DevOps, System Engineer, Cloud Engineer, Platform Engineer. Cut through it all, and I still am and have always been a sysadmin.

A lot of people look down on the "Systems Administrator" title. Employees don't like it because it doesn't have "engineer" in the title, and employers hate it because it implies the absolute godhood of the one who wields it.

Us sysadmins hold the keys. Maybe that's why some compare us to janitors. But possessing keys is about where the similarities stop. Janitors clean messes up. Sysadmins know what the messes are for. Some messes we untangle. Others we step around. It comes with the territory. We plug things together that were never designed to be plugged together.

And by what can be by God's will alone - they work. Most of the time. And if it's not working, the sysadmin is honor-bound to come running at any time of the day, to get to work fixing, and devote their entire skillset and attention until - well, until it is reasonably mitigated or a warm handoff arrives.

But we don't shirk away. It's _our_ little digital fiefdom, and we often care deeply about the ones who place their trust in us.

They trust that we're competent, that we're trust-worthy, that we're responsive. And we are. Because when a sysadmin falls short in any of those three areas - the result could be catastrophic.

But when could-be catastrophes give way to survivable cataclysms, it's because we care.

We'll be paranoid so you don't have to. We'll be overwhelmed for you to experience stability. We don't ask permission. We don't ask forgiveness.

We live or die by our own awful machinations.

And on bad days you will be glad to have a good sysadmin.

I'll be that person. I'll show up. I'll stick around.

I'm a sysadmin. I'm here to help.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47607210

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Interesting that they've opted to double down on the term "entity" in at least a few places here.

I guess that's an usefully vague term, but definitely seems intentionally selected vs "assistant" or "model'. Likely meant to be neutral, but it does imply (or at least leave room for) a degree of agency/cohesiveness/individuation that the other terms lacked.

It sounds more fair to pay people according to how much and how hard they work, but economically it tends not to work out.

Holmes core thing though is that he has an almost ADHD-esque craving for novelty and tolerance for risk taking. He also can't stand not actively working on things, and when he's not working is when he's depressed. He doesn't seem to know how to actually feel good, but he knows how to be useful, thus his penchant for productivity boosters like cocaine.

He's a great character, but I wouldn't over pathologize him according to today's understanding of mental health. Doyle was a physician and gave Holmes various traits similar to what he had seen in his patients.

I'm actually wondering if the program will make a big dent though. One issue with formal childcare arrangements is that the hours tend to not be flexible. Parents who have to work til 6 some nights, or who have nontraditional work schedules in general may not be better served by the state's option.

I looked it up and apparently we've had 3 or 4 different reactors on campus over the years, first one in 1950: https://nrp.ne.ncsu.edu/about/history/

I'd wager that even most NC State students don't know that it's there though.

But ultimately it all comes down to the game quality and how buggy it is. If people can't submit their answer or reconnect, that wears down support. But people tolerate jackbox's absolutely terrible system because the games are great.

He almost never uses search or menus for anything. Instead he has a bunch of home screens that he customized with quick links. Like he has one for each of his children with a one shortcut to text them, one to call, one to send a Facebook message, one link to their Facebook profile, and a note with special dates (birthdays, anniversaries) for each so he can remember to call them then. He's got another home page he has for stuff related to the Marines, websites and meme pages, etc.

He's very meticulous with getting everything exactly how he wants it, and is so proud to show it off. Sometimes he still needs help (last time I was there he asked me to help him set "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as his ring tone), but I'm honestly really impressed with how well he's adapted.

Meanwhile another older family member handed me their phone to fix, and it's completely unusable from malware that's highjacking everything they try to click, then they try to install something else to fix it themselves and somehow add even more malware. Took me like half an hour to track everything down and disable it so it was usable again, couldn't convince him to factory reset it. We had a nice long chat about installing things after that. I can't imagine he used anything other than the playstore, but man, it was wild.

Being able to ask it stupid questions and edge cases is also something I like with LLMs, like I would propose a design for something (ex: a usb battery pack w/ lifepo4 batts that could charge my phone and be charged by solar at the same time), it would say what it didn't like about my design, counter with its own, then I would try to change aspects of their design to see "what would happen if .." and it would explain why it chose a particular component or design choice and what my change would do and the trade-offs, risks, etc other paths to building it with that, etc. Those types of interactions are probably the best for me actually understanding things, helps me understand limitations and test my assumptions interactively.

I think the problem was all of the getting started guides didn't really solve problems I cared about, they're just like "see, a light! isn't that neat?" and then I get bored and impatient and don't internalize anything. The textbooks had theory but so much of it I would forget most of it before I could use it and actually learn. Then when I tried to build something actually interesting to me, I didn't actually understand the fundamentals, it always fails, Google doesn't help me find out why because it could be a million things and no human in my life understands this stuff either, so I would just go back to software.

It could be LLMs are at least possibly better for certain people to learn certain things in certain situations.

LLMs may end up being both educationally valuable in certain contexts for certain users, and totally unsuitable for developing brains. I would err towards caution for young minds especially.

- Learning how to solder

- Learning how to use a multimeter

- Learning to build basic circuits on breadboxes

- learning about solar panels, mppt, battery management system, and different variations of li-on batteries

- learning about LoRa band / meshtastic / how to build my own antenna

And every single one of these things I've learned I've also applied practically to experiment and learn more. I'm doing things with my brain that I couldn't do before, and it's great. When something doesn't work like I thought it would, AI helps me understand where I may have went wrong, I ask it a ton of questions, and I try again until I understand how it works and how to prove it.

You could say you can learn all of this from YouTube, but I can't stand watching videos. I have a massive textbook about electronics, but it doesn't help me break down different paths to what I actually want to do.

And to be blunt: I like making mistakes and breaking things to learn. That strategy works great for software (not in prod obviously...), but now I can do it reasonably effectively for cheap electronics too.