cobysev

When I became a sysadmin 24 years ago, I figured the general public was still adapting to the rapid overnight advancements and integration into the tech industry. I assumed that as people figured out how to use software and computer technology in their daily lives, help desk support would practically disappear and we’d be able to move our efforts toward fully maintaining systems instead of customers.

I had no idea how resistant the general public would be to actually learning and understanding technology. We went from recommending customers avoid certain bad programs and hardware, to being forced to incorporate them into our infrastructure because the general public didn’t want to give them up.

My professional opinion was overruled many times because someone higher up the food chain wanted to use a device or app that hurt our client base or mission parameters, but was familiar to them, so they wanted it included in our suite of tools.

I’m grateful to see a lot of public resistance to AI, even if corporations are doubling down on their investment into the technology. But I don’t have any hope for the future of technology or the general public who use it daily. AI is just the latest excuse for people to not learn how to use technology efficiently.

I expected younger generations to be raised on this tech and be absolute wizards in its use, understanding it even better than I do! Instead, they were raised on slop and ad-riddled ADHD-promoting garbage apps that rotted their brains and prevented them from learning basic tools and functions. As a millennial, I’ve spent the better half of a decade teaching boomers how to use this tech, and then the next decade trying to reeducate zoomers on how to properly use tech and break their life-long bad habits.

I retired from the IT industry after only 20 years. Now I enjoy tinkering with technology in my free time. I always enjoyed teaching people how to use their personal computers and smartphones, but I can’t spend another minute on a help desk, fielding calls from people who still don’t know how to read error messages that pop up in their face. AI will be the death of the industry if integrated into everything and left unchecked. Maybe it’d be for the best.

I have a Google phone, which has YouTube embedded on it. I can’t remove it. I had to disable it, then tell my phone to redirect all YouTube links to my browser. Now I can block ads again!

It’s not FOSS, but Plex does that. I host my music from a server I built at home (you can literally just use your desktop PC) and then I have access to it from anywhere. I like to stream it to the Plexamp app on my phone, which I connect to my car via Bluetooth, then I have my own homemade “radio” on the go. No ads, just my own music that I can shuffle through.

I paid for the Lifetime Plex Pass, which gave me full access to all their features and apps. It’s expensive, but it’s a one-time payment, vs. their monthly subscription which can add up over time.

I actually got annoyed at Plex for remembering exactly where I was in every song. I’d return to an album I hadn’t heard in a while and it would skip right to where I left off in each song instead of playing from the beginning of the song

Sometimes while trying to find a particular song, I’d skip around in a track, then move to the next until I found it. Then when I returned to that album later, every song would start somewhere in the middle. I eventually needed to turn that feature off. It still remembers exactly where I left off the last time I played music, but it doesn’t save my place in each individual song anymore. Just the last one I played.

On the app, it keeps a list of all the playlists I’ve recently played, so I can pick up on my latest playlist or scroll back in the history and start up one I played a while ago. This is great because I like to just shuffle my entire library as a playlist while I’m mowing my lawn, but my wife likes to hear specific genres or bands while we’re riding in the car together. So I can just keep alternating back and forth between playlists depending on the situation and it remembers where I left off in each one.