I know, right?

For a while it looked like everyone was just going to stick with calling the older folks boomers and the younger folks millenials, but I guess some intelligence leaked through into the “futile generational hate” machine.

Is every generation working to make things better than it was? No! Clearly the old folks don’t want the young ones to have anything good, otherwise the world wouldn’t have any problems by now!

Just give yourself some more years, time for life experiences, and to be shocked and apalled when you learn how hard it can be to coordinate a group of people who all want the same outcomes to a concentrated cooperative effective course of action. Hell, how hard it can be to get them to even agree on the same path to the desired outcome.

Had a project recently that was effectively “Hey other teams, you have until $date to make this change or you will lose $feature”

The deadline was extended by a month, and we still quietly didn’t make the breaking change on our end for another month after. Every team impacted (until they made the change needed) got emails weekly about it, even into the “quiet” extended deadline. Emails went to whole teams so it couldn’t be lost by one person going on vacation or something.

Day after breaking change (more than three months after first contact) I sent out the final email to any teams that still hadn’t done the needful. “Hey, looks like your shit was still wrong when we did the thing we warned about. It’s broken now.”

Over a week after breaking change, ten minutes before I’m off for the weekend: “Hey, we’ve been troubleshooting for a while trying to figure out why $feature no longer works. This is business critical for $reasons. How can we get this resolved?”

“Please see the attached email from over three months ago (attached).”

That’s always the fucking worst. “You have all the responsibility, but none of the power”.

It’s all internal “customers” at my workplace. So very often by the time it comes to my team the contract is already signed, and they of course didn’t get proper vendor support in the contract. So my team is left to scrape together whatever we can from public info about some obscure industry specific system. Always great to ask support questions and told “we can’t answer that, it’s proprietary”.

We can say “you need to negotiate vendor engineer support for this” until we’re blue in the face, but at the end of the day when the shit doesn’t work how they were sold it by the sales guy they end up trusting the friendly smiley sales guy when the vendor blames us, rather than the fucking professionals in their own workplace because we tell it to them straight, so interactions with us don’t always leave them feeling warm and fuzzy.

Our tech side’s upper management has switched up in the last few years, and they say that it’s been codified into the purchasing approval process that tech gets a seat at the table before shit gets inked. So I was optimistic.

Then we signed the first new vendor/external support contract for our own tech side shit in a long time, no way for us not to be at the table.

Additional support rebuiling our cloud infra that was previously hacked together as needed, but this time do it “right”. Templates, automated tagging, top down more easily managed governance and security controls instead of a messy mix of shit, the works. The plan is to automate a shit ton as infra as code. No one on my team has previous experience doing this as we’re not very cloud heavy.

All of this hinges on infra as code and resource templates, and the fucking contract expicitly doesn’t include any coding/cloud template building assistance. It wasn’t forgotten, they decided against it.

I’m the best script/code monkey on my team. I know I can figure it out, but I was looking forward to having a break from spending 90% of my time staring at code. From being on projects that succeed or fail entirely on my own efforts. I’ve been stuck on this sort of shit for multiple years while some of my coworkers have been able to be important, but not a bus factor of 1.

Guess it’s nice to have job security 🫠

The Who - Won’t Get Fooled Again

Another legitimately great strategy is the Wally Deflector (hate that Dilbert’s creator turned out to be an asshat). Force them to do some work. Anything really works, just something to slow down the firehose and enforce that it’s a partnership working towards a solution. Usually the best way is to just ask for clarification and actual hard requirements.

So many things just shrivel up and die when the person asking for it realizes IT isn’t going to just outsource their full responsibilities including domain specific knowledge or basic fucking thought for them just because it’s going to become digital or automated.

Sounds like someone needs to figure out email filters. Probably best to send it to a folder and mark as read instead of delete it, that way when it does inevitably concern you (something you use isn’t working) you can check them for notice of what’s going on.

Trading firms have been using ML and Neural Nets for trading and investment insight for ages before the current LLM “AI” boom started. I knew someone working in that space on investment derivatives in the mid 2010s.

You don’t really need to speculate on it. It’s old news. This is just a joke about how there’s a new crop of suckers who are absolutely using LLMs for stock advice.

Guess we’re all gonna ignore all the drama about LTT from last year?

Saying he’s the one who breaks is an understatement.

They’ve kept it up for 5 months. Downvotes and disparaging comments haven’t stopped them. Just block them if it bothers you.

Huh, why do I hear someone shouting about Windows 11 requiring TPM?

Nice, an analognowhere I missed!

I’m so thankful that I didn’t buy into the 3000 series hype and just bought a 2060 Super the moment one became available at MSRP after the 3000s launched. Everyone said it was a waste paying that price for less performance, but I had a card and they still didn’t 4 months later.

I’d say that the way around the shortages is to just not go for the latest and greatest new hardware, but that’s not really helpful for GPUs anymore anyway. Even the desirable last gen cards are still going for scalper prices.

But why is she smuggling a pumpkin in her dress?That one must be extra magic!

As someone who works as a sysadmin/systems engineer in a Windows environment, I find your analogy is a bit extreme. Not denying the issue, it’s a constant frustration and problem. It’s just that I find you can get a lot farther than most people think.

So less “hood’s welded shut” and more “Why the fuck are the headlights a single unit? I just need to fix the high beams! Why is the transmission welded shut? Who in the fuck wired the radio and power steering together? And why in the hell is none of this documented anywhere?” Maybe that’s worse, tbh. You can get very deep, but most of it is horrors.

Literally a plot point in Dresden Files. MC is a wizard who lives in Chicago doing private eye work. Regularly carries a blasting rod (wand) and a revolver. One big wizard gets taken out by a sniper rifle fired by a demon. He has semi-regular backup from non magical friends who are just well armed.

A regular human mafioso who is just so good at being a conniving and ruthless piece of shit that he can hold his own with the magic folk is a recurring character. Your spells don’t mean too much if four goons get the drop on you with a metal pipe when you weren’t prepared.

Don’t underestimate the tactical power of humping the air while dressed weird. So many modern leaders ignore the sheer stopping power of “being weird AF bro”

Once in college, armed with assorted mismatched costume equipment, a bunch of bananas hanging from the front of my belt, and socks with sandals, my sensual thrusts nearly caused the enemy supply chain to take out their own forces (a pizza delivery car saw me shakin what the manic episode gave me and almost swerved up onto the opposite busy sidewalk).

My bad, I’ll check again when I get home. Could have sworn it was available by default, but it might be a Pro/Enterprise version thing, or something I had to do through Group Policy (Pro/Enterprise unless there’s an underlying registry entry you can snag to apply to Home installs).

Either way, 100% agree that you should never have to jump through hoops for such a basic piece of functionality. It’s your machine, not Microsoft’s.

EDIT: Yeah, you’re right. Can pause updates for 35 days. You can keep resetting those 35 days indefinitely, but that’s some bullshit.

And it looks like all my fancy ways of disabling auto-restarts for updates are all Group Policy, so restricted to Pro and Enterprise versions. That’s some shit.

Protip: If you need Windows then go with the Pro version for the most config options against the bullshit, but don’t pay for it. Get a super discounted price from a licensed OEM license key seller, or just use MASGrave to spoof the license for free.

It comes from people being unwilling to learn how Windows works or how to configure it, but being 100% on board to tinker to hell and back with Linux. So you get a lot of innaccurate info from people who think their Linux skills confer some amount of knowledge with Windows when they never took the time to learn it as well, or when they haven’t used it outside of corporate controlled work machines (if they even encounter Windows that way) in half a decade.

There’s an argument (which I agree with to a point) that you shouldn’t have to learn how such a big paid product like Windows works in order to avoid frustrations, while it’s understandable in an open source thing like Linux distros. But it ultimately boils down to a combo of “Windows bad!” and learned helplessness when it comes to Windows that people are willing to push through for Linux.

What? You can easily turn updates off entirely during situations where that’s going on. It’s a single switch in the settings.

EDIT: Fucking hell, they changed it to just being able to turn off updates for 35 days. You can reset that countdown back to 35 days indefinitely, but that is some grade A bullshit.

Settings>Windows Update>Advanced Options, Then Pause Updates down at the bottom.

That’s also where you can find some settings for disabling auto-restart as well.

That would likely be the default settings trying to avoid times when you normally use the machine to install the update.

That reminds me that I have a stack of Vista era laptops (and one Win 7) gathering dust. I should find something to do with them.