Popular myths about sleep, debunked.

For many people — including me — most of these myth debunkings are in fact myths themselves. Not everyone is the same and nearly none of this applies to me.

For instance, if I can’t fall asleep in five minutes I get up because I know I never will.

How do end users have this kind of time?

I am in this post and I do not like it.

And I have often wondered the same damn thing myself. One of the reasons I believe David Graeber was mostly correct about “bullshit jobs” and their pervasiveness is that I’ve frequently had to deal with users who at most — at very most — do maybe 15 minutes of actual work a week.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Do you feel like you’re being held to a completely different standard than most other roles at your job?

Definitely. I’ve written about this many times before. Sysadmins (and nearby fields) are expected to know not only how to use their own tools, but every application ever written in any OS ever and, relatedly, how to do everyone’s job in the entire company better than they themselves can do it.

It’s in-fucking-sane. But it is very common. Enough that it is nearly ubiquitous.

The reason this occurs is that IT has more generally-competent people than other career paths. In an average company, about 1-2% of people outside of IT can handle complex tasks, deal with abstractions, and follow directions reliably. In IT departments — and especially among sysadmins — these high-level capabilities are found in up to 40% of the population. That’s not being arrogant. That’s just reality — a sysadmin’s whole job is dealing with complex and ever-changing abstractions across many disparate areas, and in a way that no other role really does to any great degree. Thus, IT in general and sysadmins in specific become a dumping ground for tasks too complex for other departments to handle, no matter what they might be.

About the breadth of what’s expected in my field, I’ve designed a new network architecture from scratch, determined why DNS wasn’t working, done troubleshooting on a malfunctioning switch, punched down physical phone lines, created a website and fixed a receipt printer — and that was all on the same fucking day. There is nearly no other job where that breadth and depth of knowledge is required all at once.

Because we do in fact know a lot, people assume we should know absolutely everything and be able to train them in fields and software that they should already be experts in. And then they cry like little babies when we cannot or will not do this.

But at least the pay is good.

What is your IT concept you just cant quite get your head around?

Containerization. For most applications, it just adds excessive complexity for no real purpose and it’s actively harmful to anything performant. Its base concepts just make no sense as they are poor and woefully-misunderstood implementations of superior and better-designed technology.

So it is something that is created in a way that can only be senseless. And so it is.

Living well is a pretty good revenge, I agree. However, seeing your former enemies fail and harm themselves through their own ignorance and incompetence is pretty goddamn fun too.

I wish it were higher res on the ‘tube, but this is such a beautiful, heartbreaking, perfect vignette. All show and no tell. Extremely hard to do. And Across the Universe is such a great, underrated film — probably because it was a musical.

Evan Rachel Wood and Carol Woods (the lead female singer) were just perfect in this bit, and Evan gave (IMO) her career-best performance in the film in toto. Also, the line that Carol Woods’ sings starting at 2:43 might be the best single phrase in music history. Just brilliant direction by Julie Taymor and editing by Françoise Bonnot.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

I Was the Villain in My Relationship.

Nice that she admits it, but if the gender roles were reversed the man would be condemned for eternity for being predatory, exploitative, and generally terrible. However, if a woman pulls this sort of crap it’s usually seen as practical and, as they say, Yassss Queeen!

Now I wonder why that is?