I’m just a werebear tech with his paws on the ground and his head in the stars.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • I’m Gen X and I’ve been in Information Technology for twenty-eight years. My generation was there at the dawn of personal computing. Yes, there are less technically-savvy people in every generational group, but “older Gen Xers” might consider what you’ve said to be… hmm, what’s the right term? Oh, yes. “Bullshit stereotyping based on age” is the term I’m grasping for here.

    I’m well aware of the ELF (Extremely Low-Frequency Radiation) panic. This actually started in the 1970s and rose to national prominence around the late 90s, when it was covered to death by every news outlet. And it was just as silly then as it is now. France is just being France.

    And that has little or nothing to do with which generational group you call home.



  • Speaking from years of experience in IT (nearly thirty of them), I can give my own unscientific opinion: because people put too much faith in certifications, and refuse to do any on-the-job training. You can have five of the six skills listed in a job ad, but if you don’t have that all-important sixth one, your application will get round-filed. It doesn’t matter if it would be a simple matter to train a tech on that one thing. Businesses want phoenixes for chicken scratch.

    Certifications are a boondoggle, and have been for years. The tests have been rigged in such a way that candidates need to take them again and again to pass, and they get charged a fee for each attempt. The test itself is a revenue source for companies. The “prestige” those certifications bring for the companies that front them is based on their difficulty, not on their relevance or fairness.

    I once attended a Microsoft certification “boot camp.” We all worked our asses off, studied the material, and most of us passed at least one test. Nobody passed all three exams except for one person. I had noticed that person using test prep software with a logo that didn’t match the stuff we’d been given. It looked like an orange DNA helix.

    After the last test, a bunch of us milled around outside the building, and I asked the guy who passed how he made it through. He ran for his truck so fast that there was practically a dust cloud behind him. That’s when I decided to look up that logo on Google.

    He’d been using a “brain dump” service. For those unaware of what a “brain dump” is, it’s when a third-party company sends a bunch of people to intentionally fail the exams over and over. During each attempt, those people memorize the test questions. Then the company has their plants aggregate all the possible questions in an exam pool and the correct answers to them. In effect, it’s a copy of the whole test.

    Brain dumps are extremely common in IT. When I worked at VMware, many of our own employees used them to pass certification exams that were mandatory for continued employment. Those people had been doing their jobs for years. They just needed a bogus piece of virtual paper to prove it to our executive leadership. It was all about appearances.

    Why is tech struggling for qualified workers?

    Because it refuses to acknowledge them.






  • I don’t think people appreicate the old axiom “when you look into the abyss, it also looks into you” in this case. For a long time, corporate social media algorithms drove what content you saw. This tended to be “outrage” content, because as others have mentioned, it gets clicks. But marinate in that long enough and YOU become the source of the outrage clickbait. The algorithm starts people down that path until their mentality becomes self-reinforcing. They post what they’re used to posting – angry stuff. And they seek out more even without behind-the-scenes manipulation of their feed. Now imagine all those Twitter refugees landing in the Fediverse with that kind of outlook. It’s not surprising that outrage and bile are trending.

    The way to break this cycle is… just ignore it. I have an extensive list of keyword filters on Mastodon. It screens out 99% of the political content. I just don’t want to see it. I’m here to engage with people who share the same passions and hobbies as myself. THAT’S what makes my Fediverse social media experience better. It’s not a magical function of crossing the corporate/open-source boundary. I have to be responsible for curating my feed according to what I want to seek.

    The same goes for Lemmy. I’m using Leomard as my client on macOS, and it allows me to block out any Lemmy instances I don’t want to see. And I set my default view to “subscribed,” not “local” or “all.” That prevents me from getting psychologically drenched with whatever angry or trollish content might be lurking in those feeds when I open the client. I also sort by “new” rather than “hot,” “most comments,” etc. It’s great that people have opnions about things, but I find relying on up/downvotes to be a poor way of discovering the content I want.

    Long story short (too late): your social media experience in the Fediverse is yours to shape. If you rely on the defaults and flow with the tide, you’ll likely end up somewhere you don’t want to be. If you trim your sails and take the wheel, there are all sorts of wonderful destinations out here.

    Don’t use other people’s anger and unhappiness as your compass.




  • Reasons I use my M1 MacBook Air:

    1. Real estate. Thanks to AirPlay and the Thunderbolt port, I can have three desktops going at once with all my open windows.
    2. Intel binaries still run on it via Rosetta 2.
    3. Control – I have more access to the OS, the command line, etc.
    4. Virtualization – Apple Silicon is built on ARM, so I can virtualize any ARM-based Linux distribution using VMware Fusion. (I run Fedora in a VM.)
    5. Input – despite iPads having the ability to accept keyboard and touchpad input these days, the pointer is still pretty clumsy.

    And lots more, but that’s a good start for me.