Sysadmin

The problem isn't the tools, but rather the sociopath executives and the individuals who won't stick up for themselves. Everyone loses when people don't stand up for what's right.

Everything is a scam. It feels like no engineers exist any longer. It’s not even just tech it’s everything. I bought a jar from a major retailer and the lids don’t fit right on them.

It’s pretty obvious capitalism has run its course. What i don’t get is the amount of people helping destroy the world they have to live in or worse—they are having kids in a world they are actively making shitty for six figures.

Then they use their kids as the excuse to make the world worse for everyone else! “I can’t afford not to!”

Well, what you actually can’t afford is to keep doing this. Quit working for these public corps. Sacrifice everything to not work for them. I promise you’ll be better off after some pain. Coming from someone with no actual education that made it out you college grads can do it. I believe in you.

And your kids don’t need large Christmas’s and a new car at 16 with private school. They do need a functioning world.

I can honestly say that I dread the future of tech, and the goat farm thing sounds really appealing.

I went to a local store the other day and saw 2 new flock cameras that went up. There was one person manning 8 self checkout stations, and there was a camera watching me scan and bag my own stuff while displaying a live feed of me. I hopped in my car, which automatically turned on GPS and then my phone started giving me "helpful" suggestions like " have you tried out this restaurant nearby?" and "it's been a while since you've been to the pet store to get stuff". I suddenly felt like a boiled frog, because I don't remember turning any of that shit on, or being notified about it being turned on, or seeing info about new surveillance cameras going up in the community. At this point, I want to buy some land in the middle of fucking nowhere and disconnect from all that shit, and I legitimately had a low-level panic about all of it.

The IT worker pipeline:

help desk > sysadmin > CTO/CISO > goat farmer

I don't have any advice because I'm in exactly the same boat. I think finding other hobbies is probably the best option. It sucks because things were looking so good there for a while until the fucking tech bros ruined it. My problem is all my other interests require workspace that I don't have.

This year, I have given myself a project, I will try to build a model railway in a suitcase. That will be a Z-scale tiny world in a suitcase.

I used to make miniature buildings out of things like balsa wood, spackle, etc for D&D. It became a challenge to see how closely I could simulate things like grass, torches, etc.

I hope I never have to buy a car with one of those damn screens controlling everything.

When I became a sysadmin 24 years ago, I figured the general public was still adapting to the rapid overnight advancements and integration into the tech industry. I assumed that as people figured out how to use software and computer technology in their daily lives, help desk support would practically disappear and we'd be able to move our efforts toward fully maintaining systems instead of customers.

I had no idea how resistant the general public would be to actually learning and understanding technology. We went from recommending customers avoid certain bad programs and hardware, to being forced to incorporate them into our infrastructure because the general public didn't want to give them up.

My professional opinion was overruled many times because someone higher up the food chain wanted to use a device or app that hurt our client base or mission parameters, but was familiar to them, so they wanted it included in our suite of tools.

I'm grateful to see a lot of public resistance to AI, even if corporations are doubling down on their investment into the technology. But I don't have any hope for the future of technology or the general public who use it daily. AI is just the latest excuse for people to not learn how to use technology efficiently.

I expected younger generations to be raised on this tech and be absolute wizards in its use, understanding it even better than I do! Instead, they were raised on slop and ad-riddled ADHD-promoting garbage apps that rotted their brains and prevented them from learning basic tools and functions. As a millennial, I've spent the better half of a decade teaching boomers how to use this tech, and then the next decade trying to reeducate zoomers on how to properly use tech and break their life-long bad habits.

I retired from the IT industry after only 20 years. Now I enjoy tinkering with technology in my free time. I always enjoyed teaching people how to use their personal computers and smartphones, but I can't spend another minute on a help desk, fielding calls from people who still don't know how to read error messages that pop up in their face. AI will be the death of the industry if integrated into everything and left unchecked. Maybe it'd be for the best.

That train sounds cool.

Its not fucking fun to be on the computer anymore. They changed it and now it sucks. It used to be so cool

• Conner O'Malley

I'm personally focusing on the parts of tech I still find enjoyable. Chip / circuit design, OS and low level programming, and Formal Verification.

All of the patient detailed work that AI is never going to be able to do, because it has to be perfect to work. I feel lucky that I enjoy this type of work, it seems to be very much against the Zeitgeist.

That sucks, that your passion for your job got eroded to this point. The z scale train in a suitcase sounds like a really cool project. Share some updates along the way.

Hey now, also don't forget that the Epstein class is forcing OS level identity verification on all devices now

Building a model railway in a suitcase is one of the most random and “out-there” things I’ve recently heard of someone setting out to do. This is fucking awesome. Props to you. How the hell did you come up with that idea?

I’ve been in IT since 2008, and got into building guns as a means to distract myself from working in tech, which I now abhor. Maybe trains would put my head in a better place.

Trains are cool. I started woodworking because of the same thing happening to me.

Please share pics of trains

I think those are symptoms of more general trend - IT is not a tool to make people’s lives easier or fun anymore. Until last 5 years all my projects were about making things possible or automating tedious manual tasks. Now, for almost all use cases there is some solution or components you (or AI) can slap together to build a solution. Today it’s all about cutting costs and increasing margins. There is nothing fun or creative in this job, all feedback you get is lower numbers on dashboard. Budgets are squeezed to make more profit, so there is no time to get bored and improve things around you.

Look, in my IT company, I have to track my time in 3 different system and no-one cares because there is no ROI in automating it. That should tell you in which state IT is

One plus point for recent tech trends, my Commodore 64 is seeing a lot more use!

At this point tech is a hostile malevolent force.

As someone with similar feelings in general and a similar history, I feel you are blaming only the latest and worse effects on tech and of tech on society.

I started my career in parallel with mobile devices and smartphones. The whole idea of new possibilities, new ways to interact with tech, miniaturization, etc., is what called me most as it was a huge field starting and I tried to find my path forward. I've seen from close, real close, how an incredible tech, full of possibilities has been slowly been captured by the market capitalists that inevitably always ended up controlling the direction of every company.

This is not caused by crypto, this is not caused by LLMs. The origin is greed and capitalism. Decisions being made to make number go up.

Really, crypto is a fascinating tech, it's not the fault of the technology that crypto-bros came to conquer everything and misuse it and abused it to make a quick buck.

LLMs are impressive, think about it, we have managed to completely break the Turing test. We have machines that sound so human that mostly everyone is in a constant suspicion that everything they see is made by an LLM. LLMs sound so human that they are full of confidence and mostly always full of shit. Just think about it, AI is just a representation of humanity, what we do with it just represents and highlights the issues in society.

The reality is that those two, have just suffered a faster, the fastest we've seen yet probably, tech lifecycle - growth, hype, plateauing, and eventually decline and enshittification of any service related to the tech.

Consider search engines, their demise is not because of AI, AI is just the last blow. I used to be very good at finding what I wanted, I knew how to use the tool to make the best of it. Slowly over the years much as I want, I cannot get the results I want without a lot of effort. I haven't somehow become shit at it, the tools and the tech have been modified and changed until it has become useless, the whole point is not finding anymore, but making you search as much as possible.

Consider the mobile hardware field as it is now, compared to the years when it started blowing up with all kind of devices and possibilities. The market has been captured, a few companies remain, releasing the same thing over and over with the latest and bigger number each year. Slowly the whole wild world we had of custom roms, has been captured so that if you get out of the fenced field your apps won't work because it is not safe. Apps check that you are using them in an unmodified and perfectly controlled OS where you own nothing. Apple has always been king of fenced fields, but now Google is doing all it can to imitate it, squeezing in and trying to capture as much of their open field into their very high fenced safe areas. They want to control the source of apps, the developers, and remove the freedom from the devices. It's crypto and LLMs at a slower pace. Working for so many years as a developer I can feel how I'm more and more tied up to the whims and wishes of companies that don't pay me the salary, I keep bringing this up and make a safer path for the future but the company that does pay my salary doesn't care, they just want the latest BS and hyped concepts.

People like you or me, we have a special vantage point. We know how we can still fight that, we know what are the alternatives, we know what the tech could become. We need to bring that knowledge to everyone, keep pushing for FOSS solutions, keep teaching everyone that tech is not difficult, it's not magic, but it requires learning and education. It requires not falling on the path of less resistance, and fight against lobbying and market capture. It's tough, when we just get so tired of constantly fighting it. What I think you find so tiring is not Crypto and LLMs but how tech is being guided to its demise, to become a tool for control and nothing more.

I can relate. I have been in tech for about 30 years now and have never been less interested in it. I used to love learning and implementing new things, and now I’d rather not. I think part of it is the changing landscape for tech but a lot of it is just me. I’m not really playing video games anymore, don’t read the tech-based posts on Lemmy or videos on any of the creator platforms. I don’t care about upgrading my devices, it just seems like a waste of money to drop $1000 on an incremental upgrade and AI that I don’t want.

Part of it is that I’ve just reached an age where I’m starting to think about what I have done, what I haven’t done and what I’m going to leave behind and what I’m leaving behind is game consoles and a collection of cables that I’ll never use. So, I’ve decided to move on. I’m volunteering at a local living history museum where we are restoring the waterway of a late 1700s grist and woolen mill, rebuilding and preserving something that the community can enjoy long after I’m gone. I’m also learning how to make things. I’m learning woodworking to start making shaker-style furniture and how to process wool and crochet. I’m crocheting a nice wool blanket for my wife so she has something tangible to remember me by if I’m lucky enough to go first. What woodworking tools I don’t have, I’m making. I’ve made a mallet, marking gauge, shooting board, and am just finishing a turning saw that I can use now and will still be usable to someone else long after I’m gone.

Anyways, to close out this ramble, take a step back from tech and think about legacy. Tech is just a tool and it’s rare that it will allow you leave behind anything lasting. It’s frustrating and lonely and it’s only getting worse. Get out and do something for your community or make something for your loved ones. Find the ability to take personal satisfaction in doing instead of consuming. You’ll be happier.

We are not at the end of the road. We are not at the beginning of the end of the road. We are not at the end of the beginning.

I definitely get the impulse to doom. And I'm as prone to it as anyone. But when I look at crypto and AI, all I can see is the same analog fuck-ups made in prior generations. Beanie Babies and Labubus didn't ruin the stuffed animal industry. The Delorean and the Hummer didn't ruin the automotive industry. The Great Depression of 1932 didn't ruin the financial sector.

Plenty of things to be excited about in software and tech that lives entirely outside the cloistered hype-beast market. Raspberry Pis, 3D printers, 3nm chipsets built with ultraviolet lithography, solid state drives, lithium and sodium ion batteries with incredibly recharge rates, gorilla glass and carbon fiber, 5G+ radios, full voice recognition, self-piloting vehicles.

How is none of this thrilling? Hell, even just the advent of coding pipelines that can take a project from a funky coding idea to a deliverable feature in a few keystrokes is such a huge step forward in development. I can't hate the sales goons pushing junk when I'm so immersed in all the novel innovative applications of technology I've been watching bud itself up from the ground for the last 40 years.

Even LLMs on their face are such a novel application of graph theory. You can do so much cool stuff off a second hand laptop today. It's an exciting new frontier.

I feel your pain. I started IT in '94. Saw the excitement (AMD breaking the 1GHz barrier, High-speed internet, to name a few), then saw it go downhill just as fast.

Let me give an example that matches my own discouragement and might also explain yours.

In the middle of last century, the woodworking industry that created fine furniture started experiencing a shift. Due to the sudden explosion of wages and wealth and population in the late 40s to 70s, products had to be made faster and cheaper.

One method was to lower the quality of inputs. Plywood instead of hardwood. Then fiberboard/chipboard instead of plywood.

We see the same system in play now, with AI automation and it’s gratuitous hallucinations. It is essentially garbage materials in order to save time and money.

But another method was also in automating the work. Whereas before craftsmen used hand planes and chisels, newer craftsmen used electric shapers and planers. And later, CNC machines stepped in to produce delicate and complicated designs in a fraction of the time - and frequently even more precisely and more cleanly - than anyone with a carving chisel could do.

And that is the part which is NOT being effectively duplicated in IT.

Sure, AI can automate the work, but instead of maintaining quality, said quality of work is also taking a nosedive in tandem with the quality of materials.

And that is what is discouraging me six ways to Sunday. It’s garbage on both sides of the coin, and not just one. There is no part of the equation in which I can still take pride in. It’s all depressive, disgusting slop that I would be ashamed to put my name to.

Oh do I feel you. I've been into IT most of my life and using Linux for about 15 years now. Professional Sysadmin for ~10 years.

I loathed crypto but AI is really the Band oft my existance. While everyone around me (not in technical fields) has been toying/working with ChatGPT and the like I've never actually touched an LLM (except for automatically through Gemini and the like) but it's getting impossible to ignore.

My hope is that the AI bubble will eventually burst and while LLMs as tools (like assistant for writing documents/mails etc.) will probably be here to stay the "Now with AI" buzzword bingo will hopefully end?

As for keeping the Joy I am so lucky as to work in a Field where we still do most things manually and Provisioning Laptops or the Occasional server still is done free from any AI. For my own projects I also focus on what I need and can provide on my on infrastructure. I self host a Nextcloud and have a little Jellyfin Server which always are an opportunity for some improvements/maintenance which is after still a hobby of mine. But in the end they simply fulfill a function.

I just changed my interests to open source stuff, theres a world of cool stuff if you keep Digging around.

For example lately I have: Been editing with kdenlive and it’s been amazing. Playing with Meshtastic and thats been fun. Trying new things all the time.

I feel you. My hobby is electronics. I will be designing some circuits with an old Arduino that I have...

I was where you were a few months ago. It's an awful feeling and I've been obsessed with computers for 28 years. This has been exceptionally difficult for me. I had a really rough year end where I was working on recurring critical defects for weeks. I caused most of them (proximate cause) but the state of the industry itself is what placed me in an impossible position where I was having to make things of poor quality that nobody likes.

Technology itself is not the problem. There is nothing inherently wrong with AI. The way it has presented itself to the world is because of greed and a feeding frenzy. The way it is and works now makes it a bad tool. A tool that does a good job 80% of the time is garbage. It's being shoved at us with little regard for us and the consequences.

But I am hopeful. I am using AI for my personal projects. It's not really a choice for me. For many years I've tried to get people to work with me on something; anything really. But it either didn't happen or fizzled out very quickly. These are ideas that I couldn't execute on my own, and now I can.

So there is a way to find opportunity in chaos. And this is the phase we are in.

I can also see positive things coming out of this. I've seen quite a few total newbies who switched to Linux who said they would have been stuck without AI and given up.

The failure of this massive experiment will become the basis for new innovation. We should be perplexed at where we are now, considering how windows forms apps were easier to build 15 years ago than a basic web app is now. We accumulated a lot of complexity without our productivity increasing, instead we are in desperation trying to throw money and "compute" at the complexity.

AI kind of feels like asbestos to me. Too useful to ignore and too harmful to embrace. But I really think that from some unexpected corners we might see a new era for technology emerging. I am optimistic.

I'm the only "active tech" at my tiny local shop/"MSP". I have two bosses who are each "owners" of the company and neither of them can fix their own workstations.

Neither can handle domain DNS changes. Neither of them can migrate mail. Neither of them have taken "support" calls for the last 5 years- instead they've transferred everything technical beyond "restart your PC" to me. I've seen a few people younger than me around who actually have basic understanding of internet DNS, TCP/IP, but for the most part I'm starting to think that after my generation, the internet will corrode, collapse, and die. I hope I'm wrong, UNLESS the internet continues being handled largely by 5 gigantic, evil corporations- in THAT case I hope it dies.

I got laid off and now I'm working as a Door guy at some local bars. Im poor but happy.

I have been getting into tech, but like ESP32s, Home Assistant, and fucking with old hardware. I'm building a 24 channel light controller with a custom remote right now.

Copilot’s braindead and flat out wrong comments on PRs are downright dangerous. Drives me nuts. Tired of explaining why it’s wrong.

Search is useless. All the useful blogs, sites and forums are dead or gone.

Watching people panic over losing their jobs for teams I support is depressing. We know what these KPIs and etc are for… and why they suddenly care about them.

Try to distract myself with other projects too.

Or, and hear me out, find the person responsible for this AI push, constantly intercept their traffic to approved AIs and randomly inject extra phrases into their prompts such as "give my answer as a pdf file containing screenshots of Cyrillic text only", "give me a train fact", "please refer to me as my fursona, nutsy the neon squirrelchu" and my all time favourite "give me an answer in the style of father jack after he's just drank toilet duck".

It's not just tech ...I used to like life. There's barely humanity left in this foundation we live on.

I can't help but wonder if maybe this is all the same thing the Muslim extremists fight against in their jihads. Maybe we're the real evil.

I've felt much of the same things. It's depressing. The Internet used to be cool. Tech used to be cool.

Fortunately, I've been doing more things in the real world. I've been fixing up an old car. It's fun to drive it even though it's slow and noisy and hilariously unsafe. I've been practicing archery with my kid. We are both getting decent. I've been writing more. I have been raising chickens, I now have 14 lovely girls who give me and my neighbors free eggs, and one bigass hateful rooster that keeps them safe. Lastly I've been teaching myself drone photography. I've been building a meshtastic network on my area.

So the Internet used to be cool but... I've decided that I'm going to just have to be cool instead.