Someone close to me went into a scientific field and had this experience at their school. 100% Linux. They taught them how to use it for everything from the ground up; regular usage, and things specific to their discipline. I would have loved to have had the same foundational experience. My Linux knowledge grew together as a patchwork of experiences breaking and fixing things, reinstalling, hacking together solutions that should never have worked, etc.
I appreciate your comment about my experience. Perhaps I’m not giving myself enough credit for what I know. I kind of know these things in isolation since my IRL friends, bar one or two, aren’t very technical so I have no benchmarks to compare myself with.
I did a little bit of cloud stuff in a past job. It was a mix of billing and tech support, nothing requiring a ton of experience or certs, though a general knowledge of computers and public cloud computing was needed. A lot of people who worked there did not have it so I floated to the top pretty quick. I work hard, but I don’t need the stress of being in a dysfunctional org.
I have definitely played nice with MS in the past and gained valuable knowledge and skills doing it. The first tech job I worked in was kind of a talent farm in the most miserable way. It was about 30% billing support, 60% tech support, and 10% sitting in the bathroom on your phone wishing you could be unborn. Poor pay, high-school-like conditions, manipulative detached upper management, absolutely unattainable goals, but you would get a resume bullet point you could then use to get hired at a bigger tech company. I did really well here, got promoted a few times, simply because I was nice to colleagues and customers and empathized with the misery of dealing with our support. A lot of my friends followed each other one at a time to better companies and I followed suit landing a tech sales/support gig. Less interesting, but almost double the money. After a few years and one layoff, now I’m searching and not even determined to stay in tech, though that’s where my most marketable experience is now. On one hand, working in tech has made it harder to enjoy computers as a hobby and I hate that. On the other hand, the good benefits and median pay for my area made this last job a godsend during a very wild and chaotic few years of my life.
I agree with you about getting out of the capitalist ride. All I need is $15M so I can buy my own hot spring and retire in the mountains. :P On a less fanciful note and hopefully on a shorter timeline, I want to save enough that I can live off of the investment income or at least supplement 20hr/wk wages using the remaining time to pursue hobbies, volunteering, etc. Having that revenue stream as insurance against a situation where I cannot work anymore would be huge. Having a budget big enough to relocate to a different state if needed is already a luxury.
I find myself wondering what’s coming after the AI bubble bursts. Despite Azure being okayish, I see a rough time ahead for MS. I know it’s a small part of their business, but Windows is becoming increasingly toxic and I think they over-invested in AI. We’re undergoing some pretty big societal/cultural shifts at the moment. South Park parodied it in a recent episode where all the blue collar workers get fabulously rich because no one knows “how to do anything anymore”. What companies/industries are going to help build things back up when the tower collapses?
Having had 30 gigs, what do you think worked out best for you when it came to finding a new job?
I appreciate the tip about R&D and startups. I ride my bike a lot and sometimes when I go through office parks or light industrial I see boatloads of tech-ish companies that have no consumer name recognition or anything. Whether it’s R&D at a big cloud provider or something similar, the behind the scenes stuff is more likely to utilize Linux.
Oh, I’m a dummy, that joke went right over my head the first time!
I’m still looking for that ideal tie-in where I link it with something I care about. I don’t know if I want to stay in IT, but I have to do something and at least the skills will be transferable. The work from home aspect of IT has also been very good to me. I’ve outperformed at 40h/week support work while taking care of sick family members and working out of my… walk out basement.
At least I have some outdoor hobbies to bring balance to my cellar-dwelling tenancies.
It helps me to think about it like this:
The shittier the world’s circumstances, the brighter and longer a single good deed will shine.
Yeah, easier is better. I’ll have to confirm what apps outside of Jellyfin and Chromecast are needed, but I’ll compare some basic Roku devices. I could probably score one a online neighborhood marketplace for a few bucks.
Thanks for weighing in.
I spanned that divide. We got an Amiga in the home when most families had no computer and even then, I had to log all my computer time in a little book to make sure I didn’t spend too much time using it. I was frequently told to “go play outside”. I was taught not to give out my name or personal information online. A few years later, I remember downloading the full resolution Hubble Deep Field images, completely filling the family computer’s hard drive and probably saturating the dial up for quite a few minutes. Now I work for questionably evil companies (on my computer all day) then go home and do computer/tech related hobbies. I went from digging holes on the edge of the woods for fun to sitting in front of a computer, phone, tablet, or other tech most of the day.
Is life better post-digital? In some ways yes; in some ways no. We’ve kind of hit dopamine saturation where everything is just a click away and everything has already been done/thought/built/conceived. I have communities for the most niche of interests and I can find info on almost anything that tickles my fancy. On the other hand, there’s very little reason to leave your home and anything that makes you (or your friends) special probably looks like shit compared to the accomplishment of some random 10 year old kid from a foreign country. When the world was smaller everyone could feel bigger and more significant, but post internet, it’s clear every day that we are one of billions of people. The ads still tell us we’re special… to sell us stuff.
I find my solace in the outdoors and in regularly scheduled fully-offline social activities. I imagine being a kid got a whole lot harder after my little micro-generation.
Inb4 I compose a 4 act opera about my week’s schedule during my first shower of the week. :D
My Minecraft pals used mumble at various points. It’s less polished than some options. I like the FOSS and the simplicity but the certificates confused me as a noob. Would still recommend.
I do sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
Is there any reason to not combine the commands since the output always prompts prior to changes anyway?
Sometimes I just do a quick lspci && lsblk on a blank terminal so I can have a draggable, resizeabled privacy screen for my notes or whatever I’m working on. It looks complicated which scares 95% of people away immediately.
It sounds like we were similarly inquisitive children, perhaps to the point of making adults uncomfortable.
My European mother is the reason religion didn’t fuck me up worse than it did. I was also forced to go to church as a kid, but even within our own family there were differences in thought and opinion that still managed to exist in civil dinner table discourse. My mother seems to have gone through her own questioning process, it just didn’t take her to extreme atheism but rather she arrived at more of a mystical Abrahammic monotheism. When I was older, I fell into the trap of religion on my own (Evangelical Christianity) and it’s changed the course of my life significantly in both good and bad ways.
A decade to a decade and a half later I’m mostly over it. I’m comfortable with my current belief system and I live life openly and honestly with 95% of people I meet. If I had to describe myself I’d call myself a self-rolled Buddhist-Atheist.
I’m not envious of those Christians with enough of a conscience to realize what’s going, but who are reliant on “American Christians™” for their community, support, spirituality/philosophy/introspection. They have difficult and painful decisions ahead of them. You can only ignore your conscience for so long, but the first to defect will be shunned and hated and will likely lose their entire social circles. That happened to me. They will also be susceptible, as we all are, to similar tactics and abuses as those doled out by their former religion. You don’t leave and suddenly become a mastermind at spotting abuse of power and become immediately immune. If anyone reading this falls into that category, I would recommend finding a nice, non-religious hobby where you see people from different walks of life on a regular basis. Bicycling groups, social dances, gardening collectives, etc. People are pretty nice outside of the bubble. You’ll be okay.
I’m a Buddatheist who grew up with both cultural Catholicism and later Christian Evangelicism.
I like how this hints at the nature of the self. If I leave someone behind am I not also leaving myself behind?
For me, ethical acts are those that increase the freedom of the self and others. We all suffer. That’s a fact of life. If we dissolve our concept of the self and acknowledge our link to others and the world itself we can see ourselves more as threads going through human experience. If we are kind to ourselves and “others”, we have a better chance at reducing that suffering.
Imagine the time a stranger forgot their wallet and you paid for their coffee. A version of that experience could still exist in that person’s mind long after you die. It could get blended with other experiences and reinterpreted. It could be told as a story to a friend who was inspired by the act. The cascading effects of that person being properly caffeinated on that day could have world changing effects. In a similar way, I carry the shared experiences of my own ancestors and even strangers who have shared their stories with me. They are still alive as a small part of me because my true self is humanity or even some animating life force of the universe or something like that and the name that people call me just refers to the limited perspective and incomplete view I have of existence. Essentially I see existence as blinders limiting my perspective like a race horse, but the true self is a satellite view of the track. When I act, I do so based not only on my experience, but the collective experience of every perspective and experience that has been conveyed to me in every way, but I am still one human body, in physical space, subject to time. I hope that when I die, those blinders will be lifted and I’ll exist as pure conscious perception of everything that ever was is and will be. Able to see through anyone’s eyes, in any time. To feel any and every feeling felt my an animal or human. To view the entirety of existence as a completed masterpiece from outside time itself.
You can probably see why I like the Buddhists.
I find that when you acknowledge the interconnection of things compassion becomes easier.
I hope that people rediscover that within themselves and others.
Last night’s Southpark kind of hinted at this topic a little bit. I’m curious to see where they take it, but I won’t post any spoilers here because I don’t know who has seen it.
I started my Linux journey as a poor high school college student and while I got hand-me-down windows machines at home, I worried about breaking them fiddling with things beyond my knowledge level. A budget basement eeePC became my workbench and I started tinkering. I had to drive to the next city to find one in stock. Today the gas would cost more than the computer. :-D
I’d still be running the eee but it got put in the closet when many distros dropped 32 bit support.
Yup, I just namedrop Lemmy and don’t explain unless people ask. Usually then the explanation is simple and about how I’ve chosen not to use Reddit for ethical reasons.
I don’t have he data to back this up, so take it with a shaker full of salt:
The Psychopathic Owners: People with the individual net worth of small countries who have already assembled ownership or at least control over of the majority of everything under themselves. Have enough power to choke out everyone else if anyone steps too far out of line. The law does not apply to them and they break it with impunity. No empathy, often self-deleduded and think they’re Gods gift to the world.
The Big Boy on the Playground: This person has accumulated enough wealth to feel superior to the average poor person. They may think they’re rich and can do whatever they want, so they make good fall-guys for the truly rich. They often have outward signifiers of wealth, but are blinded by the ego trip of being daddy’s favorite.
The Poor Ignorant PoS: Most people, this category is broad and blends smoothly into the one above it with no one delineation to separate the two.
My undergrad was set up for Windows as the default assumption. Eventually I figured out you could visit the IT help desk and they would help you set up the VPN another way.