Magic Earth works really great for me :)

Straw man. I’m encountering sys admins and systems “engineers” who don’t know how to spec out a server, don’t understand how certificates work, don’t understand basic IP addressing principles, don’t understand basic networking topology.

They just know how to click a list of specific buttons in a GUI for one specific Corpo vendor.

Maybe that is fine for a Jr. Admin just starting out, but it isn’t what you want for the folks in charge of building, upgrading, and maintaining your company’s infrastructure.

There’s nothing wrong with making interfaces simpler and easier to understand. And there’s nothing wrong with building simplified abstractions on top of your systems to gain efficiency. But this should not be done at the cost of actual deep understanding and functionality.

The people you call when things go badly wrong will always be the folks that have that deep understanding and competency. It already has started hitting the developer community in the last few years. The Jr. Devs that did a 3 month boot camp where they learned nothing but how to parrot code and slap APIs together, are getting laid off and cannot find work.

The devs that went to school for Comp Sci, that have years of real world experience, and actually understand the theory and the nuts and bolts of the underlying tech, they are still largely employed and have little trouble finding work.

I think the same will happen soon in the IT world. Deep knowledge and years of dirty, greasy hands will always be desirable over a parrot that only knows how to click GUI buttons in a specific order.

Very good read. I totally agree with your sentiment that more and more, “engineering” is becoming just gluing together and managing cloud services and features.

My job as a sys admin has become the same. It’s not about actually understanding the technology at a deep level and troubleshooting problems, it’s about learning specific applets and features to click on and running down daily and weekly checklists.

I have a monthly budget that I pay recurring charges out of, a couple hundred USD a year give or take.

I also do a lot of one-off donations to various projects and creators.

I also have some FOSS software/services that I pay monthly for premium features on, like Bitwarden, Proton, and Podverse.

I’m constantly amazed at the longevity of this probe, so awesome!

Let the enshitification begin!

It’s the timeless debate between accessibility and exclusivity. Do you want more people in your community by compromising some values? Or would you rather be a hardliner but never reach those people?

Most of the time you have to pick somewhere on that spectrum. It’s a question of pragmatism and utilitarianism.

Does it do more good for lots of people to be slightly more privacy-aware, or is it better to have a very small portion of the population that are super privacy-aware?

You have to decide, and the debate rages on all the time.

Bitwarden password manager. I’ve used several proprietary PW managers, Bitwarden is by far the most stable, intuitive, and functional IMO.