“senior” roles.

5+ years experience.

Wow. It better be extremely deep and broad experience if they’re in a position to mentor others; and even then.

Mr Stallman needs to be considered from all sides before deciding whether you’ll follow his lead. He’s not without some toejam.

I’ve said it before, but this is a 20-year-old problem.

After Y2K, all those shops that over-porked on devs began shedding the most pricey ones; worse in ‘at will’ states.

Who were those devs? Mentors. They shipped less code, closed fewer tickets, cost more, but their value wasn’t in tickets and code: it was investing in the next generation. And they had to go because #numbersGoUp

And they left. And the first gen of devs with no mentorship joined and started their careers. No idea about edge cases, missing middles or memory management. No lint, no warnings, build and ship and fix the bugs as they come.

And then another generation. And these were the true ‘lost boys’ of dev. C is dumb, C++ is dumb, perl is dumb, it’s all old, supply chain exploits don’t exist, I made it go so I’m done, fuck support, look at my numbers. It’s all low-attention span, baling wire and trophies because #numbersGoUp.

And let’s be fair: they’re good at this game, the new way of working where it’s a fast finish, a head-pat, and someone else’s problem. That’s what the companies want, and that’s what they built.

They say now that relying on Ai makes one never really exercise critical thought and problem-solving, and I see it when I’m forced to write fucking YAML for fucking Ansible. I let the GPTs do that for me, without worrying that I won’t learn to code YAML for Ansible. Coding YAML for Ansible is NEVER going to be on my list of things I want to remember. But we’re seeing people do that with actual work; with go and rust code, and yeah, no concept of why we want to check for completeness let alone a concept of how.

What do we do, though?

If we’re in a position to do so, FAIL some code reviews on corner cases. Fail some reviews on ISO27002 and supply chain and role sep. Fail some deployments when they’re using dev tools in prod. And use them all as teachable moments. Honestly, some of them got no mentorship in college if they went, and no mentorship in their first ten years as a pro. It’s going to be hard getting over themselves, but the sooner they realise they still have a bunch to learn, the better we can rebuild coders. The hardest part will be weaning them off GPT for the cheats. I don’t have a solution for this.

One day these new devs will proudly install a patch in the RTOS flashed into your heart monitor and that annoying beep will go away. Sleep tight.

Setup: noun (set-up)

Set up: verb

You need to pick the right lane, man.

Screenshot the image on screen and feed the snap into the app.

The naval battle flag of the knights Templar?

Edit: spoke too soon. I was thinking the skull and crossbones, strangely more popular among free agents after Friday 13th October 1307.

Thankfully the slop generated by copilot et al is absolutely useless dreck. I’ve had a significant number of tasks end up broken because someone chased a dream promised by Ai slop. “Sure, you can do that in python.” “that’s definitely how that tool works.” etc.

begs the question

Not it doesn’t. Did an Ai slop this story too?

I’ve had my enterprise-distro linux machines updating by cron for 22 years. I had two glitches in those 20 years, too, just like you. But in addition to my two glitches - I had to bring in one unlisted dep for cobbler and also correct the smb.conf’s old format on another box - in 20 years, I also got

• out-of-the-box
• do-nothing patch runs
• trivial back-out if I needed it

And while I know your numbers are excellent, I simply haven’t had to DO ANYTHING since deploying some boxes. They patch, they bounce later on a weekend if they need it (‘needs-rebooting’ is centralized because ALL software installs are) and I can patch while under load because linux write-locks instead of read-locking. My effort is to check ‘some time later’ and ensure things are working in ways nagios doesn’t catch.

Printer issues? Nah. Supply thing. App not working because java/perl/python/DLLs rug-pulled a dependency? Proper packages list hard dependencies, so that cobbler thing is a bug not an expectation. Network offline? nah. Reboots? timed at 3 minute downtime (1 min before systemd), or 7 minutes if I just updated 1gb of gitlab install because it starts like a manatee.

It’s really a different world; and while I’ve teased the heck out of my windows peers, it’s a true statement.

I’ve ran

I’ve run

go with ceph[:] it has everything

I heard running an object store as a filesystem was considered risky, but that’s not why it sometimes hoses your storage.

… Thus, not saying a thing if they do actually cache it.

emails

\sigh

Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Egypt have been caught spying on the US (or US citizens) from what I know

Dude, America has spied on even its allies. The bar is pretty low, here.

It’s been well known for decades that most government orgs

I’ve seen Muni and Regional gov and also dotcoms.

The Govs I’ve been at were crazy-tight about security. They were unionized and could decide based on conscience vs costs. Dotcoms, though, followed a different trending, one that really focused on costs.

You can’t use “literally” and

… be over 14

I downvote for terribad writing, but I seem to be alone in that.

Yes. Great Scott! We shall mount it externally with wood screws and call it MrDifFusion but it’s really just a cheap genny from Home Depot, Marty.

Love that analogy.

I do worry your ‘256 cars’ is a little low.

Source: I overlook some tracks near America, which currently carries lots of untariffed American stuff.

People are putting an S on the end of words like ‘traffic’ and ‘email’. They will never understand the semantics of that correction.