Posts by Plest 1288 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Feb 2020
So give me just one reason why my frickin air-fryer needs to be connected to the bleedin' "inta-webs"?!
FFS, it cooks chips and chicken nuggets when the missus goes out to see her sister of an evening once a week and I have to do me own dinner! We all love tech or we wouldn't work in this biz but sometimes I have to question how fecking stupid humanity is with it's insatiable need for info about the most pointless bollocks!
Reminds me of Richard Pryor's character in Superman III. Pryor rips off his company by funnelling money through the payroll system, the head of the corp ( played by Robert Vaughn ) finds out someone is on the make and he says, "He'll want to lie low after swindling so much money, unless he's a complete moron of course!", he looks out the window to see Pryor screaming into the car park in a bright red Ferrari!
Just FYI, tax free lump sums are now capped 25% or max £250k, whichever is the greater
I've been working on Option B for the last 35 years! People in my family think private sector IT work I do is average salaries, gonna enjoy giving them a huge shock when I throw my retirement bash at 56 in a couple of years time!
I've yet to meet any infosec people I'd trust to install a piece of AV software properly, let alone have even an ounce of securty knowledge above most quality admins. I know there must be some good infosec bods out there but all I've met so far from infosec are people who couldn't hack it as a proper Linux/Windows/DB admin job and so ended up doing infosec 'cos it was mostly just sitting around in meetings waving bits of paper with Rapid7 reports printed and moaning that no one take security seriously enough despite the constant rounds of patching admins do daily.
Apologies to the good infosec bods but you have a lot of cowboys in your part of the IT crowd, you really need to sort your image out! ha ha!!
We had a little bellend who was the class clown, messed about, screwed around and didn't bother coming in for his GCSEs. He left school, did a series of shitty low paid jobs for 10 years, got married, manage to produce two kids and dropped dead suddenly at the age of 38 from a drug induced heart attack.
I don't wish death on anyone, but life is always a case of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes".
"re-hire the medical staff and useful admin staff"
You did see this in the OP right? Everyone knows you need admin staff or no has any equipment and patients don't get where they're supposed to be to meet with medical staff at the right time, we don't need a load of overpaid admin consultants wasting tax payers money implementing schemes and projects simply to justify their £125k pay packets!
It's actually quite simple how you con this AI models into doing stuff, you simply "ask on behalf of someone" and you ask for small parts of a bigger whole thing you're trying achieve. It's really on secret and it's how everyone is conning these AI models.
The scariest thing is not that people can generate this stuff so easily, it's that the models have enough backend data with probably some absolute god-awful stuff, the frontend is basically like "chocolate teapot", ie doesn't take much to beat.
Linux was released AFTER Windows in the 1990s and Linux is able to update the system on the fly while you're using it, Windows still needs to sit on the "BSOA" ( Blue Screen of Annoyance ) for 10-15 mins once a fortnight while it updates and you pray like hell the patches will work. Number of times I've had calls from friends and family who's PCs have sat for 45-60 mins on the BSOA, panicked, called me and I've said "Pull the plug and restart, should be OK.". I had one relie in tears once as she was terrified her docs were gone!
It's 2024 Microsoft, you should be able to patch in the background, sign off automatically and request a quick 30 sec reboot to apply, not the charade we have to go through every couple of weeks for simple patch cluster.
Systems like Solaris and others have been able to literally hold an entire patched O/S root on disk to one side, you can boot between them at will, have as many roots as you have disk space for with different revisions of the O/S. We patch our Solaris boxes on the Thu and leave them until Sat morning, flip the boot environments from a master system and reboot the boxes one after another, back in abot 90 secs and these systems are about 10 years old!
Been on many interviews lately? Last one I had 9 months ago they requested access to look up me up social media and do a basic background check with official third-party agency. I refused the first ( they're going to do it anyway! ) but refusing the second would have sounded very dodgy so I agreed. I've never so much as had a parking ticket or a missed CC payment, squeaky clean to the core.
"The "technical community" for me consists of people who understand technology and whose experience leads them to be cautious with their enthusiasm..."
This is also what separates juniors from seniors, bitter experience always breeds caution!
If it's bloody risky but there's a slim chance of pulling it off then run the risk and pray. If you get away with it then you save a ton of money. If you f**k it all up, then you apologise and then you simply have to spend the money you'd have spent anyway on parallel runs! Either way you're no worse off financially.
Welcome to modern IT management, piss poor and shite!
You know where you keep bashing your head against a wall over and over 'cos it feels great when you stop? That's the kind of vibe I get from these little gadgets, like working as a handyman at a dom's flat, you just can't get a enough punishment and you'll do anything to get some!
Precisely! No need to buy corp spy software, you can no get it as part of the Windows enterprise license, baked into the system and I'll bet that within a year there'll be a console you can install ready to tap any laptop or desktop's Recall cache, perfect tool for paranoid PHBs to check we plebs are earning our daily scheckles and not wasting time going to the toilet or eating lunch!
No, it's to sell the spy-as-a-service to companies needing to check we plebs are working 8 hours a day, especially WFH is more prevalent now, 'cos companies see all those coffee and toilet breaks as a wasting company time and money, with Recall they have proof you wasted 47.6 secs going for a pee and grabbing a biccie when things got busy!
We all know perfectly well what it's for, it's for companies to spy on employees to make sure you're working your 8 hours solid and not doing stupid things like taking breaks for coffee, lunch and going for a wotnot, all those activities that companies classify as wasting time rather than working 100% of the contracted 7-8 hours a day.
All I've seen of what AI has done for developers is a million and one articles on Dev.to showing me how to write an AI powered chat bot for my phone, Windows, Linux, webpage, fridge, garden shed, dead badger I found up the road while out walking this morning! All I've seen Ai do is offer bored developers something to do of an evening so they write articles to get kudos points on social media websites, no one I know has actually done anything practical with AI hooks and APIs, some I know have butchered AI hooks into software to shut their PHBs up so they can put "We have AI in our software!" stickers on the sales pitches.
When I see something useful from AI, that isn't wanking off Sam Altman's ego, then I'm listening until then just give it rest.
Mine ain't worked properly for 4 years now! We call up every 3 months, complain, someone supposed to come out, no one ever does, squeeze under stairs one more time to read meter and manually enter numbers into website.
What a complete waste of time and money putting a smart meter in, might has well left the old one there as nothing has changed, still have to send numbers to supplier manually in 2024!
Well actually I don't but they won't replace my 7 year old work laptop with a spanking shiny new touchscreen MS laptop unless I relent and take it with company sanctioned Win11 installed. Oh the agony of choice, laptop with more than 8gb memory and battery that last more than 35 mins or.....Windows 11......oh dear gods of fate why do you toy with me for you sport?!
6 months ago we had to dumped on our desktops. I instantly asked it to generate a simple example of C++ code to make a basic REST GET, it immediately responded with "I can only offer code in Python.", failure #1. So I took the code, checked it and it was shite and didn't even have the right calls! I've since hidden it and use ChatGpt wihch is far from perfect but can at least provide code snippets in many languages and is way more chatty and polite than CrapPilot.
On-prem or cloud, horses-for-courses, some stuff is great in cloud and other stuff is bloody awful. The problem is that middle-management are always after a single perfect solution and as anyone who's been in IT for more then 5 mins will know, there ain't no perfect solution to anything in this game!
Ditto, it's pathetic how Garner is seen as some sort of tech oracle to midlde-managment.
In the end we just started using Zabbix to monitor everything, it's a lot of work to set up but it's so simple and flexible. After 6 months of using the free version, we told them that's what's been alerting production issues for 6 months now cough up for the full supported enterprise, they had no choice as it had proven itself.
Using Virtualbox is just asking to get yourself chewed through Oracle legal meat-grinder, especially if you use in any sort of business area. I don't care what the license says, Oracle own it and Oracle do what they bloody well like when they like, it's not worth using any Oracle software and thankfully we have choices. I was an Oracle DBA for 25 years and I've had my fill of them, even if they say it's free for personal or dev use, don't fall for that BS, just find something else. I use Hyper-V 'cos I work in a mostly MS shop now, it's not as good as VBox but at least my company can foot the bill if MS decide to "pull a Larry" and audit us for Hyper-V usage.
I started coding when I was 9 years old back in 1982. I was tall, spotty and into Iron Maiden and Saxon by age 12, I wasn't exactly popular among the girls as a teenager!
So I spent most of my youth in my bedroom alone hacking assembler until midnight most nights. When you're a 14 years old geek you have 2-3 friends who are into the same things as you so you're in competition with each other to learn more and impress eahc other, you soak knowledge like crazy and you have boundless energy. I once coded straight from 6pm Friday night until 2am Sunday morning living just off sweets and whatever my mum cooked me, up until I just fell off my chair and just crawled to the bed for 5 hours kip and carried on for another 8 hours. I was obsessed with learning more and more so I could beat my mate over a tricky problem we'd found in some Z80 assembler code we'd disassembled in something.
Back then we had to learn stuff on our own with just books and mags, we didn't have forums. These days kids into the same thing have thousands of posts, code samples, FOSS, forums that will encourage competition between people willing to put in the time.
We all think all kids today are glued to TikTok 24/7, a lot are but there's a lot of very smart, driven kids out there who are misled into dodgy areas such as hacking, the thrill of showing off in front of your peers is timeless for teenagers and the most powerful driving force there is for kids.
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