I fear too many universities are businesses designed to fund seminars; and students graduating are whether an afterthought or an actual negative for them.

It was related to me that, because they want to keep their customers, one can solve any problem at uni - grades, minor victimless crimes, etc - simply by offering to take more courses. The only problem money can't solve is the one where the student has no more money, and it's over quickly after that (saw that one happen).

75% of American drinking water needs treatment to reduce particulate and parasites, and the treatment additive used to render the water safe is produced at a single chemical plant located in an area of severe flood risk -- which means that a flood could take it offline for a day or two, or damage it for weeks.

(Efforts to build a second site recently fell through due to ever-changing regulations. Of course they're stockpiling it in some mountain bunker, I'm sure)

The next Katrina could give us a brain-worms infestation via tap-water.

law suits

But without the suits for law people, how will tailors stay in business?

ballpoint mice

A USB mouse ... For ants?

Systemd was built by a guy who wanted to work at Microsoft with the help of someone berated more than once for an inability to work with others and generate decent kernel code. These are your gods

Alt2600?

"hi. I'd like one quarter-pounder (aka royale) with no cheese, but with Mac sauce on the heel. Thanks."

That's kinda it.

You're technically correct.

That's the best kind of correct.

I honestly prefer Ansible.

I use Ansible all day. For work. Oh, god, is it sad compared to everything else in the space. RedHat had the choice between two in-house products and they chose poorly.

It can do lots of configuration and [set up] and install flatpaks.

We had that 20 years ago, just with a different product. The state of the art is now two generations newer.

wicked as it can be, never really messed with our internal affairs.

When you realize Ukraine is the reason Russia hasn't come for other countries, it'll make more sense.

I get that you're apparently in a nation you classify as developing. The same label can be applied to America in 1200ad or Ukraine/Gaza in 2025 -- in all cases, no ability to prevent colonizers from taking the land if they choose.

Unchecked, we're all at risk. Just, developing countries are at risk of facing a war even more outbalanced than the belligerent invasion of Ukraine or Gaza.

If you keep it small-scale, I guess. But, sooner or later unless you work in one of those finger-paint kits like checkpoint, you're going to need to write some terraform, chef or - fuck no - Ansible. The latter is less code than codes, or perhaps a suicide note, but it's still out there.

Hell; my boss, leading a team in an org so big and old that it's got a dedicated AIX group, separate from its Solaris group, still writes perl for tooling and is only now worried who'll pick it up when she retires. Old IT, new IT, big IT; they all write something.

Speaking as someone who's been in IT from kernel 1.2.x, if you're not coding then you must be running the bucket truck. Do I win?