f4stjack

Something obvious to others may not be obvious to you - and to be fair it was a key ingredient in blogging.

I find it extremely sad that blogging shifted from personal writing to a performative act - we can feel ashamed stating something obvious because the expectation is to get approvals and shares, rather than us writing something we find intriguing, interesting or worth writing down.

The problem lies with people trying to claim credit without doing the work: writing. AI is a fantastic tool that catches flow errors, grammar problems and punctuation misuse, just like a copywriter. But copywriters don't get bylines.

My line is clear, if you use copy paste the AI output that's not your writing. I am okay with AI collaboration - it detects the errors, you decide what to do with them.

Yes. Exactly. I, for one, am following this credo: If your single player game has an “always online” clause; I am not your customer. No ifs, no buts, no “but i like this franchise”s.

Vote with your wallet. Do not hesitate to boycott.

Nerds became an industry field - that's what it happened. Back in the 90'ies we were doing IT things because it geniunely interested us, not that it would "net us high salaries". I'd do this even if you didn't pay a single centa because it triggered my dopamine receptors.

Then the world digitalized, and people who do not have any interest in computing and computers in general became "experts". That's when the ball begin to roll. This created people who can't give a french fry about the work they are doing? Quality? Efficiency? What do they matter, it was a job you did for 9-5 and you got your salary. If money was in say, haystacking, they'd be doing haystacking.

Now whenever someone utters "crypto" I do a doubleback and realize they mean cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. I do not expect any of my new hires to know the word "grok" (other than the AI of course), enjoy science fiction or any nerdy things we did. IT was a community where like minded people were working, now it is not.

Yes, you can but then if you have any older software in your system (for company reasons) will not play ball. And it is a workaround, not a permanent solution. Because we still do not have that fabled WinFS so...

The best thing you can do with an enterprise Onedrive is having long long file and folder names. The moment it exceeds 255 characters, the software application dies. I am ready to hear easier fixes but so far this worked:

- Rename the offending folder from the web

- Unlink the folder from the user's machine

- Delete the existing onedrive folder

- Relink and resync

The best part is, the web side of onedrive has practically unlimited length, the windows part has. As long as you don't sync, you don't experience anything but god forbid if you try to do it.

Also do not get me started on "Add a shortcut/Sync" debate. All in all, onedrive feels like a system that works but will feed you to the wolves the moment it hiccups. But on the enterprise side that's the only game in town so... we suffer altogether.

Just a small note about fastmail: Do not launch a trial with your planned username. Because I have opened up a trial account, it expired and when I decided to reactivate it (with payment in mind) I find myself unable to sign in. I cannot reset my password as it says "Sorry, we canʼt find an account with that username." and it does not let me log in.

Then again I also moved from gmail to mailbox.org and am a happy camper since. I don't know if we are a majority but I find myself cutting all ties with google services (youtube premium, drive, gemini etc.) as they try to force unwanted features and workflows in my daily life.

Well, I have created several assistants for writing checks, the researcher module is really good and am using it when the need is there. It is expensive but the chained search queries it does is extensive and solves my problems so... that became something invaluable.

For the normal queries and questions though I use their cheaper selections from the normal screen. My go-to is Kimi usually and I like how, unless specified, the chats disappear in 24 hours.

Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean anything but overall google is heading to an _interesting_ place. In short, it was state of the art but in 20 years it became just another conglomerate sacrificing quality for shareholder gain, I think?

As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted links above the thing I actually search for. Moved to Kagi and didn't look back.

As an AI it does not work for me. I am seeing an arbitrary usage limit, refreshing in 5 hours and a weekly quota given in a percentage. That is as opaque as it gets. Again, to give Kagi as an example I look at my usage details and I see how much is remaining in a clear way. Not working for Kagi by the way, I am just a happy customer.

As a cloud storage, it does not work for me. Probably some shared folder I am working with others has a spam user and/or a hacked account and they periodically spam x-rated notifications. And that's not only me (https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1azf25v/myster...). Moved to apple iCloud and done with it.

Mail is fine. After 22 years of usage, I kind of delegated it to a non-important stage in my life. The important bits have relocated to European providers anyway.

As technical people we tend to have a technical outlook to this. However, after a certain threshold - say $1M - these projects become political things rather than a simple technical issue.

From a creator's standpoint, a software project exists to solve a problem - or at least make the lives of the software users easier. But the moment a company bigwig clique decides to make money out of company, "bad" projects pop up.

To my chance, I experienced this for three times. The signs are nearly the same. The company has a lot of workflows - usually handled by excel and/or internally developed apps that actually reflect those workflows. Then comes the buzzword team proclaiming miracles, snake oil and an app that will even cure the dandruff - just sign here. Of course, the clique has their cut - that's why they say yes or advice the board to say yes.

Then begins the grueling process of "analyzing workflows". Do they contact the actual users who are doing the work? Hell. No. What they do is, create a "Project Team" - usually hired anew, with no information about how the company does its work - and they try to "understand" the workflows. Then it becomes like that game, user says one thing, project team understands another and says a different thing and the outcome is a different product that solves a problem but not the user's problem.

Of course, this process burns money. You gotta do development, you gotta have a server to run the app, you have to book meeting rooms in hotels to train the users, you have to create fliers internally to promote the app - and create pdfs, many many pdfs to make the users understand how the app works. And no one asks "hey, if this app is reflecting our workflows... why are we getting this training?"

Because at the end of the day, this app only exists to make some people money. And after a certain point, no one dares to say anything because of all the money spent. An ambassador who says "the app we spent $10M does not work" will be get shot. People get retired with the f-you money they gained and the company tries to work with the app they "built" usually it ends up hiring an internal team and do it from the zero - and the expensive shit becomes a thing nobody talks about, a company omerta so to speak.

This may be an unpopular opinion but I feel Bazzite (and immutable distros in general) is the future for the normal users. Yes I know, they take the freedom of messing with the system core but for most people this is fine. All they need is a device that works without any problems.

First time I switched to asus kernel from the generic one was magic - I know asus-linux exists and following the instructions probably would have ended up in a working system, but with bazzite I wrote only one command and everything worked. It still feels weird not to monkey around with package installations (and this was a dangerous path, usually ended up with more work for me) but this is a tradeoff I can live with. The software I used - luckily - already moved to Flatpak so everything was a breeze. Also the fact that I can switch to a working state with one keypress is a stress reliever.

I agree. Linux is good now - for the common user. I still can't see immutable distros can be used for all scenarios but for gaming/home use, this is a methodology I can easily recommend for my friends and family who only want a computer that works without messing with console.

To be honest, I do not understand this new norm. A few months ago I applied to an internal position. I was a NGO IT worker, deployed twice to emergency response operations, knew the policies & operations and had good relations with users and coworkers.

The interview went well. I was honest. When asked what my weakness regarding this position I told that I am a good analyst but when it comes to writing new exploits, that's beyond my expertise. The role doesn't have this as a requirement so I thought it was a good answer.

I was not selected. Instead they selected a guy and then booted him off after 2 months due to his excessive (and non-correct like the link) use of LLM and did not open the position again.

So in addition to wasting the hirers' time those nice people block other people's progress as well. But, as long as the hirers expect wunderkinds crawling out of the woods the applicants try to fake it and win in the short term.

This needs to end but I don't see any progress towards it. This is especially painful as I am seeking a job at the moment and thinking these fakers are muddying the waters. It feels like no one cares about your attitude - like how geniunely you want to work. I am an old techie and the world I was in valued this rather than technical aptitude for you can teach/learn technical information but character is another thing. This gets lost in our brave new cyberpunk without the cool gadgets era I believe.

Ta! Heard about them but will definitely check them out.

Agreed. Time and time again, I wished I'd knew Ruby and/or RoR. Do you know any good (and "boring" as in time-tested & practical) tutorials/learning resources?

thank you!

Holy… I still miss kuro5hin. Wonder what is rusty doing nowadays.

Preach brother. I am in the same boat but in the caring side of things. I read e-mails, I respond to them as promptly as I can. I read the tickets and contact the users to resolve their issues as quickly as I can. I attend to meetings, do the required things and long story short, I give two shits about what is going on around me.

You know what I get? Additional assumed responsibilities is what I get, because I read the goddamn mails sent to the goddamn regional IT staff distribution list - I am the "knowledge base". If you are naivé you might, just might, assume that additional responsibilities involve a raise or a title change.

Hell. No.

The final straw was a person got promoted without any interviews etc. to a position I am de-facto doing. So you keep the people who care in the same position because "they get the job done" and you raise the people who doesn't care and the end result is this situation.

But hey! KPIs are green, the job gets "done", right? Who cares?

With W11, they seem to really gung-ho about creating that achilles heel. As for myself I am tired from having an unstable OS on my devices which may or may not bork without any intervention from me.

Thanks to this (and Steam Deck for a great deal) I jumped to Mac and not regretting it. The system boots in seconds, has great eyecandy and just works for me. My work pc uses Windows and its taskbar behaves weirdly, right now, and its quarter shows the desktop image. Update breaks the soundcard and I will need to install it again. Oh and I see another update queued in - which may or may not be a false alarm.

I am not sure which was the most stable one, Windows 7 or 10. But 11 is a mess and nobody dares to admit it because sunk-cost fallacy and with the invention of recall it will act as a data collection agency for AI - as far as I followed the discussion.

For me, Agile is a good idea implemented badly and subverted by the "business people" to hell and back.

Without going into details, I find its core methodology cool.

- You meet with the client, get an overview of the project

- Cobble together something in the given time

- Show the product-in-development, get the feedback from the client

- Rinse repeat until the product and the client needs are aligned

But from my experience the real-world implementation is meetings. More and more meetings. After a while client loses interest and basically leaves you to do something, which diverges from the real world need and solves an imaginary problem.

This happened so much that, I find my gorge rising whenever someone says "Oh we are using agile methodology"

To be honest after switching to Pop_OS! several years ago I have no regrets. The system just _works_. And curiously enough, even though it should be as same as Ubuntu, Ubuntu does not work as seamlessly as this distro. Bluetooth, for example, U. does not want to register my keyboard without some terminal shenanigans; P does. I could not even make my bluetooth speakers work with U, yet with P it just purrs.

With Pop_OS! my distohopping days were over. I install it on my devices and I forget it. I am sure their COSMIC DE will be awesome to use.

I think this is because they have skin in the game. They sell computers and they make sure they work as flawlessly as it can be with the OS they are developing. They are not selling their devices in my country but who knows, if they start to do that they have a ready customer here.

All these might have been true for Windows 10, but with Windows 11 all the things you mentioned are my daily woes. W11 suddenly "upgrades" the video driver and explorer crashes; updates bios and camera borks. With Linux I have the opportunity to freeze the upgrades and go on to my work. Also due to behind the scenes shenanigans battery lives are worse all across the board - I am managing more than 100 laptops. In addition with this OS, 8gb of ram becomes a joke and most of my users are running office applications.

Linux has its own pain points, I agree, but especially after 2019 they are rare. With Pop_Os! I never experience any of the stuff I deal at work. I dare say Pop makes Linux boring - because everything works out of the box.

From my experience, Microsoft wants you to move to a Microsoft 365 subscription. As an example, 6-7 months ago an update made Outlook 2016 clients fail to connect to the Outlook servers. You had to explicitly set an update (its KB escapes me at the moment) to make it connect again.

There are other issues as well, Onedrive, Office 2016 and Windows 11 combination has problems - Word and Excel crashes with no rhyme or reason, some documents which were not shared ask for credentials for accessing and so on.

Also there is the fact that they declared that 2016 and 2019 won't be eligible for connecting to Microsoft 365 services after October 2023 (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/endofsupport/...). So there is a clock ticking if you are using those versions of Office.

https://poolsuite.net/ to capture those nineties feeling for a sec or two...

Maybe so, but his previous company's attitude is sticking out like a sore thumb it overshadows the focus you saw...

Kevin I am sorry but you are not the one that is fault at here. There are several red flags but most noticably your ex firm lacks accountability. You shouldn't be hired with an impulsive decision, there shouldn't be closed doors decision making andyou should not be blamed because you executed the decisions made without your input.

And getting fired after a whiteboard session with no heads up? Even though he knew he is going to fire you the next day? Man, you are BETTER off without that company. There will be other jobs, there will be other gigs but nothing is worth this.

My 2 cents anyway.

Unsurprisingly this will be an anecdotal advice but here goes: Find a new job that nobody expects you to code. I know, it sounds hard - especially if your whole career is dedicated to one thing - but you probably have picked up other skills as you are doing your job.

The thing is I began this thing as a wonderful skill to build new things. I was coding in C64 when I was 8-9 years old. But we lose our "mojo" as it turns into a humdrum everyday job where we know our limits. Add in the business related constraints, you slowly begin to develop a toxic relationship. And like any toxic relationship, ending it is better in the long run for your mental health. It was for me.

Taking a long vacay doesn't work if you implicitly know that you will return to the same routine by the way.

Hope it helps.

Edit: Currently working as a general IT troubleshooter guy who is also doing some coding in his spare time.

Just installed Zorin's lite version to an Aspire One with Atom CPU and 1gb of ram. Works like a dream for a machine that's ancient for our standards. Some aspire specific tweaks were required but all in all replacing the mechanical disk with a SSD made it live again. The fact that it looks very similar to Windows makes it usable for non-Linux people.

So seeing on HN was a shock to me. Recommended for old hardware nonetheless!

Holy crap, I've seen myself in the op here. I used to love coding, owned a c64 and wrote games and other small utilities when I was only a toddler armed with the "programming guide" that came with the ol' breadbox.

After 10 years of "srs coding" I felt like I was burning out and I was burned out. Because the feeling of discovery, solving people's problems and teaching the good stuff kinda disappeared in the churn. What I felt was I was adding data to a database and retrieving it when needed. The software did the required transformations that's all. Back then I was writing Java mainly and its verbosity kinda added to it.

I am not an engineer, my diplomas are on philosophy (bach.), sociology (m.a.) and international relations (bach.). And I used to feel fun and joy while doing that. Now it's all about buzzwords and creating stuff that's not neither usable nor fun.

Anyway sorry for the rambling but as a person who is in his late 30ies I didn't imagine this present, where I feel queasy from coding and think I should "relearn" the trade.

Thank you for reading!

Did You Forget Anyone? Militant Flowers can help.

Oh man, I recently finished some of his novels and it is astounding to see the optimism he had for us, considering he was writing in a world before any world wars happened.

I really would like to live in a Vernian world where people are mostly good and rationalism wins the day. But I also would like to live in Discworld (maybe except Fourecks) so caveat emptor! :'D