Just Another Apocryphal Mess

ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Showing up to work on time is *hard* -- no, scratch that, showing up to work *at all* is difficult.

a series of Mastodon posts by @Richard_Littler@mastodon.social, in response to a screenshot of the infamous "you can read >100 books per day by asking chatgpt to summarize them for you" tweet: Pretty sure all these #AI guys have utterly misconstrued what art is. They think it's just information/data, but it's not: it's a process; it's a manifestation of interwoven conscious & unconscious thoughts that have ripened in a human mind, sometimes for decades. And the result is an interaction with another human mind, a dialogue. 1/3 These AI guys have mistaken a photo of a meal in a restaurant menu for the meal itself. They tell themselves it looks just like the real thing, so it must be the real thing, but in the end they'll starve to death. No protein, no carbs, no vitamins, no nutrients, nothing. 2/3 Imagine there's a once-in-a-lifetime walk that takes you through the greatest, most dramatic scenery in the world. You leave from Point A and walk your way back around to Point A. The ChatGPT guy above might as well say: "Pro tip: You can go on that great walk by never leaving Point A" 3/3

all Sony and Nintendo have to do now is _not_ spend all their money on "AI" that doesn't work

okay apple tv+, you did a real good job in adapting murderbot in a way which kept all the important shit intact. you nailed the tone and the themes and the protagonist's particular damage

so now I hate you somewhat less than the rest of modern corporate media

but if you fuck *this* up

living in rent-controlled housing means a lot of non-English speakers, and whenever I walk past such a conversation I remember that there are two reactions one can have:

1) anger that someone is different from you

2) relief that there are things in the world that you are not expected to understand

An LGBTQ+ pride flag formatted in the layout of the SMPTE "color bars" test pattern used for broadcast television. The first set of columns use the colors of the gay pride flag, with the addition of the original SMPTE color on the final column. The second set of columns contains two pride flags - the pansexual flag horizontally, and the asexual flag flipped and horizontal. The final set of columns contains the three colors of the transgender flag and the two POC-inclusive colors, followed by the original bar gradient from the SMPTE ECR-1-1978 pattern.

since it's the last day of pride month I figured I'd at least make one thing for it...

i now unveil to you my greatest invention:
color bars pride flag

My cartoon in this weeks @newyorker.com

A photo of a page from Italo Calvino's novel "Invisible Cities", which reads: He said: "It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us." And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

the final paragraphs of _Invisible Cities_, Italo Calvino, 1972

all that gets me through the day sometimes, is the understanding that I am making someone else endure, giving them space, and that they maybe feel the same way about me

as much as I legit miss the era of init scripts, I do get more shit done with systemd, much to my chagrin

but your average Joe Devops isn't gonna be able to write a unit configuration file either, so

nobody's going to read anything I post here so I might as well just use it as a place to articulate (or disarticulate) thoughts

if this is what getting back in the sysadmin world will entail, except it's "devops" now, I want to go live on a farm and shovel sheep dung all day, there will be less stench involved

and the whole point of this project is to work around a major online service introducing a new "AI" "feature" that you can't turn off and which is useless and terrible but probably got some middle manager a bonus, so it's clowns to the left, jokers to the right, and I'm stuck in the middle with poo

I am honestly missing the days of fucking *automake*, that's how awful this all is. just let me fucking untar something and write my own init.d script for it, please? i'm sorry if this means that Joe Devops has to learn how to write a shell script without bash-isms in it, I don't care

and the whole "here, use this docker-compose YAML file that will automatically pull all the bits you need from various servers, please trust us" thing is somehow even worse than "install our package by piping this URL into bash, please", which I didn't think possible

when did this kind of thing become acceptable? yeah it's meant to run on a home server that's probably behind a NAT box but as someone who used to be in infosec (because you couldn't be a competent sysadmin and *not* also be in infosec), this makes my guts roil in horror

from the installation guide for what's supposed to be a server package for a home network:

"First find the user ID and group ID you want to run [redacted] as, if you're not sure what this is it's probably your current user ID and group ID:"

I am in *hell*

containers like Docker are just "it works on my machine" but you wrap your machine up in a little box and give the box to other people so they have a copy of your machine on their machine and nobody has to pay any attention to fucking anything anymore

trying to get myself back up to speed on what sysadmin work has turned into in the modern world, after years of disability, by working on various home projects

and oh lord it's all just shit

a screenshot from a LinkedIn job application, where the question "What are your salary expectations?" has been configured as a Yes/No question, currently answered "Yes"

back to job hunting

I hope that this company appreciates my bravery and willingness to make salary demands