My ghost will haunt GoG’s corporate offices until they relent and transfer my games to the person who’s name I keep creepily spelling with frost on their mirrors & windows.

All the above. Full gaming desktop for editing video, 3D modeling, and hardcore gaming. Laptop for travel needs, home lab administration, and side business use. Steam deck for portable/casual gaming.

First few months in IT? Welcome to hell…

I’m kidding (mostly), I’m in IT also and if you’re in for even a few years, you’ll start to build a collection of horror stories like this one. We’ve all seen things you wouldn’t believe.

So you need to have full buy-in from the owners. If you’re able to talk directly to them, then it sounds like this isn’t a huge company. If you clearly explain in a professional way to the owners the situation with documentation and they don’t fully support you, leave the company asap.

As somebody who has been involved in multiple ransomware recoveries, trust me…you don’t ever want to deal with a rogue unsecured machine on the network. And owners that don’t care or take that risk seriously are absolute fools and this will only be the tip of the iceberg of stupidity.

That computer is a ticking time bomb. Please for the love of God tell me that your boss doesn’t have local admin rights on his system.

If the only thing your boss uses that system for is to connect to a web app to manage inventory, why is he mad about switching from windows 7? Does he just like how windows 7 looks visually?

I guess it doesn’t really matter. Also, windows 10 isn’t a long term solution because it also goes EoL next year in October, so you’ll be in this same position in less than 2 years.

You can either go to Windows 11, or if you wanna be a little wild, install a Linux distro like Mint on there and theme it like Windows 7. You solve the security problem and he gets to pretend he’s still in the early 2010’s.

Honestly though, start looking for another job if the owners don’t support you 100%. IT is already a stressful and intense enough job, you don’t need stubborn idiots like your boss to add flavor.

Tankies get spankies.

I hope to God that RustDesk doesn’t get corrupted or enshitified because I absolutely love it.

Been using it for remote assistance at my workplace for about a year now and it’s been almost flawless. By far the most responsive and easy to use remote access solution I’ve used, (and I’ve used a lot.)

I use it with my family across the country to do remote support for their family computer too. It is small, lightweight, fast, handles multiple screens like a charm, and I don’t think I’ve ever had connection issues, even when on really slow network connections.

And to add to this, if you want another overlay network solution like Tailscale that is fully Open source, Netbird is something to check out.

Lawrence Systems has some vids on their product, fully self-hostable 1st party control plane and Foss clients. Newer, smaller, not as well supported as Tailscale, but solid enough for homelabs and small biz solutions from what I’ve seen/read.

I’ve messed with both and each has their own strengths. Both solutions are really awesome though. Unless you need really high network performance, I feel like overlay networks are the way to go. Soooo much easier to setup and maintain than traditional ipsec tunnels or even OpenVPN firewall configs and manual routes.

I was gunna say, I thought this was already canon.

That only works if you have managers that give a rip about helping you grow and compensating you well for that growth, which sadly, most people don’t have.

In my experience, staying at the same place and taking on more “growth opportunities” was just an excuse for management to throw more on my plate without compensation increases. Sure I would get a little raise sometimes, but it was always pissy amounts of money, even when I asked for more.

I started jumping jobs aggressively and magically my pay exploded upwards. I now have basically zero loyalty to the companies I work for, just like they have for me. Contract work is even better for this, but the downside is usually you have bad or zero benefits.

I know some folks on the SysAdmin discord mentioned it wasn’t working for them anymore. It also stopped working for me about 2 months ago. (I work in IT and set to up new computers fairly often)

But looking online real quick, several sources including Tom’s Hardware claim it still works. So I’m not sure what’s going on with it. Maybe your milage may vary?

I’m pretty sure they have removed this recently.

It’s over if you decide it’s over. I’ve known people in their late 20’s who have given up on all that already. And I’ve known folks well into their 70’s who are happily married/dating, traveling, doing hobbies, healthy, etc.

If you give up on life, then of course you won’t get anything out of it. I hate how people act like getting older just means you become boring, weak, ugly, broken down, slow, etc.

If your life is over when you turn 50, it’s because you chose to let it be over.

The concern is for value though. Like, if I’m going to use a massive amount of power and water to compute, I should be considering value to humanity as a whole.

AI is being sold as that, but so far, it’s actually harming instead of helping. Supercomputing was helping pretty much right away.

I suppose you could argue that if general supercomputing was invented now, it would be used for just as superficial uses. Maybe the context of personal computing, the internet, and corpo interests shape that.

The difference is that supercomputers by and large actually help humanity. They do things like help predict severe weather, help us understand mathematical problems, understand physics, develop new drug treatments, etc.

They are also primarily owned and funded by universities, scientific institutions, and public funding.

The modern push for ubiquitous corpo cloud platforms, SaaS, and AI training has resulted in massive pollution and environmental damage. For what? Mostly to generate massive profits for a small number of mega-corps, high level shareholders and ultra wealthy individuals, devalue and layoff workers, collect insane amounts of data to aid in mass surveillance and targeted advertising, and enshitify as much of the modern web as possible.

All AI research should be open source, federated, and accountable to the public. It should also be handled mostly by educational institutions, not for-profit companies. There should be no part of it that is allowed to be closed source or proprietary. No government should honor any copyright claims or cyber law protecting companies’ rights to not have their software hacked, decompiled, and code spread across the web for all to see and use as they see fit.

Let’s use this as a catalyst to support them and similar projects. I’ll be donating a chunk of money to them and also to the Wikimedia foundation and other related FOSS projects.

If you are able to donate, please do! If we all do our small part, we can make a big difference.

When writing on paper, I will sometimes think, “Ctrl + Z” to undo an errant pen stroke lol.

100% true. Capitalist firms will always be motivated to get the most people possible, to pay as much as possible, for as little as possible.

Not FOSS? Byeee!

Yeah, at least with something like the fake moon landing conspiracy, there is a clear motive for it. Like the USA and USSR both had very strong propaganda machines and really strong incentives for hitting the next space race milestone.

The tech was barely advanced enough to perform the functions necessary to complete the mission, everything was pushed to its absolute limits to successfully perform.

But the flat earth thing has none of that. The tech necessary to demonstrate the curvature of the earth existed thousands of years ago and in fact was believed pretty widely by even ancient peoples.

There exists no motive, no incentives, and requires believing that basically all of known physics is completely wrong despite thousands of obvious counter-examples.

Just stupid.

I run LMDE 6 on my Thinkpad. Takes a bit of initial TLC to get tuned, but it’s rock stable.

Cinnamon is a really stable DE, I’ve had almost zero issues ever with it. It’s a little plain, but not ugly, and you can add themes if you really want to pretty it up.

God bless iFixit, and God damn Samsung.