🤘

This is delicious in every way, I really love it. Kudos!!

Here’s my tidbit - if you’re in the US and in a not-tiny or remote part of it, good chance you can find people offloading old Dell business-class laptops, workstations, all the way up to v. spendy server machines, depending directly on number of school systems, corporate office spaces (and etc), and industrial or info-tech type businesses nearby. Respectively, and with some overlap and such 😅

Beyond the obvious benefits for sustainability (reuse!) and affordability - business-class Dell have always been engineered quite well (expensively, and uhhh… opinionatedly, lol).

Arguably even more useful, all those well-engineered things were made in huge volume. You will ~always be able to find cheap parts. And, if buying a lot, by having a handful of the ~same thing (all destined for a dumpster), you already get redundancy, and…ahem…some very useful teachable moments lol.

It feels like a cheat code. Place populated enough and there will def be businesses whose main thing is snapping these up, cleaning up and etc and reselling. But I’m in a not-tiny place and I still see some deals. OTOH, all of that got a lot worse once hardware prices jumped the shark, so, maybe this tip is already outdated.

And when they start hiring juniors again, insist on onboarding those motherfuckers like you’re teaching a CS degree. The young’ns deserve to learn, this is some bullshit.

Great points! Lotta my optical media use also included hot summers in cars lol, nothing like an archival use.

Dang that’s rad, had no idea (about it being used in such a way, I guess I mean, not too hard to imagine discs lasting that long).

Sounds like a responsible strategy to draw back from a lot of this. It’s all so…effervescently remade, the “ecosystem”, every few months.

For me the takeaway comes from time I spent in some safety-critical parts of engineering and personal hobbies. Ultimately relying on people to make good decisions ~all of the time isn’t enough to prevent disaster, if something like disaster is on the line.

Systems must be engineered to remove possibilities for accidentally bad, in-the-moment human decisions, where it counts. Thoughtfully. This is the weird same-shape but exactly-opposite doppelganger of that set of best practices.

When the systems are using ~opaque automations that behave like humans (w.r.t. some decision-making and unreliable expectations of behavior) - and then relying on people making the right calls on top of that ever-shifting set of capabilities - I mean c’mon lol.

This is gonna happen a lot, while the carrot of go-faster remains dangling so unignorably (because it’s in front of everyone, everyone working anywhere near the stuff). Until we look around and take a broader view. Which will be learned the same way we learned to make safety regulations, but I largely doubt our ability to respond in a similar way.

The money will eventually respond, of course, but that’s always a poor and late proxy for what ought to be done.

Sidenote, for aspiring engineers, take heart!

It will be you who ends up tasked with unburying from all the technical debt incurred, truly. A practice steeped in the ancient wizardly traditions of yore. Spending a career on that and building something better.

It will be necessary, the work begins roughly a while ago lol but more fully when things settle somewhat. Many large and slow organizations are right now very engaged in simply unburying themselves from the technical debt of a previous hype cycle, AKA now making use of all the data they collected (badly, via go-fast charlatans) during the “Big Data! You’ll be left behind if you don’t collect extreme amounts of data, it’s cheapish and everyone else is doing it!” era.

Optical media? Is that a viable part of backup strategies? I would expect tapes for sure, sounds like you know more than me.

Except for the way they keep succeeding 😐

This is one of the most disastrously, menacingly wrong things I’ve ever read, holy fucking fuck with these people.

“Actually we’re the ones who have it bad, the way you jump down our throats when we say what we think, we can’t get anything done! You better let us do (and of course say) whatever we want or else!”

Honestly by now it’s becoming reasonable to assume “projection” as a baseline, to then change based on evidence, when someone has a take like this guy’s.

I don’t mean the political tactic, just the garden-variety kind of projection. “Probably ~everyone thinks the way I do, and boy, we better not give everyone the tools to act on that…”

Deeply wrong about how most folks think, because of how they themselves do, and believing they’re therefore helping. Likewise a self-admission, because they don’t realize they’re admitting anything.

Maybe not the case with this guy, I’m not gonna dive in.

But I do sincerely believe that’s a somewhat charitable take toward anyone making a claim like this today. Charitable in the sense of acknowledging a misunderstanding and desire to help.

The less charitable one being - just obviously complicit. Fuck this noise.

Now this is my kinda head in the sand lmao

But nah really, between my own frustrations with similar and realizing that a somewhat curated media experience for my kids is now of critical importance, I’m not far off! So far so good, I have a long way to go though. But I’ve been away from all the corporate trash for a while, cheers to that.

I’ve been expecting to hear of something like this, it’s a natural evolution of LLM use cases and grimly inevitable.

This is about surveillance, not jobs.

Same, just commiserating over here.

And every person too busy or just aloof to bother learning about any of this stuff will just glibly hand it all over, lovely stuff headed our way.

Plus…there is a LOT to talk about these days, and most sane takes have been effectively banned from all large platforms lmao, with people helping all this along by voluntarily censoring the DUMBEST FUCKING WORDS in their memes, even, just to further their own reach within those shit holes.

So. Yeah, Lemmy be political.

Hell yeah, today is the day

Well that’s a fucking disaster. BIG hate for this sellout.

Brutal lmao

Probably more of a “Highlander” scenario