Don’t feel stupid. It’s bad enough that all of IT is one giant impostor-syndrome support group. There’s literally too much for any one person to know, and it’s been that way for a very long time. Just give it your all, and memorize how to reliably search and look things up; take notes for the really important stuff. The rest will filter into your memory with practice.

Also: anyone that holds this kind of thing over your head is attempting to distract from how much they don’t know. Most people in this industry understand and don’t judge.

As for the ^ thing, I recall seeing that as far back as the 1990’s. I want to say Microsoft actually popularized it, but it could easily be OS2 (IBM) or Apple. In hindsight, it’s kind of wild to have a TUI (terminal user interface) hold your hand like this. Nano (and Pico) are kind of in a special category like that.

That was my immediate thought. There were many that came before RCT, but it has the distinction of being (possibly) one of the last in an industry that had already moved on to higher-level languages to do merely half as much.

They also hated their local sysadmin. BOFH still holds up in a few key ways.

Huh? Isn’t it like right there at the bottom of the screen?

I guess not knowing that ^X means Control+X could be the issue, but still…

Copilot: What is my purpose?

User: You download and install Linux.

These monsters crave power. They see oppressive regimes all over the world, stepping on people in a variety of ways, and think: “yeah, that’s the stuff.”

How would you describe the level of trust you have for IT systems, and IT security in general?

Basically, I’m the guy from the meme that keeps a loaded gun next to his printer. I also keep my media backed up in a fire-safe, offsite.

Was recently ejected from a job along with a whole lot of other ship subsystems. Something about “downsizing operations in engineering”? Starfleet meatbags can never make up their minds.

Anyway, “has seen some shit” could easily sum up huge swaths of my CV.

I agree and disagree.

The premise is solid: unify config so it’s standardized and machine parse-able for better integrations like an easier-to-build UI/UX. It could even have ramifications for cloud-init and older IaC tech like Puppet.

The problem is Linux itself. Or rather, the subsystems that are cobbled together to make Linux a viable OS. You’re not going to get all the different projects to pivot to a common config scheme, so this YAML standard would need a backend to convert to/from whatever each little deamon and driver requires. This creates a few secondary problems like community backlash (see systemd), and having multiple places where config data must be actively synchronized.

I think the current crop of GUI config systems are aleady well down the most pragmatic path: each config panel touches one or more standard config files, wherever they are, and however they are structured. It’s not pretty under the hood, and it’s complicated, but it works. These tools just need a lot more polish on the frontend.

The part that bothers me the most about this is how the re-institution of child labor points to the damnable confusion of moral, ethical, and legal, activity. Clearly this isn’t moral or ethical, but it is legal. So, undoubtedly some will point at the law and reassure themselves and others that this alone makes it okay to do. While there’s no stopping people that lack moral fiber to do the right thing, it’s everyone else that decides on the wrong side of moral and ethical conflict that make this so much worse.

On another note: how does one effectively boycott this behavior? No doubt, a lot of this labor will happen sight-unseen.

Do a campaign about prescription opiates or meth or something useful.

Poking at the opioid crisis would be worthwhile subversion of things.

This is exactly what had me scared straight for the longest time. It’s not the drug, it’s the system that punishes use of the drug that’s the real threat.

The fact that ex-convicts (people that have paid their debt to society) aren’t a protected class in the hiring process is beyond me. At least insofar as non-violent offenses go, there’s no cause to throw someone away like this. This goes especially considering the current state of political affairs around here.

How… how do they not have a smooth on-ramp for what is basically a straight upgrade to the same service?!

What, visit a website, read it, then comprehend it? What, like a book?! May as well ask them to make a phone call.

As far as I can tell, the contingency plan is to continue pushing places like Dubai as a tourist destination and business hub. And, honestly, as long as that place continues to function as a major regional air-traffic hub, that might actually work.

Following the path of other regimes around the world, the USA builds their own “great firewall”, segmenting most people here away from the global internet. At around the same time, personal VPNs become explicitly illegal. We might also see the government seize control of at least one certificate registrar, if they don’t fire up their own, thereby “owning” TLS online.

On the upside, there’s a chance we will see more grass-roots efforts to reboot a lot of institutions that were co-opted by the rich. You’re just never going to hear about that through conventional channels. For instance: local newspapers with real journalism behind them. Or more small businesses with the intent to last, rather than sell. It’s possible that more of those things will be co-ops, union shops, or even Mondragon inspired. Either way, there’s a path forward for more community, real communication, and eventual prosperity, provided folks keep their heads and take things offline where necessary.

The fact that Ask Jeeves isn’t an AI-only search engine is just beyond me. It was laughable that someone thought to personify a search engine 25 years ago, but now is pretty much the right time for that.

More than zero, which is too many for my taste.

It’s a needle in a haystack, but that’s a really valuable needle. It might actually be worth it.

As someone who just picked through the Zig docs (take this with a mountain of salt), Zig has a few things going for it:

• spec is simple and closer to C in scope
• modern language design, toolchain, and overall ergonomics
• Go-like struct & interface system
• 1st-class C interoperability

Go foists co-routines on you and the runtime, and Rust has the borrow checker. Both of these things deeply impact language design, standard libraries, and the overall developer experience. So Zig might actually be a “more modern C” in many ways which makes it a contender. That said, it’s not a 1:1 comparsion since it lacks everything else that C++ does: you’d have to re-envision your software designs as something other than OOP if that’s what you’re used to.