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I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again. “…spending half of the planet’s engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn’t worked out how to test database backups regularly.”

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Jason Heiss

I thought it was funny that he kinda ignored the zero-trust option in the poll he referred to, and had a footnote about not knowing what it was. That was the one option in the poll that actual security people might care about!

(It just means using authentication within your environment. E.g. your database doesn't just trust your web frontend, the frontend has to actually authenticate to the database. And employees have to authenticate to internal tools, they aren't trusted just because they're on the corporate network or a corporate computer.)

Matt G Edited

I recently started a state government job. Everything is zero trust now. I don't think anybody even knows what it means, but they neeeed it.

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Vena M

such a delight to read informed opinions that align so closely to my uninformed ones

Margaret M.

My thoughts exactly!

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enbeecee

Just wait. Any day now, we'll see food labeled "Now with AI!"

All these companies with panicked FOMO, desperately shoehorning AI into irrelevant functions and features.

Somebody please stop this hamster wheel and give it back to the hamsters.

Nate G

This IS hilarious as satire for The Onion.

Yes the AI hyped tech bros have become a depressing cliché — that definitely could use some tempering — However, the grumpy sysadmin using a few Straw Man and blatant Red Herring arguments is equally cliché.

Of course testing DB Backups is important.

James Landis

Which of his points do you consider to be Red Herrings?

Robb Monn

1. This is not a grumpy sysadmin. He is a principle software engineer and data scientist with creds and bragging rights.
2. I was a grumpy sysadmin for 30 years and have actually seen large firms collapse because of shit tech policy.
3. So far as I can see pretty much everything Nikhil writes here is not just true but very, very true.
4. Blythe minimization of concern is exactly what makes sysadmins grumpy.

Robb Monn

I mean:

But most companies can't do this, because they are operationally and culturally crippled. The median stay for an engineer will be something between one to two years, so the organization suffers from institutional retrograde amnesia. Every so often, some dickhead says something like "Maybe we should revoke the engineering team's remote work privile - whoa, wait, why did all the best engineers leave?". Whenever there is a ransomware attack, it is revealed with clockwork precision that no one has tested the backups for six months and half the legacy systems cannot be resuscitated - something that I have personally seen twice in four fucking years. Do you know how insane that is?

and

That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can't actually deliver is highly transferable.

...these two pull quotes alone establish the speaker as someone who gets it.

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