Been doing sysadmin since the 90's. Why bother with AI, it just slows me down. I've already scripted my life with automation. Anything not already automated probably takes me a few minutes, and if longer I'll build the automation. Shell scripts and Ansible aren't hard.

I’ve been developing professionally since 1996 and started on Dec Vax and Stratus VOS mainframes in Fortran and C, led the build out of an on prem data center with raised floors etc to hold a SAN with a whopping 3TBs of storage along with other networking gear and server software.

Before I started developing professionally, I did assembly language on 65C02, 68K, PPC and x86 for 10 years.

In between then and now, I’ve programmed professionally in C, C++, VB6, Perl, Python, C#, and JavaScript.

Now all of my work is “cloud native” from development to infrastructure and take advantage of LLMs extensively.

It’s not a mark of honor to brag about you don’t use the latest tools.

Some people aren’t using LLMs to do development. Some people aren’t doing stuff in hyperscaler clouds. Some people don’t work in environments where code is allowed near LLMs. Some people are and some people do. This is perfectly fine and to be expected.

Wait until he needs another job and then comes crying about “ageism” when it’s actually he didn’t keep up with the latest trends.

As opposed as I am to doing any side work, you better believe if I were in an environment that doesn’t allow me to keep up with latest trends, I would be playing with it on the side.

Before the shit show of the current employment market, I would be looking for another job if I saw I was getting behind technically.

Sometimes when I have time to play around I just ask models what stinks in my code or how it could be better with respect to X. It's not always right or productive but it is fun, you should try it!

just what I want, interactivity in my ansible playbook

> It's not always right or productive but it is fun, you should try it!

yey, introducing bugs for literally no reason!

I asked if you tried it, it sounds like you have I guess. I'm sorry you did not find another tool for your toolbox. I did.

But DHH has, and continues, to do a lot to share his obvious passion and endless curiosity for tech. I’m not going to stop following him and enjoying his work just because he is not as woke as I am. Politics is not everything.

Additionally, the trades above don't have new tooling that comes out every few years that completely changes things, while the tech industry loves to re-invent the wheel frequently.

That depends on where you are. In the US, it's rare, but our Japanese office actually had a pretty rigorous system for career growth, that involved what is, for lack of a better word, "apprenticeship."

> Additionally, the trades above don't have new tooling that comes out every few years that completely changes things

I wouldn't say that. I know a lot of mechanics, and they have experienced a big change, over the last decade or so.

One of the things about being a mechanic (or appliance repairman), is that you are responsible for maintaining a huge range of stuff; including things that are decades old.

I have a friend that sets up and maintains professional sterile stuff. This is big juju. These aren't little autoclaves, and they incorporate pretty much every trade you can think of, like plumbing, electrical, metalshop, mechanical, etc. Many of these units are huge. They also tend to be run by fairly advanced computers.

These units cost six- or seven-figures, and the customers like to keep them going for as long as possible. I often hear him talking about having to work on a decade-old sterilizer, in the sub-basement of some research lab.

If I’m bored I sometimes freelance as a field repair technician for service contractors. It’s typically opening up a machine I’ve never seen, and finding the combination of mechanical, electronic, and/or software fixes it needs to come back online. It can be a lot of fun, and the pay is not terrible. But you need to understand some analog electronics, strong digital electronics skills, basic programming paradigms, SQL, networking from the physical layer on up through the application layer, and also how to read between the lines on poorly written manuals and find the hidden truth that the various contradictions point to.

I’ve worked on everything from CT scanners to cutting lasers to ATMs, and done more server swaps, PDU replacements, and field upgrades than I care to count. It’s great when I need a break from the sea of bytes, and I get to see an inside view on a lot of cool stuff, and some pretty concerning things going on behind the scenes as well. I could say, I’ve seen some shit.

I’ve watched a 27 year old pentium pro boot up off the arm of Michelin, the sparkle of the token ring LEDs twitching furtively in the twighlight of an abandoned server room, screens blaring static amid a tangle of drooping cables and fallen raceways. Shit still gives me nightmares.

Thanks for that!

Setting up websites for people/small businesses? Give them each a virtual host/directory with mod_php if you need some CRUD. No k8s or AWS or react or anything needed. Your client's site is all in a tidy directory you could zip up and give to them if they want (e.g. you're going to move out of the business, or they want to work with someone else). I despise working with PHP, but it's the obvious choice if you were going to be a "trade web programmer" doing small jobs for people.

Writing custom software for someone? Do it with Qt's drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor and deliver it as a .zip or .apk or whatever.

It probably won't be as easy money as a SaaS megacorp, but I'm sure there is plenty of demand for programmers' services out there in the same way that you can find people looking for contractors for home renovations. If you're doing custom work, you can use whatever tools make you productive.

https://archive.nytimes.com/mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2...

When I was a kid in the 1980's I used to call the DJ and request songs A LOT. When I was a teen I used to call in to win contests. Now when I listen to a 'I<3Radio' station in the garage, its clear all the DJ segments are pre-recorded and everything is automated. Its all soundbites. Its all garbage. Its all advertisements. Its the same ~30 songs on rotation.

"Hello. This is Rosko. WKTU, New York." And then he'd segue into "Always and Forever" by Heatwave.

It was so scripted that at one point I started listening closely to see if it was recorded, but there were enough intonation and pacing changes that it was obvious he was doing it live.

Haven't lived in NYC in over 30 years but I miss that station.

I mean just look at boiler room and club culture in general. The amount of tastemaking DJs out there is pretty vast.

College radio stations aren’t dramatically increasing to make up for the vast consolidation that removed something like 80-90% of radio DJ’s.

40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s flowed into each other but the stuff was all very distinct in a way that 2000’s vs 2010’s isn’t.

I'm not interested in regional music or a regional scene.

The music on any given SomaFM station is not "a sea of mediocrity". It's generally excellent genre-specific stuff (old and new), and I love it (if I'm somewhat into the genre).

I can appreciate that others may not, but please don't over-generalize or assert that your preferences are the only ones out there.

Genres span borders now. Look at the Midwest emo / mathrock scene and how it made its way to Japan and Taiwan.

We can romanticise the old days of radio but local scenes aren't dead and these little genres are still going and new ones are popping up.

I might just be out of touch, so show me the innovation.

Rap simply didn’t exist in the 60’s. What’s around today that wasn’t in the late 90’s? Not just minor evolution but new ideas. It’s been 25 years any other stretch of that length since 1900 had several radical new ideas.

Even if you just look at popular artists: Mk.gee, Collier, Domi and jdbeck, Beyonce are some examples of mold breaking.

What exactly are you expecting, cantina jizz? If so there's no shortage of extremely out there stuff.

Rap, Country, Electronic, Funk, Hip hop, Jazz, Latin, Pop, Punk, Reggae, Rock, Heavy Metal, Soul music and R&B

I’d even take Polka. My argument is we’re missing the kind of regional cross pollination that gives rise to such things.

Every noise at once attempts to show the extremes to which music can be classified if you haven't seen it.

I don't see any signs that this evolution has ever stopped or will stop. Artists are obviously limited by physics, what sounds pleasant to us, the instruments that are available, and what is currently in fashion. That we'd have more unique music in a more isolated world seems like a pretty crazy claim to me.

> I don’t see any signs that this evaluation has ever stopped or will stop.

It wouldn’t be difficult to name something as new if there was a lot of meaningfully different new things to name.

Now I’m not saying things will be static, obviously we people will create. But I think it’s clear things have slowed down noticeably, and that means something really has been lost.