How can someone implement that and not just be constantly thinking “I really really really do not want to be prosecuted under the CFAA, I should not be doing this”.
Ethics clearly don’t really work in this profession, so schools should hammer home legal liability as well.
Ethics clearly don’t really work in this profession, so schools should hammer home legal liability as well.
I’ve thought about this a bunch in the past, and tbh the only answer I’ve come to over many forms of it “fuck the fucking USA”
it’s a place that is structurally built to allow for that kind of evasion and abuse to happen
As long as line goes up nobody knows how rich the perps will be.
And if you don’t know how rich the perps will be, how will you know if and how hard they should be punished?
Not a cult.
from r/EnoughMuskSpam
Lol. What, are we going to be installing Candy Crush on our robots? Expecting to be able to project recurring revenue from a humanoid robot based on smartphone numbers is a new kind of ignorance.
I’m sure Candy Crush will come pre-installed.
“Hello helpdesk? My fleet of humanoid workers I paid 500k for apiece aren’t at their workstations churning out fabric piecework, they’re all playing Candy Crush on their iPhones…”
I like the wet your finger and stick it up in the air forecasting model. OK - there’s 1.5 billion pocket-sized iPhones - so let’s say 2 billion person-sized robots, you know,
I’m wondering about the supply chain issues just making the extra half billion robots, might be kind of a big deal. Are there enough rare minerals in the whole world to do this? Lithium batteries? Computer chips?
Also, yeah, valuation based on revenue and not EBITA / profit margins, but whatever.
Haha this reminds me of humanoid robots belong in the trash
Thank you —she and this video are new to me - very good!
heck yeah I love
Physics Jenny NicholsonAngela Collierindeed! I rarely get to watch them because of the length, but they’re always so good, thoughtful and thorough. one of best talking heads on yt I know of
format/delivery is technically more than just talking head, I guess, but ykwim
Amazing claim considering there are I think about 10k cybertrucks in the world right now, and all of them are broken. Ok I admit, that is due to the wiper recall, but even if you ignore the wiper recall the amount of broken cybertrucks is massive.
No, all you lawyers explaining to me how the practice of law works in the U.S., you would totally benefit from GPT. Complete with bonus:
- Everyone explaining to me that lawyers actually read all the documents in discovery is really trying to explain to me, a computer scientist with 20 years of experience[1], how GPT works!
- [1] Does OP have actual tech expertise? The answer may (not) surprise you!
- You lawyers admit that sometimes you use google translate and database search engines, and those use machine learning components, and all ML is basically LLMs, so I’m right, Q.E.D.!
- Lawyers couldn’t possibly read everything in discovery, right?
- Lawyers couldn’t possibly pay for professional translation for everything, right?
- Even when it’s mandated by the court?
- Really?
- and many, many more
This thread is an unending source of amusement.
Someone there found his ORCID and… It’s not great: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2835-3521
He has basically nothing published, but has like 40 different “preprints”, read PDFs he uploaded to arxiv with no peer review.
I use these tools daily. I have also built software which utilizes genAI. I have also worked on fine-tuning GPTs. I have written extensive [sic!] on the topic. I also have formal training in mathematics, computer science, engineering, and anthropology1. [emph. mine]
🤡
1 No he doesn’t? His Education lists A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science, and B.S. in Mathematics, that anthropology claim seems completely made up.
he does seem to have carefully cultivated case of engineer disease
also it’s not “almost all” preprints, it’s all preprints, just one repository calls these papers
he didn’t discover yet predatory journals, it all could have been published for a small fee like with this one (contains mind numbing level of conspiracy-theoretic rambling and related brainworms) hxxps://uraniumisagenocidegiant[.]com/ (you have been warned)
There’s one classified as “SSRN Electronic Journal 2023 | Journal article”, I thought this was something like a predatory journal, hence the “almost”, but now that I clicked on it I think this is just an arxiv-like website that calls itself an “electronic journal”? No fucking idea.
yeah that one is sneaky but it’s a repository, not a journal with peer review
Amazing.
I could “publish” my homeworks from the 5yrs of college onto arxiv and that’d be a more scientifically valuable endeavour. Better formatted, too.
that
\hbox overfullon the subsection title was painful, wasn’t it?
Those “papers” are gold, they’re mostly a few pages long, and they span such a wild range of topics as:
- How to calculate a mean of numbers?
- What is a number?
- Atheism is actually a religion.
- Ethereum is a store of energy.
I’ve never seen someone in such a dire need of a wedgie, come on man, you spend the hours of your life writing your farts into LaTeX and generating DOIs for them, this isn’t healthy.
Ethereum is a store of energy.
fucking WHAT
I am unfairly misrepresenting that for sneer purposes but if you want to see what happens when someone with typical cryptobro brainworms gets access to a paper-looking PDF template:
jaysus, mary, joseph and the wee donkey. (ESPECIALLY the wee donkey.)
he also has a personal site, it’s linked on researchgate. i took psychic damage reading this, somebody force him to touch grass
oh goddess, he’s already a bleeding muppet, and going to be a major crank. from the researchgate profile:
I am an aspiring polymath and a rōnin scholar. I also tend to look at questions, rather than fields of study, as a research question often does incorporate many disparate topics. Research interests include the psychological and anthropological nature of religion, vaccine efficacy and impact on asymptomatic carriage, and the application of paraconsistent logic to scientific research.
rōnin! fucking! scholar!
eh i’ve seen that before at least once and i’m inclined to believe there’s much more of it that nobody cares to notice. on r/chemistry and r/organicchemistry there was a dude, 19, dramatic bitch, who read surface level philosophy and tried getting into ochem for some obscure reason. turns out he wanted to make some anticancer drugs and needs guidance. cool fine maybe get degree in ochem first so you don’t do any stupid avoidable mistakes. he won’t listen
he tried to get into uni but if i have to guess he got rejected? in any case he didn’t learn anything but over time got into contact with some research group, at least that’s what he claimed and started homelab. (you’d guess that some medchem research group at uni would have a wet lab, but it must be in other country and you’ve never seen them).
so anyway our misunderstood hero starts cooking “anticancer” “meds” in his living room. how does he know it works, did he made this, sent samples to biologists who would test it for him, or maybe compchem group would simulate it out? nope, he’d just got an idea that it will work and that’s just as good, you know, his supreme rationality unrecognized by academic cabal guided him there. so he starts cooking, but does not know how. this included shit like distilling some flammable solvent on wicker table without clamps or anything that would actually make glassware stable. so every other step he asks for advice on really basic shit like he’d learn in second year university course (BSc), or in first year of work in organic chemistry lab, his synthesis is avoidably dirty, his purifications are trash, three steps in he has painted himself into corner, yields drop to zero and he has no idea why or what now. this usually means that entire synthesis was shite from the beginning and it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
(did i mention that he was a dramatic bitch? so he picked it up because he wanted to do something Good for Humanity, and if he fails then well he could just as well commit sewer slide. his first idea involved radioisotopes btw, all in his living room mind you. then objective shifted to “anti-rabies antiviral” where he missed the point of about everything he wanted to do. then went back to “anticancer”)
anyway this was his breaking point, after something like three or four people tried to explain politely that he really should get a degree first and set some objective that is not obviously pulled from his supremely rational ass, he started insulting everyone and what eventually earned him sitewide ban was a tirade about how he’d genocide everyone who doesn’t recognize his genius, given opportunity (he compared himself to milosevic (he was serb))
anyway he also had medium blog and posted dick picks with face included from the same account. he made another one, but it’s since abandoned. allegedly he also had 2 or 3 accounts before that
if his claim of “20 years studying math” is anywhere close to accurate he’s already off the deep end, unless he’s counting in everything from kindergarten up. considering he’s a cryptobro it already happened pre-pandemic
Hey, he didn’t update the website to include his research interest in AI, huh, wonder how long he’s been a samurai of that
They’re all blog posts that refer to no actual work, my favorite is the one where he advocates for his blog posts to be accepted to journals: Call to Research: A need for a new paper format
This is mostly whining about how he’s totally an academic and people should take him seriously.
Jesus cinnamon crunch Christ. At least the blog posts are mercifully short. He somehow manages to have antivaxx nonsense there as well??
This is doubly funny because that already exists, at least in Computer Science, and is called a vision paper. You still need to put in a lot of work, perhaps more, into the bibliography and, you know, actually having compelling stuff to say.
nothing wrong with papers a few pages long, as long as they are concisely written and have supplementary information 10x that size. my last paper is 5 pages long, of which the last one are references only, and has 60+ pages of SI
Dunno, the funniest thing about them to me is that they’re still divided into 7-8 sections, each one-paragraph long. Just a guy who was never told he was wrong in his life and his idea of what research looks like.
he’s the very model of a modern crypto-douchebag.
A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science
wait, wait. that’s basically the bootcamp level of education, no?
I know essentally nothing about the US education system but…
If you’re gonna pull credentalist bullshit, maybe at least have the credentials? You took us there mate, I wouldn’t be pulling your degrees up if you didn’t first talk about how formally educated you are…
(nothing wrong with that per se, i don’t have any c. s. degree anyways and yet i work in the field for years. but the gall of a dude who has finished a few two-year courses to tell fucking law professionals that they don’t know enough… this is indeed the threadnought-level of recklessness.)
the sheer hubris of that individual putting out preprints, as if making this available before peer review would hasten chatgpt rapture (none of that shite will be ever published)
I just want to latch onto one more thing there:
GPTs are great at transforming information. Transformations include compression, decompression, and inter-language translation, among others.
Okay mister computer scientist, sure, what is “transforming information”? From what you’re saying it appears like you’re describing basically any map from information to other information. But AMONG OTHERS that includes a map going from NO INFO to CONFIDENT BULLSHIT. And I do agree LLMs are amazing at it.
Here, I’ll sketch it out for you in fucking LaTeX:
$\emptyset \mapsto \mathit{Nonsense}$
I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. You’re also mansplaining to an expert. While I admit that I am not an expert on law and am listening when corrections related to LAW and the practice of LAW are concerned, you do not want to admit your lack of understanding of this technology.
My god DANIEL, no, people are not mansplaining to you, unless that’s a mask for a Danielle.
EDIT: Down the thread he responds to Kathryn Tewson, an actual expert, with
Yeah I’m not obligated to answer every question by a horde of people. You should change your name to Karen, because you sure act like a fucking entitled white bitch.
This guy has such a punchable face, even though I’ve never seen him. I can just tell.
Daniel’s a very nice and likable guy, but he’s also a bitcoiner
Kathryn Tewson
Iirc, She is not just an expert, but she is so good at law that while she didn’t practice law, but just commented about her interpretations of the law (as ANAL) people hired her and paid for her law degree. She has both talent and expertise.
Ah shit, ML spelled backwards and wrong is LLM, they got me good.
This is also a very qucik hypthetical that I wrote up just to show a point not to argue a fucking legal case.
“Guys I totally didn’t expect the lawyers to respond like lawyers when reading my Chat-GPT generated garbage”
Except… I admitted I was not a lawyer and not an expert, and rather than working to communicate they kept latching onto errors related to law, while they confidently made statements about the nature and functionality of ML technologies like LLMs and NMTs.
“Why are all the lawyers being so mean to me?? I’m just saying they could all be replaced by chatbots”
I wish I was surprised at what the main account was posting about when I looked into it 😵💫
studied maths and CS for 20 years, all he has to show for it on his orcid is BSc and bunch of lousy preprints (with blockchain!). jfc. in that amount of time, people can finish entire PhD degrees, starting from high school, twice over
he also has researchgate
Looking to network with other researchers in a diverse array of fields for collaboration and discussion.
bet you would want to, you time-waster
aand his crowning achievement seems to be dead startup where he tries to put covid on blockchain, it has coin and everything. it’s even associated with worldcoin and so with sam altman. curious that
nsfw: nice to see thejuicemedia jumping in with a quality sneer
oh that’s very good
bring back rap news :<
Have a cursed book written by Henry Kissenger in 2023.
The Age of AI: Our Human Future – https://www.amazon.com/Age-I-Our-Human-Future/dp/0316273805
Found by way of https://old.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/comments/1dqv2kj/having_heard_the_entirety_of_the_kissinger_series
I hate that I saw that same post earlier today
Here’s a quote from the book:
AI already transcends human perception — in a sense, through chronological compression or “time travel”: enabled by algorithms and computing power, it analyzes and learns through processes that would take human minds decades or even centuries to complete.
Glad to know the calculators I had in school were capable of time travel
everything with a memory is capable of time travel
Isn’t it absolutely deranged? These people have (well had lol) real power over us.
There is a great March 2023 episode of Trashfuture I’m listening to atm called “The Diet of Brainworms” about this book. They basically want to install feudalism and tech-priests because AI is sO pOwErFuLl.
One of the hosts (Riley iirc) made a great point that it’s as if someone showed Kissenger that trick where you write “boobs” using a calculator, and he became deeply unsettled by the computer’s power of speech. Also appreciated the one about Kissenger being the guy who used an etch-a-sketch to draw a gun and was scared of it.
Strange sightings of electoral posters in Tokyo:
But wait, there’s more!
AI Steve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2vtKT9RrrI
Det Syntetiske Parti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Synthetic_Party_(Denmark)
AI party (apparently now defunct, if it was ever halfway serious in the first place): https://www.centerforeverything.com/history/constitutive-meeting-of-the-ai-party-fi/
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI党
This is just weird. But I guess that’s to be expected from elections anywhere in the world, disgruntled groups use them to get their message out.
Me: Mom I want AI mayor!
Mom: Shush now Saturn, we have AI mayor at home.
AI mayor at home:
finally, my sneercon cosplay! it’s like Tuxedo Mask on a severe budget
presently:
(you can turn it off but in typical fashion: sneaky new setting, default-on, way to make it turn off is hidden in settings instead of a direct “no fuck this” button. same shit twitter and fb pulled for years)
double kicker is that the opt-out settings have been been in “No, do not use my data” for months
discord feedback: “Thank you for sharing your concerns. We understand your frustration regarding ads in the client. Discord continuously explores various features and changes to enhance the user experience, including the possibility of advertisements. As of now, having a Nitro subscription does not exempt users from seeing ads in the client. We appreciate your feedback and will make sure to pass it along to our development team.”
As of now, having a Nitro subscription does not exempt users from seeing ads in the client.
wait what’s the fucking point of nitro again? is it seriously just the ability to use more annoying reactions and upload slightly larger attachments?
I ask, having instantly closed the nitro ads discord regularly pushes to my client cause the feature list looks roundly annoying and irrelevant to how I use the app (open source project docs that only exist in this completely inappropriate medium, DMs, and an annual game of Quake)
wait what’s the fucking point of nitro again?
Remember when people used to smugly say ‘unless you pay for it, you are the product’ turns out you always are the product!
is it seriously just the ability to use more annoying reactions and upload slightly larger attachments
and server boosts! (and better video quality I guess?)
irunno the whole mechanic is a bit weird but I’ve been “okay” with it in the sense that at least it meant discord was getting revenue from rich-enough gamers and that would mean they didn’t have to suck on the VC nozzle. ostensibly.
like I would’ve likely never bought nitro for myself because idgaf about the featureset, but I would consider it if it meant no ads. alas.
how I use the app (open source project docs that only exist in this completely inappropriate medium
yeah. god. it hurts how many projects have done this shit. and now I bet that exact fucking thing I predicted may start coming around…
also, slack, ~1h ago:
Free workspace content older than one year will be deleted
Your workspace, <snip> , is on a free Slack plan. This workspace has content that is older than one year which will be deleted once the policy takes effect. Moving forward, Slack will not retain messages and files older than one year for a workspace. This policy will impact your workspace starting August 26th, 2024.
the ouroboros must be hungry.
I might have been wrong on the capabilities of ML, this is very impressive. (twitter link), was I wrong and Yud right?
Don’t worry a heavily edited 3 minute video filled with inconsistencies promised me that AI movies were right around the corner. No matter that the unearthly writhing of the backgrounds makes me simultaneously motion sick and stressed out, I’m sure they’ll work that out.
And be careful that you don’t lose yourself in the eyes of a pig.
You know what would be awesome is if there was a way to easily see new posts to a thread, like if the “New” button actually put New posts on top. Maybe lemmy truly is too janky for that but it’s a shame because I just start to ignore threads after a while.
I recently learned there is a page showing just the comments of the communities you are subscribed to; that works for me because this space is so incredibly low-traffic, but I guess falls apart if you use that account to follow higher-traffic chatter.
I use it, but at least on my browser the
nextbutton is disabled so I can only see the most recent page of updates. I treat that as a the jank is a feature moment, though; if there’s more than one page of new comments, I’m forced to stop reading.
I also use the new comments page, and when lemmy default frontend broke the next page, I looked around and found https://alexandrite.app, which fixes this page. EG https://alexandrite.app/awful.systems/c/techtakes?type=Comments&sort=New
The downside is that, in implementing an infinite scroll, it unloads comments that you’re not looking at, so ctrl-f will be unreliable.
yeah, it’s a Lemmy breakage
The Death of the Junior Developer
Steve Yegge goes hard into critihype, there’s no need for any junior people anymore, all you need is a senior prompt engineer. No word on what happens when the seniors retire or die off, guess we’ll have AGI by then and it’ll all work out. Also no word on how the legal profession will survive when all the senior prompt engineer’s time is spend rewriting increasingly meaningless LLM responses as the training corpus inevitably degenerates from slurm contamination.
this is such a sad slop. i wouldn’t guess it’s yegge, it’s so far from his style when he used to write himself.
Funny, as I also assume LLMs will cause the death of the Junior Developer, but not because the job dissapears, but because due to relying on LLMs devs never really build the skills to understand software and will suck so hard people will not hire them for the junion -> senior positions. And it gets even worse for the junior dev when the LLMs enshittify (either by the output degrading or the deal altering more and more pray they don’t alter the deal further).
Guess the difference of opinion here is calling people who use LLMs junior devs vs calling them senior devs.
I’m oddly reminded of the person who used copilot to write a script to do something (which they offered to others), and didn’t know what http errors meant. (they just asked the LLM how to fix it).
“DevOps” is a word meaning “sysadmin who can still use the command line”
@dgerard @Soyweiser I thought we were SREs now. At least, the message for years was “Sysadmins are useless shit now because they aren’t software engineers and hell, they don’t even call themselves engineers”.
a euphemism treadmill of “keeping shit working”
@dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor who’s worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with “Venereal Disease” and passing through “Special Clinic” on the way to “Sexual Health Clinic”. Same thankless job, just different labels.
Same basic lessons, too… “consider the risks of giving root privileges to people you just met”, etc.
I don’t feel like any great shakes as a sysadmin, then I encounter someone with the same job title who has clearly never used a command line before
Wait there are people who cannot use the command line. No wait again, don’t answer that please.
There are “sysadmins” who have to be dragged kicking and screaming to using the command line.
…what… What would they use instead?
having seen the horror from a distance: VNC, a fuckton of clicking, occasionally mouse and keyboard macros, possibly a networked KVM (itself not a bad idea at all for emergency access to hardware too commodity or misdesigned to have a sensible serial console, but we’re talking day to day here), and a massive chip on their shoulder about being forced off their beloved Windows Server 2003 and onto Linux
How do they sysadmin a server that doesn’t have any display devices aside from the terminal then? Which in my experience is almost all of them?
I have had the actually quite heartwarming experience of us hiring on a serious NT BOFH (someone who knows precisely how to wave a hammer at NT to intimidate it) and he sees how Linux does stuff and is trepidatious but eventually delighted
then there are others
i’m at like the pointy-clicky stage with NT admin and sometimes it’s just not enough, cos it’s Babby’s First OS but with several layers of tentacles underneath
If I had a nickle for every time on June 27th 2024 I’ve read someone argue that chatbots make lawyers obsolete I’d have two nickles. Which isn’t a lot of money but it’s weird that it happened twice.
As a “senior” programmer; my coworkers, even the newer ones are people. They can think. They are professional. I can describe problems to them and eventually get solutions, or at least sensible follow-up questions. I don’t have to baby them or “prompt engineer” stuff I tell them. I can just sit back and drink my hot cocoa and occasionally try to sound distinguished while my juniors do all the hard work.
Chatbros have discovered that you can get a chatbot to string together tutorials from the net into simple programs that almost work with some finangling. Somehow they never realized that you could always do this by web searching for “socket example I hate unix please make it gentle”. Of course none of this generalizes to anything complex or not in the training set (read: anything that anyone will actually pay you to do), but the Chatbros don’t care because they were never doing real work in the first place.
