theroff
@theroff@aussie.zone
- Comment on ANU asks staff to give up agreed pay rise to help reach $250m cost cuts 4 weeks ago:
Even with a 10% pay cut the VC will be remunerated over $1,000,000 per year, even despite the university’s poor financial performance.
Having worked at a university the waste is in plain sight. Vendor lock-in, consulting fees (especially with the Big 4), high executive pay, and compartmentalisation between professional and academic staff are high on the list.
In my area (different university) there was a constant stream of poor decision making. Moving to the cloud? Let’s hire a consultant to tell us what to do, and then do it in the worst possible way, instead of using internal capabilities! I suggested that the contract include provisions for “best practice” as listed by the vendor (HashiCorp) but this was ignored. The consultant gave us spaghetti Terraform code and an inefficient, high cost subscription layout.
The professional and academic staff barely talk in my experience. Academics do their own thing as much as possible. Professional staff throw solutions over the wall, mostly because of the existence of the wall in the first place.
The university was looking at using “crotch sensors” (motion sensors under the desk) to measure desk utilisation, spending money on “smart” ambient sound solutions etc. in the executive building, and other high cost solutions looking for a problem, at the same time as freezing staff and threatening redundancies. I was denied training but offered access to an LLM subscription (GitHub CoPilot) along with other IT staff, because AI is the going buzzword being parroted by the executives.
The higher education sector seriously needs an external review… and a proverbial kick up the bum.
- Comment on Australia's internet watchdog says she received "death threats" and that her children were doxxed after she was targeted by Elon Musk for attempting to regulate Xitter 2 months ago:
Yeah 100% agree. I put in a submission to the joint select committee on social media a while back saying as much. The concept has Meta, X, Microsoft, Google and the big players in mind. Even if it is just the big players it’ll have unintended consequences, privacy being the main one. Digital ID providers, public or private, not using standards and only supporting Google Play and Apple App Store is a big issue.
I personally don’t care about the concept of the eSafety Commissioner that much. I think the idea of a government body that looks at cyberbullying cases is possibly misguided (way too high up) but I’m not overly concerned with that aspect. Julie Inman Grant is ex-Microsoft and ex-Adobe, two organisations which are pretty hostile to users’ rights. She is constantly requesting more powers to solve an unsolvable problem. There are massive problems with X and Meta, but some of the solutions she puts forward are just draconian like mandatory ID and client-side scanning. Their strategy page is a thinly veiled pro-big tech piece talking about concerns about potential lack of authority in decentralised computing.
Yeah, eKaren is really not far off the mark as far as name calling goes.
- Comment on Australia's internet watchdog says she received "death threats" and that her children were doxxed after she was targeted by Elon Musk for attempting to regulate Xitter 2 months ago:
On one hand, the hate that’s being directed to the e-Safety commish is disgraceful.
On the other hand she is effectively proposing an internet licence for all Australians to be able to interact online via mandatory age verification. It applies to all social media sites but the definition of social media is so vague it basically just says a digital service which can be used to communicate with other people. She is deserving of our scrutiny.
- Comment on Should I keep shared or separate k8s clusters? 2 months ago:
At work we use separate clusters for various things. We built an Ansible collection to manage the lot so it’s not too much overhead.
For home use I skipped K8s and went to rootless Quadlet manifests. Each quadlet is in a separate non-root user with lingering enabled to reduce exposure from a container breakout.
- Comment on Is ansible worth learning to automate setting up servers? 6 months ago:
Bash scripts will only get you so far and I can wholly recommend Ansible for automation.
Basically the main advantage of Ansible is that its builtin tasks are “idempotent” which means you can re-run them and end up with the same result. Of course it is possible to do the same with bash scripts, but you may require more checks in place.
The other advantage of Ansible is that there are hundreds of modules for configuring a lot of different things on your system(s) and most are clear and easy to understand.
- Comment on what will be my next server operating system (Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, NixOS), your experience and opinion 6 months ago:
Yeah, too frequent and too buggy. It got annoying having to do upgrades every six months and have to deal with all the new bugs that came with it.
Basically give me Debian-style biannual releases or Arch-style rolling releases.
- Comment on what will be my next server operating system (Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, NixOS), your experience and opinion 6 months ago:
I use Debian at home on my homeserver and a mix of Debian and Arch for my workstations. Most of my stuff is managed with Ansible to make rebuilding easier and most workloads in podman containers.
Personally I don’t overthink the distro thing. I recently started using Arch and quite like it. I’ve noticed packages that are available in Debian but not Arch and vice-versa. Debian Stable is nice because it’s just, well, stable.
Fedora has an annoying release cadence IMO. I have experienced desktop bugs in the early GA releases before which put me off. If I wanted instability I would sooner go with Arch (and I am yet to have many issues with Arch yet).
If I were to go with a BSD for a home server it would probably be OpenBSD or FreeBSD. OpenBSD has vmm and a bunch of tooling around it, and FreeBSD has bhyve and jails. I haven’t taken the plunge because Linux works and it’s what I know.
These days I hear about people using proxmox on their homeserver with LXC containers and/or VMs.
- Comment on Forrest’s Facebook fight dropped by Australian prosecutors 6 months ago:
Trying to talk to a human at the big tech companies is nigh impossible these days. It’s actually quite concerning how unaccountable they have become. If a billionaire can’t do it, what chance do us commoners have?
- Comment on US President Joe Biden has said that he is considering a request from Australia to drop the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange 7 months ago:
We really didn’t say the same thing
- Comment on US President Joe Biden has said that he is considering a request from Australia to drop the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange 7 months ago:
It’s more complicated than that. He offered to go to Sweden to face charges on the proviso that he was guaranteed to not be extradited to the United States. Sweden refused, the charges expired and the US extradition process started in the UK.
- Comment on Draining entire superannuation savings wouldn’t cover most young couples’ home deposits, research finds 7 months ago:
Where do you suggest people invest their long term money to avoid the scourge of coke bros? If one is to believe the stereotypes, real estate and non-Super investments seem just as likely to face the same problems.
- Comment on Draining entire superannuation savings wouldn’t cover most young couples’ home deposits, research finds 7 months ago:
Cherry picking an article seems to suggest the US has similar problems www.investmentzen.com/blog/average-401k-return
Australia’s superannuation has improved over time. For example, the MySuper reforns led to consolidation and an exodus of underperforming funds.
A quick search on some of the biggest super funds in Aus shows returns of > 9% in a more equivalent, potentially volatile “high growth” fund.
There are funds that offer lower cost index-tracking products if that’s your thing.
The biggest problem, IMO, is financial literacy which needs to play a bigger role in education.
- Comment on Draining entire superannuation savings wouldn’t cover most young couples’ home deposits, research finds 7 months ago:
Scam a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation*
Can you elaborate on super being its own scam?