"If confronted with a gnome login gui, how do you make the system useful again?"

Alt-F1 (or whatever it is in Linux - I only use certified UNIX systems, which Linux will never be)

Or you know, build robust apps that don't have one cloud provider as a single point of failure.

This wasn't a root dns failure of TLD servers, so it wasn't by any means an unsolvable problem.

But that takes effort, and to be fair, if the company cared about reliability, they wouldn't be on AWS anyway. Not that AWS isn't generally reliable, its a great service for many things, but when you outsource everything to someone else because its hard - and don't understand that you're still actually responsible for the 'hard' parts - well thats on you and its why you should have done it yourself first.

The shit you outsource to AWS is actually the EASY part. Putting all that stuff together into a working architecture is and always has been the difficult part. Keeping rack servers running is a pretty well understood process at this point, its not hard to keep racks of running computers, it just takes people who know how to build your automation and understand that time is more expensive than cpu cycles.

No. There will always be jobs. Stupid jobs that pay nothing, but there will always be jobs. Why? Because having people you control is a kink for the oligarchs.

Thatâ(TM)s it. Itâ(TM)s about slavery. Never expect UBI, as long as billionaires exist. They want to keep you poor, weak, and most importantly *dependent*.

Bruh. Thatâ(TM)s literally how passports work. They work with visas, and visa free travel agreements.

Did you think TFA was going to be about how many grams the cardstock the cover is made out of can support? Seriously, what do you think âoea powerful passportâ means? Itâ(TM)s where you can travel without visas.

I donâ(TM)t know if the Internet feels like Philadelphia, but I will say it feels like Itâ(TM)s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Even this sounds like Charlie asking if Pittsburgh is part of Philadelphia.

I own, but do not operate, a few IT companies that manage corporations in the $600MM-$1B receivables range.

Based on our own help desk ticket software, our clients have opened 40% fewer tickets since ChatGPT was rolled out to every desk and phone. 40%. I expect another 40% drop (total 80%) by next year as end users just manage things themselves.

I won't downsize as the tickets aren't really generating revenue as much as headaches. One of my engineers had a broken PDF file that took her 6 hours to fix, and the end user spent 6 days trying to fix it themselves with Ai.

But -- the basic stuff? Reboot your computer stuff? Email rejected because you mistyped a domain name stuff?

You don't need a human, and we would probably have outsource that stuff to India anyway next year if not for ChatGPT etc.

I spend quite a bit on Discord server services, but I'm out.

GFY, Discord and governments, for mandating this bullshit nonsense.

It's reasonable when you consider they have to "support" those drives via their various support channels.

You put in a drive with incompatible firmware, then start asking for support because an issue with the firmware comes up, it directly costs them money.

Im not arguing the cost is valid, but if you've ever dealt with large commercial product support you would completely understand why its logical.

No you cant just refuse support to those people because
A. You will still contact them and waste resources to confirm an unsupported drive
B. Most states require vendors to honor warranty/support for modified products unless the vendor can PROVE the modification is the source of the problem.
C. Even after proof, some customers would continue to argue and add legal costs
D. Finally the customer will trash talk the vendor online and word of mouth, right or wrong ... costing the vendor even more money

Or they could just block your cheap drive and not have you as a customer and lose less money cause you're a tight wad.

You're not the customer they are interested in, you're a potential cost rather than profit.

Talking to people in public isnâ(TM)t harassment.

Talking to people on taxpayer funded grounds also isnâ(TM)t trespass.

Tax funded?

Not private property anymore.

LLM-based AI can do some pretty impressive things. It *seems* to answer questions with remarkable accuracy, and it instantly produces code in response to often ridiculously vague input queries:

"Write me an app to track ant farms in Vietnam"

And what do you know? You get something that seems surprisingly useful!

Except that it's all an illusion.

I'm an experienced software developer (25 years now) and I focus on information lifecycle apps targeting workgroups and enterprise - organizations of 50+ people. As I write this, about 20,000 people are concurrently using an app I created.

Over the past year or so, I've been trying to deeply integrate AI into my workflow. It's there when I write code in VSCode, it's there when I write sysadmin/shell code, and it's there when I'm refactoring.

The more I use it, and the "better" it gets, the more frustrating I find it. It's only somewhat useful in the area that most coding projects fail: debugging.

No matter what it seems, LLM-based AI doesn't *understand* anything. It's just an ever-more-clever trickery based on word prediction. As such, it serves only as another abstraction that still must be understood and reviewed by a real person with actual understanding, or the result is untrustable, unstable, and insecure "vibe code" that is largely worthless outside of securing VC funding, which is the thing that AI perhaps does best: help unprepared people get VC funding.

You still need real people to get code you can live with, depend on, and grow with.

I have been saying for decades now that the F-1 (student) visa should be able to convert to a resident visa upon graduation.

The whole idea of it not being a resident visa was a cold war notion that after graduating, the international student would return to their country and spread the gospel of how wonderful the United States was, and how their local country needed to oppose the Soviets. I doubt that ever really happened.

Today, weâ(TM)re just training people and then at best turning them into indentured servants for a few oligarchs, or even worse (and now the policy of the Trump administration), throwing them out so theyâ(TM)ll build up some other competing country, while weakening our own.

This is retarded.

1. It isn't for profit healthcare that is the problem, it's THIRD PARTY PAY.
2. I don't use third party pay, ever, for healthcare. I've been insured nonstop for over 30 years, and NEVER ONCE has my insurer paid my doctor.
3. Even when I've had emergencies, I still called around, negotiated a fair cash up front rate, paid cash up front, and billed it to my insurer. My cash up front rate was sometimes below any co-pay negotiated with my insurer, lol.

I just recently had some elective surgery that would have cost me about $2000 on my annual deductible, but I was able to cash pay a negotiated rate of $400 including a follow-up "free". I submitted the $400 to my insurer and they reimbursed me.

Third party insurance exists because YOU VOTERS demanded the HMO Act of the 1970s, which tied health care to employment, and then employers outsourced it to third parties.

Health care is remarkably cheap in the US (cash pay, negotiated) and I don't have to wait months to see a doctor when I call and say I am cash pay. They bump me up fast.

How will this benefit the share holders of our trillion dollar corporations?

Iâ(TM)ve stopped writing articles how to solve unique cloud problems. No interest anymore in sharing if itâ(TM)s going to be used by these companies for profit.