Wanna be a goat farmer with me (https://www.goatops.com/) ? I've been in IT for 20 years or so and when I first saw that goat list maybe 10-15 years ago it gave me a chuckle, then over the years it made more sense and became a goal. Not necessarily goats, but something entirely separate from IT; for now I'm stuck trying to earn a bit of a retirement, but my eye is on the door.

There is still some good IT stuff to be done though. I have a homelab that I use to avoid Google where I can (degoog/nextcloud/immich/etc), and keep my data indoors as much as possible...

You may be playing into their hands...

Your rig is how you communicate with the world - via unbreakable encryption if you choose to. It's your source of information from sources of your choice more than theirs. It's a route to be heard by your friends beyond your local neighborhood.

Yeah, big platform social media is a cess pit. Your rig is your portal to be a force against that tide. No, one pebble on the beach won't stop it, but a billion pebbles?

After decades of digital life, I guess it's back to the real world. They aren't going to like what that shift of focus, time and energy results in.

You are part of the problem. You chose to profit by building their tools. Now they enslave you.

You still have valuable experience that this world needs. You could choose to work on open source software, and in building an ecosystem outside of the technofascism you did mercenary work for.

Signed, an open source developer (that also gets paid a pretty penny and is still happy with their day to day work, surrounded by like-minded peers).

I still find joy in it. I work in tech support but I also am setting up my first homelab with ubiquiti gear and I'm having a lot of fun. Some parts are cobbled together from bits I can get free or cheap and those are the most fun. I don't have a lot of money and that keeps it interesting.

I will carry the torch and have enough fun for the lot of us. I hope you have just as much fun doing what you're doing.

Same boat here, minus the "still in tech" that I left over 10 yrs ago. Picked up my last pc end of last year and packed up my previous rig for future use. With the old tech around my apt: Laptops, old pc's, and raspberry pi's, I should be able to last til I die. I will never use cloud gaming, only use for that I see is linux users that want to play certain "competitive" games, next phone will most likely be dumb as well. I started my journey on a Commodore Vic 20, never thought this would manifest

fortunately, I could retire today if I wanted to

"I enjoy great comfort and privilege."

I got here–in part–by building parts of the platforms that harm us

"I have relevant expertise and understand how these systems work"

I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford these ridiculous prices

"Remember, I have money and I'm gonna be fine whatever happens to everyone else"

as a tech worker, I immediately log out at the end of my workday and shut everything down.

I think I'm basically done

"I'm too fucking cowardly to use my knowhow to fight back because that might jeopardize my relative comfort."

Go fuck yourself, really.

yup.. once my current rigs fail, I'm not replacing them. I'm just abandoning it and they can do whatever.

I've checked out. I have zero subscriptions, own all my software, could afford to replace if I need to but... why... it's a literal cesspool of corporate trash and I want nothing to do with it.

same with the cellphone.. when it dies, I honestly don't think I care to even replace it. might get hosted VoIP somewhere and have a landline in the house.. beyond that, whatever .. not my issue and if places like the Bank etc try to force it well.. tough. I'll go into the branch like it's 1995 and update my paper passbook and withdraw cash for the week

I mean with every day passing there's less and less desktop users anyway. Most teenagers know significantly less about windows than you know about Linux. They're on iOS and android.

As an admin i see it as an opportunity to switch to Linux but the boomers are refusing to let go of microslop office so it's a bit of a fight still.

I've been recommending Endeavour because its "Arch with a nice installer" and it seems to go down well with modestly technical people.

Especially since they can then pick their DE.

Microsoft is truly the most mind bogglingly stupid company of all time. How can an establishment be SO incredibly incompetent?

I don’t think the personal market will completely die out, but it will definitely shrink by a significant percentage over the next ten years or so.

We’ll see a considerable volume of gamers move to thin clients, ditto for businesses, casual use (email, browsing, consuming media etc.) will continue to switch to mobile devices.

PCs will still exist as a hobby for enthusiasts, but we’ve definitely seen peak-component sales.

One could argue that the personal computer has been dead since the introduction of the Intel Management Engine which is an internet-connected spy chip inside every computer with full access to all hardware that you cannot observe, modify, block, or disable.

Just get rid of as much American software as you can. The US is a mess and the cloud act will always be abused.

Edit: or open source software

My phone shit the bed and I decided to just install graphene on the new one. One of the biggest hurdles in degoogling. Now I'm slowly migrating my accounts away from Google. I can't do it all at once because that's just too big of an endeavor.

My mom has even started to degoogle a bit and is switching to proton for email and cloud storage. She's learning a lot about privacy and cyber security from me butching about corpos and dumb end users at work. She had her Microsoft account hacked today and she called me from the store as soon as she got an unknown MFA prompt and I helped her secure her shit immediately. So proud of her. She went home after that and immediately started resetting passwords to literally all of her accounts for different things and even appropriately prioritized them. I've trained her well lol