Thanks to this post, I'm going to adopt the title of Butlerian!

I worked in telecom for years, and recently left because my company decided to automate out a bunch of positions by using their shiny new AI. It suggested carrying 300 Amps at 50 volts (DC) several hundred feet with 14 gauge cable. (Electricians, go ahead and laugh.)

I went back to school, learning IT support. Most of my classmates are fresh out of high school, and they're all using Chat GPT like my generation uses Google. But instead of googling the answer and then figuring out how to make it work and testing the results, they just stop.

Chat GPT says to use this config? They use it. Of course it doesn't work.

Over and over, I have classmates asking me why their Copliot generated code isn't giving them the right answer, or why their server process is failing to start.

I fear for the safety of a world where the tech support is provided by people who never learned how the tech runs, never learned to read, test, experiment, fail, and try again...

So yeah, Butlerian. points at my face

9600, 8-N-1

One of my favorite things about Linux is this: you can try it. Get a thumb drive, get Rufus or Etcher. Download Mint, Ubuntu, something with a "Live Linux". Boot from the thumb drive, spend an hour or two surfing, clicking around, seeing if things work. 2018, you had like an 80% chance of a flawless experience. 2024, it's way higher! Plus, the alternatives have gotten slower, more bloated, more interested in monetizing you than serving you, so even if it feels strange, and you have to relearn some stuff, more than ever, it might be worth it.

Even if it didn't work quite right, keep the thumb drive around. The number of times I've rescued an important file off of a messed up system using a thumb drive with Mint on it? You'd be surprised.

It's funny, I had a horrible toxic job for way longer than any sane person should ever have to deal with, and one aspect of it was dangerous noise levels. We complained, and the company always sent "independent" inspectors who always found that the noise levels were juuuust inside the legal safe limit. Even when they added enough equipment to double the volume! Funny that... Anyways, I am now over six months gone from that job, and I just realized that my tinnitus is way better than it was! Ditto my mental health... Now I just need a winning lottery ticket or a not-soul-sucking job...

I had a work laptop and did the "external USB" thing. One day, at work, I'm messing with my Linux on a public wifi, having unplugged from the corporate LAN.

A co-worker walks by, sees the Network cord unplugged, plugs it in. I am oblivious in the washroom.

Corporate security got to my laptop before I did.

I didn't get fired.

I don't work there anymore, though.

I have an x86 proxmox setup. I stuck a kill-o-watt on it. Keep your pi setup if it does what you want, and realize that there's someone out there who is jealous of your power bill.

I may have once worked for one of these companies, and they aggressively lobbied the government to prevent MVNOs from happening in Canada. An MVNO would be able to compete with the big telcos, and force them to lower prices. What kills me is that the big companies have "discount brands" that are only a tiny bit cheaper, and then they use their existence to claim that there's lots of competition in the market!

Some of the crap I saw... So glad to have gotten out!

I had one go pop on a customer, and it melted their computer, irretrievably destroying their data. Leave the battery out and somewhere fireproof.

There are a lot of good sellers of corporate leasebacks out there... A five year old ThinkPad is going to kick butt over anything new with a Celeron. I'm a student, and I got an MSI workstation with an i7-9750H, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVME, and a garbage battery for 250$ CAD. That's less than 200$ USD.

Old Man's War! Pretty green people fighting aliens! What's not to like?

It's slangy, for sure. It's said in a way where the rest of the sentence is not explicitly stated but implied. Like, "Now I put the cheese... " (On the burger), and then I put the bun. (Again, on the burger.) It's not terribly uncommon, but it does happen.

I don't know if this will show up or is already in the list, but: Rufus. I burn all my thumb drives for os installs with Rufus. It also lets me bypass a lot of the windows garbage that they've tracked on to the installer, like making you sign in to a Microsoft account to install. Also, Ventoy. It's a multiple OS installer, so one big thumb drive lets me install any number of OSes from it.

While I'm setting up those OSes, ninite gets me my windows programs, and Snappy Driver Installer Origin gets me my drivers. No more laptops with pre-installed bloat for me!