Agreed. Most of us are stochastic parrots most of the time. Rarely — maybe 10-15 minutes a day — we rise above that. Normies less and the extremely intelligent maybe double or triple that time.
Tech
SEC
DNS Security is Important But DNSSEC May Be a Failed Experiment.
DNSSEC is fucking moronic, harmful clownery of the worst kind. It’s a giveaway to those who want to hijack your traffic and a boon to malware.
Fuck DNSSEC. Fuck anyone who implements it.
When It’s Over
How many of you don’t actually interact with end-users?
In my field if you’re good enough, I don’t think you ever stop dealing with end users.
Once they figure out that you can solve their problem in 5-10 minutes that the helpdesk might take a day, a week, or months to puzzle out, it is fully over. Even if it’s not the best use of your time and the company has other priorities. And often enough the “tier 1 emergency” is that they forgot how to unmute their headset.
The end users seem to be able to sniff out your problem-solving ability like some weird sightless creature from a cave in Guatemala. I don’t know how they do it, but they always find out and always ignore all protocols, escalation paths, good sense and etiquette to locate you and take you off a $10 million high-value high-impact project so you can spend time and company money researching why they cannot click a button in Microsoft Word.
A good use of time, certainly.
Lotta Bot
When the purchase price and annual support cost for humanoid robots becomes lower than the cost of training, operating, and sustaining human soldiers, traditional infantry will be obsolete. We seem to be heading towards Isaac Asimov's vision of the future at breakneck speed. https://t.co/t2W47fduQP
— Nicholas Drummond (@nicholadrummond) July 13, 2025
That’s CGI of course, but given the current rate of progress and assuming it continues, I’d say we’re 12-15 years away from that result.
Unifxable
Windows 11 Has a New Way To Fix Itself.
Removing itself and initiating a Linux install? That’s the only way to fix that putrid OS.
Diff Skill
I don’t think I will ever understand the desire to turn systems and security people like me into shitty developers.
It’s happening because devs dominate all now. There is nothing wrong with automation, but development is a completely different skill. And I’ve never met a dev who was even remotely as good as at systems, design, security or networking as even an average systems type. And rarely have I met a systems person who was a good dev.
Again: completely different skills. Though most devs cannot see that — they think because they’ve heard of an IP address and know what a SIEM is, they know all there is to know in that space.
Pass Up
Microsoft Is Erasing Your Passwords Next Month.
Fuck this. I only use Microsoft Authenticator where I have to so it won’t affect me much. But passkeys are such a scam. I will avoid them at all costs for as long as I can anywhere I can.
Passkeys is all about forcing vendor lock-in. Evil, evil stuff.
AI AI Oh
Exactly. Everyone on both sides of the debate is so solipsistic that no one talks about what’s actually happening. And what’s actually occurring is (as usual) all I care about.
The question, “Does AI act and think exactly like a human?” is idiotic. Clown-level thinking. “Does a submarine swim like a fish?” Who gives a fuck? The doofshit left is so concerned with calling AI a “plagiarism machine”and retrenching corporate copyright power in an extremely poorly-considered rearguard action against AI that they never even consider what’s really in store for the future or even what’s happening right under their always-upturned noses.
The real question is, “To what extent will AI replace human labor?” And, “What are the consequences of AI use, in the politico-economic sense and socioculturally?” (Etc.)
AI and all the implications and complications thereof is not going away. The Bluesky clowns can screech all they like about their poorly-conceptualized understanding of plagiarism and how AI works but the incontestable fact is that AI is here and MBAs are going to use it even where it makes zero sense. That is now inevitable (absent Butlerian Jihad).
Time to deal with it like adults, not like whiny petulant children.
Ransom, Walked Some
Data Encrypted & Veeam Backups Deleted – Any Hope for Recovery?
Probably not. Pay the ransom and hope for the best.
A recovery tool might get you some back. Always iffy, though. Ideally you’d pursue both paths simultaneously. I’m not sure why people don’t have immutable offsite backups as a matter of course, but hey, some people like the drama I guess.
Me, I like the easy life so I do have those in spades. And aces.
LLMinate
“They don’t actually reason at all” honestly sounds like human level intelligence to me. https://t.co/FtRVfw47TG
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 8, 2025
For once I agree with Yglesias. And yes, I read the whole paper.
This is a big nothing. The highest-quality LLMs are now smarter than most humans. But so what? Progress is not made by the lumpen masses and neither it will be by LLMs who are near that level of mundanity. The gap between someone like Bill Atkinson or Nancy Cartwright and some regular clown is nearly as vast as the gulf between a slime mold and Goofus Tardbiscuit III (i.e., most people).
All most people have — probably 99.999% of humanity — is the illusion of thinking, the same as LLMs. The thoughtuful few are those who make any progress, who lift the rest of everyone up out of the muck.
LLMs are still in the muck. I don’t know their future but that’s where they are now. And so is nearly every human.
Copy This, Copy That
I’ve now written two different extensions for Firefox (both signed, but none of them publicly released as I just don’t need that kind of drama). One copies text and converts it to title case. The other takes text from a page copied into the clipboard and turns it into a plain-text anchor link with the copied-from page as the link target and the text properly formatted with punctuation.
Neither one is really that sophisticated but both do exactly what I want them to do. And it was so much more of a hassle than it should’ve been for a browser running locally on my computer and in my control. Or, rather, should be in my control. I have nearly no power to alter what the browser UI can do so adding an icon for an extension to the non-existent status bar is now impossible. And all the fake security means I cannot substantially change the UI to do anything useful.
Even worse, to even run any extension permanently on my own goddamn machine I have to get Mozilla to sign it so it’ll persist beyond a Firefox restart (in regular editions of FF). It is fucking insane anyone puts up with this. I cannot understand it.
To use what the kids do these days, you are all cucks. Miserable, simpering ones.
No Comp
We broke every possible social contract for young people, unprecedented wealth transfer from young to old, devalued the currency, made home prices insane, education debt crazy and now for the lulz we're automating all the entry level white collar work. Just incredible https://t.co/NtR2s0ktD6
— Adam Singer (@AdamSinger) June 5, 2025
It’s insane. But we’ve done it and are doing it.
I’m not worried about my job because there is zero competition behind me. No one can do the things I do and no one is learning them. The younger generations just have not had the opportunities, and in every aspect this decline is accelerating.
Clouded Out
I Refuse to Pay for Cloud Storage—Here’s Why I Keep Everything Local.
This is the way to do it. The only thing I store in the cloud is a few double-encrypted password files that I also have backed up in at least three other places. Otherwise, fuck the cloud for anything personal. It’s for chumps, losers, dipshits and clowns.
Search Inside
Nearly no users can Google effectively yet still get upset when you in IT Google for an answer — even though they spent hours looking for something that I can do a successful ten-second search for and fix in less than a minute. As this comment mentions, the difference is that I know how to use the information found and that they do not. Nor do they even know what to search for in the first damn place.
But as another comment points out, you’ve achieved enlightenment when you’re able to solve things that cannot be Googled, that no AI can answer.
And I do that every day.
User Antics
Working help desk or anything near help desk leads to general misanthropy. It did for me.
One time I had a user who angrily declared, “I don’t want to have to turn on my laptop. It’s stupid I have to do that.”
I asked him what he thought about having to turn on his lights or his position on being required to start his car if he wanted it to go anywhere. He reported my comments to my manager. Fortunately, my manager just laughed and told me it was better to say nothing when the users were being dumbasses.
That was way back in 2002 or so and I generally followed her counsel after that.