Tech

Get Behind

Chill Annoying, Tech

When you see any scam information on Reddit or even in the press, realize that anything said is usually 2-10 years behind where the technology actually is. So if you see someone claiming, “Real-time video deepfakes aren’t possible.”

That was true…in 2021. But it’s been possible since about then, and is getting easier all the time.

If you see someone assert that, “Voice cloning from a small sample can’t be done.” That was true…in 2018. About 2019, it became possible. In 2020 or so, it became trivial with some effort. Now you can do it by clicky-clicky on any of a dozen websites.

Tech is moving faster than people realize and can contextualize. Reddit seems particularly bad at being way, way behind the times. But I see it all over everywhere else too.

Tuna

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

That is in-fucking-sane.

The left really is fully in degrowth anti-tech mode. AI is a tool like any other. It has its uses. For instance, I put it to work it to create an infrastructure usage estimation and comparison spreadsheet with tunable parameters in about an hour. I could’ve done it all myself, but it would’ve taken me 5-6 hours (it’s a quite complex spreadsheet). But I could do this because:

1) I am extremely familiar with all the infrastructure involved so I’d notice any hallucinations.
2) I’ve done infrastructure capacity planning for twenty years.
3) And I’m already very competent with Excel.

It wouldn’t have saved me nearly as much time if those three items weren’t true and also probably would’ve produced something inaccurate without my manually fixing what it got wrong. But the key is: it did save me tons of time.

Systems

Chill Rant, Tech

Is it just me or a “sys admin” now needs to be licensed in literally everything in existence and beyond nowadays JUST to be employed with an inhumane workload?

This isn’t exaggeration. To some extent, sysadmin types have always been expected to know more and do more than any other role. In some places we’re required to be subject matter experts in dozens of different IT domains, have great customer service skills for all the escalations, and master completely-unrelated areas of expertise such as electrician work, HVAC, plumbing, facilities tasks, and even carpentry.

But in the last decade or thereabout, it’s gotten so, so much worse. We’re expected to be expert developers in a dozen different languages while being full-time developer support, be masters of security, networking, design, architecture, three or four different cloud providers, and still be capable of all the other stuff above. And so much more.

I’m extremely smart. Not a brag, or if it is who gives a damn. Anyway, I’m in something like the 99.998th percentile. And I find keeping up with all of the above challenging. People who don’t have brains that big simply cannot do it.

Will AI help? I have my doubts. It just makes dumber people screw up faster and in less predictable ways from what I can tell.

This rant doesn’t have a point, really. Just some fulmination into the void.

Tahoe

Chill Annoying, Tech

Because I like pain I guess, I “ugpraded” to Mac OS Tahoe. Though it’s not as bad as I expected, the interface is a lot worse. But it’s also kind of cozy, because it reminds me of CDE.

Yes, it’s that clunky and inelegant. I think the font rendering is also a little worse — which is too bad. Mac OS used to have the best fonts for a while there, but now Linux does if you tweak it.

Apple gets further and further away from what Jobs intended, unfortunately.

Bow Down

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

First year IT Support and I’m treated like a dog

This is common in IT. It’s probably even worse if you’re a woman (as this poster is).

Most people see anyone in IT — no matter their title or role — as the computer janitor/servant who should be completely subservient and willing to do whatever bullshit no matter how unrelated to the job or what the business needs. I’ve seen it over and over again. And I’ve lived it.

There’s some good advice in that thread (as well as some bad). Her boss should be doing a much better job of having her back. If someone treated one of my people like that, I’d be raising hell and blowing up the CEO’s inbox and Slack. That’s what’s a quality boss does.

And it never ends! I make well more than $100 an hour and I still spend time helping people unmute their headset. Or plug in a USB thumbdrive correctly.

Makes no damn sense.

Not Happening

Chill Annoying, Tech

What’s an IT “truth” which other departments assume, that really annoys you?

That anything that uses electricity, or that has any moving parts, is IT’s responsibility to provision, troubleshoot, replace and maintain.

I know it’s because we have the only population with methodical and reliable troubleshooting skills but Karen, nope, I’m not gonna fix the coffee maker. And I’m not gonna unjam your stapler and definitely will not help you do your own team’s job, either.

Baseline Bassline

Chill Amusing, Tech

Don’t Blindly Trust AI!

Or any assorted crap you find on the internet. AI is no different than any other tool. You don’t just copy and paste code snippets or scripts of unknown function or provenance and hope for the best, no matter where they come from.

My question is after this screw-up, why did it take six entire weeks to diagnose and fix? This is something I (or honestly, anyone competent) could’ve figured out in a part of an afternoon once the junior put the bad PowerShell in the SCCM baseline.

Not a hard problem. Not with all the evidence already available and easily gathered. Most people are incredibly poor troubleshooters.

1990s Design

Chill Clowns, Tech

Some thoughts on IPv6.

That is pretty stupid and clueless.

I understand IPv6 just fine and have set it up from scratch many times in large networks.

So I can very confidently say that it really sucks. It was designed in the 1990s before we understood any of the problems we’d be facing in the 2020s. And it shows. It’s creaky and ill-suited to its actual use. It has security assumptions that aged poorly (IPSec everywhere? Sure, Jan.) and features that will never be used. It’s mostly cruft and useless crap with some ok functionality if you’re using dial-up.

First, its human-unfriendly addressing makes diagnostics, documentation, and training way harder. No fucking one alive can remember or understand just by looking at it what 2001:0db8:85a3::8a2e:0370:7334 means or does. (For my non-techies, that is an IPv6 address, like 192.168.1.1 in IPv4).

Additionally, no matter what you’ve read, NAT actually is a great security feature and IPv6 only begrudgingly supporting this is clownish and harmful1.

The crack I made about dial-up earlier was actually leading to something. IPv6 was designed long before cloud-native networking became a thing. That means it was created when it was implicitly assumed that all hosts had one interface and one static address. These days, containers, VMs and ephemeral workloads are dominant. IPs change all the time, get re-assigned and altered, sometimes every few seconds. IPv6’s assumption of a static architecture makes it poorly-suited to dynamic cloud environments.

Also, for we admins, things like stateless address auto-configuration (SLAAC) and router advertisements give us less control. We actually need this control and visibility for security and observability. Allowing IPv6 to do its black-box magic is not any advantage for us. It is in fact actively harmful and makes networks much harder to secure and administer.

IPv6 also assumes end-to-end connectivity is a good thing — that everything should have a public IP address and be on the public internet 24/7 (related to my point about NAT above). Bro, I don’t want my washing machine or toaster on the internet. Trust.

Subnetting in IPv6 is also absolute crap. “Just use a /64 everywhere!” Why, god, why? This just adds complexity, not reduces it. Insanely dipshitty.

And don’t get me started on the fucking idiotic link-local address. For those not in the know, in IPv6 every interface gets assigned a link-local address to talk to its neighbors. This is bad! It’s not routable, is a security hole, it causes problems in logging and diagnostics and with multi-hop while being confusing and inobvious to most network admins.

Of course, IPv6 also replaced ARP with NDP. This inefficient-as-all-hell turd of a protocol has more useless steps, a larger (and difficult-to-audit) attack surface, is far, far more fragile and requires complex (and also fragile) firewalling. The clowns replaced a dumb but reliable protocol (ARP) with an insecure, “smart” but fragile one. Great job.

It also has crap DNS integration. The designers back in the 1990s assumed we’d use an IP address for everything. Hostnames and DNS were an afterthought. Meanwhile, DNS is used for absolutely everything these days.

IPv6 also makes network planning far harder. Global prefix delegation, renumbering, and prefix lifetimes are a goddamn nightmare. Get it right the first time or you are screwed (ask me how I know).

And, related to a point above, IPv6 was designed for well-structured pre-built networks with planned addressing, stable routers, and consistent ownership. That means it really does not work well with mesh networks, ad-hoc clusters, cloud VMs that spin up/down in seconds, serverless functions…I could go on.

IPv6 is like giving a skateboard to a donkey. Sure, theoretically it might be able to get wherever it’s going faster. But what the hell is a donkey going to do with a skateboard in reality?

(Source: I am an active CCNP, have worked in tech for 20+ years, and have designed hundreds of IPv4 and IPv6 networks from the ground up and then built them out myself, often purchasing all the required hardware as well.)

  1. No, NAT shouldn’t be your only security feature. But it works well and is far better than nothing, which is what most would have otherwise.