Gran Torino.

Yeah, from my Debian VPN.

Back in the day when we were all amazed at Yahoo!'s loading speed I pulled the homepage HTML. 79K. Imagine that.

The Half Life demo was 50MB. Took me 4 tries to get it over dialup. Played till the sun came up!

Holy shit, this thread made me realize Hammond invited the scientists and grandkids to the island with a hurricane inbound. Not like those things just pop up like tornadoes. You know it’s coming as much as a week in advance.

Active Directory is a monster. Got downvoted to hell the other day for saying there is nothing out there that comes close for managing a fleet of machines. Most of the idiot arguments revolved around thinking AD is fancy LDAP.

“Linux and Mac can do authentication!”

If one’s view of AD is that limited, we’re not having the same conversation. Cross connect AD with Powershell and Hyper-V, you have a robust ecosystem for enterprise. And there are zero issues with running headless Linux servers on Hyper-V.

Kurt Vonnegut started it!

https://www.photopea.com/

Free Photoshop in a browser. Some modest ads, nothing intrusive. Ublock is stopping those for now. I’d be glad to pay for such fine software, maybe I’d pay the $5/mo. were I a pro.

Somebody clue me in on Typescript. I’m somewhat familiar with scripting, PowerShell guy here.

PS really is the bomb. Been a Windows sysadmin for a decade and I couldn’t do a damned thing without PS. I have no modern programming or scripting experience, yet picked up PowerShell and started implementing it very quickly. If you’re running Active Directory, it’s a must, no question.

Snover has some great intro to PS videos. That’s what got me started.

It’s not just TV series in my mind. I’ve seen dozens of movies that start with a great premise, rockin’ right along and then run out of steam near the end. Comedies are the worst. Best jokes and plot up front, then filler for the rest.

Those movies don’t have enough content for a feature length show and TV shows often don’t have enough content to go beyond a season.

How not to order three drinks.

Windows, Firefox, uBlock Origin, PiHole DNS, zero issues. Same in Edge.

Looks fine by me. Clicked the cookie link, done.

Funny thing, I spazzed out and clicked on my Putty link after accepting cookies. Putty pops over the website, for a split second I was like, “Oh what fresh hell is this?!”

Yep! LLMs are an excellent tool for getting over a hump, maybe finding a new pathway to solve a problem. I scan the output and pick the bits I want to try. ChatGPT may spit 40 lines of broken code, but I only need that one thing I hadn’t thought of or didn’t know.

It’s no replacement for knowing what you’re doing. Almost all IT work is knowing enough to recognize good and bad ideas, knowing where to look for solutions. LLMs can’t replace experience.

Y’all never get tired of preaching to the choir, do ya?

Anyone with technical chops has likely tried Linux, or is running it now. 99.954% of the Windows users will either upgrade or roll without updates. Converts are going to be exceedingly rare.

Only way I’ve got people using Linux was when I fixed “little old lady” computers as a charity thing. I’d throw whatever spare parts I had in there, swap in an SSD, load Linux Lite. I never told them it was Linux. Show them how to get FaceBook and email, done. And I never got a call back!

I was learning BASIC on a VIC-20 around that age.

more programming than coding

What’s the distinction?

I got a Sensi thermostat 5 years ago. Very happy. Only trick is it doesn’t work cut off from the internet, not even on the LAN. But you can still walk up and punch buttons. (Tested this last week. Might be a way around this.)

I started with a VIC-20 at twice that age. In the 80s computers were viewed as somewhat magical, a bit scary. Took a 2-week summer camp on programming BASIC and two things they told us made me feel way better.

You can’t physically destroy the computer typing at the keyboard. I took that to mean no matter how badly I screwed up, the problem could be unscrewed.

It’s a dumb machine, no brains, period. That means you are in control of it. Some people could use that lesson today. 🫤