Post #2280815

2026-04-17 17:07 UTC

I am an old school UNIX Systems administrator. My first &quot;technology&quot; job was Radio Shack, then a repair shop, then call center. My first professional UNIX job was as one of Chicagoland&#39;s first Linux admins at an ISP that predominantly ran Solaris boxes/hosts. I&#39;ve had various roles in that neighborhood, both in hosting and enterprise support, working on Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD, HP/UX, and others too rare or niche to mention. When I say that the industry has changed, I&#39;m not talking about &quot;Hey, they moved the chairs around&quot;, but more like &quot;Hey, they decided we don&#39;t need chairs and have replaced the desks with ocelots&quot; kind of different. It&#39;s all spreadsheets and AI now. In short, I hate it. When I started I was building technology and working with open source because I thought the Internet and Linux were going to be great equalizers. I thought what I was doing was going to make things better for humanity. I don&#39;t think it did, and even if that was true, it sure isn&#39;t the case now. I don&#39;t see the value in burning myself out trying to become some prompt engineer. I feel like a blacksmith being told to be an aircraft engineer. Hopefully I&#39;m not alone, but that also doesn&#39;t bode well for any kind of career change I have to make.

Replies (1)

@genericperson@hachyderm.io 2026-04-17 17:16

I also don't think the problem is as insurmountable as the blacksmith/aerospace analogy makes it out to be - I could certainly get up to speed. The problem really becomes what I call a Jurassic Park kind of problem - we've spent a lot of time thinking about if we can do AI, but not enough time asking if we *SHOULD*. What I keep coming back to in all of this is this... Is AI being used to: 1. Build humanity up 2. Enrich our knowledge 3. Save our planet 4. Solve inequality and suffering What I see happening is: 1. People are being replaced, wages are being stolen 2. People are losing their critical reasoning skills. Disinformation and/or hallucinated propaganda are now automated 3. We're increasing energy usage, heat production, and pollution that 4. Is being used to build tools that make rich people richer, automate warfare, destroy art, and generally increase the divides both real and digital. It's an awful situation and it comes down to a lot of ethical considerations. I don't see a lot of options where I can maintain a living and most importantly (I'm in the US) decent health insurance without either putting up with some serious ethical compromises or taking a huge risk and changing careers

Open ##3124741