secretforest

I got into IT because I want to be challenged. Asking some generative AI bot about how to write a better hotpatch function or how to automate a terribly-detailed set of steps that require two people would defeat my own learning. I'd rather take 3 days to sort that out than solve it in minutes with AI. I get better by slogging it out and the mistakes I make help me avoid future mistakes.

I don't want the answers, per se, I want guidance. AI would solve the issue for me. I don't want some bot thinking for me. I'll retire when I cannot suss out how to write code that solves problems or makes life easier.

And yes, I'm one of those holdouts who has never had the desire to even test out generative AI. I'm not worried about it supplanting me. I worried that I will lose my own edge and curiosity.

A lot of this mentality has to do with wanting a throat to choke if something goes south. The bigger the throat, the more the C-Suite rests easy, despite the costs. The old "Nobody ever got fired buying IBM has morphed into nobody ever got fired buying Microsoft/Oracle/AWS/whatever the flavor of the day."

I've worked in places that refused to allow us (IT) to write programs to automate processes that would have saved enough money yearly to buy a house. They were "severely concerned" because "if you leave or get hit by a bus, who will maintain it?"

I work at a place now where I can automate away with permission and prototype to show use case. I've been at this job a year and have already automated a goodly portion of the grunt work. Some of my colleagues look askance at me, and one has said, "you're automating us out of jobs, eventually, you do know this, right?" These guys/girls fear AI. I don't. I don't use it because God gave me a brain and I'm expected to exercise it. AI also feels like cheating to me. Sure, I may have to read the docs more, hit up someone on Stack Exchange, debug my code a little more, but you know what? I enjoy the challenge. I'm basically getting paid to have fun, despite the daily grind.

FF gets crapped on all the time, BUT... it's still the best mainstream browser out there IMHO. I've been using FF since day one, when it was code named Phoenix. As the spiritual successor to Netscape Navigator, I have super fond memories of using NN, as it was the only decent browser we could install on the Sun Sparc workstations we had in college before I could afford my own computer. I still toy around with SeaMonkey once or twice a year for the memories.

Sadly, the browser world has almost become something of a mono culture with the majority of offerings using Chromium as their base. I liked Opera for years. Original engine. Tabbed. Now Vivaldi is the Opera successor, but sadly uses Chromium as the base. Vivaldi have said they are not going to allow the changes to affect them.

Again, sadly, I doubt that in the near term, anyone will try and offer up a new browser. Even Edge is nothing more than Chromium with MS's tech-nasty Kabuki makeup and overly-complicated proprietary plumbing. Is it too much to ask for a browser that just browses the web without all the garbage tie-ins? Tabs, ad blocking that I control, not add-ins. Like a Pi-hole, where I can add lists. I realize some browsers do this, but the tie-ins, notes, skins, email, political activism, it's all too much.

Tron Legacy. Such a good film. My kids and I watch it a few times a year. I tried watching the original from 1982 and it just felt so... dated? Perhaps I'm spoiled like most people from all the great CGI and effects.

Good old Neal Stephenson books, but I really like Cryptonomicon and Reamde. I read Cryptonomicon in one day it was that good, and years later read it again and got more from it. Neal is a great writer, and I love his "wordiness", how he dedicated pages to the experience of eating Cap'n Crunch cereal.

I rather like the look, even now. I also liked T'Pol in Star Trek Enterprise.

I liked the movie and it reminded me of when I was a kid and my dad bought me a Commodore 64 and 5 1/4 floppy drive and a 1-year subscription to Creative Computing magazine. I spent so many hours learning programming and then wasted it all by going into the military because my parents couldn't afford to send me to university. Rural community and only my dad worked since my mother was injured. When I got out and returned back up north, I got a "job", got married, and had a neighbor who was a Unix programmer. His home office was decked out with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD servers, BSD magazines and literature everywhere. He talked me into using my GI Bill to go get a degree in CS, which is what I did. My unofficial hero since has been Theo de Raadt. Still using a *nix OS, still in IT.