💻 Everything you should know about being a Linux Sysadmin — but probably don’t.
A sarcastic reality check from a 30-year veteran.
👉 Outdated tools, reflexive mistakes, cultural gatekeeping, and the mess we still work around.
🧵 https://linuxexpert.org/everything-you-should-know-about-being-a-linux-sysadmin-but-probably-dont/
#Linux #SysAdmin #DevOps #FOSS #Unix #TechHumor
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Good morning fellow Mastos and hello to the weekend. Saturday has arrived, seemingly at high speed - it feels like last Saturday was just yesterday!
I might manage a lazy day today, Wesley excepted of course. MrsD is off out gallivanting wit a girlfriend or two, for lunch. Then she's off to Keith (the place!) for a hair do. She's not expected home before 5 PM.
Have a great Saturday folks, have lots of fun and laughs. Take care.
Today's photo is a sign on a walk near here, Good advice.
🇷🇸Ground Station: Nis, Serbia NOAA 15 07-06-2025 07:43 CEST Max Elev: 56° E Sun Elevation: 28° Gain: 15 | Southbound
#NOAA #NOAA15 #NOAA18 #NOAA19 #MeteorM2_3 #MeteorM2_4 #weather #weathersats #APT #LRPT #wxtoimg #MeteorDemod #rtlsdr #gpredict #raspberrypi #RN2 #ISS
🇷🇸Ground Station: Nis, Serbia NOAA 15 07-06-2025 07:43 CEST Max Elev: 56° E Sun Elevation: 28° Gain: 15 | Southbound
#NOAA #NOAA15 #NOAA18 #NOAA19 #MeteorM2_3 #MeteorM2_4 #weather #weathersats #APT #LRPT #wxtoimg #MeteorDemod #rtlsdr #gpredict #raspberrypi #RN2 #ISS
When the past comes back to haunt you. ‘The Danger of Life’ is a fast-paced thriller set in Scotland during World War Two. It uses many real settings, transported eight decades back in time.
The busy port of Mallaig lies at the end of the ‘Road to the Isles’. This modern photograph shows it in beautiful weather: quite unlike the stormy day on which a deadly manhunt reaches its climax here in the book.
Find out more on my website:
http://www.kenlussey.com/dol/index.html
@Thayer Well that’s… depressing
#BoreDa bawb. A phenblwydd priodas hapus @Maker_of_Things . Wnawn ni'n dathlu ar ein gwyliau dwi'n meddwl, gyda pryd o fwyd neis mewn bwyty. Dyn ni'n mynd i #CaffiTrwsio Boothstown heddiw.
#GoodMorning everyone. And happy wedding anniversary @Maker_of_Things . We'll celebrate on our holidays I think, with a nice meal in a restaurant. We're going to Boothstown's #RepairCafe today.
#GoodMorningWorlds
Happy wedding anniversary, @suearcher, I love you very much and for always.
We are packing tools, and off to Boothstown #RepairCafe this morning.
Heavy rain is forecast, and I am in shorts as it is warm.
Ooh! Happy anniversary to you both! 🎂
Here's the most recent crochet make designed by a wee girl who is absolutely chuffed with the final result. Her Mum sent me a photo of her holding her new toy and beaming, which always warms my heart and reminds me why I love crocheting these toys so much 🤗
#Crochet #Crocheting #Toys #Toy #ToyMaking #FibreCraft #FibreArt @crochet
Billy-puss has been supervising my housework. It’s a bit rich, as most of the fluff I’m dealing with is his!
@neil If you're not aware there's also a cli linux client to get the data off too. https://github.com/tahnok/colmi_r02_client
Woot, mkdocs conversion is finally live! 🎉
The SCSI Bus Is Coming
Boosts
Hey, if you're going to write a paper on the subject of academic writing with AI and you reference a book by me that I NEVER WROTE AND DOESN'T EXIST AT ALL, maybe don't submit it to the journal I edit and where I am literally its first reader (and now perhaps its *only* reader)
6.0.0 – New Kids on the Block
Our latest release brings a lot of improvements — especially to our blocks!
The Follow Me and Followers blocks now have a fresh design, better interactivity, and broader support for ActivityPub-enabled users.
The Reactions block and “Reply on the Fediverse” feature also now take advantage of the latest Block Editor features and are built on the Interactivity API for a smoother experience.
We’ll follow up soon with a deeper dive into the new block features — stay […]
https://activitypub.blog/2025/06/06/6-0-0-new-kids-on-the-block/
Consumer networking devices come in two varieties: Altar to a Dark God and Aromatherapy Machine.
FediCon - Fediverse Conference, August 1st & 2nd in Vancouver
What if the Fediverse met... in real life?
As I have said before, it's one of the unfortunate truisms of the current backlash that no one ever lost a dollar attacking trans kids. When they finally do, we'll know the backlash has at last run its course.
@catsalad What we do each morning :blobcat_coy:
Made a DIY dye sensitized solar cell at https://shihweichieh.com/ workshop at OHSWA 2025 in Edinburgh, and here's the voltage reading the next day in Glasgow!
It’s 2025 and I can’t sign up for a T-Mobile free trial because their form doesn’t think that a two character last name is a valid name. 🙄
So you got a 3dPrinter! TinkerCad is free modeling software. It is VERY easy but incredibly powerful tool. If you are an expert it has features that make modifying a mesh super quick. If you are clueless, it is very approachable. #3dprinting #3dmodeling #easy #tool #snowglobe #make #adorable
Since I've left my last job, I've been thinking about the guy who used me as an alternative to ChatGPT whenever he hit a problem that he couldn't vibe code the answer out of at work.
He basically rotted his own brain by compulsively using ChatGPT in lieu of actually thinking with most any of the projects he was working on. Instead of taking the time to read through code in our framework, look up documentation, or do any sort of debugging, he instead just begged and pleaded with ChatGPT to try and get somewhere because "it was faster." Basically just really hammering his brain with the Programmer's Slot Machine. (@davidgerard wrote a really good article here about this specific gambling addiction angle here. I highly highly recommend reading/watching the corresponding YouTube video:
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/ )
Back to the story; When that wasn't working, which was a significant portion of the time, he'd then just turn and use me as a "more informed alternative" to ChatGPT.
I worked fully remote and the majority of our interactions was via a Teams chat. which apparently crossed some wires in his monkey brain and made him start just... Basically verbally barraging me like he would with the company ChatGPT instance. No thoughts at all, just an immediate process of:
- Ask vague question
- Get guess for an answer with a request for more details
- Try applying the guess blindly without thinking if it's applicable at all
- Have it not work and just report back that it didn't work.
- No follow-up details, no further explanation of what was going on or what he's trying to do. Nothing added past the original vague situation
- If lucky, I might get a screenshot of part of the error, meticulously sliced before it gave something useful in the output because he stopped reading error output to things and made no attempt to understand it. (Why? ChatGPT can do that part!)
- Rinse and Repeat until I get fed up and get into a call with him
- Fix the thing in less than a minute, pointing out that he should have been able to tell what was wrong almost immediately if he actually dropped a break-point and debugged the code at *literally any point* along the way
- Fuck off immediately after getting his fix, no thank you or anything
- start the process anew the following day when he vibe coded himself into a corner all over again
I literally had to go to leadership and make them have a talk with him and get him to leave me the fuck alone at work, after repeated attempts to establish boundaries about it, due to how much time it sucked out of me being able to work on other projects. Effectively just doubling up my work and slamming me with burn out right at the start of the year for absolutely no reason other than his belligerent insistence to just Not Do His Job Without His Hand Being Held By A Chat Window.
It rapidly went from a "He sometimes asks informed questions that I can answer and help him with. I enjoy working with him" to "The dude isn't even trying in the slightest and is now basically offloading his work onto me because he broke his capacity to actually do work independently of an external chat window. I fucking hate him and I hope he gets in a car wreck so I can get a break from the bleakness of dealing with him every goddamn morning"
ChatGPT has basically just been an absolute blight for me since it's inception. Going from the team being generally pro-crypto to intensely pro-genAI/LLM because their favorite scammers (er.. I mean YouTubers) had them hooked on a fantasy of some day making it Big by jumping from one Hype cycle to the next. I sincerely was very close to just finding an entirely different career path altogether because of just how incredibly shitty it was working with that team on just about anything, but lacking the job experience on the resume to land someplace else.
Nobody wanted to be an actual expert, nobody really wanted to learn anything. They had their degree and ChatGPT, which means they learned all they ever will need. ...While working in an industry that tends to re-invent itself every half decade or so while half-assing solutions with an outsourced bullshit generator. 🫠
All in the name of "Well it got me from point A to point B faster." and leaving it at that, despite taking significantly longer than they should have from the get go over it.
I've seen and lived what an AI Fueled future looks like:
Mediocre men harassing their talented and likely autistic peers until their peers just up and fuckin leave to a different organization out of frustration and exhaustion.
I think down the road, we'll be able to measure the negative impact using LLMs has on people's cognitive faculties by comparing it to horse kicks to the head, and only be exaggerating it by a little bit.
Raccoons NOW!
Size contrast between Vatican City and Japan’s Kansai International Airport (situated on an artificial island)
If you are in the UK, and need to stop on the Motorway, I would avoid #WelcomeBreak especially their Membury Services stop on the M4 🙄 They have decided to segregate all #trans people into the mens loos by the looks of it 🚨⤵️ #BeAnAlly 🏳️⚧️
@LegalizeBrain
Mon meme préféré :
Sterke brief van Haitske van de Linde! Als #ProgressiefLiberaal vind ik dat we (NL) al een tijdje niet de juiste kant op bewegen. Dit is een betoog hoe het mijn inziens wel moet.
https://haitskevdlinde.medium.com/open-brief-aan-de-vvd-top-a9793876450b
Why Bell Labs worked so well, and could innovate so much, while today’s innovation, in spite of the huge private funding, goes in hype-and-fizzle cycles that leave relatively little behind, is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot in the past years.
And I think that the author of this article has hit the nail on its head on most of the reasons - but he didn’t take the last step in identifying the root cause.
What Bell Labs achieved within a few decades is probably unprecedented in human history:
They employed folks like Nyquist and Shannon, who laid the foundations of modern information theory and electronic engineering while they were employees at Bell.
They discovered the first evidence of the black hole at the center of our galaxy in the 1930s while analyzing static noise on shortwave transmissions.
They developed in 1937 the first speech codec and the first speech synthesizer.
They developed the photovoltaic cell in the 1940, and the first solar cell in the 1950s.
They built the first transistor in 1947.
They built the first large-scale electronic computers (from Model I in 1939 to Model VI in 1949).
They employed Karnaugh in the 1950s, who worked on the Karnaugh maps that we still study in engineering while he was an employee at Bell.
They contributed in 1956 (together with AT&T and the British and Canadian telephone companies) to the first transatlantic communications cable.
They developed the first electronic musics program in 1957.
They employed Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie, who created UNIX and the C programming language while they were Bell employees.
And then their rate of innovation suddenly fizzled out after the 1980s.
I often hear that Bell could do what they did because they had plenty of funding. But I don’t think that’s the main reason. The author rightly points out that Google, Microsoft and Apple have already made much more profit than Bell has ever seen in its entire history. Yet, despite being awash with money, none of them has been as impactful as Bell. Nowadays those companies don’t even innovate much besides providing you with a new version of Android, of Windows or the iPhone every now and then. And they jump on the next hype wagon (social media, AR/VR, Blockchain, AI…) just to deliver half-baked products that (especially in Google’s case) are abandoned as soon as the hype bubble bursts.
Let alone singlehandedly spear innovation that can revolutionize an entire industry, let alone make groundbreaking discoveries that engineers will still study a century later.
So what was Bell’s recipe that Google and Apple, despite having much more money and talented people, can’t replicate? And what killed that magic?
Well, first of all Bell and Kelly had an innate talent in spotting the “geekiest” among us. They would often recruit from pools of enthusiasts that had built their own home-made radio transmitters for fun, rather than recruiting from the top business schools, or among those who can solve some very abstract and very standardized HackerRank problems.
And they knew how to manage those people. According to Kelly’s golden rule:
How do you manage genius? You don’t
Bell specifically recruited people that had that strange urge of tinkering and solving big problems, they were given their lab and all the funding that they needed, and they could work in peace. Often it took years before Kelly asked them how their work was progressing.
Compare it to a Ph.D today who needs to struggle for funding, needs to produce papers that get accepted in conferences, regardless of their level of quality, and must spend much more time on paperwork than on actual research.
Or to an engineer in a big tech company that has to provide daily updates about their progress, has to survive the next round of layoffs, has to go through endless loops of compliance, permissions and corporate bureaucracy in order to get anything done, has their performance evaluated every 3 months, and doesn’t even have control on what gets shipped - that control has been taken away from engineers and given to PMs and MBA folks.
Compare that way of working with today’s backlogs, metrics, micromanaging and struggle for a dignified salary or a stable job.
We can’t have the new Nyquist, Shannon or Ritchie today simply because, in science and engineering, we’ve moved all the controls away from the passionate technical folks that care about the long-term impact of their work, and handed them to greedy business folks who only care about short-term returns for their investors.
So we ended up with a culture that feels like talent must be managed, even micromanaged, otherwise talented people will start slacking off and spending their days on TikTok.
But, as Kelly eloquently put it:
“What stops a gifted mind from just slacking off?” is the wrong question to ask. The right question is, “Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?”
Or, as Peter Higgs (the Higgs boson guy) put it:
It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964… Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.
Or, as Shannon himself put it:
I’ve always pursued my interests without much regard for final value or value to the world. I’ve spent lots of time on totally useless things.
So basically the most brilliant minds of the 20th century would be considered lazy slackers today and be put on a PIP because they don’t deliver enough code or write enough papers.
So the article is spot on in identifying why Bell could invent, within a few years, all it did, while Apple, despite having much more money, hasn’t really done anything new in the past decade. MBAs, deadlines, pseudo-objective metrics and short-termism killed scientific inquiry and engineering ingenuity.
But the author doesn’t go one step further and identify the root cause.
It correctly spots the business and organizational issues that exist in managing talent today, but it doesn’t go deeper into their economic roots.
You see, MBA graduates and CEOs didn’t destroy the spirit of scientific and engineering ingenuity spurred by the Industrial Revolution just because they’re evil. I mean, there’s a higher chance for someone who has climbed the whole corporate ladder to be a sociopath than there is for someone you randomly picked from the street, but not to the point where they would willingly tame and screw the most talented minds of their generation, and squeeze them into a Jira board or a metric that looks at the number of commits, out of pure sadism.
They did so because the financial incentives have drastically changed from the times of Bells Labs.
The Bells Labs were basically publicly funded. AT&T operated the telephone lines in the US, paid by everyone who used telephones, and they reinvested a 1% tax into R&D (the Bells Labs). And nobody expected a single dime of profits to come out from the Bells Labs.
And btw, R&D was real R&D with no strings attached at the time. In theory also my employer does R&D today - but we just ended up treating whatever narrow iterative feature requested by whatever random PM as “research and development”. It’s not like scientists have much freedom in what to research or engineers have much freedom in what to develop. R&D programs have mostly just become a way for large businesses to squeeze more money out of taxpayers, put it in their pockets, and not feel any moral obligation of contributing to anything other than their shareholders’ accounts.
And at the time the idea of people paying taxes, so talented people in their country could focus on inventing the computer, the Internet or putting someone on the moon, without the pressure of VCs asking for their dividends, or PMs asking them to migrate everything to another cloud infrastructure by next week, or to a new shiny framework that they’ve just heard in a conference, wasn’t seen as a socialist dystopia. It was before the neoliberal sociopaths of the Chicago school screwed up everything.
The America that invested into the Bell Labs and into the Apollo project was very different from today’s America. It knew that it was the government’s job to foster innovation and to create an environment where genuinely smart people could do great things without external pressure. That America hadn’t yet been infected by the perverse idea that the government should always be small, that it’s not the government’s job to make people’s lives better, and that it was the job of privately funded ventures seeking short-term returns to fund moonshots.
And, since nobody was expecting a dime back from Bell, nobody would put deadlines on talented people, nobody hired unqualified and arrogant business specialists to micromanage them, nobody would put them on a performance improvement plan if they were often late at their daily standups or didn’t commit enough lines of code in the previous quarter. So they had time to focus on how to solve some of the most complex problems that humans ever faced.
So they could invent the transistor, the programming infrastructure still used to this day, and lay the foundations of what engineers study today.
The most brilliant minds of our age don’t have this luxury. So they can’t revolutionarize our world like those in the 20th century did.
Somebody else sets their priorities and their deadlines.
They can’t think of moonshots because they’re forced to work on the next mobile app riding the next wave of hype that their investors want to release to market so they can get even richer.
They have to worry about companies trying to replace them with AI bots and business managers wanting to release products themselves by “vibe coding”, just to ask those smart people to clean up the mess they’ve done, just like babies who are incapable of cleaning up the food they’ve spilled on the floor.
They are seen as a cost, not as a resource. Kelly used to call himself a “patron” rather than a “manager”, and he trusted his employees, while today’s managers and investors mostly see their engineering resources as squishy blobs of flesh standing between their ambitious ideas and their money, and they can’t wait to replace them with robots that just fullfill all of their wishes.
Tech has become all about monetization nowadays and nothing about ingenuity.
As a result, there are way more brilliant minds (and way more money) in our age going towards solving the “convince people to click on this link” problem rather than solving the climate problem, for example.
Then of course they can’t invent the next transistor, or bring the next breakthrough in information theory.
Then of course all you get, after one year of the most brilliant minds of our generation working at the richest company that has ever existed, is just a new iPhone.
https://links.fabiomanganiello.com/share/683ee70d0409e6.66273547
Books That Built Me: The Street Lawyer
I was such a genre snob as a kid - until my school librarian finally talked me into reading something different...https://news.kestr.al/books-that-built-me-the-street-lawyer/
Truth Social has crashed from the traffic surge and in so doing accidentally created a hauntingly poignant image.
