Sorry, the best I can do is install a camera and microphone on our next model, to spy on you and force interaction with advertisements.

I mean video conferencing from your living room. How neat is that?

IT is a very wide field, and maybe that generalization is actually not good

That was what set me off. I was having a bad morning and misread the tone to be more dismissive than it likely was.

I’ve misread the tone, I agree. I apologize for that. However, I find that his complaints were not about things that are always “fundamental core principals of working in IT”. For some, sure, but where I work I’m by far the employee with the most familiarity with CLI/powershell and scripting. Almost everything is done via a GUI or web interface if it can be. I would tell any of my coworkers that maybe IT isn’t for them.

I also, in a rush to finish, misremembered and incorrectly reread some of your words too quickly. You did not recommend the “clone a repo” solutions, you advised against them. Again, I apologize. I still am suspicious of this massive collection of self hosted services that work perfectly with each other after like 20 minutes of tweaking and little maintenance. That was what I was trying to imply with that section. I’ve lost close to a dozen 6-10 hour sessions on Saturdays pulling my hair out because I can’t seem to find out how to do some specific things that it seems like I need to do to make some “easy” new service to work with my setup. It’s like that Malcom in the Middle (?) clip of the dad 5 projects deep at the end of the day trying to fix some simple problem in the morning.

I’ll try to document some of my issues this weekend. I would honestly appreciate any help or recommendations.

That being said, I think there’s a bigger issue at play here. If you “work in IT” and are burnt out from “15 containers and a lack of a gui” I’m afraid to say you’re in the wrong field of work and you’re trying to jam a square peg in a round hole.

Honestly, this is the kind of response that actually makes me want to stop self hosting. Community members that have little empathy.

I work in IT and like most we’re also a Windows shop. I have zero professional experience with Linux but I’m learning through my home lab while simultaneously trying extract myself from the privacy cluster fuck that is the current consumer tech industry. It’s a transition and the documentation I find more or less matches the OPs experience.

I research, pick what seems to be the best for my situation (often most popular), get it working with sustainable, minimal complexity, and in short time find that some small, vital aspect of its setup (like reverse proxy) has literally zero documentation for getting it to work with some other vital part of my setup. I guess I should have made a better choice 18 months ago when I didn’t expect to find this new service accessible. I find some two year old Github issue comment that allegedly solves my exact problem that I can’t translate to the version I’m running because it’s two revisions newer. Most other responses are incomplete, RTFM, or “git gud n00b”, like your response here

Wherever you work, whatever industry, you can get burnt out. It’s got nothing to do with if you’ve “got what it takes” or whatever bullshit you think “you’re in the wrong field of work and you’re trying to jam a square peg in a round hole” equates to.

I run close to 100 services all using docker compose and it’s an incredibly simple, repeatable, self documenting process. Spinning up some new things is effortless and takes minutes to have it set up, accessible from the internet, and connected to my SSO.

If it’s that easy, then point me to where you’ve written about it. I’d love to learn what 100 services you’ve cloned the repos for, tweaked a few files in a few minutes, and run with minimal maintenance all working together harmoniously.

with funny tweets

Those are from a team of social media savvy folks. He’s demonstrated that he doesn’t always understand his own tweets.

They use a different kind of RAM.

It’s the capacity to make RAM and the materials required to make RAM that is going to datacenters.

Bots that scrape for training do not usually respect typical methods of asking them kindly to not look at their data.

If we could start from scratch and force these bots to check for some kind of opt in data before scraping, I’d be a hell of a lot more comfortable with Gen AI scraping.

At this point, most models are trained on content taken without consent. In most cases, much of that content would, if a human were to consume it, be considered stolen/pirated. The courts just decided that these AI companies are above those laws for reasons. That reason is money.

Not an expert but… typical computers do what they do by transmitting (primarily) electrical signals between components. Is there electricity or isn’t there. It’s the “bit” with two states - on or off, 1 or 0. Electricity is the flow of electrons between atoms. Basically, we take atoms that aren’t very attached to some of their electrons and manipulate them so that they pass the electrons along when we want them to. I don’t know if there is a way to conduct and process electrical signals without using an atom’s relationship with its electrons.

Quantum computing is the suspected new way to get to “better” computing. I don’t know much about the technical side of that, beyond that they use quantum physics to expand the bit to something like a qubit, which exploits superposition (quantum particles existing in multiple states simultaneously until measured, like the Schrodinger’s cat metaphor) and entanglement (if two quantum particles’ states are related to or dependent on each other, determining the state of one particle also determines the state of the other) to transmit/process more than just a simple 1 or 0 per qubit. A lot more information can be transmitted and processed simultaneously with a more complex bit. As I understand it, quantum computing has been very slow going.

That’s my shitty explanation. I’m sure someone will come along and correct my inaccurate simplification of how it all works and list all that I missed, like fiberoptic transmission of signals.

I’m afraid the best I can give you is a proprietary, always online, underpowered, half-assed piece of spyware that will probably end up costing you a yearly subscription fee if you don’t want advertisements and get a mandatory, irreversible AI integration over-the-air upgrade 1 month after you buy it.

While I do want the logs accessible, I don’t know if I want it all on display.

Ever like, dig through Windows or Proton logs? Plain text files measurable in megabytes within seconds.

Yes, and I’m forced to bring Win11 home if I need to work remotely because they allegedly would need to install drivers (?) on and reconfigure their firewall for me to use the Linux Cisco VPN client? So it’s too much work.

I have a small homelab and I’ve never had to install drivers to support another operating system connecting. I also don’t have to pay a subscription for access points and can reconfigure them myself so maybe it’s a Cisco thing.

I am very, very concerned at how widely it is used by my superiors.

We have an AI committee. When ChatGPT went down, I overheard people freaking out about it. When our paid subscription had a glitch, IT sent out emails very quickly to let them know they were working to resolve it ASAP.

It’s a bit upsetting because may of them are using it to basically automate their job (write reports & emails). I do a lot of work to ensure that our data is accurate from manual data entry by a lot of people… and they just toss it into an LLM to convert it into an email… and they make like 30k more than me.

Bill Gates who has more or less devoted his life to saving as many lives as possible.

…

Buffett who last I heard had donated some 50 or 60 billion to different foundations.

…

Even Musk, for all his recent evil got rich trying to reduce our dependence on gas cars

Maybe they are happier than OP suspects - I’m not them so I can’t really comment on that. As far as your framing of their motives and achievements though… Hard disagree, especially Musk and Gates. All three fucked over tons of people to get their obscene wealth.

I’d go into great depth as to why I feel that way and how they are unworthy of any praise, but it usually ends in nothing being learned and a lot of my time wasted so I’ll just hard disagree and bow out.

The few times I’ve used LLMs for coding help, usually because I’m curious if they’ve gotten better, they let me down. Last time it was insistent that its solution would work as expected. When I gave it an example that wouldn’t work, it even broke down each step of the function giving me the value of its variables at each step to demonstrate that it worked… but at the step where it had fucked up, it swapped the value in the variable to one that would make the final answer correct. It made me wonder how much water and energy it cost me to be gaslit into a bad solution.

How do people vibe code with this shit?

FYI, a few typos in “3. Organize with Categories” first paragraph in the getting started tutorial/blog post.

As I understand it, it’s atomic Fedora with virtually everything you might need to game on Linux baked in (no need for layering) and more or less preconfigured. Off the top of my head, proprietary Nvidia drivers, Steam, Lutris, Hero launcher, support for Xbox One wireless controller dongle, plus a number of useful tools like Tailscale. An app with a catered list of gaming-oriented flatpacks, one click updating. Also a lot of effort into replicating the Steam Deck experience for handheld devices or devices connected to a TV.

I believe they also do Aurora, which is similarly geared toward workstations with a ton of container-related tools like distro box readily available to easily use containers instead of layering where possible. The same tools may be available in Bazzite but I never checked. I have Aurora on my laptop and use a dedicated gaming device with Bazzite.

I’m not a Linux veteran by any means but I was hopping distros looking for something I could install on my family’s computers I tried atomic Fedora. When using it for myself, I became frustrated with the number of tools I use that needed to be layered or run in a container and eventually found myself on Bazzite and Aurora. So far so good.

If you pay low enough wages and workers are too exhausted to do anything about it, lower productivity is profitable. It’s about the bottom line.

If the workforce makes a pittance and is too exhausted to rebel, the bosses win.

I tried AI a few times over the last few years, and sometimes I don’t ignore the Gemini results from a search when I’m tired or I’m struggling to get good results.

Almost every time I’ve done either, helpful looking hallucinations wasted my time and made my attempt to find a solution to a technical problem less efficient. I will give specific examples, often unprompted.

I also point to a graph of my electric bill.

I also describe the logon script that a colleague (with no coding experience) asked for help with. He’d used AI to generate what he had to show me and was looking for help getting it to work. Variables declared and never used. Variables storing relevant information but different, similarly named variables used to retrieve the information.

I grabbed a TubesZB and it has made things so much easier. I can put it wherever I need it and if I need to migrate my HA VM to another host there is no fuss. Literally did it the other day and it worked flawlessly.