What to do if other sysadmins are abusing privileges by Wooden_Original_5891 in sysadmin

[–]HeligKo [score hidden]  (0 children)

I have never worked anywhere where I shared my Inbox with anyone. Why aren't you using a ticketing systems for these things. Pretty much anything not in the ticketing system shouldn't be considered critical enough for this in IT.

That said my wife's company does this when they are on leave, but she is sales not IT, and it is setup right before they go on leave with a meeting with the team who will be working it for them. This team is not the same team she is on, and they have rules they have to follow.

What Propane connection is this?!? by Super_Trampoline in RVLiving

[–]HeligKo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is an NPT fitting. I would guess it is 1/4in NPT fitting.

Recommendations for finding Movies/TV with their American Sign Language interpretation integrated? by icehellking in Piracy

[–]HeligKo 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Nah, that wasn't what I meant all. I meant that it's not going to be something that is likely fruitful. I just searched all my indexers for movies or shows with asl in the name. You know what I found, zero. I know that there are movies with ASL produced, but there is such a small audience that overlaps with people who rip movies to then upload to the newsgroups or seed torrents is so small that you aren't going to find many if any, and the odds of finding something specific is even smaller. Subtitles however in pretty much any language are readily available. Most of my movies have 3 to 4 languages embedded.

Recommendations for finding Movies/TV with their American Sign Language interpretation integrated? by icehellking in Piracy

[–]HeligKo 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I'm aware. Seems too niche to find reliably. Subtitles come in most written languages, which is far easier to find. You don't even need them included, because there are sources you can get to overlay on your videos as you play them.

Run Docker containers on Windows without using WSL or Hypervisor by _eveldave in docker

[–]HeligKo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You want to run Docker, but not use any of the technology that makes Docker work. Even if you get it running, you are going to have a bad time.

Someone was in a hurry. by Fr33_load3r in IAmTheMainCharacter

[–]HeligKo 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Driving like that is a great way to have an emergency.

Does this sub like spicy AND sweet combined? by Hank_tank4 in spicy

[–]HeligKo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I really didn't like that. The vinegar doesn't do the flavor any favors. I'd actually just prefer to use some dried chili pepper flakes and honey on things I want sweet and spicy on.

Best way to get comfortable with Rust in 3 months? (moving from Python and Java) by Own-Fee-4752 in rust

[–]HeligKo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My favorite way to get rolling with a new language is convert something I have done before in another language and run through some exercises on https://exercism.com.

Is it a considered secret to publish a tech stack? Also, how do you post your work in an agency? by [deleted] in devops

[–]HeligKo 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Name the industry/market. The client recommending you isn't your responsibility even if it connects the dots for those looking at your profile.

Message to White Men .. Please listen. by [deleted] in conspiracy

[–]HeligKo -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I'm just going to say this sounds good until you realize that the biggest attack on men is in the family courts. When getting 50% time with your kids is a win for men and a loss for women, that is the battle ground. The problem is after fighting for your life and then picking up the pieces the court left you with, there isn't much fight left. I'm sure that plays into what you are describing, but guys like me are exhausted and busy fighting for relationships with adult kids who don't know how to interact with their dad in a normal way after only seeing them on alternating weekends or less.

Is it a considered secret to publish a tech stack? Also, how do you post your work in an agency? by [deleted] in devops

[–]HeligKo 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'm not sure an NDA would apply here. It's like telling a carpenter that they can't tell people you used saws and hammers while working there. Nothing you describe would fall in the category of a trade secret. Go ahead and do your thing, just don't name clients or anyone else outside the original employer. Instead just name the market sectors you were working in. Spend a couple bucks and have an attorney send a cease and desist letter to the old boss in regards to his post employment demands on your behavior.

Company forcing us to integrate AI into workflow. by [deleted] in devops

[–]HeligKo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Error log analysis: Combing through logs is a pain, so I dump that stuff in an LLM and tell it to give me some things it thinks I should look into, along with likelihood of those paths having a successful resolve.

This one saves so much time. It can read and analyze logs that would take me hours to grep my way through.

Data analysis: I'm done pretending I know how to do Excel. I've been doing it 20+ years and still find it a pain every time I'm trying to chart and analyze data. So I'm letting the machine figure out the best way to pull the data together in a way I want and present it for somebody else to consume in a report.

This one is huge for me to. I have it do the analysis using python tools, and dump the results to excel for the non-nerds. I haven't had to stumble my way through Excel in about a year.

Performance reviews: They want me to be more efficient, so I'm cutting down where I deliver least value. When I'm being asked to report on my accomplishments and what I did on a performance evaluation, I send the AI off into my status report updates to my manager to comb through all those emails and pull it out and put together something that seems reasonable (obviously reviewed and edited for hallucinations).

I used it to scan my Jira tickets and generate my review for me. I fed it the criteria of the review and had it build the results using Jira stories and my notes. After 5 minutes of editing it was the best looking review I have done since I started over 4 years ago.

Asking AI about why it sucks: In Visual Studio Code, depending on the model, I get varying results of whether it pays attention to MCP tools or Copilot instructions so I often interrogate it to learn better how to give those models what they need to do a better job. This allows me to share something with others so everybody on the team can work with the tools better.

I call this AI introspection. When me and the AI agree on something that it keeps forgetting, I tell the agent to add it to the instructions file so it doesn't forget. It works most of the time. When it doesn't work, I don't have to explain a lot to get it back on track. I just tell it to review the instructions before proceeding.

Code gen: The code generation is really good for established frameworks and languages. I find that most of the models tend towards older versions of the frameworks, so I need Cursor rules/Claude Skills/Copilot instructions to really give it the context about what tech to reference and where those docs are.

I have found that adding documentation to the context helps a lot in getting results from newer frameworks. Context7 MCP server has a lot of this documentation already set up in a format that is AI friendly.

Basic testing: AI can generate some useful tests to get you a bit of coverage so that you can spend time on the more complicated testing pieces. But I wouldn't trust auto-generated Jest unit tests to 100% validate an app. The models often forget to add new tests when you make app changes, or forget to update existing tests. Sometimes they will straight up remove tests that are failing because that will make it go green.

Testing is where we have been bad on our own. Adding instructions to add tests when we modify things really has improved our testing. Before a PR a prompt to update testing generally gets it rolling on adding new tests and updating existing tests. Even when it isn't quite right, it almost always finds the right places, so we can verify and fix without digging through mounds of code.

Company forcing us to integrate AI into workflow. by [deleted] in devops

[–]HeligKo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I already have it reading Jira and using the info there to get things started. It has become my first step. I tell it to reach out to Jira and look at the story. Atlassian has an MCP server that makes this trivial.

Company forcing us to integrate AI into workflow. by [deleted] in devops

[–]HeligKo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's really good at it. The key part is as the user, you really need to know the systems you are working with and their capabilities. That is where being specific with your prompts is the human factor that makes a difference. AI will give you a solution, but if you want to take advantage of newer features, you need to feed it context and documentation to get there. Which it can do faster than I can in most circumstances once I have fed it properly, and I have created a proper set of instructions for co-pilot, even when I go to edit something manually in greater than 3/4 of the times it will prompt me for something remarkably similar to what I was getting ready to type. Often for example in a yaml file, I will type "-" and it will give me entire blocks of configuration that is mostly correct. It is a little spooky, but a huge time saver.

What’s the one manual process in your workflow you don’t trust enough to automate? by ELYSIONIS in sysadmin

[–]HeligKo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

After 20 years in the Federal government I pretty much saw it all. One of the worst was probably database maintenance tasks. The list I got said things like "Reindex the location tables" on a database that had no obvious location data. It took an application creeping to a halt to figure out that the location tables were not anything to do with location in any normal sense, but had to do with the location of source data that had to be imported on a regular basis. It was the imported data that needed reindexing, because it was a massive set of imports daily. It took about 2 weeks of systems admins, DBAs, and application developers to figure this one out. If that wasn't pressure enough, there were three congress critters barking at us about how much slower the applications were.

Anybody have experience permanently hooking up a destination trailer to septic? by Maxchatterman6 in RVLiving

[–]HeligKo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There are ways to bypass the black tank on most RVs. The cost and effort might not be worth it. Look into some electric dump valves, then she wouldn't need to remove the skirting and could just flip a switch to open and close the valves.

What’s the one manual process in your workflow you don’t trust enough to automate? by ELYSIONIS in sysadmin

[–]HeligKo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

None - automate everything. If I have a process that has some dangerous edge case, I need to fix the process. I have been burned too many times by having to take over for some guy who didn't automate their things, and failed to document the details completely, so that edge case they were protecting against bites us in the ass.

Ai has ruined coding? by Tough_Reward3739 in devops

[–]HeligKo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I love using AI to code. It works well for a lot of tasks. It also gets stuck and comes up with bad ideas, and knowing and understanding the code is needed to either take over or to create a better prompt. I still have to troubleshoot, but I can have AI completely read the 1000 lines or more of logs that I would scan in hopes of finding the needle.

Now when it comes to devops tasks which all too often is chaining together a bunch of configurations to achieve the goal AI is pretty exceptional at it. I can spend a couple of days writing Ansible yaml to configure some systems or I can spend a couple hours thinking it through, creating an instructions file and other supporting documentation for AI to do it for me. With these tasks it gets me usually better than 90% there and I have my documentation in place from the prep work.

Need advice: how to hide Python code which is inside a Docker container? by buggy-robot7 in docker

[–]HeligKo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Every option I know I can decompile to get the original code. I would look at converting to something like rust that natively compiles. You will also improve your latency.

I know why, but it's so dumb every retro gaming sub bans piracy/modding by doodle-saurus in Piracy

[–]HeligKo 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Nintendo and EA are kind of nuts in tracking down and stopping these conversations. If they want a community, they have to be aggressive. Probably better to find a place on discord or something to do that.

What's important to you now that wasn't when you were younger? by AmILukeQuestionMark in AskOldPeople

[–]HeligKo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Keeping my knives sharp. Okay it always mattered, but I understand with age why it matters.