Well, that was the smoothest Ubuntu LTS release upgrade I’ve ever done. Went from 22.04.3 to 24.04.1. Only one package broke and that one was easily fixable. In the past, I’ve had the system not boot at all after doing an LTS to LTS jump¹. Thank the gods for VM snapshots.

So pretty smooth, especially since I’m using Xubuntu and not the shitty Gnome default distro which I am sure receives more testing love.

1. Which, theoretically, should never happen. But Linux….

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, I saw tech as the path to freedom. Now I see it as the path to surveillance and subservience. What a terrible change.

This comment nails the entire problem with the failtrain that has been Mozilla’s killing of Firefox over the years:

It really is tragic that Mozilla destroyed Firefox’s add-on ecosystem several different times. This malicious negligence crashed the browser’s usage as people abandoned it since those torpedoed add-ons were Firefox’s main competitive advantage. It would be a far better world where FF had 25-30% market share (very realistic numbers) vs. the one where they made a series of hilarious and preventable blunders leading to irrelevance.

Nearly anyone could have done better than Mozilla senior leadership, so I wonder quite often if all this wasn’t deliberate. But sometimes, people are just huge dumbasses and we have to accept that.

I do not want AI anything in a single thing I use, deal with, manage or make. Fuck all of that.

Microsoft is bringing annoying Windows 11 Start menu ads to Windows 10.

One of the trillion reasons I use Windows only when I absolutely have to. Fuck that OS and everything about it. And the dumbass motherfuckers who lie about it.

Partially, this general decline springs from s misalignment of incentives. To bring up the old saw again, all of these products and services relying on advertising for revenue means that you become the product. But it’s more than that, too. It’s what I call the “scam economy” taking shape. This goes well beyond Cory Doctorow’s¹ “enshittification.”

The “scam economy” is the result of transition of the entire sociocultural basis of trade behavior from community-minded mutual service with some profit stacked on top to an attempt to grift everyone else at any opportunity. This is what our economy has slowly but nearly-fully moved to since the 1980s. Ads as the primary revenue model just reinforced this pre-existing trend, but did not create it. “Enshittification” is just a natural outcome of this larger movement.

I’ve been thinking about what the larger animus driving this transition to a scam-based economy might be, but I haven’t reached any solid conclusions yet. When I do I’m sure you’ll be the first to know.

1. What does he know? He’s Canadian.

IT Lead caught reading emails of execs challenging termination because he was never instructed not to….

Well that’s an incredibly good way to get fired. Where I work, I could read anyone’s emails anytime I want but I do not because, first, it’s not ethical and is, as mentioned, a good way to get canned. And it’s boring to read other people’s emails even apart from all that. I have far and away enough of my own.

And in some cases, you can get tossed in jail for doing so. Why do that?

Tech Layoffs Reach 132,000 8 Months Into 2024.

Very brutal out there this year. And as I’ve mentioned before, that doesn’t include all the de facto layoffs disguised as RTO. Also, there have been a lot of forced relocations. It’s probably going to get a bit worse too, at least in tech.

Can we go Butlerian Jihad yet or not? I think we should.

Because I don’t want to monkey with the PHP that runs this site, I’m sort of using CSS as a full-ass programming language. And that’s been weird but kinda fun. I would never, ever (as mentioned) want to do it as a job, though.

But it’s been enough, despite the huge limitations of doing it that way.

Solo sysadmin with 6 months experience at an SMB (~500 staff) being asked to get entire org SOC2 compliant. Zero experience with compliance. Is this reasonable?

Oh fuck no that’s not reasonable. I have well more than 20 years of IT experience and I’m about to do this nearly solo at a much smaller org. I’m also fairly well-versed in compliance, and I can barely handle it¹. It’s a huge task, with hundreds of interlocking parts necessitating deep understanding not just of IT but of the entire business and of various compliance requirements.

Someone with only six months of sysadmin experience going for SOC 2 is like sending out a gaggle of kittens to fight a rhinoceros. It’s just not gonna happen.

When I was working at a company of similar size to the OP’s, it took a team of about a dozen people working on it nearly full-time for 18 months to get SOC 2 Type II. I’d expect about the same anywhere.

1. And I also have the advantage of expertise in more areas than the average IT person.