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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I grew up in the 90s where schools and offices had physical filing cabinets full of folders and files. And in the late 90s when learning computers at school those same concepts were reinforced in the computer file system. So files and folders within the context of using a computer is ingrained and seems obvious to me.

    But kids these days are born with iPads in their hand, they use Chromebooks in primary school, and all their files are automatically saved to the cloud and immediately available on all their devices. How would they ever learn the concepts of filesystems? It’s not taught at school. It’s not relevant to anything they do.

    It used to make me so frustrated (it’s a simple concept!) but now I get it. Maybe it’s not as obvious a paradigm as we thought. Maybe there are better ways of organising files (eg, tagging, keywords, filtering) that are more human. Or using namespacing (ns prefixes, curies). Or even using non-local universal identifiers (ipfs locators). It makes me wonder if we might eventually even move away from hierarchical-directory based filesystems at the system level too.


  • Came here to say this. My workplace used to offer a Linux workstation option (which I opted in for 9 years), but they had to remove that option to fulfill new security and management, compliance standards. They need to be able to manage exactly which applications are installed on a system, which binaries are allowed to run and when, the exact settings for every application, the exact version of the OS and the specific updates, and precisely when updates are installed. All of this needs to be applied based on the user, their organisational division, their security groups, clearance level, specific model of device, etc.

    I know that using a combination of Selinux, Kerberos, and something like Puppet can get you close in the Linux world, but Microsoft group policy has been around for 30 years and is well understood and just works.





  • Man, you’re basically saying “I want to move to a new country, but I don’t want to lose any of my friends, I can’t change my job, I don’t want to learn a new language, I want to bring all my furniture and appliances with me, and we just had a new baby a month ago so I’m sleep deprived and don’t have any spare time. How do I do it?”



  • flubba86@lemmy.worldtoAutism@lemmy.worldSo many labels
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    22 days ago

    I’ve been in the tech industry for 20 years. I undertook an IT degree in 2004 (for microprocessor architecture) and another in 2014 (for software engineering).

    Both times I observed three distinct styles of student. The first were those who heard they could make big money in IT. They didn’t have any interest in the field, knew little to nothing about computers, and massively underestimated the difficulty of the course work. Very few of these made it past first year.

    The second group were the “enthusiasts”, the kind of people who ran their group’s local LAN party every month and own an ethernet hub. The kind who reformat their PC every 6 weeks to keep it running fast. They built their own PC when they were 16. These kind think first year is a breeze, and don’t even read the text book, but are quickly out of their depth in second year.

    Finally are the autists. These are the ones who you can just tell they have a deep special interest in the field. You ask them a question about metaprogramming in Python, or database denormalization and they talk your ear off for an hour. These people read the whole textbook in the first week of class. They correct the professor when he gets something wrong (but politely, by email, after class).

    My point is, in my experience, there are always some percentage of neurotypicals and those who are motivated by the money in every year, and has been for more than 20 years. I don’t think it’s getting more prevalent. Maybe now due to higher levels of diagnosis and increasing social awareness, it’s easier to spot the autists, and perhaps due to the AI boom, the money chasers are easier to spot too.





  • I generally prefer native local applications wherever possible, and for a long time I was against the movement to web based tools. That is until one thing changed. I moved to a different department at work. In this different department, I am issued with a Windows 11 laptop that is extremely locked down. It cannot run any executables aside from those whitelisted. I cannot run anything as administrator. If I need anything new whitelisted, I need to write a full page justification, get an endorsement from my manager, and then it can take over a year to get approved (but most likely will be immediately denied).

    Obviously one thing it can run is MS Edge. All of the company tools and systems are webapps on the intranet, accessed via Edge. Now I’m grateful there are so many high quality browser based webapps around.



  • This is the same as how I am. People know I’m “the Linux guy”, but I don’t preach it. I don’t try to get friends and family to switch operating systems. That’s like trying to get someone to switch to your favourite brand of underpants. The whole ethos behind Linux is the freedom of choice. If someone wants to learn more about it, I’m happy to point them to helpful resources, but they need to make the decision on their own, and choose for themselves. I won’t install it for them, because I don’t want to deal with the “where are all my pictures are gone?”, or “why doesnt my scanner work anymore?”