It’s not just websites; search does not work anywhere. Not in email. Not for the local filesystem. Not in calendars or notes. And search is not all that hard, contrary to what you have been told. One developer alone writes a search tool that’s better than any other one I’ve used and works absolutely flawlessly. So it can be done.
For some reason, these companies just do not want to have working search. In most cases, I can’t even imagine why.
How are you dealing with your company using the IT Department as a catch-all?
This is always going to happen because the IT department has the largest single population of people who can think through a problem and follow tasks step by step. In IT, that’s maybe 40% of the people present. Nowhere near the majority, to be clear.
But outside of IT, that is maybe 1-2% of people in the average department.
Because of this, IT becomes the dumping ground anything that is more complex than folding a piece of paper in half. I’ve seen it over and over again.
I don’t foresee this ever not occurring. So IT will be assembling barbecue grills and doing training until the sun goes red giant.
Where has the left’s technological audacity gone?
They have gone clownishly degrowther even though tech is the only way out of our current predicament and is the only path to any sort of livable future or the non-extinction of humanity. Also, eventually, the species will have to become multiplanetary and that is going to take tech we can barely even dream about yet.
No, it’s not impossible (no matter what you might read that is now a nearly-ubiquitous opinion). Yes, it is very very hard. But who gives a fuck? Metallurgy is hard. Harder than we give it credit for. Reading and writing is hard. Building an airplane is hard. And despite all that, we have cars, widespread literacy and A320s — all things that would have been claimed to be something “impossible” in various time periods.
It does not matter even a little bit about what current dipshit mooks think about what the future will be like. They’ll have (over the long time span) no say in building it. Their opinions are irrelevant chaff. Building is what matters, and we should do that.
We still aren’t taking the effect of phones and social media seriously.
We should be focusing on it the way we focused on cigarettes in the 80s or lead in gasoline before that. https://t.co/6X6mCkVxbG
— Saikat Chakrabarti (@saikatc) March 14, 2025
Smartphones and social media are enormous cognitohazards that are now actually destroying intelligence too. Not surprising, but more than alarming.
Phone addicts, cry harder.
I’ve had to explain many times that in fact virtual machines do need hardware. Sometimes, it was to technical people who absolutely should’ve known better. Hell, I worked at a hosting company where we had people who believed that once we had the base hardware we could spin up and use unlimited VMs on said hardware.
It’s insane the kind of stuff you encounter in the wild. Where did people leave their brains?
Containers are all the rage now and have their uses. But because they are made to be (only) dev-friendly, they are still at the level of usability and administration capability that virtualization was in the late 1990s or early 2000s.
Developers are fine with something being a bunch of unreadable JSON or YAML. But that doesn’t work for the rest of the world and makes changes vastly harder than they should be.
A lot of the tech world has gone from attempting to make thing easy for users, admins and managers to now only working to make them easy for developers. I think this might be just a numbers thing — there are now many more developers than there are of the other types. And it didn’t used to be that way.
So now in an inversion of how things should be, the primary optimization is to make development easy while everything else is getting more difficult.
I hate that my career field has been made into another shitty development job, except that to be competent I have to know 10x as much as the average developer.
I mean, that’s easy for me. But it still sucks.
I worked helpdesk and near-helpdesk jobs for a number of years. And one thing I found is that about 2% of the users are responsible for 95% of helpdesk work, calls and tickets. It’s an extremely uneven distribution.
At one place I worked where we tracked tickets and non-ticket contacts, one woman alone was responsible for more work and tickets than the entire rest of the company combined. She had constant “problems” with her machine, with her network, with remembering how to do anything more complicated than clicking on an icon and innumerable other nearly all self-caused issues.
At one point all three of the techs I had working directly for me were involved in various of her tickets (as in actively troubleshooting) — and thus were unavailable to help any other users.
The first time I brought it up to management they said, “We’re here to help all users, even the less competent.”
And then when those other users started complaining my techs were not available for them, I let management know why, showed them evidence and let them decide what to do. That week, the woman was banned from using the helpdesk at all without going through two layers of management first. We rarely heard from her again1.
Admittedly, she was an outlier (though not that unusual). But the truth is a relatively-small contingent of the utterly incompetent will monopolize the average helpdesk, especially at a smaller company.
Laptops have worse specs now than they did 4-5 years ago.
I was talking with a colleague about why that was and we speculated it’s an attempt to force people into using cloud services. Less storage, less processing power, less of everything means you’re more likely to be forced by “convenience” to cloud crap.
This decrease in laptop specs has become a real problem for our development team. Laptops with memory and storage options that we used to be able to get in 2-3 days years ago now take 6-8 weeks to be shipped. For instance, machines with 64GB of memory. Our devs still all do development locally so they need that much mem; Visual Studio alone eats up tons.
So much in the world just seems to be getting worse now, even apart from Trump and Musk.
hot take: the word 'spyware' has virtually disappeared from internet lingo not because it went away, but because it became applicable to nearly every major website and widely used software.
— gabsmashh (@gabsmashh) March 4, 2025
That’s true. We made hell and decided to pretend it was a fun place and the way things should be.
HELP – Deployed Firewall Policy To Block All Outbound Traffic.
No testing of such a consequential change? Love it. I don’t believe “accidentally” at all.
And no local admin? Clownish setup. Sometimes it is fun to see how bad a lot of my competitors in my field are.
It is a terrible loss. I’ve said and written this before and I will probably do so again, but Steve Jobs envisioned computers as “bicycles for the mind.” Instead, we’ve made them into manacles and straitjackets that serve the rich and the authoritarian.
I’m old enough to remember when I could easily make my computer do anything that I could think of or had time to figure out. Now, you’re lucky if you can get a machine to run something “unauthorized” at all. Mozilla and Google clowns et al. will tell you nothing else is possible because of “security.” Why, they are protecting you from yourself “for your own good!1 But remember: the only security they actually care about is keeping the computer secure from you, the user.
I need a browser that can keep every tab I have ever opened forever while simultaneously indexing its contents and metadata into a database that has a nice and responsive front end.
I need more powah.
The next phase of putting the information genie back in the bottle is increasing (US) state-level tech regulation that de facto bans services like Mastodon and anything else similar to it.
This will be done under the cover of protecting “privacy” and “for the children” but will really be for the purpose of making sure nothing that’s not large-scale and easily-controllable can exist.
It’s already starting. And many so-called liberals will be right on board with this.