artair
@artair@pawb.social
I’m just a werebear tech with his paws on the ground and his head in the stars.
- Comment on Intel's comeback appears on track — CEO Gelsinger says 18A process node performance is 'a little bit ahead' of TSMC's N2, but Intel's process arrives a year earlier than TSMC's 6 months ago:
Henhouse is fine, secure says local fox.
- Comment on Tumblr's 'fediverse' integration is still being worked on, says owner and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg | TechCrunch 6 months ago:
Having tried it, I’m hoping I can forget Bluesky.
- Comment on Flipboard stops tweeting, launches new podcast about decentralized social apps | TechCrunch 7 months ago:
Not only do they still exist, but they also have a Mastodon presence.
Example: @topintech@flipboard.social
- Comment on [deleted] 9 months ago:
You’re not the hero we deserve, but you’re the hero we need.
[Salutes in English Major.]
- Comment on How social media killed the protest — For a certain kind of activist, politics has been reduced to pure performance 9 months ago:
I was able to bypass the paywall using Google Search’s “cached” view of the page.
webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_Uu…
As for the content, although I agree with some of the tentpoles to this article, the rest seems a bit saggy. It’s more of an op-ed piece without much more than subjective opinions. If the Financial Times wants to paywall this kind of stuff, they’d better make it worth the price. (This definitely wasn’t.)
- Comment on When Twitter Died, So Did Independent Journalism 9 months ago:
If this is the quality of “independent journalism” we can expect on Twitter/X/TwiX, then let it burn to the ground. Clickbait isn’t journalism.
- Comment on IT needs more brains, so why is it so bad at getting them? 9 months ago:
Speaking from years of experience in IT (nearly thirty of them), I can give my own unscientific opinion: because people put too much faith in certifications, and refuse to do any on-the-job training. You can have five of the six skills listed in a job ad, but if you don’t have that all-important sixth one, your application will get round-filed. It doesn’t matter if it would be a simple matter to train a tech on that one thing. Businesses want phoenixes for chicken scratch.
Certifications are a boondoggle, and have been for years. The tests have been rigged in such a way that candidates need to take them again and again to pass, and they get charged a fee for each attempt. The test itself is a revenue source for companies. The “prestige” those certifications bring for the companies that front them is based on their difficulty, not on their relevance or fairness.
I once attended a Microsoft certification “boot camp.” We all worked our asses off, studied the material, and most of us passed at least one test. Nobody passed all three exams except for one person. I had noticed that person using test prep software with a logo that didn’t match the stuff we’d been given. It looked like an orange DNA helix.
After the last test, a bunch of us milled around outside the building, and I asked the guy who passed how he made it through. He ran for his truck so fast that there was practically a dust cloud behind him. That’s when I decided to look up that logo on Google.
He’d been using a “brain dump” service. For those unaware of what a “brain dump” is, it’s when a third-party company sends a bunch of people to intentionally fail the exams over and over. During each attempt, those people memorize the test questions. Then the company has their plants aggregate all the possible questions in an exam pool and the correct answers to them. In effect, it’s a copy of the whole test.
Brain dumps are extremely common in IT. When I worked at VMware, many of our own employees used them to pass certification exams that were mandatory for continued employment. Those people had been doing their jobs for years. They just needed a bogus piece of virtual paper to prove it to our executive leadership. It was all about appearances.
Why is tech struggling for qualified workers?
Because it refuses to acknowledge them.
- Comment on Under-appreciated 10 months ago:
There’s a feline race in the Star Trek universe called the Caitians. Their appearance varies WIDELY depending on whether they’re live-action or animated.