Asklemmy

A lot of what is sold to consumers is straight up shite.

I think that the AI industry is particularly harmful to writers, journalists, actors, artists, and others. This is not because AI produces better pieces of work, but rather due to misanthropic viewpoints of particularly toxic and powerful individuals at the top of the tech industry hierarchy pushing AI as the next big thing due to their general misunderstanding or outright dislike of the general public.

I'm a writer and my work is increasingly making me use AI to do things. I'm 98% sure I'm just training this thing to replace me at this point, and am planning accordingly.

The Microsh*t Office Suit is atrocious — both from a Software Dev and ordinary user perspective. Literally any alternative is better, Libre Office, Google Office, etc.

Word is bloated, slow, impractical, bad for collaboration, and politically dubious. Teams is buggy, impractical, also politically dubious, and lacks many basic features. At this point, I literally despise Microsoft. Also Windows really seems to be unusable, from the enlightened perspective of a Mac or Linux user (in my case the latter).

SystemD is bloated and stopping Linux from getting faster.

Most mainstream programming languages suck, Rust being the exception.

Alright, I'm done ;)

Edit: any website that breaks because of uBlock Origin medium mode is poorly made and not trustworthy. /endrant

Tech workers need to unionize

So Just for context I work as an engineer but I consider myself pretty low level. I am completely self taught as I sort of flunked out of college and didn't pay much attention anyway. I've just been the sort of person who takes everything apart and tinkers around to figure things out or reads documentation. So I am not some genius programmer or anything. However what I have noticed over the span of my ( 40 + years ) is that the Internet and technology used to be a challenge but rewarding. Things were skewed towards creativity, sharing, community, and knowledge. I remember spending lots of time on forums like Usenet and later bulletin boards of various types. I remember when Wikipedia first became a thing and it really seemed to me that we were going to get this amazing platform to learn and self teach just about any subject imaginable. Then somehow the Internet just became an endless fucking scroll farm. My dumbass uncles and older family members who used to be content with just eating aerosol cheese while channel surfing got online and became complete fools. Instead of creativity and debate we just have endless AI slop, morons reacting to videos of nothing, Bots, and click bait. It seems like the industry just loves it because before they could barely figure out how they could make money off of this crap and now they have it figured out "turn everyone into fucking zombies". People at work are at times blown away at my stamina to work through problems and it's like bro I used to sleep next to my 486 so I could put in disk 20 of 50 to install something and it would take like all friggin night. I used to have to find a dude that got a catalog so I could get a CPU upgrade or part because there was no internet. I used to have to fight for every damn piece of documentation or software I could get my hand on. Now it's all right there and people have decided to watch Tik Tok instead of being able to do anything on their own. We screwed the hell up the Internet and tech has made people lazy, less capable, and focused on instant gratification. It was supposed to make us curious, creative, and engaged. Now with AI we are like "hmm how can I even be lazier?". I would get if they used AI to help solve really complex problems reserved that compute and stuff to assist on certain things that humans are not good at. However we are using this shit to just circumvent having to think and a substitute for community. Why ask a friggin bot when all the answers were in forums where you could interact with people make friends and learn? Now I am looking down the barrel of the gun of being replaced in the next 5 years or so going, Great so this shit which was "my thing" the only damn thing I was ever good at or interested in is going to be taken away from me because of some lazy ass people who just want to watch Tik Tok all day? -End rant.

companies don't know how to interview. i don't need someone to walk me through a sorting algorithm. i need someone who will be responsive, and interested in the problems we actually face.

• IT reconversions are bullshit and dangerous to the industry. Everyone and their grandma are becoming "programmers". We're in the "fuck around" phase, the "find out" will be explosive. Companies are inundating themselves with these "reconverted" juniors and doing soft-layoffs to seniors..

• crypto, Blockchain and AI are just bs to make a quick buck out of investors. They are truly disastrous to the environment

• If you use chatgpt et al. I'll look down on you from a technical competence level

• marketing and middle management are mostly useless. A good, and small, sales+marketing team is very effective but the moment they start growing they start to degenerate pretty fast into BS world and imposing company culture

Neither Python nor JavaScript should be the primary language used in any production back end.

There are some highly intelligent, very dangerous people out there, and 95% of companies will be incapable of stopping them. Most people, across all industries, are too slow, uneducated, lazy or just uncaring enough that no amount of training or tools will fix it.

My opinion on tech is that there are cool things being done that do one shiney thing, but everyone disregards the shit it produces behind the scenes. Blookchain is an awesome concept, the whole chain depends on all the other parts of it, but the fact that in order to use it, you have to download the whole thing in several systems. The size of a single will grow so large, only a few companies will be able to analyze it at scale. And AI is a huge joke. Nobody should be celebrating generative AI. A ton of computing power that is dangerous to our eco system, and it's all trained on shady material. Nobody is doing anything significant about the power consumption, just coming up with agencies to help companies use AI properly. It's all a joke. Most of our most influencial technologies are just someone asking how to make big bucks off something comes else created for free.

I truly believe that innovating the internet is really running in place. Might be just me but I can't think of anything we can really do, to 'evolve' it. We're doing everything that we've been doing in the past three decades, but it's only just been more accessible and the speeds faster (depending where you are). But we're not actually moving the needle when it comes to progressing the internet as a whole.

And I see it this way as to why. We've experienced two big booms in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, with Web 1.0 being what some consider the Wild West of the internet. Web 2.0 is basically the great social media bubble that has blossomed for years. We're not doing anything new or different now than we did back in 2007. Every new social media platform that comes out is recycling the exact same things as many before it presented. I truly think we stopped evolving the internet the day we managed to get messengers onto phones when phones were developing and it's only been perfected by the age of the first wave of smartphones.

So I just think with all of this AI stuff, this "Web 3.0" I've been hearing about for a few years now, the Metaverse .etc are all just gimmicks. Gimmicks of shitty ideas coming from the wrong people that should be practicing said ideas, all saying that they're innovating the internet when all that they're doing is just taking advantage of the internet for themselves. All within political theater of course.

At least half of the people working in tech shouldn't be. They have 0 clue what they're doing and that's dangerous. And far to many people solve everything with a golden hammer.

You don't need a Mac to work in IT. Especially if all your doing is ansible.

Ansible sucks. It's slow, it's limited, it gives a false sense of understanding to do many. I mean it's nice that it's a structured playground for some folks I suppose. But there are better tools that do the exact same thing. Or you could just write a proper script.

I don't get the term 'technical debt'. Most people seem to use it to say "We took shortcuts previously, so now we need to go back and do things properly".

FIrst, it's a bad metaphor. You take on debt to invest in long term things that will provide future benefits. Telling the bean counters that you need to stop working on useful features to 'pay back technical debt' is not making things clearer to them.

Second, you write software, what the heck are you talking about? Compare to civil engineering. If an area gets busier and the existing narrow wood bridge is no longer suitible, engineers don't say "Wow what idiots built this road with no eye to future growth?" It was built with the needs and resources of the time. To improve it, the bridge needs to be closed, demolished, and rebuilt with planning, labour and materials.

Instead software is empherial. You don't need to demolish what's there. No need to build temporary alternative infrastructure. No need for new materials and disposal of the old. It's just planning and labour to redo a piece of software. It always seems so whiny when people complain about technical debt, as if switching to a different build system is anywhere close to the difficulty of fixing real life; replacing lead pipes with copper for an entire city, or removing asbestos from buildings.

I don't feel comfortable sharing any personal opinions at work. The workplace is somewhere one should arrive, work, go home, not somewhere to share opinions and in doing so make potential enemies or risk your position.

Why do I care if my colleagues know my opinion on X or Y? It changes nothing about my life or theirs, we're not even friends, just colleagues, or work friends at best.

Anyway yeah, that's just my thoughts :-)

Blockchain is a joke

CI/CD and a lot of container fuckery is entirely unnecessary for like 80-90% of orgs

The jobs AI will eliminate are managerial and their hustle to implement it will their own death sentence

Dear Skippy,

I'm sorry to hear you're going home and leaving one of the prettiest cities in the country. I understand you were frustrated with the pacing and guardrails in place around large-scale enterprise projects where privacy and security and auditing are paramount.

I worry that it took you a long time to realize that you weren't a good fit for the job, and I worry that blaming the inability to find a decent house to buy near work - when you could have moved anywhere in the country in the WFH programme and found a place that brought you joy or just something to rent - on your decisions to move away to where your schoolchums and your parents live, may make that discovery harder to reach than ever. I'm glad if you're going somewhere you believe will make you happier, but a clear audit of this last situation needs to be done.

The truth is, you weren't a good fit. The first, last, and every word in any solution you suggested to every problem was merely a regurge of every last-5-years buzzword, and incredibly short-sighted. "Just use AI in the cloud" was neat to discuss the first time, but no solution built on such jello could pass muster by security people who were not new in their job -- which meant they were maybe old, but also VERY experienced. It's this experience that seemed to cockblock every resume-based solution you dreamt up.

I'm relieved you've landed a job at some dot-co-dot-in startup -- not because I bear you any ill-will "boy needs to learn a lesson" thing and I know that the odds are vastly against long-term employment, but because chasing the constant churn of buzzword products will get it out of your system; and in this day and age, still suffering from the loss of our mentors and gurus 20 years ago and the Lost Boys age of Tech that followed, you need to discover yourself the things you refuse to hear from people eschewing certain tech not because they're old but because they're critical of the gilded shit that likely will never survive long enough to realize a return on the investment and churn costs.

I wish you a speedy end to that slow soul-search and a placement at the company ready to receive the mature you as we hope to gain a more mature version of your astounding intellect and enthusiasm in your seat very quickly to carry on the work you should have been fucking doing.

Keep in touch, so I can witness your transformation into a focused force of nature.

Sincerely, your friend and peer, --cg

rabbits in skinner boxes pressing two buttons for a treat is not a far cry from tech workers sitting in cublices pressing 104 buttons for paycheck nor internet users doing it for imaginary internet points.

Most IT infra exists solely to justify work that is pointless work.

One if the worst IT sectors is ad tech. The entire industry rationally should not exist.

Much of what we do and have built is overpriced and useless bullshit that doesn't make anybody better off.

We are inventing solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to...etc etc.

Websites used to be static HTML pages with some simple graphics, images, and some imbedded stuff. Now, you need to know AWS for your IaaS, Kubernetes to manage your scaling and container orchestration for the thousands of Docker containers that you use to compose your app written in some horrific pile of JavaScript related web stacks like NodeJS, Typescript, React, blah blah blah...

Then you need a ton of other 3rd party components that handle authentication, databasing, backups, monitoring, signaling, account creation/management, logging, billing, etc etc.

It's circles within circles within circles, and all that to make a buggy, overpriced, clunky web app.

Similar is true for IT, massive software suites that most people in the company use 10% of their functionality for stupid shit.

I'm all for advancing technology, I love technology, it's my job and my hobby.

But the longer I work in this industry, the more I get this sick feeling that we lost the train long time ago. Buying brand new $1,500 laptops every 3 years so that most of our users can send emails, browse the web, and type up occasional memos.