FreeAssembly

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this is FreeAssembly, a non-toxic design, programming, and art collective. post your share-alike (CC SA, GPL, BSD, or similar) projects here! collaboration is welcome, and mutual education is too.

in brief, this community is the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. read this article for a solid summary of why having a less toxic collaborative community is important from a technical standpoint in addition to a social one.

some posting guidelines apply in addition to the typical awful.systems stuff:

all types of passion projects and contributions are welcome, including and especially those that aren't programming or engineering in nature
this is an explicitly noncommercial, share-alike space
don't force yourself to do work you don't enjoy, or demand it of others

(logo credit, with modifications by @dgerard@awful.systems)

founded 5 months ago

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Post your IT redundancy tales here (awful.systems)

submitted 3 days ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/freeasm@awful.systems

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I'm in our daily standup and it's turned into exchanging fucked up sysadmin redundancy tales.

One place I worked lost a machine room. They'd fired people so fast that nobody remembered where the boxes were any more.

I knew, but they didn't ask me. Oh well!

The cycle of IT binge and purge is eternal. Post your tales here.

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[–] mii@awful.systems 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Well, our company is trying really hard to make my whole department redundant at the moment.

Some months ago our CEO went to Silicon Valley to "talk to some people", although I have no idea what he really did there. We're also from Europe and don't even sell anything in the Americas, so that trip was really unusual. And ever since he came back, he's been completely AI-brained, and here's some things that happened since then:

an executive order to "integrate AI into all layers of our business"
replacing all our laptops with new Thinkpads because they are apparently better for AI and have a Copilot button
activating Copilot for MS Teams even though it's 100% not GDPR-compliant
dumping tens of thousands of euros into MS Fabrics in the hopes that it will somehow vomit out useful data for marketing; it hasn't vomited out ANYTHING so far

Worst of all, though, our development department consists of two people including me, and the other guy mostly does organizational stuff so I am more or less alone responsible for the entirety of our production-critical code. We are understaffed and I am working on a project for which I was promised two juniors early next year ... now however, I was being asked to evaluate whether we can do that with AI instead, and the hires have been shelved.

And I don't think I'm allowed to submit "lol no".

[–] dashdsrdash@awful.systems 1 points 1 day ago

My semi-serious suggestion:

"That sounds great. I'm going to need to take a course in how to best utilitize AI, and the existing timeline will probably need to change. To really engage at expert level, I will go look at best-practices from experts. You'll sign off on reasonable expenses, right?"

Then book a trip to [interesting place] and get it expensed. Then look for a new job while promising great things in a few months time, maybe a year or so.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

if only there were whistleblower bounties for gross GDPR violation

[–] mii@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I actually flagged this with our DSO, still waiting for the results.

(Somehow MS Teams itself did go through years ago, which also surprised me.)