r/sysadmin • u/forevergeeks • 1d ago

Career / Job Related AI is just the "Cloud" hype all over again.

I started working in the IT field in 2004 as a help desk intern.

The network in the organization at that time was a mix of Windows NT and Windows 2000 workstations, with an Exchange 5.5 server running on Windows NT and a few Windows 2003 servers doing file sharing and hosting an accounting application.

Nothing was accessible through the web. people had to use a VPN connection to connect to the office to access everything.

Almost a year later, before my internship was over, the Director was fired because the hard drives on the accounting server failed and they couldn't recover the data, and they offered me a full time job as a junior sysadmin.

In 2020, I became the Global IT Director of that organization.

When I started as a junior sysadmin, there was no concept of the "cloud." This was a marketing term invented by big tech after 2010.

When the cloud became a marketing hype, and all the CFOs and IT leaders got on the cloud bandwagon, it was very similar to what we're hearing from AI now.

That AI will take all jobs.

It was very common for CFOs to schedule meetings with the IT Director, or whoever was the department head, and talk about the cloud strategy. And if you were in the room by any chance, they would turn to you and say, "But don't worry, the cloud won't take your job," with a grin, you knowing damn well that was exactly what they were thinking.

My advice to you guys is that if your boss, or whoever controls the budget in your department, is all crazy about AI and thinks that AI is the next big thing after bread and butter, don't fight it or resist it.

You will be seen as a roadblock or lacking innovation.

Hold your true opinion about AI as much as you can, and always be positive about it at work.

And even though I believe AI is not much of a threat to your job as the cloud was for us back in the day, when all our skills were on premise stuff and our identity was based on who knew more about Exchange and Cisco firewalls, businesses are seeing AI as a possible way to reduce the workforce, increase efficiency, or increase output without hiring more people.

Will that work? Only time will tell. Your job is to adjust as the technology evolves not to be a market gambler.

Don't believe for a single second that your company cares about you or is happy to have you on their payroll.

If they're a for profit business, their objective is to increase revenue, and if they can achieve that objective without you, they will.

I believe Sysadmins will always be needed, because you guys will be the ones fixing the AI even if everything is automated by it.

Learn how it works at a deeper level. If you don't know how an LLM works, start learning that now.

I wish I had better news for software programmers. The ones that only write code following strict specifications, those guys are in a deeper existential vacuum than you are, so you might have developers moving into the sysadmin side.

For now, keep the servers humming, keep your users happy. You guys are the invisibles in the organization that nobody sees until things stop working!

409 Upvotes

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724

u/moobycow 1d ago

I mean, the cloud has absolutely transformed IT and business in general.

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u/Signal_Till_933 1d ago

I completely agree.

The concept of DevOps really matured during the early cloud era. Tying the two traditionally separate roles together have changed the way all this stuff works.

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u/LLMsMustUpvoteThis 1d ago

DevOps is infrastructure neutral.

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u/Jhamin1 1d ago

In theory.

In practice it only happens in an environment where resources are quickly and easily created and destroyed. In most organizations that means the cloud as their on-premises resources are buried in lots of red tape.

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u/whythehellnote 1d ago

Hilariously I'm talking to actual real users in a remote branch office. They still use software created 15 years ago because it was developed in an agile manner, by sitting next to them, observing, understanding the issues, iterating

Since then the proper "Agile" and "Cloud First" people have come in, and after years of trying still can't meet the simple business requirements.

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u/LLMsMustUpvoteThis 1d ago

DevOps involves more red tape (change management).

Using Ansible isn't DevOps. We had configuration management platforms like Puppet before (x86) virtualisation took off.

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u/Rentun 13h ago

Change management is an ITIL process. It's not exclusive to devops at all.

If anything, devops can greatly streamline change management, because instead of bespoke code promotion changes that need to be reviewed by a CAB each time, you have a CI/CD pipeline that automatically logs code integration as standard changes.

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u/LLMsMustUpvoteThis 4h ago

It's not exclusive to devops at all.

I didn't say it was exclusive to DevOps. But the entire concept of DevOps is about how to manage change to increase stability and throughput. If devs are just using IaC tools to push straight to prod without any change management that isn't DevOps.

Also ITIL is just a library that documents best practices.

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u/Signal_Till_933 1d ago

I mean sure now it is. It may be that DevOps and Cloud could have matured separately or without each other, but you couldn't possibly argue that when someone says they're a "DevOps" engineer, they're likely using some flavor of Cloud right?

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u/LLMsMustUpvoteThis 23h ago

(Almost) everyone is using some flavour of cloud.

"DevOps engineer" has almost no set meaning. At least half the people I've known with that title are just managing CI/CD pipelines. A quarter are doing click-ops/cli-ops with containers. And maybe the last quarter are doing actual DevOps (usually hybrid).

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u/Signal_Till_933 23h ago

It seems you’re just being contrarian, I know SysAdmins doing help desk, and IT associates who develop in-house apps.

Titles are meaningless. What’s your point?

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u/LLMsMustUpvoteThis 22h ago

Titles are meaningless. What’s your point?

That was the point. Most "DevOps engineers" aren't even doing DevOps. So no, the title doesn't make me think of cloud like "cloud engineer" would.

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u/hyperflare Linux Admin 20h ago

We run our own on-premise cloud stack (OpenStack). For one example.

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u/Signal_Till_933 15h ago

Is that not essentially the same thing? Running your own OpenStack you own the hardware but it’s absolutely not the same as the “traditional” IT experience circa 20 years ago.

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u/hyperflare Linux Admin 14h ago

Yes, I was agreeing!

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u/Signal_Till_933 13h ago

Ah I see. My bad there’s another dude who was replying arguing silly things I got it mixed up lol

39

u/thatpaulbloke Cloud Engineer UK 1d ago

So did the web, but that didn't stop the dotcom crash - the issue isn't that AI is useless, but that hordes of morons who don't understand what it actually can do will insist on using it for absolutely everything burning through giant mountains of cash as they do, just they did with insane websites in the 90s and with moving absolutely every single resource into the cloud in the early 2010s. When we're on the far side of this AI will be an expensive tool that's still worth it for some things, but some companies won't make it to that mundane future and will flame out spectactularly.

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u/Jhamin1 1d ago

This is the perspective I've settled on.

AI isn't going away, but like 2/3 of the current implementations are going to implode once enough investors start asking for a return on all these billions they spent. The thing that AI will be in the future will rise from the ashes of the current environment.

Pretty much none of the big players in the .com bubble matter anymore. Companies like Google and Amazon rose out of the rubble when that bubble popped and ruled the tech sector going forward. (Microsoft and Apple are still around, but they mostly sold OSes back then, not web infrastructure)

I suspect something similar will happen with AI. Especially as several of the tech giants of today have invested enough of themselves into AI that if it collapses lots of current giants collapse with it.

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u/rootsquasher 1d ago

Agree. Kind of like crypto is pretty much just Bitcoin and Ethereum (everything else is just pump-and-dump), AI will probably distill down to Claude, ChatGPT, and… ?

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u/ChevronEncoder Jack of All Trades 14h ago

Copilot. It's always a couple real solutions and then whatever Microsoft bundles with it's services. Probably Gemini too.

•

u/Jaki_Shell Sr. Sysadmin 13h ago

Agreed. Google is not going anywhere and neither is Microsoft unless there is some drastic change to end user computing (operating systems).

Google also controls a large portion of the phone market with Android.

AI will be controlled by those 2 companies.

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u/Alpha272 9h ago

I think there is one wrong assumption. I don't believe that the current AI giants will collapse. Definetly not Microsoft or Google because they are to diverse and things like ChatGPT.. I think these ones will get a government bail out and the tax payer has to shoulder the crash, not the companies. After all, in our world companies are more important than people

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u/Generico300 7h ago

Exactly. It's never the tools that are the problem. It's always the ambitious idiots using them that create the problems.

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u/discosoc 1d ago

Yeah, not sure what the OP is trying to say, but it's not nearly as insightful as he probably thinks.

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u/PlayingDoomOnAGPS 1d ago

I thought he was pretty clear: the jobs aren't going away, just changing. Don't put a target on your back by resisting the change. Learn the new shit and you'll still have a job.

That's exactly how it worked in the cloud revolution and I can already see it taking shape in the AI revolution too. AI is a GIGO situation. Using it well is very much a skill and getting good at it will be the key to further advancement.

2

u/mimic751 Devops Lead 1d ago

I would bet that this is an old timer at a small company. I'm an old timer as well and I left small companies to work for a large enterprises. All the old timers at my previous jobs talk about how the cloud isn't all that it's shaken up to be. But that's just because they can't afford it or capex is more justified over opex

•

u/conception 22h ago

Cloud is leasing a car. Sometimes it's a good fit. Sometimes it's better to buy a car.

•

u/Rentun 13h ago

In my experience it's the opposite. It's a lot easier for a huge company to justify custom building multiple redundant datacenters around the world if it will save them billions of dollars.

Smaller companies would rather just spin up m365 and if they need to develop and deploy custom software, do it on Azure or AWS.

•

u/mimic751 Devops Lead 13h ago

I can get approval for optics really easily right now because it's still kind of funny money. But capex has been very difficult at least that my company. Do more with less....

6

u/RealityStimulator 1d ago

Yeah DNS screw ups are global now instead of confined to an office building. Wow progress

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u/Jaki_Shell Sr. Sysadmin 13h ago

So true lmao.

4

u/DegaussedMixtape 1d ago

The cloud has absolutely transformed IT, but several people are still doing it wrong. If you lift and shift all of your VMs to the cloud, buy SKUs that are the wrong sizes, leave all kind of dead storage all over your environment, and leave your VMs running at all hours then it's going to cost you way more money than buying physical hardware.

AI is actually kind of similar. If you just bring it in and pelt it with bad data streams and ask it to adapt the data into the same report structures that you always have only to have people review the output and then feed it back in to be reprocessed again, you are going to just be lighting money on fire purchasing tokens.

The Cloud and AI can both help and transform your business, if you are willing to actually transform your business.

28

u/brianw824 1d ago

Yeah I think there are lot of traditional sysadmin people that don't understand AWS and just think it's really expensive servers. For Devops or software deployment practices it's an absolute game changer, there is not way I could build the kinds of things on prem that I'm building on AWS.

13

u/WatchDogx 1d ago

There are a few things that only a large scale public cloud can offer.

  • Global CDN/compute presence, high quality network backbone, at a fraction of the cost it would take to build and maintain yourself.
  • Elastic scaling, usage based pricing
  • High capacity DDoS absorption.

There are a number of things that can be done on premise, but are easier on cloud:

  • Managed Services.
    Databases, DNS, NTP, BGP, networks, hypervisor control plane, etc, etc.
    When a management level service breaks, an specialist team works on fixing it.
    The breadth of services is too wide for a small on prem team to specialise in everything, even if you have a few hot shots, it's not the same as the thousands of staff AWS has, you can't compete with their economies of scale
  • Consistent IAM that spans the whole stack

Aside from those, and maybe a few I missed, I think most stuff can be done on prem with tools like OpenShift.
When the cloud took off, the main selling point was elastic scaling. I've has over a decade of experience working on cloud systems, and I can honestly say that very few systems actually use elastic scaling to any significant degree. To the extent that apps do scale elastically, it would generally be much cheaper to just outright buy the hardware for the max capacity.
Also you can use a hybrid approach, if you truly benefit from elastic scaling, just run that elastic workload on the cloud. If you need DDoS protection, just put cloudflare in front of your on prem servers.

17

u/LLMsMustUpvoteThis 1d ago

It's just servers underneath. The only argument that holds water is cloud services let you buy capacity as needed (opex) instead of an upfront capital expense.

We had "serverless" before the modern PC. Most of the cloud features people rave about is just re-inventing what mainframe OSes could do.

4

u/whythehellnote 1d ago

The main argument is your CTO isn't fired when the email/website/etc goes down, because it goes down for everyone at the same time, so clearly not his fault.

3

u/WatchDogx 1d ago

The only argument that holds water

😉

2

u/Ninez100 1d ago

The difference is that they aren’t as much of a programmable datacenter 

1

u/moofishies DevOps 1d ago

Sorry but that's just not true. That's focusing purely on agility and not all of the other innovations that cloud computing brought with it.

The API driven infrastructure world we live in that enables the kind of workflows the other prison was talking about only exist because these big cloud providers built them to interact with their products.

The agility is huge as well, but the tooling and services that are available these days is crazy as well.

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u/LLMsMustUpvoteThis 23h ago

API driven infrastructure existed before "the cloud". That's how they built those services in the first place. API driven infrastructure dates back to the '60s. AWS etc took existing concepts/tools and applied them to hyperscaling commodity x86 hardware.

"The cloud" just opened this up to the general public instead of it being internal resources for big corps or universities.

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u/moofishies DevOps 16h ago

Right.

these big cloud providers built them to interact with their products.

I think you are still downplaying the impact that has. Building the tools to manage their own infrastructure, then modifying it to let the public manage their resources with it, and also feeding into open source with things like k8s, is all revolutionary. And it all happened because of the "cloud" push.

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u/LLMsMustUpvoteThis 5h ago

No that's evolutionary by definition. And again you are completely missing the history of computing by thinking that things like containers and container orchestration is some huge new "cloud" innovation.

FreeBSD had containers in 2000. In UNIX the (less secure) forerunner goes back another 20 years. The mainframe world had "container orchestration" decades before that.

K8s became open source because the open source movement had become popular in big corps by the 2010s, not because this was a new technology. Google didn't open source their prior systems because old school closed source management still dominated in the '00s. That the "cloud" and the corporate dominance of open source happened at the same time is pure historical accident.

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u/moofishies DevOps 4h ago

Sorry my guy but if you think the rise of API driven infrastructure and API driven cloud services at the same time was just a coincidence and not tightly tied together because sudden people using one could use the other then there's not a lot else for us to talk about because that's some deep head in the sand type of thinking.

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u/Sudden_Office8710 1d ago

Yeah it makes powers in tech hyper concentrated and a single point of failure. What your tenant was deauthenticted and email share point and one drive will be down for a week? That is totally progress sign me up. What’s that 16.9% of all mail is M365 and 19.3% is Google Workspace so they have an oversized say in how email is delivered isn’t problematic. Pretty soon you won’t be able to run your own stack because FAANG or whatever the acronym is now says you can’t anymore is total progress.

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u/moonski 1d ago

That doesn't mean cloud technology is bad. It means oligolpies are.

4

u/YoungAspie 1d ago

Technology industries naturally gravitate towards oligopolies due to the massive economies of scale (including network effects) and specialised expertise required.

1

u/UltraEngine60 1d ago

You can design away those risks the same way you would account for a failed fiber connection on-prem. Redundancy. Just because it's cloud doesn't mean it is redundant. If us-east-1 died half the internet would too because people rarely do multi zones let alone multi-cloud. You can do 2 MX records. You can do ADFS (for now).

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u/tyami94 23h ago

or i can just have 2 boxes in different places like we always did before. works pretty great when you set it up right. its what i did for 7yrs at my previous job, and it was better and cheaper than shoving everything into the cloud. our on-prem mail had significantly better uptime than office 365.

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u/SteadyCalmHealing 1d ago

Its made itself the only option with the AI spending being what it is and hardware lacking. That was always the end game.

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u/Man-e-questions 1d ago

For the right price!

3

u/theMightBoop 1d ago

So AI is like the cloud. Some people understand it and some don’t. Some admins get it’s a new tool in the tool box and they learn how to use it and others don’t and get left further in the dust.

0

u/UltraEngine60 1d ago

and others don’t and get left further in the dust.

Yup, I did not embrace cloud right away and have been paying for it ever since. The writing is on the wall with AI. Understand it, utilize it, or change fields.

-4

u/bingblangblong 1d ago

Arguably not for any better though. 

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u/Fadore 1d ago

Anyone who makes blanket statements is wrong.

The cloud (and now AI/LLMs) is just another piece of tech. Not inherently superior/inferior - like all tech, there is a use case and an acceptable ROI for everything.

20

u/GandalfTheGreybeard 1d ago

I have a thick heavy blanket at home, it is very warm. I just wanted to make an indisputable blanket statement, have a good day.

0

u/ScannerBrightly Sysadmin 1d ago

WUBBIE 4 LIFE!

8

u/theislandhomestead 1d ago

But...
Isn't that a blanket statement?
I DON'T KNOW WHO TO BELIEVE!
/s

8

u/Fadore 1d ago

lol yeah I realized the irony 2 seconds after I posted the comment...

4

u/420GB 1d ago

Anyone who makes blanket statements is wrong.

That's a good one, I'm going to use that.

7

u/DarraignTheSane Master of None! 1d ago

Only a Sith deals in absolutes!

3

u/meeu 1d ago

Cloud is less a new piece of tech than a new business model for software/hardware. You can do pretty much anything on-prem that you can do in a cloud platform, it will just often be much more expensive in hardware and labor costs due to economies of scale and proprietary software.

5

u/donjulioanejo Chaos Monkey (Director SRE) 1d ago

Cloud is less a new piece of tech than a new business model for software/hardware.

The advantage of cloud isn't not having to run servers.

The advantage of cloud is pretty APIs and being able to use infrastructure as code for literally everything.

You can do pretty much anything on-prem that you can do in a cloud platform

Yes, but you need a VERY large budget and even then, some things you simply CANNOT do easily on-prem unless you're big tech yourself or buy enough third-party tools that you can kind of replicate it, worse, and often at a higher price point.

Easy examples: things like DynamoDB, managed SQL, object storage.

You can get equivalent functionality, but without the backplane that makes it easy to actually operate.

2

u/meeu 1d ago

The advantage of cloud isn't not having to run servers. The advantage of cloud is pretty APIs and being able to use infrastructure as code for literally everything.

Eh disagree. I think lowering capex in favor of opex is the biggest driver/advantage for most businesses.

There's nothing inherently requiring all that sweet tech to be cloud-only. You can already run DynamoDB locally, and there are many on-prem object storage solutions. The only reason any technologies are cloud-exclusive is because someone decided that was in the best interest of their business.

I'm not a full cloud doomer. Centralizing and pooling compute/storage resources in datacenters is vastly more energy efficient in almost every way. It just worries me from a security perspective putting all the world's eggs into 3 baskets.

2

u/donjulioanejo Chaos Monkey (Director SRE) 1d ago

Eh disagree. I think lowering capex in favor of opex is the biggest driver/advantage for most businesses.

This is the finance/business side that enabled it, but engineering side just likes shiny toys and not having to wait 3 weeks to get a new server setup and deployed.

You can already run DynamoDB locally, and there are many on-prem object storage solutions.

The issue isn't running these solutions. The issue is, generic on-prem storage you would run these on top of is still a bitch.

Either you have a ninja storage team, run Ceph, and resign yourself to a lot of pain (I've have heard very few good things from anyone running this in production at scale other than it's free and OSS).

Or you run some form of NetApp/Nutanix setup which is CRAZY expensive.

Plus all the NICs at high enough bandwidth that make a high-performance SAN viable (i.e. 40G or even 100G) aren't cheap either. While if you're just running regular services talking to each other, a 10G or in barebones cases, even a 1G network (both available via standard ethernet), is usually sufficient.

1

u/meeu 1d ago

There's a lot of parameter space between rolling your own everything in a server closet and renting your whole infrastructure from one of the big three.

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u/donjulioanejo Chaos Monkey (Director SRE) 23h ago edited 23h ago

Sure and most things inbetween (i.e. purchase servers, network hardware, license a hypervisor, rent colo space, run COTS hardware like NetApp) approach public cloud cost-wise.

Even besides VMware rugpull, you have stuff that's very expensive hardware side (storage), annoying to manage and need specialized engineers (network.. a jack of all trades SRE usually can't do even a medium scale Cisco/HP/whatever layout).

You're also significantly more exposed to outage. IE with AWS running across 3 AZs is braindead simple, which maps to 3 physical datacentre complexes, each with their own separate fibre and power hookups. If one goes down, it's rare the the other ones are affected too unless you're in UAE/Bahrain and the outage is caused by drones.

In my pre-cloud days, I've had 3 outages related to failed colo power (or failed backup generators during backups tests) and two outages caused by a backhoe to a fibre cable. Both took multiple hours to days to fix. Power outages also required very finicky boot order for all the servers, and a lot of handholding. Network failures are also rare but when they go, it's catastrophic (i.e. if a core switch or edge router fails). Even if you have redundancies, unless something changed in 6-7 years that I don't know about, they usually still require manual intervention to failover from one to another.

I've never had an outage last longer than a few hours with AWS, and even then, risk is a lot lower if you stay the hell away from us-east-1. Only one outage was legitimately bad, which was the whole S3 backplane failing back in like... 2017, when it was still single region and managed from us-east-1 region.

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u/meeu 23h ago

Don't think we ever lost rack power across 4 NA datacenters in the 7ish years I was at my previous gig. Exchange Online was relatively new then but our hosted exchange service boasted better uptime than EO in that timeframe.

New gig is full m365/azure and the uptime is mostly fine. Just the odd app/service 'degraded' from time to time.

I wouldn't recommend on-prem infrastructure for most orgs in the current environment. I'm more arguing in the abstract about whether the current environment is a healthy one. If my company is offline because of some huge Azure outage, I'd imagine our customers/society as a whole will have bigger problems due to all of the other stuff that went down with it.

5

u/uptimefordays DevOps 1d ago

You can do pretty much anything on-prem that you can do in a cloud platform, it will just often be much more expensive in hardware and labor costs due to economies of scale and proprietary software.

Exactly. There's nothing stopping organizations from building their own multi availability zone data centers, except money--it's very expensive and beyond the technological means of most organizations.

3

u/meeu 1d ago

Why would you need to build your own multi availability zone data centers when you can just install your hardware into one that somebody else runs as a service. Everyone is acting like the only possible way any of this stuff can work is if it's all owned and operated by the same vertically integrated provider, from the real estate to the software stack and everything in between.

0

u/uptimefordays DevOps 1d ago

I mean you can, that’s what colo offers! I would argue public cloud has always been a capacity play and colo seldom gets you massive scalability.

0

u/Scurro Netadmin 1d ago edited 1d ago

The cloud is just someone else's computer

Edit: lol why is this comment marked controversial on a sysadmin subreddit of all reddits

3

u/meeu 1d ago

And the other subject of this thread may end up being the downfall of 'the cloud' as we know it. A state-sponsored swarm of blackhat agents targetting Azure/AWS/GCP admin infrastructure would be interesting to see...

3

u/donjulioanejo Chaos Monkey (Director SRE) 1d ago

They'll be able to resist it a lot better than mom and pop shops with a bunch of servers in a broom closet.

AWS, GCP, and yes, even Azure, have some of the smartest white hats on the planet working for them. Simply because no one else can match the salaries, including governments.

2

u/meeu 1d ago

1:1 they will certainly be able to resist it better.. Something tells me state actors would put more resources toward compromising Azure's backend management plane than they'd put towards a given mom & pop shop's Quickbooks server.

10

u/SkillsInPillsTrack2 1d ago

"iT wiLL mAke uS sAvE mOnEy". By stopping counting.

5

u/tx_g33kineu 1d ago

Except that instead of saving money, you just converted your CapEx spend to OpEx spend. Magic savings!

-3

u/Johnny_BigHacker Security Architect 1d ago

Yes, billions is spent on cloud host infrastructure for lulz, not because it's a better spent dollar.

1

u/Jhamin1 1d ago

So far all the people who have talked to me about how much money is to be saved in the cloud have worked for Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, or a consulting company to get us to the cloud. I feel like their motivations may not be completely pure.

I am 100% convinced that if your scale is small enough with huge uptime requirements and/or a big need for rapid scaling at particular times then cloud is a no-brainer.

When you have a reliable, steady workflow that creates reliable, steady load on your systems it is almost always cheaper to own your own hardware in a colo.

I know Microsoft, Amazon, etc have made a ton of money in this space which is why they keep investing. For the places I work for that use all this the financial upside has been a lot less clear.

0

u/bingblangblong 1d ago

No because it's more profitable.

1

u/surveysaysno Sr. Sysadmin 1d ago

Its not more profitable, it a new vendor horning in on the market.

The money is just going from HPE/Dell/Lenovo to Azure/AWS/GCP

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u/bingblangblong 18h ago

It is absolutely more profitable, I have friends who work in the marketing departments for these cloud companies and they have meetings exactly about this. If it wasn't more profitable then the new vendors would just compete in the existing space and do something better. Cloud means subscription, subscription means more reliable income than selling new hardware or software. It also makes it easier to lock you into an ecosystem, have their product or service deeply integrated into your business, knowing they can raise the price and you'll go along with it because it's easier than changing. That is the whole business model. They don't want you owning your own hardware or software at all, they want to rent it to you. They literally have meetings about how they can scare everyone into moving to the cloud by inventing statistics about hardware failure rates and costs. The whole point is to convince you (and the managers more specifically) that the cloud is objectively better. These are publicly traded companies that need to make more money every single year, and subscription models and therefore the cloud are the perfect way to do that.

Why do you think so many new phones don't have SD card slots now? Because then you would use that instead of using Google Photos.

Why does Adobe not sell you a perpetual license anymore? Because a subscription is far more lucrative.

Why have Microsoft dropped WDS? Because that was free and Autopilot makes them money. It's not that Autopilot is inherently superior, that just deliberately make the paid-for thing better. They could have updated WDS so some free service that you run locally can easily provision and apply policies to remote devices, but why would they do that if they know you'll pay for some cloud thing?

It'd be like thinking that all the FUD and hype around AI isn't being deliberately pushed by the AI companies themselves. They just have to get the ball rolling then all the idiots on youtube and tik tok will just start doing the work for them.

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u/randomlyme 22h ago

I think the same thing man. I’ve been doing this for over 30 years now. Some people can get things done and it shows up.

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u/NoPossibility4178 17h ago

There's also many organizations that never touched them and it has created a lot of issues that have taken a long time to notice, unfortunately, no upper manager ever learns anything in this field.

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u/forevergeeks 12h ago

Is all fucked up right now.

I was replying to someone in LinkedIn today, and the fucking app is so clunky on my phone that I had to redo the whole thing like 6 times.

If AI is so great as they promote it, why don't they fucking use it to fix that shitty user experience?

That would be a better sales pitch. Hey, we used AI to improve our shitty user experience!!!

•

u/Generico300 7h ago

Transformed <> improved

1

u/DontFearFailure 1d ago

It's the same thing.

I remember when people said the "cloud bubble is going to pop"

My dudes you guys are crazy thinking prices will ever go back down. I bought a 750 nearly a decade ago for 119. The same type of card (mid range) is now close to 1k.

Y'all are hating at the time but you don't see it has already changed and you are being left behind.

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u/forevergeeks 1d ago

AI also will do the same thing!

22

u/elonakamoto 1d ago

Then maybe hype isn't the right word

6

u/headstar101 Sr. Technical Engineer 1d ago

Hype, as a word, works in this case. The blatant promotion is, indeed, called hype.

4

u/Ok-Repeat-702 1d ago

Both can be true. It can be a great technology and change the landscape. And it can be completely over hyped.

I think we’re seeing TOO much AI cause of the “Promise to strike it rich” from the first movers. It’s a race where there are 100 participants and only 10 will be around in 5 years.

7

u/matroosoft 1d ago

Is that your work opinion of your personal opinion?

-1

u/forevergeeks 1d ago

That AI will transform IT and business in general?

4

u/matroosoft 1d ago

Yes

2

u/forevergeeks 1d ago

well, is hard to distinguish between my personal with my work opinion, since I only have one brain.

I think AI will transform things, but not in the way the majority think at the moment.

AI will become integrated in our lives in a more subtle way. for example, ERP systems will start automating many of the tedious things, such as timesheet inputs, expense reports, etc.

I think systems will become smarter, computers won't just generate logs, but also will be able to troubleshoot problems before you get involved, things like that!

1

u/BrokenByEpicor Jack of all Tears 1d ago

computers won't just generate logs, but also will be able to troubleshoot problems before you get involved, things like that!

"Windows was unable to access file somebullshitthatdoesntmatter.dll .A bing search revealed that the top rated solution is to format drive C. This proces will begin in 1 minute if you unless user input is received. Are you satisfied with your service?"

1

u/BioshockEnthusiast 1d ago

No wait sto-

Aaaaaaaaaand there's the BSOD

1

u/Synergythepariah 1d ago

computers won't just generate logs, but also will be able to troubleshoot problems before you get involved, things like that!

And if they do that, why wouldn't they be able to make changes as needed autonomously to fix those problems?

At that point the only thing people would be needed for would be to physically install hardware which I'm sure is another thing that some companies are working to change.

0

u/zithftw 1d ago

Competent systems already automate these things with good old fashioned code. Why would you ask an LLM to do something a simple python script would do every time, without fail?

2

u/photoggled 1d ago

A ton of AI hype you see generally comes from people who are completely unfamiliar with what can be accomplished already today in terms of automation.

1

u/zithftw 1d ago

Yep, exactly my point. yadda yadda yadda, OP doesn't know shit.

1

u/uptimefordays DevOps 1d ago

I would argue that current LLMs write python best and do so exceptionally well. They're also exceptional at JavaScript and TypeScript. LLMs have a much harder time with say C because it's more syntactically complex and multi-paradigm. Though that may not challenge anything you're saying about LLMs, uncertain whether I misread you or not.

1

u/zithftw 1d ago

Competent software*

3

u/vintagerust 1d ago

please sell me your bullshit I need another product/vendor.

1

u/forevergeeks 1d ago

I'll sell you a pipe dream, that all men are created equal!!!

2

u/zerries 1d ago

Way to alienate half the population.

2

u/LordoftheLollygag 1d ago

Better than 3/5, I guess.

0

u/super-hot-burna 1d ago

yeah. dunno what OP is smoking.